{"id":264,"date":"2026-04-15T11:57:27","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T10:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/?p=264"},"modified":"2026-04-15T11:57:27","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T10:57:27","slug":"the-killing-of-a-murderer-a-rebalancing-of-the-order-of-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/2026\/04\/15\/the-killing-of-a-murderer-a-rebalancing-of-the-order-of-things\/","title":{"rendered":"The Killing of a Murderer – a Rebalancing of the Order of Things?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

David Gurnham,<\/a> 15 April 2026\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 7 mins read<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 7 March 2026, I caught a BBC television news headline reporting that the murderer and former school caretaker Ian Huntley had died in prison following severe head trauma inflicted by a fellow prisoner at HMP Frankland, Country Durham, in an attack a week or so previously. The newsreader having given this much of the story, I expected the report thus introduced to offer more about the incident itself: at the very least some details about the man suspected of killing Huntley and facts so far established about the circumstances and conditions at the prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the report<\/a> (by the BBC\u2019s Senior UK Correspondent Seema Kotecha) was not like that at all. Her full story, taking precisely two minutes of airtime, ran thus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soham in Cambridgeshire, an ordinary Sunday in August. Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells were best friends. Mad about Manchester United, this photo was taken by Holly\u2019s Mum that afternoon. At around six, they left Holly\u2019s home, it\u2019s thought to buy sweets. The search lasted 13 days; more than 400 officers took part. Amid huge public concern, it became one of the biggest operations of its kind. A school caretaker, Ian Huntley, said he had seen the girls before they disappeared.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

His girlfriend Maxine Carr was Holly and Jessica\u2019s teaching assistant. The girls\u2019 bodies were finally found by a gamekeeper, dumped in a ditch around 10 miles from Soham. Huntley was arrested the same day. He\u2019d lured Holly and Jessica into his home, claiming his girlfriend was inside. He was sentenced to life with a minimum of 40 years, the judge said his continuing lies and manipulation had deepened the family\u2019s suffering.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maxine Carr, who\u2019d given him a false alibi, was sentenced to three and a half years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Huntley, as one of Britain\u2019s most notorious prisoners, was always a target. He was slashed across the throat in 2010, needing 21 stiches. The man who senselessly stole the futures of two happy, carefree girls enjoying their summer holidays.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found it odd that the BBC report seemed to be so reluctant to talk about Huntley\u2019s own death, a reluctance apparently reflected the general attitude of people of Soham as reported in another BBC story<\/a> from the same day: that \u2018he’s not worth their breath or time\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having listened to the report, my attention must have been taken away to something else, because it was only when coming back to it a month later that I found that it had been followed up with an interview with Danny Shaw (former BBC journalist and crime and policing commentator) who had elaborated on some of the facts of the instant case that I had expected to hear in the initial report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shaw also mentioned certain contextual matters: that the same prison had seen a serious attack on prison staff by Hashem Abedi<\/a> in April 2025, and that there had been a sharp rise in the number of prisoner deaths by homicide in the UK in 2025 and 2024 (as reported by the Ministry of Justice<\/a>). He also noted that the principle of rehabilitation is undermined in the case of prisoners serving a whole life term (as Huntley\u2019s alleged killer was) since they have \u2018nothing to lose\u2019 by further offending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the first minutes of his contribution, too, continued in the same vein as Kotecha\u2019s, reminding viewers of the \u2018shocking\u2019, \u2018brutal\u2019 and \u2018evil\u2019 nature of Huntley\u2019s own crimes and his attempts to \u2018manipulate\u2019 both the girls, and afterwards, the media as well. Like Kotecha, Shaw framed death of Huntley through the truism that the latter was, after all, \u2018always going to be a target because of the crimes he committed<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder how many viewers of the BBC news on 7 March watched this item to the end and thus heard the discussion at the end of what happened to Huntley at HMP Frankland, and how many, like me, caught or noticed only the first part in which nothing at all was said about it. The programme editors may rightly believe that making Huntley\u2019s crimes in Soham in 2002 the first and central focus was a necessary reminder of why his death is newsworthy now, and to ensure due respect is paid to the memory of the child victims, their families, and members of the community affected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe the BBC\u2019s presentation of the item, and especially the text of initial report, throws some troubling light on our \u2018cultural imaginary\u2019 of crime and punishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is the way it speaks to a \u2018displacement\u2019 of justice into informal channels which, while often frighteningly uncontrolled and brutally violent, may not be entirely unpredictable or even necessarily intolerable. The presentation of Huntley\u2019s case, for example, conveys an implicit expectation that   vengeful emotions will from time to time escape from their official (legal) constraints, and that this is itself part of what is popularly understood as \u2018justice\u2019 for society\u2019s most reviled characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The release of Huntley\u2019s girlfriend Maxine Carr with a new and secret identity, for example, precipitated several incidents of other women being mistaken for her and being relentlessly harassed, threatened, and abused<\/a> by people who believed that \u2018justice\u2019 in her case too required much more than a few years in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for Huntley: \u2018He was slashed across the throat in 2010, needing 21 stiches. The man who senselessly stole the futures of two happy, carefree girls<\/em>\u2026\u2019 The juxtaposition of those sentences may not quite amount to tacit approval of the murder of a child-murderer. But they do seem to affirm a natural causal relation, and insinuate that the two crimes so separated in time represent a rebalancing of the order of things in a way not antithetical to justice\u2019s values of desert and retribution. After all, the \u2018retributive\u2019 justification for punishment is retrospective, and the report \u2013 in its determination to focus only on that \u2018ordinary Sunday in August\u2019 of 2002 \u2013 implicitly participates in that punitive orientation back to the original crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second point, which flows from this retrospective quality of the report, is the theme of genre and how genre tropes and conventions are used in ways that tell us something about the imagined role and responsibility of law and criminal justice. When I reflect on my own surprise at the lack of focus on Huntley\u2019s death in the initial BBC report, I realise that this was the result of certain generic assumptions that I had made – mistakenly, as it turned out – upon hearing the initial headline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had imagined that the piece would follow the genre conventions of crime reporting, hence my expectation to hear details about the crime that had just been discovered taking precedence over the crimes committed 24 years previously by its victim. Instead, the report invokes a trope from an entirely different genre and thus a wholly different set of conventions, namely the retrospective<\/em>: a staple of genres such as the memoir, biography (or in this case \u2018geo<\/em>graphy\u2019), and obituary. There may be various reasons for this, but I suggest that it allows the report to reflect a view about the \u2018proper\u2019 role of law with respect to \u2018doing justice\u2019 and its limits in respect of the \u2018underserving\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notice that the vast bulk of detail given in the report concerns law\u2019s positive and energetic involvement action in service of the \u2018real\u2019 victims of the \u2018happy, carefree girls\u2019, their families, and the local community of Soham, some of which Shaw then repeated in his interview:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The search lasted 13 days \u2026 it became one of the biggest operations of its kind \u2026 Huntley was arrested the same day \u2026 sentenced to life with a minimum of 40 years \u2026 Maxine Carr, who\u2019d given him a false alibi, was sentenced to three and a half years \u2026<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By comparison, law\u2019s involvement in Huntley\u2019s death is not only minimised, but almost entirely set apart from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was \u2018always (going to be) a target<\/em>\u2019 on account of his own \u2018senseless\u2019<\/em> crimes, and an object of such understandable and widely shared hatred that his own violent end at the hand of a determined executioner could hardly be delayed forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Gurnham, 15 April 2026\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 7 mins read On 7 March 2026, I caught a BBC television news headline reporting that the murderer and former school caretaker Ian Huntley had died in prison following severe head trauma inflicted by a fellow prisoner at HMP Frankland, Country Durham, in an attack a week or so previously. … Continue reading The Killing of a Murderer – a Rebalancing of the Order of Things?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7259,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[41,55,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-justice","category-law-and-literature","category-mob-justice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/southamptonlawschoolblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}