Official News page 4

NOT SO AMUSING AFTER ALL

by Hazed

Last week I wrote a light-hearted news story about how some unpleasant people had used Google to research the best way to kill an elderly relative.

Given that the victim in the case was seriously beaten by the criminals, the tone I used for the story was really inappropriate. I definitely shouldn't have made light of the incident.

This was brought home to me this week because of another news story I read in which someone had used the internet to research ways to dispose of his victim. But in this case, the young woman did not survive. The murderer is now appearing in court in a high-profile case in the UK. The details are not in the least bit light-hearted.

Vincent Tabak is accused of murdering a young woman called Jo Yeates. The technology angle is that he searched the web for information on the length of sentences for murder and manslaughter, and for "body decomposition time". While the police hunt for the killer was continuing, he used the net to follow their progress, and to search for details that related to the case, presumably to gauge how likely it was that he would become a suspect, as well as just being fascinated by the details of what he had done.

It's a shocking case, of the nature we're more used to seeing on crime dramas on TV than in real life. You can read about it here.

I guess the moral is that I need to be a bit more sensitive about the way I write my news stories!

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