![]() Which is what might happen, the programme ponderously explains, if you were a girlfriend who maybe knew about your boyfriend’s first wife’s suspicious death, too, and might start airing your concerns to the police. A journalist wrote an article thereafter pointing out that Hunter’s first wife died by what was considered to be a very unlikely suicide and that his girlfriend Betsey was found dead the day after the police informed him of Linda’s death. His name was Andrew Hunter and he was convicted of killing his second wife, Linda, and dumping her body in his local woods a year after Lannen was found in Templeton. The longer answer was no, there was absolutely no similarity between the murders or the victims, the police had a likely suspect for McCabe’s murderer but the evidence was contaminated so no dice, and there wasn’t one for Lannen’s at the time but one cropped up thereafter. Or was it – as the press was particularly keen that it should be – a single killer? Snowfall destroyed any clues the killers might have left. In 19, the bodies of two women were found in Templeton Woods, Dundee: Carol Lannen, a young single mother who had been in the care system and who was last seen getting into a man’s car on a street known to be used by men looking for paid sex, and Elizabeth McCabe who was a nursery nurse who lived at home with her parents and vanished after being separated from her friend on a night out. In the opening episode of the new series, it is the turn of the Templeton Woods murders to be re-examined for our … what, exactly? Delectation? To further our sense of despair about the world? To pander to our very worst voyeuristic impulses? Unconvincing efforts are made to gloss it as a chance to jog people’s memories or to encourage witnesses to come forward, as if the chance of this happening were not so infinitesimal as to be nonexistent. Emilia Fox is there, too, to react to the recapping and bemoaning, ask tortuously scripted questions and look suitably tragic about the whole abducted children/murdered women thing, and because she plays a forensic psychologist in the long-running drama Silent Witness. As with the new series, they are investigated – if that is the word – by criminology professor David Wilson, whose MO seems to be to recap the events, tut over what could have been done better, bemoan the lack of forensic technology in the past and identify the prime suspect as someone the police interviewed at the time but never had enough evidence to prosecute. The first series – of three programmes, this second series comprises six – covered the 1967 murder of 19-year-old servicewoman Rita Ellis along with the 1986 disappearances of Patrick Warren and David Spencer – “the Milk Carton Kids” – and Suzy Lamplugh. The subject matter is cold cases, where someone was abducted or killed but the perpetrators were never caught. ![]() The lip curls, the eyes narrow and the hand reaches for the remote control. It’s when the soul recoils instinctively, like a snail touching salt. That’s a technical critical term, but I hope you understand. ![]() When the gulf between subject matter and approach is as wide as it is with In the Footsteps of Killers (Channel 4), it is hard not to get the ick.
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