Hacked About

The Press Association has been getting its clichés in a twist over the case of Derek Brown, who has been given a life sentence for butchering two women. Naturally, the victims were young mothers, second only to murdered newly-weds and dead pets as providers of pounds per column inch on the journalistic button-push; and there are the usual emotional appeals, cravings for notoriety and combing of files, spiced up with the killer's juicy ambition to emulate Jack the Ripper and his picking up of his victims in the area the Ripper stalked. Best of all is the murderer's social life: a loner in the second paragraph, in accordance with the time-honoured serial killer psychological profile, by the end of the story Brown somehow manages to become a father of seven. Unlike the young mothers, it appears, the loner's status as a parent is incidental rather than central; the concept of women being butchered by a middle-aged family man is evidently a bit too much for the Press Association's collective consciousness to handle.