25th November, 2024 in True Crime

Christmas is the cruellest time for murder. But why is it so common at the sweetest moment in the year?

By Simon Farquhar

Simon Farquhar’s new book, A Deafening Silence: Forgotten British Murders, led him down dark roads as he trudged the wintry countryside trying to understand forgotten tragedies and talking to those whose lives had been affected by them. Here he reflects on why he wanted to tell these stories – and why several of them have something in common: Christmas.

A Deafening Silence: Forgotten British Murders marks ten years of writing about historic crime. Although I had always held an unfocused interest in the subject, my first book in the genre, A Dangerous Place: The Story of the Railway Murders (2016), was specifically a memoir of my late father, a senior police officer. It told the story of his last case, a notorious serial killer inquiry of the 1980s that I had grown up watching with fascination. The book was my tribute to him and an opportunity to understand who he was in his working life. I then spent three years investigating an extraordinary case which remains partly unsolved, which became A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay (2022) – a story as strange as it is pitiful and one which unexpectedly became a media sensation again, over half a century on, while the book was being written.

When it came to thinking about a third book, I thought about all those people I had encountered over the past decade while researching these tragedies, those with a professional or a personal connection to crime—the police officers, the witnesses, the victims’ friends and families. I thought about that question I ask every police officer I interview: “How do you cope with the things you have to confront on a daily basis?” The reply was almost always the same. “You find ways to cope with things, to compartmentalise them. But inevitably, some cases stay with you…”

This book tells five of the stories that have, in turn, stayed with me. The intrigue and bewilderment that they each generate however, was not in itself enough to justify revisiting them. As well as a desire for remembrance, I was struck by the revelatory nature of each of them, what truths they held about our understanding of such crimes, the causes and effects, and what they tell us about the society that we live in—how it has changed or how it still needs to change.

As always, this means researching the stories from a factual but also an emotional perspective, discovering the legacies as well as the circumstances of those tragedies. Once sentence has been passed and the police and the press have moved on, what remains? Do those whose lives have been disfigured ever manage to restore some sense of normality? What effects do such crimes have on the disbelieving families of the perpetrators? And what becomes of a killer, during his incarceration and then after his release? Are there ever optimistic stories of reform, or understandings of why these people each chose to take a human life? The answers proved to be surprising.

The title A Deafening Silence established itself quickly, referring to both the long-term effect of losing a loved one to murder, and the unanswerable question of why such crimes occur. Sadly, unlike the intricate and elaborate plots of crime fiction, real-life murder is usually not only for no good reason but for no reason at all. Stupidity is as much an explanation as cruelty.

Two of the stories in the book take place over the Christmas period. I wrote that a crime committed at Christmas underlines the callousness of those who visit such acts upon the world. At a time for kindness, for families, for children, still devils walk among us, impervious to the season’s fashion for compassion and felicity. But specifically, one of the murders took place on 29th December 1968. That was also the date on which, a year later, Muriel McKay was kidnapped from her London home – the case that I had written about in my previous book, A Desperate Business. And even stranger was the realisation that on 29th December 1985, 19 year-old Alison Day had been murdered by John Duffy and David Mulcahy – the last case that my father investigated and the one which my first book, A Dangerous Place, was centred around.

This is coincidence, but meaningful coincidence. The holiday season is for most of us a well-earned step back from our daily routines, a chance to comfort ourselves, enjoy a little indulgence and sentimentality. But for some, it seems, during such times, unable to find joy or satisfaction in festivity, the devil makes work for their temporarily idle hands.

In the troubled, frightening world that we occupy today, Christmas is approaching again. The fairy lights are twinkling, and our high streets and pubs are becoming prettier and a little more wondrous. We need Christmas. We need distraction from all that there is to trouble us in the world. But perhaps in the same way that there is a tradition of ghost stories at Christmas, tales to make a virtue of the dark nights and the feelings of reflection and loss that inevitably come with the close of the year, we reach for stories of murder to remind ourselves, in our sweetest and safest moments, that this world is as dangerous as it is delightful.