Like many people, I’ve been following the saga of Joanna Yeates’s murder with rapt attention. Unfortunately, I’m not at all confident that her killer will ever be caught. The Avon and Somerset Police just don’t seem up to the job.
To begin with, they neglected to intercept her rubbish and that of her neighbours before it was carted away by dustmen after she’d been reported missing. The upshot is that they now have to sift through 293 tonnes of the stuff to stand any chance of finding a missing pizza box. (She bought a Tesco pizza on her way home from the Ram pub on the last night she was seen alive.) Their latest brainwave is to start a Facebook page, apparently in the belief that people are more likely to report vital information on the social networking site than they are on the police hotline.
But the most worrying thing about the investigation so far was the arrest of Christopher Jefferies, Joanna’s landlord. Now, I’m not saying this 65-year-old former public schoolmaster definitely didn’t do it. How could I know? It just seems rather unlikely.
After Jefferies’s arrest on suspicion of murder, the media engaged in an orgy of speculation and concluded that he must be guilty because he’s a little eccentric. The case for the media prosecution seemed to be based entirely on irrelevant details about his personal habits, such as the fact that he once died his hair blue and lives alone in a bachelor flat. One newspaper even drew attention to the fact that ‘the nutty professor’ was wearing moccasins in the widely published photograph of him as a schoolmaster at Clifton College. Moccasins? Oh well, he must be guilty then. Case closed.
I’m not naive enough to think that respectable, middle-class men are incapable of committing murder. I’ve read up on the case of Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the solicitor known as the Hay poisoner. But Armstrong is notorious precisely because he’s such a rarity — he was the only solicitor in history to die by the hangman’s noose.
You would have thought that the sheer improbability of a man like Jefferies strangling a girl to death would have given the police pause for thought before slapping the cuffs on him. How many murderers are retired schoolteachers? How many cold-blooded killers are heads of their local Neighbourhood Watch schemes? Lib Dem activists may regularly murder the English language, but do they kill 25-year-old architects? I can’t think of any precedents. Yet the police arrested him without any apparent evidence and in doing so opened the floodgates to a bucket-load of vile innuendo.
What was curious about the media portrayal of Jefferies — and no doubt this played a part in the police’s assessment of him as a potential murderer — is that his middle-classness was presented as a reason to think him guilty rather than innocent. Much was made of the fact that he’d been head of English at Clifton College, as if public schoolmasters are, by definition, homicidal. Then there was his fondness for Christina Rossetti’s poetry. Again, the implication was that anyone weird enough to be familiar with the work of a 19th-century poet must be capable of murder in the first degree.
I was vaguely aware that being educated was unfashionable in contemporary Britain, but I didn’t know it was grounds for suspecting someone of homicide. Has the left’s assault on traditional standards in schools been so successful that anyone who teaches English literature is now thought of as a social pariah? Perhaps if Christopher Jefferies had taught citizenship at a nearby comprehensive he would not have had his collar felt. On the contrary, he’d have been asked to write an article on the case for the TES.
The keen-eyed detectives of the Avon and Somerset Police have now released Jefferies, unable to produce sufficient evidence to detain him any longer without charge. Detective Chief Inspector Phil Jones summed up the progress he and his colleagues have made shortly afterwards: they don’t know when or where Joanna was killed or by one man or two, they have no idea whether she knew her assailant or assailants, and they still don’t know what happened to the Tesco pizza.
There is some good news, though. They’ve had a number of reports of a 4×4 in the vicinity on the night of her disappearance and they’re hoping that someone on Facebook may be able to help them trace it, even though it may be ‘completely unconnected’ with the case. Well done, boys. Keep up the good work.
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