LIKE anyone else, I read these stories with an open mouth, a heart shifted sideways. But I often wonder exactly why I read, and whether my motives are anything other than prurient and voyeuristic.
On Tuesday a father and his two sons were found guilty of killing their mother, Eve Howells, in August 1995. The summing-up in Leeds Crown Court revealed the home to be a nightmare. The mother, a history teacher, was a vicious disciplinarian, punishing her two boys in a variety of cruel and petty ways since infancy. The father, a drunken labourer, was entirely under his wife's sway. The most persecuted boy, Glenn, was elected to kill her while his father played darts at a local pub. There was some money involved, and a lover, but these were merely grace notes to the central theme. This was, as the headline writers put it, a ''family from hell''.
The domestic murder, perpetrated in the heart of suburbia, reaches out to us especially. How much human chaos do we hear through our walls, beyond the hedge, echoing across the railway tracks? And when should we escape from our own private worlds, to intervene in anyone else's? One of the Howells' neighbours used to hear screams at bathtime that made her think ''someone was murdering them'': she will now ''always regret not calling in the social services''. Others saw Eve Howells dragging her children in from the garden by their hair, vigorously smacking them, swearing at them like a trooper.
How often do you speak out against an adult that's publicly abusing their child, in either words or blows? Try it - as I occasionally do, in the name of civility - and you are subject to a parental fury.
That reveals how difficult it is to bring public shame into the private bonds of family life. And then, as the wean is dragged into the underground or on to a bus by a barely chastened mum or dad, you gulp at the consequences of your own actions. Will the kid get an extra lamping from her parent when it gets home? Maybe I should just have left well alone.
It's not as if we haven't begun to provide routes for children (and adults) to liberate themselves from the madness of some family lives. Social workers had begun to be involved in this case: but the Howells presented idyllic family photographs from holidays in Ibiza, taken to put the authorities off the scent. The court heard that the murderer, Glenn, put in repeated calls to Childline - only to hang up when the phone was answered. For Childline it must be heartening (in a minor way) to know that it is an available option for children in such dire circumstances. That the child couldn't begin the dialogue is a quiddity of intention that no-one can do anything about now.
Yet there are always stray details in such cases which reach out to other aspects of our lives, and quietly turn them upside down. In considering how they would murder Eve Howells, the father and sons went through various desperately banal options - throwing her off a cliff, pushing her under a bus - until they came upon guidance, readymade and extensively detailed: an episode of Crimewatch, in which the murder was done with a hammer and made to look like a burglar's work.
Surely there can be no clearer case of the media enabling a violent act to be done. And surely the arguments about violence on television must be revisited, when the culprit isn't some lurid episode of Cracker or some Hollywood splatter-fest, but the unctuous police-endorsed theatrics of Nick Ross and his team. That violence on TV can ''generate new feelings of anger, and channel their direction'', in the words of Greg Philo of the Glasgow Media Group, seems undeniable. Yet the Howells murder, churning as it was with all kinds of deep emotional trauma, allows us to abandon a simple cause-and-effect model of TV violence. When murder will out, it may grab at any script to effect its end.
But we regard these murders as if they were reverse narratives themselves. We observe all the pieces of this situation, each one as irregularly shaped and mysteriously banal as the other, spinning back through their sad trajectories to the terrible moment of death. And we are chilled by the fact that many of those pieces look like chunks of our own lives or experiences, and wonder whether there are explosions in store for us.
We've all known the weak, alcoholic working-class father, intimidated by his graduate wife into silence and dependence. We've all known the tyrannical teacher, obsessed with order and behaviour in the classroom, using her professionalism to hide a serious personal pathology. We've all known the control-freak mothers in the home, hysterical when presented with insubordination or even a break in their routine, for which their children pay heavily. We may even perceive combinations of these selves in those we know around us, and idly speculate on lives about which we only know the extremities - sheltering our own problems from the speculation, of course.
But where our knowledge departs is at the murder line: to what extent could it ever get so bad that you'd hit your tormentor's head 10 times with a stonemason's hammer, crushing it ''like an eggshell'', as the court reports put it? One tends to have imaginary dialogues with all concerned, trying to unravel the tight skein of fury that led to the murderous act. Couldn't Mr Howells have taken the boys away before then? Why didn't Eve Howells's colleagues perceive her as someone seriously out of control and make some intervention? If the death of her first-born was so traumatic to her, why didn't Eve Howells seek some therapy and advice, instead of venting her fury on her boys?
Questions, options, alternatives - anything but the deliberate end of a life: and I think this is why these family tragedies grip us so profoundly, swimming through our heads for days. The banality of the conditions that led to such a crime force us to assess our own petty irritations and problems; sensitising our responses, getting things into perspective.
An apple core in one of the boys' rooms would mean that Eve Howells would ground them for two weeks: does domestic untidiness really matter that much? She'd threaten to burn their teddy bears, gave them nicknames which turned them into scapegoats: are we always judicious when we punish our children by deprivation, or reduce their rich personalities by turning them into little ''characters'' in a household drama?
Clearly Mrs Howells was a very disturbed woman - but she was not Rosemary West. Her parental severities were close enough to the mainstream to enable us all to examine the mote in our own eyes. Murder is murder, and punishment should be appropriate. But if the death of Eve Howells causes us all to stay the domestic hand and soften the parental voice a touch, some little good may have come of it.
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