Is it in their blood?

                                         

                                                       Thompson and Venables

In 1968 Mary Bell killed Martin Brown and Brian Howe. In 1993 Robert Thomson and Jon Venables killed James Bulger who was only 2 years old at the time. The murderers in the above cases were all under 12 years old. 

It's fair to say that the perpetrators of these crimes had upbringings that were far from ideal. They are all examples of why sociologists believe that parenting, a family, a sense of belonging and examples of the 'good moral compass' will tend to keep children on the right side of the tracks. That’s a generalisation, but one that is often true.

Much has been said about the murders and the tragic victims, but I do confess to be interested in what happened to the children who committed the crimes. Given the chance of a clean slate, what happened to them.

                                        

                                                              Mary Bell

Mary Bell was released in her early 20s. She's married and she has children, and probably grandchildren and has never committed another crime. Neither has Robert Thompson. He has been free since 2001, he lives a quiet life and is reported as being well integrated into the community he lives in.  

Jon Venables has taken a slightly different path, found with child pornography on his computer and is now re-incarcerated. His parole hearing ended in refusal.

The paperback of my book, In Her Blood, is published on the 1^st August and is not the first novel to explore what happens to children who have killed children and have then grown up, received therapy and molded their personalities into that of a responsible adult. 

I suppose we are interested in nature versus nurture. Can they be 'cured' or is it in their blood?  

And the book looks at the success of that in the context of the power of social media and how easy it is to track people down nowadays. 

Obviously In Her Blood is a total work of fiction. The initial crime that brings her to the attention of the authorities happens in the family house during a great storm. The neighbour's children and the children of the house are put together in a safe bedroom as they seriously suspect part of the roof of the semi detached building is going to be blown off. In the morning, one of the children, the baby who was screaming all night is found dead and the blame for that is put at the feet of Gillian, the eldest children present. Maybe 8 years old at the time.

And then, two years later, there’s an incident where the kids are playing on the train track on the main  line from Glasgow to Oban and this time the authorities are a wee bit more severe on her as there's the eye witness testimony to who shoved who. When she’s released, she is given a flat in England and obviously told to never tell anybody of her true identity.

As realised child killers do in real life, she was living in witness protection conditions. 

When I was writing it, I remember always being quite empathetic towards adult Gillian, a  young women who makes herself unapproachable and she comes across as a rather horrible human being. But it doesn’t take a psychologist to see the damage behind that. 

Of course there are others out to take revenge and see such actions as justified. 

                                                    

There’s understandable moral outrage when a child kills a child. But the killers themselves are, after all children with immature brains by definition and maybe it's society that feels the outrage the most as these things just should not happen. Yet they do.

                                                             

In the book Gillian inevitably becomes the hunted on social media  as somebody has worked out exactly who she is. So, as the authorities are now failing to protect her, she goes back to the one place she feels safe.

She goes home.

Right back into the lions den.

 And the book starts off with a body falling off the Connel Bridge near Oban and is caught in the falls of Lora underneath. The body of course turns out to be that of a child psychologist who was looking into the past of Gillian as one of the subjects of a book he was writing, and he found out things nobody ever expected to find.

                                                             

Writing it, the narrative took the turn that the locals in the small village where Gillian was born are rather protective of her. They had known her since she was a baby, knew her mum and dad, and maybe have a bigger picture of the tragic events that took place.

Even fictionally, writing a child killer seemed to carry a heavier weight of responsibility. I was glad that my fictional detective has a daughter roughly the same age as Gillian, and took a 'but there for the Grace of God' approach to the media storm around the case.

But in the end Gillian, as a character, grew into a young woman of responsibility with good social values. I think she also swears more than any other character I've ever written.