Sunday e-mail 11th February

Substack, swords, and Valentine's Day crimes

The coffee-time conversation turned briefly to Substack. I had introduced a friend, who’d been righteously impressed by the sheer number of people writing and posting here. I was about to say something profound like ‘Many are called but few are chosen’ – a weighty comment along those lines – when he startled me by saying ‘It’s like making a sword’.

A great number of Substacks there may be, but how many actually survive? Fewer than you might wish, my friend suggested. Many perish. Perhaps there just isn’t terribly much to say on a particular subject, or the author depletes energy, or the quality just isn’t there. Perhaps an endless topic, authorial hyperactivity, and punctilious prose are all required for a Substack to survive. The wood burns away in the heat of the smithy; the bright, tempered blade emerges stronger and sharper for the work to come and…well, you get the picture.

Thank you, dear readers, for your comments, questions, and Likes. They fill me with the desire to continue.  Crime & Psychology fans, you’ll be delighted to learn that this peerless publication is remaining right here, just where you found it. Some philosophers will have you believe that all change is change for the better – but in the case of Crime & Psychology, the only change will be change for the better! Even now, I know you can hardly get enough of this nifty newsletter – but wait till you see what I have ready and waiting for you over the next few months! You’ll be wishing it was summer already, because by then you’d have read all about voodoo death, crime in Manhattan, Victorian monsters, truth detection, and a host of other truly tanfastic topics that only such a scintillating Substack can provide. You’re going to love it, I’m sure.

If Crime & Psychology is a scholarly sword, a burning blade, a swooshing scimitar, it is you, the readers, who wield it! So let me know what you think. Is there anything you’d especially like to learn about, from neuroimages to crime statistics? Where you’d like to see the Substack go next? I promise I’ll do my best to serve.

Back to the present… This week’s newsletter features a criminal I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. The time didn’t seem right until ‘Vanilla Killer’ Lucy Letby reappeared in the news just a couple of weeks ago.  We’ll take a look at her case, plus female serial killers in general, and touch on such trendy topics as technocracy and offender profiling on the way. Sound good? You have only a few days to wait! On Thursday morning, you’ll be jostling to join the other cool kids in the coffee room, titillatingly tattling about our noisiest, newest, newsiest newsletter.

Meanwhile, the middle of February is on its way. This week’s bullet list: the crimes of St Valentine’s Day (and I’m not even going to mention Al Capone):

2010: Richard Schoeck planned to meet his wife, Stacey, in a park to swap Valentine’s Day gifts. Instead, he was shot to death. It appeared initially as if Schoeck had just been in the proverbial wrong place at the proverbial wrong time. Not so. It transpired that Stacey had hired a hitman. He was a gym instructor who’d been recommended by a friend over Mexican food, casual as can be. The hitman’s immodest moniker was ‘Mr Results’. The actual result was life imprisonment. Covering the case, one journalist wrote that ‘[Stacey] Schoeck admitted to having an affair in court’, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean exactly that.

2013: The notorious Oscar Pistorius. On Valentine’s Day, the previous inspiration-to-millions – a double-amputee once renowned as the awesome athlete ‘Blade Runner’ - thought someone had broken into his home. Or so he said. He shot a gun twice through a bathroom door, killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. Pistorius got a five-year stretch for culpable homicide. The verdict was later overturned and became a thirteen-year sentence for murder.

2013, again: Baptist minister Nathan Leuthold shot his wife in the head. She’d just come through the front door. Leuthold claimed it was a burglary gone wrong, but the police knew that burglars don’t usually waste time rifling through the kitchen and hunting out spare keys to the car. Police looked at Leuthold’s computer: he’d recently Googled ‘how to muffle a gun’. Leuthold, no criminal mastermind, got 80 years. A fellow prisoner was told that the murder had been a Valentine’s Day gift from Leuthold to his 20 year-old mistress. ‘Oh, you really shouldn’t have.’

2019: Larry McClure was sentenced to life for the murder of John McGuire.  McGuire had told Larry he loved Larry’s daughter, Amanda, and wanted to marry her. Larry, though, was not exactly the stereotypical charmed-but-stern paterfamilias. In fact, he was a convicted sex offender who was himself busily conducting an incestuous relationship with Amanda. He and his two daughters tied McGuire up and tortured him for two days before he died. He married Amanda one month later. And if you turned this one into a script, Netflix would tell you in was too far fetched.

2021: Does any crime have a more bathetically British name than the Bubble and Squeak murder.? David Jackson was stabbed while on the phone to police begging for help. He’d been attacked by Penny, his wife of 24 years, after a disagreement over whether or not to serve bubble and squeak for her birthday dinner. It’s always the little things. Penny claimed she’d tried to stab David in the heart but ‘he hasn’t got one’.

That’s all for today, Crime & Psychology fans! More from me on Wednesday, but, before then, please take advantage of the Like and Restack buttons that I have thoughtfully provided for your convenience.