Two weeks have passed since Nicola Bulley went missing while walking the dog in her Lancashire village. The police say their working theory is that she fell into the river but that they are also ‘keeping an open mind’ and pursuing ‘many inquiries’. The head of the underwater team searching the Wyre for Ms Bulley says that in 20 years he has never seen so unusual a case.
The police say they would like to speak to ‘as many members of the public as possible’ and yet have also called the level of online speculation ‘totally unacceptable’. But is public speculation really so wrong? There’s a big difference between hindering the police investigation, which is a crime, and generally being interested in Ms Bulley’s disappearance. If the amateur sleuths are indeed getting in the way of the police or causing distress to Ms Bulley’s family and friends then they should of course stop, but I do not think their curiosity should be condemned.
Sherlock Holmes first appeared at a time when the country was fascinated by forensic investigation
Crime enthusiasts get a bad rap – there’s an assumption that they must revel in other people’s misery and that there’s something sick about a fascination with suffering. But that argument shows a remarkable lack of interest in the way that we think. Of course the public is invested in a story like Ms Bulley’s. She disappeared from her village just after dropping her children off at school. She can’t have left the area by the main roads and she is accounted for in all except a ten-minute window. She has vanished. How can we not speculate?
Britain has a long history of sleuthing and fascination with true crime. In the golden age of English theatre, playwrights regularly used true crime stories to explore the human condition. In 1605 a rural aristocrat named Walter Calverley murdered two of his children and stabbed his wife in the family’s Yorkshire home. The events caused a sensation – pamphlets describing the case circulated nationally and the story was turned into a play in 1608, A Yorkshire Tragedy.
More than two centuries later Arthur Conan Doyle was obsessed with newspapers, keeping hundreds of cuttings in his study for later reference. Not only was Doyle a member of an organisation called the Crimes Club, which met to debate unsolved cases, but he also managed to overturn two convictions by re-examining the evidence himself. Sherlock Holmes first appeared at a time when the country was fascinated with the possibilities of forensic investigation.
Britain in the 19th century was teeming with new ideas and initiatives in policing. The Home Office had started publishing a weekly crime bulletin towards the end of the 18th century, detailing cases and appealing for witnesses, which was sold alongside other newspapers and gazettes. The London Metropolitan Police was established in 1829 and in 1842, only 13 years later, Scotland Yard created its first detective unit, professionalising what had before been a semi-professional group of private sleuths. The men of that unit and their particular qualities captured the public imagination, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins included.
Detective Inspector Jack Whicher was among the first of that original unit, and the case for which he is best known was initially as baffling as that of Ms Bulley. In 1860 a young boy went missing from his bed and was found murdered in a privy in the grounds of his father’s house. Police at first interrogated only the servants, because the idea that the family could be culpable was considered too awful. Eventually, Whicher deduced that he had been killed by his 16-year-old half-sister. The story is the basis of Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel The Moonstone, as well as Kate Summerscale’s brilliant 2008 non-fiction account, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
True crime stories like this are told again and again, not because people enjoy imagining the murder of a little boy, but because we are desperate to know how such awful things can happen to normal people and how to prevent them. Curiosity is only human.
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