Status Anxiety: Moccasins don’t make you a murderer

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.