A shocking story of police failings
SHOUT out to the Kosher
Kardashians over in My Unorthodox Life on Netflix.
I’m addicted to the glossy reality show which follows Julia Haart,
Elite World Group CEO and former member of an ultra-orthodox
Jewish community.
In Julia’s old life, she kept herself covered and her only purpose was to marry and have babies.
Now she wears five-inch heels and tiny hot pants (her “emblems of freedom”) as she wobbles from one wealthy crisis to the next.
With her adult children at various levels of Jewish observance, it makes for compelling viewing.
But with big issues and silliness in equal measure, it’s a fascinating insight into what happens when
two worlds collide in one family.
TRUE life crime stories are bleakly fascinating, fulfilling our morbid curiosity while making us
feel slightly uneasy.
It’s why we read grim news stories and rubberneck at traffic accidents. Don’t feel bad, we’re all guilty.
Channel 4’s new four-parter Deceit, which started on Friday, is the latest drama to delve into a gripping real-life story.
In 1992, young mother Rachel Nickell was stabbed to death in front of her two-year-old son Alex on Wimbledon Common in a random attack.
The 23-year-old’s body was later found with toddler Alex clinging to her, saying repeatedly, “Wake up, Mummy”.
Rachel’s killer was Robert Napper, who had long-standing mental health issues and carried out more than 100 violent sexual attacks on women.
But the drama does not focus on the murder, but on the catastrophic and systemic police failings which meant Napper escaped detection.
Instead, innocent Colin Stagg became the sole focus of the investigation, leaving Napper free to kill again.
The police operation centred on a controversial honeytrap, known as Operation Edzell, in which an undercover officer codenamed Lizzie James (Niamh Algar) working to lure Stagg into a confession.
Uncomfortable
It was a rather slow start to the drama as we were introduced to ambitious cop Sadie (not the officer’s real name) as she prepared to make contact with Stagg (Sion Daniel Young) and become sexual bait.
The plan was devised by Met Det Insp Keith Pedder (Harry Treadaway) and criminal profiler Paul Britton (an excellently creepy Eddie Marsan), but I loved the refreshing female perspective of this series. We see Sadie come up against workplace misogyny, then change her appearance and devise a persona for the honeytrap job, ultimately confronting uncomfortable sexual fantasies from Stagg that she knows she must indulge.
No woman would surely be asked to do this today?
This is not hammer-blow viewing that reconstructs grisly murders, but a more nuanced, troubling account of the effect the undercover job had on Sadie.
By the end of episode one, ‘Lizzie’ and Colin had exchanged a couple of letters and one tense phone call.
Future episodes will tell the astonishing detail of what ‘Lizzie’ was asked to do, how she was manipulated – just like Stagg – and how it traumatised her.
Deceit is an account of police failings and of terrible crimes, but mostly it is the disturbing journey of one woman at the centre of a disastrous operation that should never have happened.
Absorbing, jaw-dropping telly.