AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
Hard to resist opening lines like that. Before they know it readers are hooked in the page-turning grip of Raymond Chandler’s classic The Big Sleep. And they just know that tough LA detective Philip Marlow will solve the crime.
Our fascination with ‘whodunits’ supports a multi- billion industry in books, films, TV programmes and this week yet another crime series launched with BBC Two’s Murder24/7 which follows detectives as they investigate murders.
Courses on how to write a best-selling murder mystery advise on making life difficult for the main character and having the right setting. Hard to beat the dreaming spires of Oxford in Inspector Morse’s TV series or Venice where author Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti investigates amid the glorious city’s maze of canals.
In real life, while the majority of perpetrators are brought to justice, detectives don’t always get the same results as their fictional counterparts, despite the advances in forensics, DNA testing, technical surveillance and data analysis.
False leads, bias and the absence of a body in missing, presumed murdered cases where the time and cause of death can be established and sometimes failure to apply what Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot calls “the little grey cells” may play a part.
These unsolved crimes can exert endless speculation and may be revisited in cold case scenarios. Initially the case of American Annie McCarrick, missing since 1993, was thought to be connected with a serial killer of other women who went missing in the Vanishing Triangle in the ‘90s.
Later recommendations that the case be upgraded to murder allowing increased resources on the case were finally acted on in 2023. Investigations are ongoing amid speculation that the motive for Annie’s murder was jealous rage over a romantic rival.
In the Tina Satchwell case, where she was reported missing in 2017, no conclusion was reached in the initial investigation. When the case was reopened in 2023 her body was found, thanks partly to the use of a cadaver dog, under the stairs where her husband Richard had buried her in the couple’s Youghal home. Satchwell was found guilty of murdering his wife last month and later sentenced to life imprisonment. The handling of the Satchwell case together with the macabre case of murdered Kerry farmer Thomas Gaine, originally thought to be missing, whose dismembered remains were only discovered weeks into the investigation in sprayed slurry, are to be reviewed.
In the light of the above it may not be entirely co-incidental that it was announced last week that the Gardai have decided not to upgrade any further unresolved missing persons’ cases to murder. The reviews of two other cases – Fiona Pender from Tullamore reported missing in 1996 when seven and a half months pregnant and Elizabeth Clarke from Navan, a mother of two reported missing 10 years ago – where extensive searches and excavations have taken place, have not resulted in discovery of their bodies or arrests.
The case of missing six year old Kyran Durnin remains unsolved .Unless new information or evidence arises, cases like those of missing Philip Cairns (1986) and Trevor Deely (2000) more resources won’t be devoted to them. We may never know what happened to them.
Fascination with unresolved murders simply refuses to die away in some instances. The notoriety of the Toscan du Plantier case is helped by its blockbuster ingredients.
Parisienne Sophie was beautiful, a talented TV producer, her brutal murder took place in mysterious circumstances at her holiday cottage in scenic Toormore in West Cork with saturnine outsider Ian Bailey as the chief suspect.
Although Bailey,who died last year of a heart attack, was never charged here, he was found guilty in absentia in France.
Now in the wake of Jim Sheridan’s documentary Murder At The Cottage, Netflix’s series A Murder In West Cork, books and numerous articles, Jim Sheridan has now made a film re-creation.
It’s time to let her rest in peace .Whether or not the film offers any new insights, we will probably never know who dunit.
Justice delayed may be justice denied, but justice undelivered can be seen as a failure and as a torment for the families of victims.
