The greatest trick...

Reporters convinced they know what evil looks like have failed to report properly on the Lucy Letby case and many others.

Previously: Orwell spinning at 45rpm
A.N. Wilson puts words in Eric Blair's long-dead mouth and reporting on a horrific case delivers more than the Two Minutes Hate

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Movies have taught us to expect the ‘baddie’ to break near the end of the story; we want a monologue that explains the plans and motivations, that caps off some understanding of what was working behind the mask. But reality usually denies us the moment when Verbal Kint’s limp evaporates and the viewer, via the camera’s unblinking and unacknowledged eye, realises he and the monstrous and near-mythical Keyser Söze are one and the same. If a real James Bond came face to face with Blofeld, the latter would just shoot the spy. No explanatory monologuing.

Good crime reporters — good reporters full stop — do not believe there is a certain look that criminals and killers have. They know something that Terry Pratchett, himself a former local newspaper hack, articulated in the Discworld novel Jingo:

It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

When reporters on the Lucy Letby case explain in hushed and hurried tones that the convicted murderer of multiple babies did not “look” like a killer, they are confessing their own prejudices and bolstering the prejudices of hospital managers who could not believe the ‘angelic’ woman was behind the deaths. Dr Ravi Jayaram, who raised concerns about Letby, is a consultant paediatrician and more senior than Letby was but executives at the NHS Trust told him to “draw a line” under his suspicions and apologise to her for his accusations.

Race was and remains a factor. The media has bent itself out of shape in search of explanations for how a “middle-class”, “well-educated”, “church-going”, Disney fan, with a close relationship with her parents, and a “suburban semi” could have been a killer. The key adjective they are skirting around is “white” but the Daily Mail came close when it dubbed her “the vanilla killer”.

It’s not surprising that the Mail is so ‘confused’ by Letby. In a 2011 piece on Rose West — the killer who remains imprisoned for life at HM Prison New Hall in West Yorkshire — the paper exclaimed with faux surprise:

Catching up with the goings-on in Ambridge is one of her favourite pastimes, along with playing Monopoly (she is the champion of her ‘local league’, apparently), embroidery, cooking and shopping from catalogues.

She especially loves beauty products from Avon and trinkets from Argos, which she has delivered.

So far, then, a very ordinary housewife. Except that the subject of this story is not sitting at home but behind bars in a maximum security jail.

Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” has become so familiar since she coined it in 1963 for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil that it is often spouted without much thought to what it actually means.

Dennis Nilsen was considered a quiet, conscientious employee at the job centre where he worked; he was promoted several times. At home, he was killing young men and boys. Marlin Lee Vortman, who met and became friends with Ted Bundy before his campaign of serial murder and necrophilia was revealed, said: “He was a very nice person. He was the kind of guy you’d want your sister to marry.” There are pictures of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady that show the Moors Murderers looking like any other young couple. To believe that a murderer looks like a murderer is to ignore the advice we give children — stranger danger — and to indulge in a passive form of phrenology.

Arendt called Eichmann “terrifyingly normal” and wrote in 1971, 10 years after his trial, that she was:

… struck by the manifest shallowness in [him] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.

However, the banality of Eichmann was on the surface. Eichmann Before Jerusalem, the 2014 book by the German historian Bettina Stangneth, draws on interview tapes recorded by the Nazi journalist William Sassen in which Eichmann is revealed as a self-avowed and committed ideologue. Eichmann presents himself as a Jekyll/Hyde:

I, ‘[t]he cautious bureaucrat,’ that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright…

It is unlikely that Letby will attend her sentencing, still less so that she will deliver a speech outlining her motives. Some, including Richard Gill, a statistician who helped to overturn the conviction of the nurse Lucia de Berk in the Netherlands for serial murder, have raised significant concerns about the evidence presented in the Letby case and the manner in which her trial was conducted.

Reporting and reporters that seek to either reinforce the idea that killers must look like monsters, chase explanations for why such a ‘good girl’ might go bad when they give offenders from different backgrounds far less consideration, or accept prosecution evidence without question are not going their jobs.

The concluding paragraph of BBC North of England correspondent Judith Moritz’s ‘reflections’ on the Letby case typifies this problem:

The smiling nurse with the sing-song name who went to salsa classes is now Britain's most prolific child murderer. Can anyone make sense of that? I know I can't.

The suggestion is there again that a killer couldn’t do normal things. John List — one of the inspirations for the character Keyser Söze — murdered his whole family and disappeared to start a new life. He spent 18 years living that new life with a new wife, working as an accountant called Bob Clark. He seemed perfectly normal to a new set of friends and neighbours. He did not look like a killer; he looked boring.

ITV News reporter, Sangita Lal, writes in the Telegraph:

[Letby] said “my job was my life” and I really believed her. In whatever way she meant that, I believed she was obsessed with her job and obsessed with some of these babies. But I just couldn’t match the crimes she was accused of with the person I was watching. She was so hard to read. She seemed so ordinary… 

… It was difficult for me to accept at that stage in the trial that this educated woman, who – before the allegations – had her whole life ahead of her, could do what the prosecution said she did.

… At the end of her defence, I knew I wasn’t looking at the caring, conscientious nurse that Letby claimed to be.

I knew I was looking at a murderer, who committed the worst of crimes against the most vulnerable children.

If you could spot a killer by looking, the homicide clear-up rates would be much better and the world would be much safer. Hacks have written a lot about “having a god complex” when covering the Letby case but they often seem to be suffering from one themselves. It is not a reporter’s job to have all the answers; it’s their job to ask the right questions. “How could a middle-class, white woman, with blonde hair, and what seemed like very banal tastes, be a killer?” is not one of them and, within it, lie answers about the preconceptions those reporters, columnists, and their editors hold that don’t say anything good about the industry.

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