Читать книгу Cold Blooded Evil - Neil Root - Страница 5

In early December 2006 most people were winding down, mentally preparing for the relaxed limbo-land that the average British Christmas brings. The decorations were coming down from the attic and being dusted off, the Christmas lights checked, cards written and sent, and office parties planned. It was the usual drill in the run-up to the festive period, a time to relax and catch up with friends and family.

The town of Ipswich in Suffolk was no different from anywhere else. The town itself and the sleepy villages surrounding it had no idea that their pleasant repose was about to be shattered. There was no sense that this Christmas would be different to any other. But the events of the following weeks would unfold at a ferocious pace and the people of the area would never see life in the same way again. Sinister events of this magnitude can only cast a shadow on the psyche of a community.

The media storm that blew up would gather pace until it was a terrifying whirlwind – local, then national and finally international coverage. From brief mentions to headlines, and then to blanket coverage. There was to be no escape for the people of Ipswich and no release for the British nation as a whole, as every day brought new revelations, suspicions and finally arrests.

George Orwell once wrote that the reason we like to read about murder is because it feels so removed from us. We can sit in our cosy living rooms, letting family life continue. It only happens to other people. Unless we are directly connected to a homicide victim, we can indulge our morbid curiosity and ‘safe’ fear with little emotional investment. Perhaps we feel a slight shiver as we draw the curtains, thankful that we are comfortable in our homes, tucked up in warm beds. We feel sympathy and compassion, but the lack of any real impingement on our daily lives allows us to sleep well. Especially if the murder victim seems to have lived in a very different world from our own.

But it was not like that for the families of five young women in Ipswich and the surrounding area that winter. The women in question may have worked as prostitutes and lived a life most of us know only from newspapers, books and films. They may have had different experiences. But no one should judge them. They too were human beings with feelings and aspirations that were probably very little different from our own.

The shockwaves will go through that part of Suffolk for years, with Ipswich and the villages around it forever changed, if not scarred by these terrible crimes. The evil of these actions is hard to understand and explain. On one hand these are extreme and thankfully rare events, yet on the other hand we may be reminded of the writer Hannah Arendt’s famous quotation about ‘the banality of evil’. Horrors might be difficult to comprehend but try to understand them we must. This is the story of the Ipswich stranglings.