MURDER AT HOME

David Wilson

(Sphere, £22)

It’s one of those not-so-fun facts that we know we’ve heard at some point, but have immediately pushed to the backs of our minds. That is, if you’re going to be murdered, it’s statistically unlikely to be on a deserted street late at night, or in an underground car park, or in your workplace, or tied to a chair in some isolated barn. Of all the murders committed in this country, the vast majority take place at home.

Having visited countless crime scenes in his 40-year career, leading criminologist David Wilson is fascinated by how the mundane and banal can be transformed by violent death. In his excellent 2020 book, Signs of Murder, Wilson wrote about the murder of Margaret McLaughlin in his home town of Carluke when he was still a boy. Here, he takes a tour around the various parts of the home, examining the significance of each room to “the commission or aftermath” of a murder.

He refers frequently to the Freudian concept of the unheimlich – literally “unhomely” but often translated as “uncanny” – and asks what it is that is “submerged in the history of the spaces where we live, that ... surface in a way that leads to death”.

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It’s not by chance that he begins his tour at the doorstep, the preferred spot of the hitman, as it is one of the “liminal” spaces that mark the boundary between the public and private, one of this book’s recurring themes.

So much personal and cultural significance has been invested in the idea of the home. And, as the use of various rooms has changed over time, so have those meanings, along with their practical utility and symbolic value to a murderer. The kitchen, once set off from the main house due to its smells and risk of fire, has been transfigured into the domestic hub, and with changes in the role and status of women become a “contested space”.

The bedroom, now considered an inner sanctum, was once a much more communal space, a fact illustrated by the case of Mary Ann Cotton, who poisoned Joseph Nattrass (very likely her 17th victim) in 1872, under the guise of nursing him through gastric flu. In Wilson’s view, the more public nature of bedrooms in those days, suggests that she, like many bedroom killers, wanted on some level “to be seen”. She was, and witnesses to her treatment of Nattrass ensured she ended up on the gallows.

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Similarly, an act of murder in a living room can be “part of a process of showing the private self to the outside world”. The location of a murder may, according to Wilson’s methodology, help to determine the culprit. Issues of dominance and control particularly express themselves when bodies are buried in gardens or within the fabric of the house itself, and the state of the crime scene can suggest a great deal about the interplay between a killer’s conflicting desires to evade justice and yet be recognised as the author of their crimes.

Like all books on the more morbid end of the true crime spectrum, the case studies (which include Reg Christie, Fred and Rose West and Ian Brady) are profoundly horrifying and depressing. But they do provide insight into the psychologies of their subjects from the perspective of an expert of 40 years’ standing, twinned with a genuine desire to understand what the concept of “home” represents to us, and how violent death can both shatter it and expose the hidden, implicit meanings beneath the surface.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT