True crime can be an unedifying business, so why am I drawn to writing about it?
In a 1996 essay for Granta, the late Gordon Burn set down his experience covering the trial of Rose West. “There was nothing much to see and it was always much the same,” he wrote. “But the heavy media presence was in itself justification for having the story high in the running order.” Burn was a writer of unusually versatile brilliance, who returned repeatedly to the most violent, sordid corners of British life. But even in the mid-1990s, he was to diagnose a growing weariness at the sheer number of crime stories on offer. “There are now so many … that only the most sensational or brutal or those which contain unusual elements stand any chance at all of making it on to the news agenda.”
Having just published my own book on a historical crime, I know all too well that Burn’s diagnosis can be applied today with minimal alteration. True crime is in the midst of an exceptionally well-documented boom. Real-life tales of murder, rape, robbery and fraud are deeply ingrained in the Anglo-American cultural landscape, arguably long past the point of oversaturation. We are more than familiar with the arguments as to why this may be a bad, or at least unedifying, thing. It sometimes feels that for every Serial or Dahmer, there is an accompanying viral essay restating the baked-in exploitation and muddied ethics implicit in packaging grisly crimes of the recent past as entertainment.
The appetite for this debate is almost as ferocious as that for the stories themselves, as a recent back-andforth between the crime writer and columnist Sarah Weinman and the incarcerated journalist John J Lennon in the New York Review of Books made clear. The very public debate had begun with Lennon’s subtly critical review of Weinman’s latest nonfiction book, an account of the life and crimes of Edgar Smith, an American prison writer and murderer. Lennon’s piece asked to what extent true crime, however skilfully crafted, might deepen a collective “thirst for punishment”.
Yet several questions are often overlooked. Why are some crimes destined for perpetual re-examination and others locked into permanent obscurity? And what precisely are the “unusual elements” that Burn wrote of, that make a particular case so attractive to a certain kind of audience? It might be a particularly savage or unfathomable level of depravity, as with the crimes of Fred and Rose West. But very often it has something to do with the precise amount of mystery involved. Unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable, cases offer something that “ordinary” murder doesn’t. One thinks about the apparently bottomless fascination with the Victorian bogeyman Jack the Ripper, or the nightmare lore of the selfstyled Zodiac killer of late-1960s California. Stories so well known and theorised that they have long ago curdled into myth.
The playing out of this process is what led me to start reporting, in 2018, on Glasgow’s infamous Bible John killings. Between February 1968 and the end of October 1969, three women were killed after a night spent in Glasgow’s Barrowland ballroom. Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock were three young, working-class mothers living through a a fractious time in the city’s history, when the murder rate was high and a fear of “youth violence” lingered in the air. Their murders were later ascribed to the spectre of an apparent serial killer, who the enterprising tabloid press of the day rapidly christened Bible John: a moniker derived from the figure’s apparent fondness for scriptural quotation, according to the memory of Puttock’s sister.
The murders sparked what was then Scotland’s largest ever manhunt. Thousands were interviewed across the country, as part of a fatally flawed police investigation led by Joe Beattie, a distinguished and terminally inflexible Glaswegian detective who was quickly consumed and eventually engulfed by the hysteria surrounding the case. The killings have never been solved, drifting into the city’s folklore over the subsequent half century. For some, including the police, as well as the run of writers, documentarians and celebrity criminologists who have taken up the story over the years, the myth has carried its own convenience. After all, it is easier by far to blame a quasi-mythical scripture-obsessed killer than interrogate the litany of professional and institutional disasters that followed the murders.
There is perhaps some slight temptation in glossing over my own role in keeping Bible John alive. Clearly, anyone who has decided to write a book on the subject has to reckon with some degree of complicity with the true-crime industrial complex, even if that same book is intended as a critique of the genre’s worst excesses. It was a question I wrestled with from the earliest days of my reporting. What gave me the right to try to reframe and retell these stories?
Perhaps this is a question without a satisfactory answer. If pressed, I’d say the crimes were a window through which a volatile, captivating chapter in Glasgow’s recent history could be seen. I never proffered a theory regarding the killer’s identity, or made any outlandish claim that I could “solve” the case. Instead, there was the weight of available evidence to sort through, which showed how and why these murders still carry such an outsized fascination for so many. It is a search that has taken me from musty Glaswegian archives, to hotels in the Scottish borders and council estates in Kent seaside towns.
These sorts of mysteries are a powerful prompt to all manner of ingenuity. The social media-enabled internet sleuth is a very modern phenomenon and it isn’t just murder that fuels it. Much critical coverage was recently devoted to the blunt insensitivity and wild speculation surrounding the weeks-long search for Nicola Bulley. Though shocking, it was hardly surprising for anyone that has lingered in an unsolved mystery forum or Facebook group. This is what not knowing can provoke, particularly when one is located at a safe remove from any sense of real jeopardy. For many, the right to air a theory is increasingly sacred, however careless or harmful it may be. This impulse is easy enough to condemn in others; it is far harder to acknowledge that it may lie dormant in us all.
Francisco Garcia is a journalist and author of We All Go Into The Dark: The Hunt for Bible John
about 20% is absorbed through the stomach lining. The rest is absorbed once it reaches the small intestines, all of it ultimately ending up in your bloodstream. Food can act like a sponge and slow the alcohol’s absorption: if you are drinking on an empty stomach, the alcohol takes effect much faster. A few minutes after your first sip, once it gets to your bloodstream and into your brain, it starts to have an effect.
“This is what we call the rising phase, which is what most people are looking for,” says Nutt. “Your blood vessels widen, which can make you start to feel a bit flushed, you start to feel a bit relaxed around the jaw and then you start to feel chilled and more sociable and convivial. That comes from Gaba, our main inhibitory neurotransmitter, which for most of us is turned down a bit in social situations, making us a bit anxious and tense.” Alcohol, in other words, turns up the Gaba system, helping us to relax. This can also be accompanied by a temporary feeling of warmth and drop in body temperature. This is, essentially, the good bit: you’re half a pint or a glass of wine down, and things feel great.
The session
As you keep drinking, dopamine kicks in. This is the “seeking” hormone that is often associated with the drive to do things, rewarding us with a little feelgood spike whenever we think about it. “This is where it gets moreish,” says Nutt. “You get a little hit, you get energised, you get loud, and as the effect starts to diminish, you want more. Alcohol releases endorphins, which are the brain’s natural opiates – and they’re also addictive, turning off your sense of control so you drink more than you planned to.”
Alcohol affects the prefrontal cortex, which primarily governs cognitive control, impulse behaviour and the brain’s memory centre. This means that your judgment becomes impaired and movement is disrupted.
If you drink too much, your liver starts to feel the strain. “On average, the liver can only metabolise, or break down, roughly one small glass of wine or a pint of beer an hour,” says nutritionist Hannah Macey. “When more than this is consumed, your liver becomes unable to deal with the workload so it begins to send alcohol to the heart. This leads to a fall in your blood pressure, while the newly alcohol-rich blood is now pumped to the lungs.” This means that you exhale some of your intake, which, of course, is how Breathalyser tests work. Oh, and those increasingly frequent toilet breaks you take on a night out? Alcohol limits the brain’s production of antidiuretic hormone, instructing your kidneys to release more water, causing dehydration.
The morning after
While there is no single commonly accepted cause of hangovers, several bad things tend to happen in combination after a big night out.
“Dehydration is common,” says Macey. “But alcohol can also irritate the stomach lining, potentially causing diarrhoea, vomiting and an imbalance of electrolytes including sodium, potassium and magnesium, which the body needs to function well. Together with blood vessels in the brain expanding, this can all cause a thumping headache.”
It is not just the headache: overdoing it inhibits the liver’s normal ability to release sugar, leading to the sluggish feeling that comes with low blood sugar levels. The body also reacts to what it perceives as an imbalance in brain chemicals, and tries to correct it by reducing Gaba – which can cause what many drinkers think of as “hangxiety”. Finally, even one drink will negatively affect sleep, and having a few means you are unlikely to have had much beneficial sleep.
The fix? It is everything you know you should do, but don’t: eat before you start boozing to slow the absorption of alcohol into the blood, and drink plenty of water before, during and after drinking. In terms of food, protein is digested slowly, leaving you feeling fuller for longer, while fermented foods will feed the good gut bacteria you are about to start killing. The morning after, take an electrolyte supplement to replace what you have lost, eat anti-inflammatory foods containing omega-3 fatty acids, and get back on the fermented foods if you can face it.
For a slightly more kill-or-cure option, a cold shower might help. “Some evidence shows that elevated levels of adrenaline in the bloodstream can help with alcohol clearance,” says Macey. “Cold exposure is known to increase adrenaline and dopamine levels in a safe manner. But the evidence isn’t conclusive, and you should always do this safely.” To put it another way, turning down the temperature of the shower the morning after one too many is fine, but a cold plunge while you’re still drunk could give you hypothermia, or worse.
The medium term
Before we get to alcohol’s long-term effects, what about those weeks and months when you are overdoing it – maybe you are under stress, fitting in with the culture at a new job, or just desperately trying to enjoy the British summer? Well, the bad news is that it is probably not helping you much with any of those things. For a start, the ill effects mentioned above can build up, leaving you overstressed, short on sleep, and with high blood pressure. Regular consumption can cause permanent dilation of blood vessels and weight gain. As well as the significant calories lurking in alcoholic drinks, there is some evidence linking moderate consumption of alcohol to the buildup of visceral fat around the waist, associated with a number of health risks, including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
The good news is that alcohol doesn’t seem to affect your performance in the gym too much – as long as you are not specifically aiming to pack on muscle. “Where you may see an impact is with muscle protein synthesis,” says Scott Tindal, a performance nutrition coach and co-founder of Fuelin, a nutrition programme for athletes. He says that, although the greatest impact alcohol has on anyone trying to perform better “is on sleep quality and quantity, over time that will have a huge impact on health and performance”.
Over the medium term, booze can also kill off the helpful bacteria in your gut to an extent that can affect your immune system and mood, the latter enough to make you likely to drink more. “This can lead to a hindered immune response, negative gut symptoms and higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression,” says Macey. “It also plays havoc with our hormones, which can lead to increased hunger and diminished sex drive.”
The long haul
One of the better known health consequences of long-term alcohol consumption is liver disease, alcohol being the most common cause in the UK. Although cirrhosis can take years to develop, regularly drinking over the recommended limits can damage the liver. Meanwhile, cutting down on drinking has become standard advice in lowering the risk of dementia. While alcohol doesn’t appear to directly kill brain cells, it candisrupt the growth of new ones – and also indirectly cause neurological problems that can lead to dementia.
Still, a glass of wine a day might help your longevity, right? Well, unfortunately, rumours of booze’s effectiveness in that area may have been exaggerated. “For a long time, I think we’ve told ourselves alcohol is good for us, partly because we enjoy drinking it,” says Dr Sadie Boniface, head of research at the Institute of Alcohol Studies. “But science has debunked some of the ‘health benefits’ of moderate drinking, and one thing I think people generally don’t understand is that the official drinking guidelines are for ‘low-risk’ alcohol consumption, not ‘safe’ consumption. When the drinking guidelines were developed, they did an enormous review of the evidence, and did calculations for the health risks of drinking at different levels.” The cut-off they chose for low-risk, she says, was a little below a 1% lifetime risk of death from alcohol: “I think that’s higher than a lot of people would expect, and much higher than the risk of death that we would probably accept for other exposures, such as air pollution.”
It seems fairly clear that there is nothing in alcohol that is directly beneficial: resveratrol, an antioxidant often credited with health-boosting properties, is only present in minuscule amounts in red wine. “The World Health Organization outlines its thinking quite clearly,” says Dr Inge Kersbergen, a lecturer in public health at the University of Sheffield. “Essentially, even low amounts of alcohol consumption increase our risk of seven different types of cancer and there is no evidence that any protective effects for other diseases outweigh this increase in cancer risk. So, even though the health risks of light drinking are small, people shouldn’t drink alcohol to try to improve their health.”
Despite this, people who have a drink or two every week aren’t necessarily likely to experience worse health outcomes. A recent meta-analysis that considered results from 107 studies found that, compared with never drinking, low-volume drinking is not associated with an increase in all-cause mortality.
The UK government’s most recent advice suggests a limit of 14 units or fewer, spread throughout the week, but it is not a one-size fits all situation. “There is no single threshold of consumption that decides whether someone might experience problems due to alcohol,” says Kersbergen. “Artificial distinctions between ‘normal drinkers’ and ‘problem drinkers’ can cause people to not recognise it when they are experiencing problems.” If you’re concerned, she advises taking The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, which, she says, is “a helpful 10-question screening tool that is used to assess whether someone is at higher risk of alcohol problems”.
Drip-feeding your alcohol slowly over a week comes with its own issues. “It will reduce the acute risks such as accidents and, of course, hangovers,” says Boniface. “But drinking on a daily basis is also not advisable in terms of habit forming, so it’s good to have alcohol-free days every week.” This limits exposure to the psychological phenomenon known as the ‘alcohol priming effect’ whereby, Kersbergen says: “Drinking even a small dose of alcohol can cause people to drink more, even if they didn’t intend to, due to increased craving and reduced inhibition. Someone who wants to cut down on drinking could therefore find it easier to not drink at all on a day than to drink only one drink.”
If you don’t want to give it up entirely, perhaps the trick is to balance the (relatively) small health risks of low consumption against the fact that having a glass of red with some friends remains a lot nicer than the other health risks we are routinely exposed to. “Alcohol is the best drug for socialising that we know of,” says Nutt. “And the whole history of humanity is socialising – we’re an enormously social species and alcohol facilitates that. The problem is that about 10-15% of people really struggle to control their drinking and quite a few people drink more than they should without knowing it.” Nutt suggests two things. “First, you should be aware of how much you drink, in the same way you’re aware of your weight and waistline, and try to reduce it if necessary.” The second point may take some practice: “Never have a drink that doesn’t give you value. Most people have one drink and carry on – but most of the value comes from that first drink.”
troubles, with more than 100 cases against him. The former prime minister is calling for elections to take place on a provincial and national level. He alleges the attempts to detain him and a crackdown on his party are part of a plan by Pakistan’s powerful political establishment and the ruling coalition government, led by the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, “to stop PTI forming the next government”. The military leadership and the Sharif government has hit back, accusing Khan of supporting violence and terrorism.
Yet Khan also faces an impending dilemma. While his anti-military rhetoric has galvanised popular support on the streets, it has also alienated many key members of his party who have faced harassment or have longstanding ties with the army establishment.
On Tuesday, Shireen Mazari, Khan’s former human rights minister, became the latest high-profile PTI leader to quit the party after being arrested twice, joining a dozen others who have left in the past week. Khan blamed the army for pressuring his party members into “forced divorces”.
When Khan, 70, entered Pakistani politics in 1996 as a retired but still celebrated cricket captain with a playboy reputation, he was shunned for his attempts to challenge the status quo. But over the years the charismatic populist who thrived on celebrity grew popular among the middle class, who approved of his drive against corruption and ambitious promises to strengthen democracy and the rule of law. Meanwhile, his embrace of radically conservative Islam and anti-western rhetoric, particularly against the US, garnered him support among influential religious conservatives.
Malik Farooq, 28, a software engineer in Lahore, said it was Khan’s “vision” for Pakistan that had drawn his support . “Khan does not come from a political dynasty and he does not want to build any dynasty. He is in politics to save us from these corrupt families.”
In 2018, Khan was elected after promising that he alone could fix
Pakistan’s deep-rooted problems. But though he was personally popular, his majority was slim and it came amid allegations it had been rigged in his favour by the powerful military establishment, whose decades-long grip on power was seen as responsible for the rampant corruption and lack of accountability that Khan had vowed to stamp out. Several opposition politicians from the dynasties he had openly criticised had also jumped ship to join PTI and became Khan’s close aides, leading to allegations of hypocrisy.
Once in power, beholden to the military, most of Khan’s promised reforms never materialised. There was a clampdown on media freedom, extrajudicial abductions by military agencies continued and Pakistan fell further in the transparency index that measures corruption. The economy floundered and state spending soared, while his promises to shun the “lavish” lifestyles of former prime ministers did not become a reality, with Khan since accused of costing the country billions of rupees for his helicopter rides alone.
Amid economic strife and allegations of dysfunction, Khan’s support went into decline and it was at historical lows by April 2022. But it was Khan’s removal from power, after dozens of his own MPs defected and he lost a parliamentary vote of no confidence, that would revitalise his popularity.
Khan swiftly and loudly blamed a US-backed conspiracy for his removal as prime minister. Though the claim was debunked and the US denied it, it played well to rampant anti-US sentiment and riled up support, while his fervent conservative Islamic rhetoric also strengthened his populist support base.
Khan’s decision to turn against his former ally – Pakistan’s military establishment, accusing them of colluding with the west to bring him down – has also galvanised support among many who are tired of the decades of the army interfering in politics. In recent months, his populist, firebrand speeches against military leadership have drawn thousands on to the streets in support, and sympathy for him only strengthened after he was shot in the leg in November while at a rally, with Khan accusing the military chief of being behind a plot to assassinate him.
The economic crisis in Pakistan in recent months, with inflation at 36% and people dying in ration queues for food, has also helped Khan politically. The ruling coalition removed subsidies and implemented hikes in the price of food, fuel and power to try to secure a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and avoid default, which has made them unpopular among the masses.
Taseer Ali, 26, an electrical engineer, was among those who said he believed the US government and the military were involved in toppling Khan. “Khan is trustworthy and visionary,” he said. “Yes, Khan has changed his stance towards the army but he has seen the military’s real face and he knows them well. He has given us hope that he will change this rotten system.”