The Wiki Man: A question of trust

One of many reasons I love reading about crime on Wikipedia is the marvellous pieces of unintentional comedy you get at the end of an article in the list of internal links. Beneath the entry for the Hay poisoner Herbert Rowse Armstrong, for instance, comes:

Poisoners | People executed by hanging | Executed English people | English people convicted of murder | Alumni of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge

Even finer is the tailpiece to the entry on Fred West:

English rapists | British people convicted of child sexual abuse | People convicted of theft | English serial killers | Parents who killed their children | People who committed suicide in prison custody | People from Herefordshire

Armstrong was hanged in 1922 for the murder of his wife, poisoned with arsenic the solicitor had bought to kill dandelions in his garden. (A few years ago I surreptitiously lifted several dandelions from the garden of his former house; I replanted them at home, where they proved surprisingly resilient.)

The Hay crime is one of those classic English murder cases, matched only by Raymond Chandler’s favourite, the 1931 murder of Julia Wallace at 29 Wolverton Street in Anfield. Such is the English monopoly of classic crime, even the French rely on the 1952 killing of an English family (at a roadside campsite) for their own great mystery of the last century, the inexplicable murder of Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and ten-year-old daughter.

What’s fascinating about all these cases, along with modern examples such as the murder of Meredith Kercher, is the extraordinary weight we attach to the demeanour of the suspect even before any hard evidence has come to light. Armstrong ordered his servants to reopen the curtains after the servants had closed them in mourning; Amanda Knox’s unconcern probably appeared even more incomprehensible to the Italians than to us.