Three-point turn
Billie-Jo And Me: A Tonight Special
I don't normally bother about Tonight With Trevor McDonald, mostly because it's sensationalist ITN crap, but it just happened to coincide precisely with cooking the dinner last night so I watched it all. I note this morning that it drew an impressive 6.4 million viewers (beating the FA Cup match on the other side, which must have really irked BBC1 after the damp-squib Jean Charles de Menezes Panorama on Black Wednesday a couple of weeks back, which pulled just 2.1 million, thus proving that the murder of an innocent Brazilian on a Tube platform in Stockwell doesn't put bums on seats like the murder of a 13-year-old foster-daughter with a gerbil and a dog in Hastings). Anyway, I found myself morbidly and mundanely fascinated by the interview with Sion Jenkins, 48, who might not be able to spell "Sean", but can clear himself of murder.
Looking like a cross between Jim Davidsdon and sports presenter Rob Curling*, Jenkins might have had enough of being cross-examined, having been on trial three times, but he allowed Sir Trevor to do it one more time. This was his first interview since being cleared of killing Billie-Jo with an iron tent peg, and the interview covered most of the contentious areas: his odd behaviour on discovering her body (he claims, fairly credibly, to have been in shock - who knows how we would react in the same situation? - we might go and sit in the car for a bit like he did), his circuitous route to B&Q, which was held against him as a deliberate attempt to provide an alibi for himself (he claims, less credibly, that he couldn't do a three-point turn and drove round the block, twice, instead) and the allegation that he beat his kids with a stick and his first wife, too (which he flatly denied - it's his word against theirs).
He certainly laid in to the police, for what he sees as tucking him up and failing to notice that he was in shock, and the prosecutors, who used his odd behaviour (going to the DIY store without any money to buy white spirit that he didn't need) to turn him into a murderer. I know that a lot of people think he did it. Until they find out who did (perhaps the suspicious-looking vagrant?), these people are going to carry on believing he did it. Perhaps he did do it. Jenkins, whose Prince Charles-like use of the word "one" can't have endeared him to anyone on the jury, had this to say to Sir Trev (who incidentally has some pretty marked downward creases in his forehead, suggesting gall bladder trouble): "For any man or woman in this country who believes in British justice to now have a situation where the Crown might seek a conviction on hearsay and on bad character issues that bear no relationship at all to what that person is in the dock for, I think is worrying, deeply worrying."
It's a fascinating case, made more fascinating by this interview, so I must thank Tonight for setting it up for me. Nobody explained why Billie-Jo had the name of a country singer.
*Apologies to Rob Curling, who looks like this. You decide.
And to compensate, this is his website - he does training videos and conference hosting. Why not book him and say it's the non-murderer Sion Jenkins. That would pack out the auditorium.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 3:12 PM
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13 Comments:
There is some gender imbalance at play that bothers me.
Recently a mother took her own life and those of her two young boys. It was reported as a sad tragedy.
Not so recently a father did the same. He was described a child killer and murderer.
Draw your own conclusions.
Many people "think he did it" because we're informed by secondhand information poorly communicated in the guise of television entertainment.
Yeah. I'm having a shite day.
Sorry to hear that, Peter. But if you're going to take it out on anyone, let it be the news media.
Rob Curling looks like Jon Culshaw "doing" Matthew Kelly. Or, to put it another way, Jon Culshaw.
Is "Sion" a Welsh spelling?
Something strikes me as wrong with the statement "[he] can clear himself of murder." You don't clear yourself of murder: other people clear you of it. This isn't pedantry, it's just that to me this phrasing seems to imply that he did it and then got away with it. (After all, if you assume he didn't do it then this statement becomes utterly meaningless.)
Maybe it's just me. If it isn't though... well, he has been cleared...
I actually think he didn't do it. But it's just a hunch - I have no more evidence than anyone on the juries that did and didn't think he did it. And if he didn't technically clear himself (although his testimony was a factor in the clearing) he was still cleared of the charge of murder if you want to get pedantic. I'll stick with the statement that it's fascinating. (Blimey, it's like being cross-examined by Sir Trevor!)
Interesting though that once the bare facts are passed through the filter of the TV/radio media, the impression given is one of a possibly guilty man getting off, rather than a wrongly-imprisoned innocent man freed when the full range of evidence (denied to the first jury) is presented.
Like Andrew, I have a hunch that he didn't do it, but what bothers me more is the Daily Mail-esque insistence in the news reporting of this that the police and judiciary knew best first time, and that if you WILL pander to the opinions of a jury then what do you expect.....
It's true - mud really does stick.
OK, like I said I wasn't being pedantic. I just think that if you haven't committed a murder then your ability to get yourself cleared amounts to telling the truth and putting your faith in the jury. It's not a skill that's worth mentioning unless you're talking about someone who did do it. So simply by mentioning it you imply...
But you've made your position clear anyway. My concern was that you seemed to be joining in with the "we all know he did it" brigade (they're a subdivision of the there's-no-smoke-without fire brigade).
How is one supposed to take being compared to Sir Trevor? We find out, after this break.
But he can clear himself of murder. He did. I wasn't implying he must have fooled the jury into wrongly letting him off. (I know, we've covered this. But I really don't want to be lined up alongside the Daily Mail!)
I thought Sir Trev did a good job. It is good to be compared to him. Mark Austin is shit. At least Sir Trev presented the news as if to adults.
I think you've established clearly that you're not lining up with the Daily Mail, don't worry. And I wasn't trying to further press my case, I was just trying to clarify what I was saying.
(But I still think that if you go to the trouble of saying someone can clear himself of murder, it looks like you're suggesting he's guilty of murder. Don't worry, it really is probably just me.)
I actually feel sorry for Trevor McDonald. He seems to be a good journalist with integrity working on a programme (and a channel) that values neither. Ditto for Melvyn Bragg, only he gets to do clever stuff on Radio 4. And he's been very lucky with his hair.
I know . . . "clear himself of the murder charge."
Hmm. I don't know. Words are funny buggers, aren't they?
Maybe the problem is that I don't really know what you're trying to say with this sentence. Would it change your meaning if you said "but he was cleared of murder"? I know that changes the flow of the sentence, but then maybe it's the sentence construction that's not helping.
The dubious jibe about not being able to spell his own name "properly" sets us up to expect a further, contradictory statement about the man's intelligence. The implication is that whatever follows the "but" will suggest that a greater intelligence is at work than we might have thought at first. "[He] can clear himself of murder" - or even "[he] can clear himself of the murder charge" - both fit with the conventions of this form of sentence and therefore imply the application of a surprising degree of intelligence. Like I said before, all he could do was give his testimony. Any application of intelligence to that process would mean lying, embellishing, or suppressing. Which would imply that he did it.
There you go. That's my best attempt at explaining myself. I promise I won't have another go.
I just checked with Chambers: Sean is the Irish form of John; Sion is the Welsh form of John.
I think it's best if we let this one go now, anonymous. I love the cut and thrust of the comments space on this blog, but when we're into the endless analysis of a single sentence in a single entry, it becomes slightly surreal. The daft thing is, I could go back in and delete or rewrite the sentence, but that's a kind of self-Stalinism. I wrote it, in a light-hearted moment. Move on. Unless you're doing this as a kind of therapy, in which case, far be it from me to discourage you.
That's fair enough. As I said, I wasn't going to try again anyway; it's certainly not therapeutic. I know the whole piece was light-hearted, and most of it walked the line very skilfully. That sentence struck me as contentious, but you clarified your position anyway. I wouldn't want you to change what you'd written. It's just that your responses suggested you didn't understand what I was getting at, which is always frustrating.
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