I went for a quick walk at lunch and for some reason got to thinking about the Timothy Evans case. For those who don't know, Evans was either: a man who murdered his wife and child. And by an amazing coincidence shared a house with a man later convicted of serial murder himself (Reg Christie). Or of course, he and his family were in the wrong place at the wrong time and Christie murdered his family as he would go on to do to many others, manipulating the somewhat slowitted Evans into incriminating himself with the police.  Either way, Evans was arrested, convicted and hanged in 1950. People have been arguing about the case ever since. (Christie himself was caught and hanged in 1953, having murdered four women, including his wife).

True Crime books are always one of those things that I feel I shouldn't be interested in, due to it being so ghoulish and morbid. It isn't all crime that interests me either - those books on serial killers who cut an evil swathe through unfortunate lost souls are just deadening - an endless stream of women who through bad luck, met the most hideous of ends for no reason.

There has to be a reason. There has to be some element that stands out. Norah Lofts was an amazing writer (and now sadly out of print) and she suggested that part of the fascination is due to the magnifying glass being applied to what seemes on the surface to be the most mundane of families. So the starling, unbelievable murders of Lizzie Borden's parents are considered along with the fact that the family were ill that week because they kept eating a joint of mutton that was kept unrefrigerated in the larder for seven days. In summer. It fascinates me that otherwise trivial events such as popping in to buy a bag of sweets (as John Hanratty claimed to have done) assume matters of critical importance when placed in the context of a murder.

And there has to be doubt. One of the thngs I loved about David Fincher's film "Zodiac" was how it captured not only the fascination with the studying of the jigsaw pieces of a person's life (see above) but equally how easy it was to make the pieces into totally convincing pictures - so-and so MUST be the killer, you think. Fincher shows how this happened time after time with Zodiac, how amazingly hot leads turned out to be dead ends. This isn't rare. In fact, it seems common with many investigations. In Ann Rule's book on the Green River Killer, the detectives emerge as the most patient men on earth, meticulously combing through evidence for that one, conclusive breakthrough, refusing to get their hopes up again until they are really sure. Otherwise, it seems that finding a pattern that fits is easy and very seductive. Quite frightening really how often it happens. The James Hanratty case is a fascinating example of how this happened in reverse. after his conviction and hanging, all manner of utterly convincing evidence was brought forward by highly intelligent, diligent campaigners that Peter Alphons was the true killer. So it was very surprising when science, in the form of DNA testing eventually caught up with the past and confirmed, decades later, that the courts had made the right decision after all - Hanratty was guilty of the crimes he committed. The rest? circumstantial, coincidence and fraud, apparently.

It highlights how much we don't live in the world, but only in our perceptions of the world That one test in 2003 on a handkerchief and clothes means that a totally different set of events are deemed to have occurred. It fascinates me that reality gets rewritten, or in this case re reestablished as a result of something so tiny. And of course, this is a big and dramatic example but it shows how all of us must do this all the time, just on a smaller scale every day - never really seeing the world but just making patterns of what we perceive.