Comparing the Criminal Psychology of the McCanns, Jeremy Bamber & Jimmy Savile

[Erik Narramore]

One topic that seems to interest lots of people about the McCann case is the psychology of the parents, manifested in their apparent behaviour, and whether this fits into any pattern of criminality.

Supposedly, we are told, the parents are guilty and brought all that publicity on themselves in order to distract the efforts of investigators; and maybe the attention also appealed to their alleged narcissism and greed for money.

But the situation could be looked at the opposite way.  Why would guilty parents in that situation seek to bring global media attention on their case, with all the potential close scrutiny and examination this entails?  Wouldn't guilty parents be more careful and seek to keep a lower profile?

Also, surely even those who think of the McCanns as guilty must concede that nobody can act naturally under worldwide media scrutiny.  It is impossible anyway to devise a template for appropriate behaviour for people in grief.

In the case of Jeremy, people say that his behaviour at the funeral and in other interactions, such as the infamous cooked breakfast and the "I'm the Boss!" outburst, are all indications of guilt.  These same people would have us believe that the same Jeremy coolly planned a mass murder without leaving a single trace of direct evidence.  He then calmly contacted the police to report his own crime and stood outside the house with officers while affecting to have no knowledge of his own horrific actions.

At the very least, this is not consistent behaviour.  It may be true that Jeremy had certain obnoxiously boisterous personality and character traits, but wouldn't the same man who had planned the murder of his entire family make an effort to control himself, knowing he was under scrutiny? At one point, he was being filmed by the world's media at his own parents' funeral.  Isn't it more likely that a guilty Jeremy would keep his cool and go about things in a low key way until long after the dust had settled?

An innocent Jeremy, on the other hand, would feel no such restraint.  If he didn't get on with his parents and his sisters, wouldn't he see the opportunities opening up for him with their passing?  Could this, together with the novelty of the constant police and media scrutiny, explain Jeremy's insensitive behaviour?  Is it possible that his boast to Julie about recruiting Matthew MacDonald was an immature jape, a laugh at Julie's expense that was then cruelly twisted against him?

MacDonald strikes me in accounts as a rather inadequate figure and it could have been a source of fun for Jeremy to invent a story about how he had recruited a hitman who was none other than McDonald: the Everyman they knew from a local bar.

The problem for Jeremy is that if he admits to having told Julie this story, then the trap of 20/20 hindsight comes into play and, in all the circumstances, it wouldn't sound very believable that it was just a joke.  Apart from anything else, who jokes about such things?  Well, I do - it's exactly the sort of thing I would have said to her, to wind her up - and so does and would Jeremy, and maybe Jeremy did joke in that way to Julie on one or more than one occasion, but who will believe it? I believe it, potentially, but I have the benefit of a sympathetic channel into Jeremy's mindset and the leisure of studying the case and evidence for many more hours than a trial jury can.  A harassed jury, under pressure to reach a verdict, probably won't believe it, which means that if he admits to the joke, he is a fool, even if an honest fool, because it amounts to a confession, and with all suspicion on him, he is further validating Julie's decontextualised account of their conversations.

This brings me to the last personality of the tripartite: Jimmy Savile.  Everybody believes he was some sort of paedophile, molester and abuser of women and girls.  I don't, or at least, I am sceptical.  The reasons for my scepticism are numerous, but one I will mention here is Jimmy Savile's sense of humour.  Savile's humour was what we might call 'West Riding humour', which is my phrase (I can't find any other terminology to encapsulate it).  It's the sort of humour that rubbed off on me, because I spent some of my childhood and teens in the coalfields east of Leeds (among other places).

West Riding humour is deadpan, dry, sarcastic, self-deprecating, politically-incorrect, insensitive, and black as coal.  When gossip and rumour started that Jimmy Savile was a danger to women and children, he responded in the West Riding way, by making a joke of it and going round boasting about how he was feared in every girls' school in the country.  That, potentially, is also how I would have dealt with it, as that reflects the West Riding influence on my humour and attitude to life and adversity.

Humourless, stuck-up west Londoners would not necessarily understand the humour, or would understand it but decide to take offence.

Jeremy Bamber, I suspect, always had a West Riding-type sense of humour.  That, combined with his fundamental immaturity, perhaps left him in a vulnerable position and allowed others to misinterpret his actions.  Though here I only speculate: I do also acknowledge that there is evidence in the case against him.

[Erik Narramore]

If the humour and the demeanour of suspects are irrelevant, then can we expect dogmatic guilters in future to avoid mention of it in the Bamber case?  Will they also stop referring to such similar matters in discussions about the McCanns?  Since after all, according to the pro-guilt camp, it's not relevant.  In the case of Jimmy Savile, his sense of humour was used against him, but I don't expect the pro-guilt camp to stop to consider such things.  They just accept at face value whatever the mainstream media tell you.  They portray Jimmy Savile as a monster all of a sudden, therefore in your mind that is what it is.

Jimmy Savile allegedly had victims.  The accent there should very much be on the word 'allegedly'.  It was never proved because, strangely for such a leering, slimy monster, nobody bothered to prosecute him in a criminal court under the high standards that apply (or should apply) to criminal trials.   I know that the burden of proof would not apply if you had any say in it, and I know that things like facts, logic and evidence are not your strong point, but you might at least consider and reflect on the simple observation that there was ample opportunity to pursue him on several fronts while he was still alive, but nobody did.  Why was that?  It seems the police did take an interest at one point, but there was insufficient evidence.  Why was that?  There must be a reason.  One possibility is that, while his behaviour on occasion may have been inappropriate, it was not criminal.

It seems much easier to slander the dead than actually prove things against the living - especially when there's compensation on offer and lucrative lawyers' fees.