I Met a Murderer

I once met a murderer.  Of course, I didn't know then that he was a murderer.  To be absolutely fair, at that point he hadn't murdered anyone.  That came later.  It was to do with the job I was doing at the time - this was someone I had to visit at their home in order to serve papers on them.  Nothing criminal, just run of the mill minor league civil stuff.  He lived in an upstairs flat with external access.  It took me a while to get him at home - his downstairs neighbour, an old lady, gave me a steer as to when he was likely to be at home.  In the end I must have dealt with him two or three times on the matter in hand.  I remember that he kept birds, budgies, I think.  He had them in cages in his living room.  They were tweeting away in the background as I explained to him what he needed to do.  (Actually, that's what made me think of him today - I walked past an aviary in a local park that is full of budgies and their tweeting reminded me of that flat).  Months later, maybe more than a year, I saw his picture in the local paper - he had been charged with murder.  All I could think at the time was the he just hadn't seemed the 'type'.  That he had been so meek and mild mannered with me.  The typically insignificant sort of middle aged man you find living in provincial Britain, nothing to mark him out from the rest of the crowd, quietly toiling away in some routine, unfulfilling job and coming home to his birds and patiently waiting for his pension.

The murder itself, of which he was subsequently convicted, was also, sadly, all too typical of contemporary Britain - a domestic incident leaving a woman dead in her own home.  It seems that Mr Ordinary had struck up a relationship with a divorced woman with grown up kids.  When they were alone at her house, some kind of argument had broken out in the kitchen and he hit her - too hard, as it turned out.  He might have used a kitchen implement or she might have fallen and struck her head, I don't recall the details.  The end result was that she was dead.  But instead of calling the police and taking his chances pleading that it had all happened 'in the heat of the moment' - there was always a chance that such a defence might have brought the charge down to manslaughter - he ran away, then came back to the house and pretended to find the body.  He appeared, with her kids, as part of a police appeal for anyone with information about the 'intruder' who killed the woman.  But the police and a subsequent jury clearly didn't believe him and he was charged and convicted.  I kept coming back to my initial reaction that he wasn't the 'type'.  But what is the 'type'?  We've been conditioned for decades by newspapers and fiction to believe that there is a 'type' of person more likely to kill, part of the Victorian's 'criminal class', no doubt, and that they can be 'spotted'.  Yet the truth is that most murders are, like this one, unpremeditated, the consequence of what might otherwise be an inconsequential domestic dispute, or the result of an alcohol fuelled dispute, unfounded jealousy and the like.  They are committed by people just like you and me.  People we would normally walk past in the street, unnoticed.  You never can tell, that's the thing.