Jackie’s story

Abstract

My research for this study has necessitated the usual trawl through modern data banks and long-forgotten texts in once venerable, now defunct titles. It has also taken me to numerous unlikely places throughout the mainland and beyond; to coroners inquests and Crown Courts and Her Majesty’s prisons. I came into contact with many family members and friends during this time, including a woman whose husband had killed their children, and then committed suicide. She had once given a brief anonymous interview to a journalist. I was struck by the degree of similarities in her case and in so many of the cases I had been studying. I asked her if she would be willing to submit to a (much lengthier) questionnaire for my study. She wrote to me saying that she would be ‘happy to help in any way possible … BUT, I do not want my children’s pictures or names used, or my surname’. There was no possibility of me doing that, yet during the period which followed, I was preoccupied with discomforting questions. The all-abiding preoccupation for the woman was: could anonymity be maintained? I was reasonably confident it could; I have been writing about and anonymizing actual child abuse and mental health cases for over 30 years. But this was a case which, like every other filicide-suicide case, was so heavily publicized, nationally, in the press, on radio, on television and on the internet.