Blood River by Tony Cavanaugh

Author:Tony Cavanaugh [CAVANAUGH, TONY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Published: 2019-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

Reckoning

WAS SHE GUILTY?

The jury said so.

They deliberated for three hours, about the same time a Darwin jury took to convict Lindy Chamberlain for murdering her daughter, back in 1982. In that jury room, there were no deliberations. They had all agreed, well before the trial was over, possibly even before it had begun, that she was going down. Presumably the same thing happened with Jen’s jury. Despite the horrifying imprint that Nils had indelibly put upon each of them, it was the pretty teenage girl who was going to be found guilty. Because there was also, of course, the knife with its blood match and, try though he did, her QC could not get the jury to express scepticism over the last-minute discovery of the evidence. The only actual evidence that tied her to the crimes.

Lindy Chamberlain was found guilty through some blood tests – which were later revealed to be not blood but rust inhibitor and milkshake. The analyst had stated the tests were conclusive, at the behest of the investigating police, who were under extreme pressure from the government, who were under extreme pressure from the press, who were under extreme pressure from the hungry public to get the bitch behind bars.

Like Jen, Lindy Chamberlain had no motive to kill. The prosecutor made one up and there was a lot of drivel about her baby being killed as a sacrifice in the wilderness, a bit like the blood sacrifice Jen made to her god of thunder, Taranis.

And also, like Jen, Lindy Chamberlain was young and pretty. Subjugation rarely happens to a woman who is not and it certainly doesn’t happen to a woman who fails the meek-and-bashful test.

—

I DON’T REALLY talk about my criminology course and what I learned; cops don’t like it when another cop quotes facts and stats. Cops like blood and semen stains, body hairs and fibres, fingerprints, broken alibis and insurance payouts and, for the past ten years, the holy grail, DNA.

For me to talk about the ‘she-devil’ complex or the ‘third wave’ and their impact on how male police and lawyers and judges behave when considering the possibility of a female killer would only invite derision, then anger and then push-back.

I can speculate, as I did when I studied this, about the notion of an attractive woman, who is seen by men as a nurturing, loving, earth-mother, falling under the black grip of suspicious violent behaviour. The creation and then subjugation of a she-devil reaches back to the witch-hunts in Salem and even further back to Cleopatra, the wealthiest and best-known woman on the planet whom the Romans derided as a whore.

But I won’t speculate, not to Billy, not to my colleagues, because I’d be dancing solo on a desert plain. I could quote them facts, about the huge spike in focus, from police and law courts, on the potential of women’s criminality whenever a wave of feminism grew. Like in the United Kingdom after women successfully lobbied to vote in 1918. Like

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.