It is Sunday evening, preferably dark and frosty. A pizza has just been delivered, and the beers are chilled. You put your feet on the sofa, cut a healthy slice of pepperoni and cheese and watch the bubbles rise in your glass.
You stay for the news, only this time the story line is slightly different. The murder story that leads the bulletin has been running now for two weeks. Tearful relatives and steely-eyed detectives have been on nightly. Promising leads have gone nowhere; arrests have been made; suspects put in the frame and rapidly removed; behind those police tapes, Amanda Burton lookalikes come and go in their forensic overalls. And yet, and yet... still no solution.
We are all armchair detectives today. We've taken the cerebral route alongside Poirot and Morse; we've been tough guys with the Sweeney; we've watched the boffins of CSI New York nail their man in the lab. Even with ad breaks, we know it will all be done and dusted before we put the cat out.
So we are somewhat surprised when in real life cops chase false leads; the boffins seem impotent; sinister-looking suspects prove guiltless; tabloid rewards fail to flush out fresh information.
Naturally we blame the police. Compared to the TV heroes, real officers seem to have feet of clay. Surely, with all the technology at their disposal, they should have the criminal in a cell by now? The super detective is, after all, merely PC Plod.
So, after three weeks with no tangible evidence of progress, the inquiry into the killing of Bristol landscape architect Jo Yeates has reached the stage where the police are - reportedly - considering DNA testing thousands of local men in an attempt to match a DNA sample taken from Jo Yeates's body which they believe could belong to the killer.
It is a massive undertaking - with 5,000 or more men over 16 living in the suburb of Clifton, and 200,000 in the Bristol area - but similar mass testings have reaped dividends in the past.
The inquiry has also reached the point where speculation fills the gap. The Sunday Mirror yesterday hired a retired Scotland Yard detective, Dai Davies, to 'follow' the routes taken by Jo and, later, by her murderer and to come up with some ideas.
These included wondering whether the police had made the best use of CCTV, first in the Bristol Ram, where Jo had an evening drink with her colleagues, and later at the Redwood Hotel near where the body was dumped; why she went home so early to an empty flat (Jo's boyfriend was away in Sheffield); why she bought two bottles of cider to take home (she was surely expecting someone); why her body was dumped so close to the CCTV-protected hotel.
Davies's theories were presented as if none of the local police could possibly have thought of them for themselves.
Having spent considerable time as a journalist watching the police in action, I know murder investigators inevitably make mistakes; I remember one forensic 'expert' failing to find a blood-stained shirt in the murder room.
But I also know they endlessly talk through every possibility. I covered - from the inside - a murder inquiry during which every possibility was chewed to pieces.
At the end of each day, my murder team sat down to 'wash-up' sessions where every idea (even those that might have occurred to a retired cop and his tabloid ghost-writers) was dissected time and again. The SIO (Senior Investigating Officer), especially when the trail goes cold, wants even the battiest notion.
Ironically, forensics, while ultimately likely to pin the killer, in the short-term often put a break on what appear to be promising leads: suspects are eliminated for lack of evidence for example, no fibres connecting victim and suspect are found. This is the Sherlock Holmes dog that didn't bark.
The danger is as demonstrated in the murders of Rachel Nickell and Jill Dando that these failures create a frustration and the pressure on the murder team then leads to hasty arrests of innocent people. The work of real Sam Ryans is as much to do with protecting the innocent as detecting the guilty.
Which leads to another misconception. Because murder is the most serious of crimes, we tend to believe it must be the most difficult to solve. Yet in truth, most murders are open-and-shut cases, often committed within the home, and the vast majority of killers are caught bang-to-rights. Many murderers immediately give themselves up.
Which is why unsolved murders especially of attractive people like the Soham school girls, Dando, Nickell and now Yeates command such attention and headlines.
It was ever thus. In 1946, George Orwell famously wrote his essay Decline of the English Murder, suggesting that the British have long derived a callous (and not quite proper) enjoyment from high profile killings.
In Orwell's day pre-pizza, pre-telly the grim details were spelt out at length (by court reporters with fluent short-hand) in the News of the World and read avidly over cups of tea after Sunday lunch.
But much remains the same today: good murder stories true and fictional have always relied upon stereotypes. Sex was almost always a power motive and, ideally, wrote Orwell, "the murderer should be a little man of the professional class... living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs..."
But surely one thing has changed since the 40s? With the technology at their disposal, life for real detectives must today be easier than it was when Orwell wrote.
Yes and no: the line between fiction and fact is now so blurred that all of us - the police also watch TV - believe it must be easy to nail the killer. It isn't, as the continuing inquiry into the cruel death of Jo Yeates reminds us.
Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/73495,news-comment,news-politics,jo-yeates-murder-hunt-this-is-not-tv-its-real-life#ixzz1AfAbvCuY
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/73495,news-comment,news-politics,jo-yeates-murder-hunt-this-is-not-tv-its-real-life
