Watching true crime documentaries to relax sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it? But at the end of a long and difficult day, there is little better than sitting on your favourite armchair with a snack and a mug of (decaf) tea and binging on real-life murder stories.
Such is the proliferation of satellite channels dedicated to the gory and the gruesome, I’m willing to wager I am not alone. I have not (yet) watched the oft-discussed Jeffrey Dahmer series on Netflix, but a brief scan of the serial killer on Wikipedia and all of his, um, activities, sounds right up my street. It may prove even too scary for someone as hardy as myself, mind.
I really don’t know what it is about murder documentaries that is so appealing; after all, our collective hearts go out to the families and friends of those victims, and it goes without saying it is not something one would wish on even one’s worst enemy. And yet, there is an undeniable pull.
A personal favourite tale concerned a series of murders in the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire, which were brought to life on a recent television drama series and documentary dubbed, rather straightforwardly, ‘The Pembrokeshire Murders’. A pair of brutal double murders in the 1980s had gone unresolved until advances in DNA technology decades later eventually brought the killer, John Cooper (pictured above), to justice. Fascinatingly, Cooper had appeared on the legendary game show Bullseye a matter of weeks before his second double murder, and a still image of him on the programme allowed detectives to decipher what he would have looked like in the 1980s, and to therefore compare likeliness with an artist’s impression.
It is these fascinating twists and turns in the tales of horrific crimes that keep the viewer captivated, dramatic music and high-budget graphics and reconstructions adding to it. You are always on the side of the victim and their loved ones, and you always hope the perpetrator is brought to justice, so when they are, it is a credit to the hard work and often ingenious investigating techniques employed by some of the brightest and the best in the world of criminology.
So, there we are. A short but sweet blog as there’s a double bill of Killer In My Village on Pick about to start. I just hope the village in question never turns out to be ‘my’ village...
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