The Iceni Project, the small, independent Ipswich-based drugs charity which was founded in 1998 to provide care, support and treatment to those whose lives have been affected by drugs, reported this month that it has seen a surge in donations since the broadcast of the BBC’s Five Daughters.
This three-part drama chronicled the lives of the five women – all of whom were drug addicts and involved in the sex industry – who were murdered by the serial killer Steve Wright in Ipswich in 2006. Brian Tobin, the director and founder of Iceni, said that he had been moved by donations of more than £10,000 from members of the public since the drama was aired in April.
I, too, have been a beneficiary of the drama. My co-written book, Hunting Evil: Inside the Ipswich Serial Murders, which was published in 2008, moved rapidly to the top of the Amazon bestselling true crime chart and I found myself outselling such classics as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (which invented “new journalism”) and Kate Summerscale’s bestseller The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
Frankly, I wasn’t quite certain what to make of this, even if I was delighted to be selling more books.
I was even less certain what to make of the letter that awaited me in my office at Birmingham City University and a subsequent telephone call from Jon Clements at the Daily Mirror.
The letter came from Trevor Hardy, currently a prisoner at HMP Wakefield, who was convicted of murdering three young women in Manchester between 1974-1976 and was sentenced to a “whole life tariff” for these crimes. I had written in a Daily Mirror article that Hardy was interesting as these crimes – killing three or more people in a period
greater than 30 days – meant that he was a “serial killer”, even if no one has ever heard of him. What was it, I wondered more generally, that allowed some serial killers to emerge
into public consciousness while others all but disappear?
Hardy wrote to protest that I had chosen to label him in this way and was considering not allowing me to visit him.
In the same article for the Daily Mirror, I had produced a table of British serial killers – based on this academic definition of three or more victims in a period greater than 30 days. Jon Clements rang and said that he had just taken a call from the mother of a boy who had been murdered by Steven Grieveson and she wondered why he had not been included in my table. “Steven who?” I asked Jon.
Grieveson was convicted in 1996 for the murder of three boys in Sunderland between November 1993 and February 1994, but Northumbria Police had initially suggested that each of the boys had died as a result of sniffing glue and this suggestion clearly influenced how the case was reported at the time. In fact, the three boys – Thomas Kelly, David Hanson and David Grief – had all been strangled. The mother of one of the boys contacted the Daily Mirror so as to have the label “serial killer” applied to her son’s killer. I’m happy to oblige, as Grieveson is clearly that: a serial killer.
But that still leaves my question of why some serial killers emerge into public consciousness – such as Myra Hindley, Harold Shipman, Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rose West – while others like Hardy and Grieveson disappear. Is it something to do with how newspapers report crime or a southern bias in the news? Perhaps the role of the police in shaping and defining how journalists should think about a crime allows some serial killers to disappear? In Grieveson’s case, the police denied that there had been murders committed at all. With Hardy, the Greater Manchester Police denied that the three murders of his victims were actually linked. How many other “serial killers” have been ignored in this way?
Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt that serial killers remain a staple of our news and entertainment industries. Perhaps the biggest question of all is to work out how to harness our fascination with this phenomenon so that more Iceni projects benefit and fewer people fall victim to this particular type of offender.
