PAUL FLYNN
Serial killer’s spree shows that mother really does know best
OPINION
I’M FREQUENTLY REMINDED of my mum’s favourite family yarn about her mother’s best friend being murdered by her son. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to an actual matricide. I know the story inside out, down to the last detail of the medication he was taking at the time.
My mum visited us recently and made everyone watch the macabre Tim Roth interpretation of the serial killer crimes committed by John Reginald Christie at Rillington Place, a true story from the Forties and Fifties which enthralled her as a child.
Are you spotting the connecting tissue here? A combination of the passive bloodthirstiness incubated in Mancunian matriarchs by events such as the Moors Murders and a Catholic obsession with retribution has built in my mum a thick hide for murder. She can scour a newspaper in five seconds flat and find the most gruesome stories. She knows the exact outfits Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, wore for her court appearances.