Julie, Colin And Thoughts On Death

[Erik Narramore]

In pre-civilised times, death was intimate.  Initially, the dead may have been eaten by the living, to aid survival.  As French anthropologist Pierre Clastres recorded of the Guayaki tribe of Paraguay, some contemporary primitive tribes still hold to the view that cannibalism is a necessary ritual for the dead.  A custom that arose initially no doubt out of hunger, and a simple need for sustenance, became part of a sophisticated belief system in which eating the dead body allowed the wandering soul to reach its destination of the realm of the dead in the sky, rather than occupy another living body.

Cremation and inhumation rituals probably arose due to the development of emotional attachments to the dead as tribal life became more settled, and maybe also due to a recognition of the need for hygiene. In organised Germanic tribes, the dead were honoured, revered, worshipped, cleansed and prepared for their journey.  Death was part of the wheel of life for all Nature, even something to be celebrated and looked forward to, because it promised a relief of suffering or a new beginning for the soul.

Then under Christians, Man was separated from Nature and death became a liminal phenomenon, part of an Other-World, which was touched only briefly by ritual.  This reflected an imaginative ambivalence about the corporeal, influenced by Platonic dualism, perhaps in turn reflecting the co-incidence of Abrahamic faiths with agricultural and then industrial societies, in which life expectancy is longer and we come to associate death with age and decline.  Yet the charge against Christianity of dualism can be taken too far.  Ironically, ultra-dualistic notions of an eternal spirit departing the body at death are a result of secularism.  The Nicene Creed itself is clear: the Christian Resurrection is that of Christ and rests on the universal incarnation of the soul-being, ergo Christ's Resurrection is your Resurrection.  In other words: you come back as yourself!

This can be explained by some of the fundaments of the Christian faith.  Christians honour the human body as made in the image of God.  They see God-as-person as a precursor to Man-as-person – one as a sort of template for the other - and this personage of Man separates humanity from the rest of Nature.  This, however, implies that Nature is not itself divine and worthy of consideration.  Christians hold that Man is special and the whole basis of the Christian faith is that God interposed Himself in human affairs in the incarnate form of Christ, to lead us towards Him.

In modernity and industrialism, the odd neo-Platonic dualism of mind-spirit versus body arguably reached its apotheosis as faith and tradition began to falter.  The Catholics retained traditional death rites, especially reception of the body; the Protestants, more influenced by modernity, clinicised death, and took it into hospitals and old people's homes, etc., and the body became something to be taken care of by functionaries and 'professionals'.  In post-modernity, death is a consumer product.  You can buy death.  Save up for a funeral package.  You can even elect for death, pain-free, and be euthanised in the Netherlands or Switzerland, if you so choose.

This 'clinicisation' of death perhaps has no better example than the mortuary in which bereaved relatives of those who have died in suspicious circumstances are asked to view the bodies to identify their loved ones.  There is something distinctly frosty about this.  As the bodies of Nevill and June Bamber, Sheila Caffell and Nicholas and Daniel, rested on cold slabs, Julie Mugford was ushered in to carry out a perfunctory identification.  Instead of family members gathering around the bodies, a seemingly emotionally-frigid non-relative undertook a nod to formality.  When asked at trial to explain why she would agree to do this, it was as if in her reply Julie was calling back to the Guayaki of Paraguay: she believed the spirits of the dead could talk to her and give her answers, rather as you could imagine the Guayaki would think these bodies had not been eaten and freed from their corporeal existence to make their journey to the eternal realm and so could bear witness to something, if somehow they could be channelled by someone gifted in reaching into their residual spirits.

Colin Caffell, the twins' father, did not want to see the dead, only remember them; his spiritual solace came from dreams and imaginings about them, not physicality.  He kept a sanitised distance from the crime, wanting to remember them in the way he preferred, and handed over the 'ritual' of identification to others, specifically Julie, an outsider.  Colin's attitude seemed to be a New Age-style eclectic confluence of the Greek and the Judaic: he retained a modernist pseudo-Christian idea of death, combining faith (albeit, dream-like) in his sons' eternality and that they live on in some way, but rooted in the pagan doubts about post-death embodiment.  Like the Greeks, he asked: what if the bodies are irreparably damaged?

Julie did not seem to mind.  Hers seemed to be a more flesh and blood attitude to spirituality, indeed spiritualism.  A conventional middle-class woman and perhaps not a specially imaginative person in the first place, she was more grounded than Colin and wanted to see it to believe it.  This is the primeval, base idea: she wanted to 'touch death', but perhaps also her desire to 'touch' was a manifestation of an inner doubt?  Perhaps when primeval Man faced death, he wanted – needed - to see and touch it in order to believe it?  After all, how could someone who was before singing, dancing, hunting, talking, singing, living, now be a lifeless, inanimate corpse?  How can that make sense?  Maybe it makes sense to us, but on what basis?  Some of us have seen it, but in most cases, it makes sense to people only because they have been told about it or had it portrayed for them in various media.  Death, in a way, has become a simulacrum and perhaps Julie's profession of spiritual beliefs under the pressure of cross-examination is not as odd as it may seem when viewed in this wider social context.  Touching, seeing and smelling death helps to verify it, but even then, we are now so dissociated from death and other natural things that we may not quite believe it and still think that the corpse in front of us can be animate or can 'talk' to us in some way. Related to this, perhaps – assuming Jeremy is guilty - his evil and cruelty had, in Julie's mind, taken on such awesomeness that she could not but doubt it, even doubt that the murders that were claimed to have taken place and that Jeremy had admitted to had in fact taken place.  This, again, is understandable to a degree.  Unless you are a drone, there must be a part of you that doubts things unless you can see them for yourself.

To emphasise the point, let's imagine a scenario.  One morning you receive terrible news.  It is the hospital.  They have called you at work to inform you that your mother sadly passed away in the night.  You can't quite take this in and ask to be with your mother as she takes her last dying breaths.  As tactfully as possible, the caller reminds you of what you have just been told: in fact, your mother is already dead.  You then ask to see the body, so that you can say 'goodbye'.  For some reason or other that you don't quite understand, you are denied this request, and you are told that the body is already being prepared for burial.  How do you know you are being told the truth?  How do you know she is dead?  Or if she is dead, how do you know that she has not died in suspicious circumstances that are now being concealed from you?  Jesus admonished Thomas for wanting to 'touch' or 'see' in order to assuage his doubts, but Thomas, the doubter, still had to observe before he could believe.

Colin accepted what he was told by everybody, at every stage.  When told Sheila had committed suicide, he accepted it.  He later tried to claim that he distinguished between the suicide of Sheila and the concept of her killing the twins, readily accepting one but not the other.  Yet he did not want to see the bodies.  He then accepted Jeremy's guilt and the reasoning in favour of the thesis, and has never questioned this in any serious way, instead elaborately rationalising why Sheila could not have done it.  For instance, though she was violent, Colin offered a lawyerly distinction for the trial: that Sheila was only violent towards inanimate things.

When a society is built on ordered prior truths, a Logos, a dichotomy is necessary between truth and doubt about things.  This in turns brings mystification into everyday life. Did such-and-such that we are told happened really happen in the way claimed?  How did it happen?  Who was responsible?  We can't always answer these questions.  In a more primitive society, there may be no such dichotomy, or little of it, because all knowledge is based on personal experience: the clean and the profane are not distinguished, the dead are dead, and we know it because death is 'seen' and 'touched', even celebrated and revelled in, and recognised as part of life's experiences.  The Logos breaks down as soon as people start to think and reason about distant things in a purely subjective manner, as if those things are their own personal experiences or reflect their own narrow needs.  God, for instance, is not a personal experience, as post-Christianity would have it.  God instead is the opposite of experience: He is the result of overcoming doubt of the senses and accepting something as Truth that, in its nature, is beyond anyone's personal comprehension.  The experience of being a Christian is a totality of mind and body, in which the individual emotionally surrenders to the inevitability of God, because God is the overcoming of doubt to embrace Truth, which – if you stop to think about it – is necessary for all Truth and provisional truths.  I am scientific and atheistic in my outlook, but even I have experienced those moments of 'totality', of both deep emotion and deeper intellect, in which I have wanted to embrace the God-Truth.  I am human, and Christianity is a story of what it means to be human.

People who think they personally 'know' God don't like being asked questions about it and can react aggressively, even violently, and will often throw up a veil of taboo and defensiveness about their beliefs.  This is because their belief in God is truly primitive: a throwback to a child-like state of subjectivity and attachment.  Perhaps we should approach the beliefs of Julie and Colin on this basis, not as careful eggshell treaders, but in the rigorous spirit of Logos, even if it offends them, even if some on this Forum react violently to what they perceive as insensitivity or impertinence?  At any rate, since they both, in their own different ways, made an issue of their beliefs – Julie at trial, Colin in his subsequent book – their declarations are public property and open to scrutiny.

Did Julie lie about her spirituality?  If so, for what purpose?  Why did no one else know about it?  She had a steady boyfriend in Jeremy and, it seems, many friends, yet no-one other than Julie can testify to this belief in a Spirit World.  Why?  Was she influenced by Colin?  Or did she just make the whole thing up in a conscious or subconscious effort to conceal something more important?  Colin talks about robins in his book.  Robins carry spirits, according to Colin. This is ridiculous and tragic. Unlike the Guayaki of Paraguay, Colin seems to think that the spirit has not departed on its proper journey to the 'realm of the dead', instead it must maintain a metaphorical existence as the anthropomorphic projection of the bereaved, flitting around desks and window sills, helping solve those terrible murders on the night of the 6th./7th. August 1985.

Can we trust in a prosecution case that depends on disingenuous people like this?  I only ask the question.  There again, faith in Jeremy's guilt or innocence has to be considered a sort of religion in itself because, on proper consideration, the case is a 'blackbox' and fundamentally uncertain.  Whether you are Colin Caffell or Julie Smerchanski or some random person unconnected to the case but posting about it on an internet forum, it's human to have this approach to the mystery of Jeremy Bamber, even if it is not very commendable.  Human beings need religion or dogma to cling to, just as spiders spin webs.  We can't admit we don't know.  Instead, we salve our angst and engage in these metaphorical bluffs and 'pulling rabbits out of hats' because Not Knowing is utterly unbearable to the human ego.