Tag Archives: Murder

A Day in the Life of Lorna Windham

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Jess on Helen's Polly 715.

I live in Northumberland.  With the Cheviots Hills, Rivers Tweed, Coquet and Wansbeck and endless beaches, I have plenty of choice about where to walk and think about writing. When I won the North Tyneside Short Story Competition with ‘Spirit of the Age’ and my children’s novel ‘Toby’s Secret’ was long listed in the Times Chicken House competition in 2008, I was hooked.

 

Spurred on by this success, I’m now the author of three local history books ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘Deaths Disasters & Dastardly Deeds’ and ‘Murder, Mystery & Mayhem’ and in November I was invited to BBC Radio Newcastle to chat with Jonathan Miles about my latest effort.

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I often promote my writing by doing power point presentations for local history societies.  One talk I did was about ‘Deaths, Disasters and Dastardly Deeds’. It was a catastrophe.

Waking at 3am with a razor blade-throat, I used an old operasingers’ trick and gargled with gin. Numbness crept over my vocal chords. I slept. Hours later I was sure someone had performed surgery with a cheese grater. I grabbed a whisky bottle and gargled. My throat was completely anaesthetised. Success.

By that evening I had a dull headache and my eyes had more bags than Louis Vuitton. It was flu, but I had promised to do the talk.

“Something’s up with the heating again,” said the perspiring IT gent as I rehearsed the presentation.

“Really?” I croaked.

The audience trooped in at 5.00 pm. Thirty minutes later I pointed the IT gent’s laser repeatedly at the screen. Nothing happened. The audience groaned. “It’ll be the USB port, we’ve had difficulties with it before,” he said as he fiddled with leads.

Lorna & three books.

 

Should I kill him? I took a deep breath; at least he wasn’t piloting a plane. We began again. Everything worked, the audience clapped in anticipation. By 6.15 pm the talk was going really well. Emboldened by my success I started to move forwards, but couldn’t because my heel was stuck in a hole in the rostra. I was now attached to the stage. “Well,” I said wrenching myself free, “my talk is about disasters.”

Ten minutes later I was on the final furlong. My throat was raw, my head was about to explode and I was perspiring like a woman in labour. However, I was sure I’d delivered a talk which had mesmerised the audience by its sheer brilliance.

I glanced at the front row. One man’s eyelids were going down like blinds, his partner’s were closed and the woman beside him had her head on her chest. I finished quickly and thanked ‘EVERYONE’ for listening. They limped out adjusting whistling hearing aids, leaning on sticks and sucking teeth. Ah well, that’s what you get when you give a talk to octogenarians in an overheated auditorium.

 

Lorna & mouth of River Wansbeck.

 

 

Julian Ruck The Bent Brief | Book Review

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This legal thriller is full of unlikeable characters but I still enjoyed it. Like all good books it has brilliant observations on life and some good literary quotes. It’s author, Julian Ruck, has also worked as a lawyer so he knows what he is talking about. This book draws you in and also shows both sides of infidelity.

It has very good twists, some that I really did not see coming. My only complaint is that the main character, Edwin Hillyard is quite crude. Something that I don’t like. He is not a likable chap either, and is quite sexist, but the story still works. He is amusing even if you don’t like him.

Edwin Hillyard, a disillusioned Suffolk-based lawyer, spends his life dealing with inadequate clients who are constantly moaning about their self-esteem, or his even more inadequate ex-air stewardess wife, Claire, who believes life is all about make-up, mobile phones, trips to the shops – and of course Coronation Street. Feeling frustrated and abused, Hillyard finds diversion in the pursuit of a beautiful Sikh doctor, Jaspreet, whom he meets when called to the scene of a suicide in the London Underground. It is an inauspicious start to the relationship. But Hillyard is not the only one seeking a diversion; his wife Claire has fallen hopelessly in love with an old friend from her flying days, Jessica Howard, an ambitious sexual predator. As their affairs entwine and jealousy and resentment build on both sides, the ensuing hell starts to blow Hillyard’s life to pieces. When Claire is found dead in their bedroom, Hillyard finds himself on trial for murder. Was Jessica involved? Will Jaspreet stand by him? Did he kill her? It’s down to the defence and prosecution barristers to battle it out in court and readers will be on the edge of their seats until the very end to find out the truth.


Worth a read. Especially if you like legal dramas. The Bent Brief is very well-written.

Amanda Knox Freed, Kercher Family: “We are back to square one.”

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The Brother of Meredith Kercher has said that the family accepted the Italian court’s decision to clear Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito of killing his sister Meredith.

Lyle Kercher went on to say that there were now fresh questions about what “truly happened” on the night she was murdered in November 2007.

“While we accept the decision that was handed down yesterday and respect the court and the Italian justice system, we do find that we are now left obviously looking at this again and thinking how a decision that was so certain two years ago has been so emphatically overturned now,” he said.

“If the two released yesterday were not the guilty parties, we are obviously left to wonder who is the other guilty person or people. We are left back at square one.

Meredith’s parents John and Arline are said to be in shock

He, Meredith’s sister Stephanie and her mother Arline had been in court hear the judge’s decision.

After the verdict they held a press conference in Perugia before flying home to the UK.
Stephanie said the court’s decision was “a shock” and that forgiveness was impossible until the family knew what happened.

“It’s very upsetting… We still have no answers. Until the truth comes out, we can’t forgive anyone. No-one has admitted to it,” she said.

She said the “biggest disappointment” was knowing that there was someone else out there who had killed her sister.

“We don’t want the wrong people put away for a crime they didn’t commit,” she said. “It may be a case of waiting another year to get the truth.”

Her mother Arline said what had happened to her daughter was “every parent’s nightmare”.

“We are still absorbing it. You think you have come to a decision and obviously it has been been overturned. I think it is very early days really,” she said.

Meredith’s father John stayed in London, from where he said the court’s decision was “ludicrous” and “crazy”.

John Kercher said the family are “shocked” and were wondering if anyone else would now be brought to justice.

He told the Daily Mirror: “It is ludicrous. How can they ignore all the other evidence?

“I thought the judge might play it safe and uphold the conviction but reduce the sentence. But this result is crazy.

“There were 47 wounds on Meredith and two knives used. One person couldn’t possibly have done that.

“What happens now? Does that mean the police need to look for more killers?”

Stephanie had said on Monday that her sister had been “hugely forgotten” in the furore over the appeal.

Miss Knox and Sollecito had been jailed for 26 years and 25 years, but have now been cleared.

The American has already started her return trip to her hometown of Seattle and was with her parents at an airport on Rome in the last hour.

Rudy Guede, 24, was convicted of the murder and had been jailed for 30 years but his trial concluded he did not act alone and his conviction was upheld on appeal but his sentence reduced to 16 years.

Ceri: Portrait of an Inadvertent Killer {Ceri's Column}

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I killed the most beautiful butterfly today. Wow, that sentence makes my look like a soon-to-be serial killer. I didn’t mean to. It was fluttering along, maybe trying to find a new home, maybe trying to find a mate. Probably just fluttering aimlessly. The problem was, it was fluttering 1.5 meters above the M4 motorway.

I wasn’t fluttering. I was moving at a positively super-sonic pace (late for some bollocks, again). I was also encased in my 2 tonnes of steel and fibreglass and whatever the hell they make the cup-holder from.

The colourful mass left on my windscreen really was horrific. I mean, it was like the aftermath of a clown’s suicide jump…I assume. Fragments of red and yellow wing were still visible through the dark gunk, (butterfly lung, ass and uvula).

My next action, on reflection, was quite sick when you think about it…and you have nothing else to do. I pulled a tiny lever and the corpse was washed away in an instance. The remnants of such a beautiful little creature treated as equal to fluff, stains and those bits of crap that get in the way of our otherwise squeaky clean world. I’m a killer. I’m a bastard.

I mean, I couldn’t avoid killing it. The insurance folk wouldn’t accept “I swerved into the tanker to avoid a butterfly” as a valid reason to write off my car and maybe write off a limb or two. But my reaction, or lack of, makes me a killer. And a bastard.

But that spider I Hoovered deserved it. I hope the fucker rots in spider hell…great, now I’ll dream of being in spider hell tonight.

Shitter.

by Ceri Phillips