Cold case open and shut
IT’S obvious from history, not to mention the news, that human cruelty knows no bounds. Sometimes though the cruellest acts are done without violence, without anger. Sometimes it’s a mere stroke of the pen or the closing of a file by people just doing their jobs.
Back for a second series THE INVESTIGATOR: A BRITISH CRIME STORY (ITV) took up the case of Louise Kay, missing since June 1988. After a night out with friends the lively 18-year-old headed to Beachy Head, planning to sleep in her car. Neither Louise nor her distinctive hand-painted car were ever seen again.
Led by the investigative journalist and former policeman Mark Williams-Thomas, the programme veered from Louise’s disappearance to the more well-known story of serial killer Peter Tobin.
After he was jailed in 2007 for the savage murder of a young Polish woman, police searched some of his previous addresses and found the remains of two further victims.
Until he was locked away Glasgow-born Tobin led a nomadic lifestyle, staying at dozens of addresses up and down the country and using numerous aliases. He often worked and lived on the south coast and had been employed at a hotel in Eastbourne around the time Louise disappeared.
In addition there were reports of her having met “a Scottish man” in a café who had given her money to buy petrol. With the police looking at Tobin for other unsolved murders of young women, Louise’s family naturally hoped there might be some answers.
However after investigating two properties where the killer lived, police decided not to investigate a third. Mark Williams-Thomas requested permission from the relevant local council to dig up the garden there and was refused.
They’d consulted the tenants, the council said, and nobody wanted it to happen. In a sense it was easy to understand Peter Tobin. He was, and is, a psychopath who gets pleasure from hurting and killing.
It was far harder to work out what was going on in the minds of the police and the council. Quite possibly nothing at all.
A tiny country with a big history, Portugal has had some influence in virtually every corner of the globe.
In the 16th century, as last night’s CIVILISATIONS (BBC2) explained, Lisbon was a meeting point of races and cultures. Contact was a two-way deal and the distinctive art of Benin in West Africa melded African traditions with Christian crosses and merchant ships.
Presented by the historian David Olusoga, last night’s instalment reminded us how gently the story of colonisation often began. It was a similar tale with the British in India, the first foreign presence being merchants who established a base in Calcutta, married local women and even converted to Islam and Hinduism.
Over time this pattern changed and Olusoga found two perfect examples. Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, painted around 1784, shows high jinks at the court of an Indian ruler, the Nawab of Oudh.
Men sit about and in the background a red-coated soldier slips away with his Indian girlfriend.
Compare that to the Governor’s House, built in 1803, a copy of a Derbyshire mansion, itself copied from the glories of Rome and slapped in the middle of an Indian city. So what had changed? Why, around the world, across the ages, does trading turn to slavery? I guess civilisation isn’t that civilised.