Was Jeremy Just Kidding?

[Erik Narramore]

Have you considered the possibility that Julie Mugford accused Jeremy because she thought he was guilty?  It doesn't follow that Jeremy is guilty.

I think life experience affects how people look at something like this.  If I recall correctly, I think she says Jeremy mooted at one point the idea of burning the house down with the family in it, but that could easily have been Jeremy's idea of a joke, or a flippancy, or a way of teasing Julie.

I have no problem believing that, in the generality, Jeremy didn't like his parents, but one way of expressing this dislike could have been through dry humour and ad hoc flippant eruptions.  It's actually quite a common personality quirk among English men, and was especially at that time when maybe people were more relaxed in each other's private company and we didn't have the same intrusion of political correctness into society.  Dark humour was a sine qua non of manhood, mainly because it made women laugh, and if you can make women laugh, you know where that leads.

Julie could have twisted all of this round into something it wasn't, or she may even have taken the view that Jeremy's 'jokes' had a serious undercurrent to them and revealed some sort of emergent criminal intent.  In other words, as often happens, she put 2 and 2 together and came up with 5.

[Erik Narramore]

Julie told five friends of hers.

Is it that Julie wasn't really imparting any knowledge to her friends, they realised this, and they just discounted what she was saying?  If Jeremy is guilty, then this looks foolish with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time it may have seemed sensible.  Women do tell lies like this, you know, Adam.  It's common knowledge that they do and common experience.  It's really not that hard to extrapolate a scenario based on that premise.

Moreover, looking at this objectively (I hold no brief for Jeremy), Julie's evidence was content-free.  It was a mixture of bad character evidence and hearsay about a fictitious conversation between some fantasist called Matthew Macdonald and Jeremy, who may also have been a total fantasist, albeit a darkly funny one.

Julie's evidence actually proves nothing at all of any centrality to the case.