The landlord of the murdered landscape architect Jo Yeates, whose body was found on Christmas Day, after her disappearance on the night of 17th December, has been arrested on suspicion of her murder.
He has not been charged and indeed may never be charged.
He may, if charged, be found guilty or not guilty. But these are very early days.
The national papers, however, are full of stories about him – he dyed his hair blue; as a teacher, he threw pens and books in a temper; he has not married; he seems mildly eccentric. Oh and he is a great fan of the poet Christina Rossetti whose work often deals with death. QED?
Arthur Miller wrote a play, The Crucible, about McCarthyism in the USA, using the metaphor of the witch ‘trials’ in Massachusetts in 1692 to show how malevolent was the rabid persecution later of those said to have communist sympathies in modern America.
In Massachusetts in the late 17th century, groundless hysteria led to a situation where twenty-nine people were convicted of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen – fourteen women and five men – were hanged. One man, Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea and was ‘pressed’ – crushed to death under heavy stones, in a failed attempt to force this out of him.
This was a context in which old women who were suffering from what we now know to be forms of dementia – like muttering to themselves, were accused of witchcraft on those grounds alone.
How many people dye their hair? How many would love to go bright green – at least once? How many throw things in a temper? (Our hands are shooting for the skies.) How many talk to themselves? How many people are moved by poems, novels or films that confront the gloomy and the gothic?
Do we want a society where we are all afraid to dye our hair, to make a scene, to evangelise for an author or artist whose work we find important, to dance in the street, to behave as if we were half our age, to go on children’s swings in the dusk when we hope no one will see us…
If Mr Jefferies is guilty, it is not because he has had blue hair at one time of his life, has had the odd tantrum and loves Christina Rossetti’s poetry.
And he may well be guilty of no more than foolish attention seeking – a man once important in a specific society finding that in retirement he has lost his identity and his ‘voice’. How many know all about that?
Suspend judgment. Wait to see what proof brings – either way.
Do not assume that eccentricity equates to homicidal tendencies. And dye your hair.