Murder Staged
Cheish Merryweather was keen to emphasise the value of critical thinking, investing her audience with a dignified, sober reflection on the machinery of justice, but she was canny enough to indulge a more scurrilous fascination with the macabre. It left me feeling a little uneasy that horrifying photography and unnerving reconstructions were being presented for our entertainment, not least as I found myself being entertained.
Epic Studios
Once in a while you come away from an evening's entertainment shaking your head in disbelief at what you've witnessed, muttering to yourself how some people really do think they can get away with murder. I certainly came away from Cheish Merryweather's lecture thinking it, but that's hardly surprising, given the talk was literally about murderers that thought they could do just that.
Epic Studios have, of late, broadened their offerings to include lectures on all manner of interesting, and occasionally eccentric, subjects. I can’t pretend to have attended all of them, but those examining the mayhem of murder must surely be among the most successful. On this occasion, the venue was packed – and it’s a big venue when it wants to be – with devotees of true crime, keen to gobble up the details of some of the most grisly brushes with death on record.
Most murder victims, Merryweather explained, know their murderer, who is generally someone that has acted in the heat of the moment. It’s what happens next that distinguishes a handful of cases. Either as a result of careful planning or creative serendipity, some killers have the presence of mind to misdirect a subsequent investigation by staging a false narrative, sending investigators on wild trails and down blind alleys, with the thought that they might thereby avoid detection. How many do so successfully is, of course, unknown. Her talk therefore necessarily focused on those that were caught, having committed crimes almost beyond imagining.
Whether it was driving Mum and Dad into a canal, shooting your kids to get your boyfriend back, or simulating death by owl (you had to be there) what unified the cases discussed were not only the grotesque nature of the crimes, but how singularly hopeless the execution. Murderers who stage, it turns out, are not very smart. Add to that the subtext running through the talk - that neither are the police - and a gloomy picture emerged that at least historically, the primitive forensic techniques available required the murderers to be pretty bone headed to get caught. All of which flies in the face of the classic image of the perfect murder we all secretly think ourselves capable. Turns out it's hard to carry out a plan to dispose of a body when you get a flat tyre, hard to clean up the mess when bleach doesn't work on bloodstains, and hard to lie your way out of trouble when you've been Googling how long a corpse smells the night before.
Merryweather was naturally keen to emphasise the value of critical thinking, investing her audience with a dignified, sober reflection on the machinery of justice and how to achieve it, but she was canny enough to indulge a more scurrilous fascination with the macabre. Her talk was punctuated by uneasy chuckles from an audience enjoying the guilty pleasure of ghoulish horror, while her personable presentational style did much to dispel what might otherwise have been unbearably challenging. On the contrary, the grander absurdities of plans gone wrong and the ridiculous scenarios presented were outlined with humour and the occasional quip.
I did reflect on how, time and again, she felt sure her audience would be familiar with a particular case, begging the question as to what she imagined they would get out of her discussing it further. To be frank, it left me feeling a little uneasy that horrifying photography and unnerving reconstructions were being presented for our entertainment, not least as I found myself being entertained. Seduced by detail, I found myself eager to find out more about the hammer, the knife, the poison or the gun - all the while feeling uncomfortable I was hanging on her every word. When it came to the interactive psychopathy test she conducted at the close of the show, I wonder how many others were sneakily a bit disappointed that they turned out to be boringly average.
