Copy-Cat Violence and Media Reports
| Published date | 01 January 2000 |
| Date | 01 January 2000 |
| Author | Keith Soothill |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X0007300112 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
KEITH SOOTHILL
Professor
of
Social Research, Department
of
Applied Social
Science, Lancaster University
COPY-CAT VIOLENCE
AND MEDIA REPORTS
The Ashton Memorial in Lancaster's Williamson Park dominates the
skyline as anyone who has driven past on the M6 motorway will
recognize. Opened 90 years ago in October 1909 and described by Sir
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as "the grandest monument in England", it has
been a familiar landmark for generations. However, interest in the
memorial has recently had a more macabre focus. On June 25,1999 the
main headline on the Lancaster Guardian's front page proclaimed, "Just
who was the man who fell to his death?" Within living memory no one
had died from falls from the Ashton Memorial. The following week
(July 2, 1999) the newspaper headlined, "New tragedy at Memorial:
Woman, 69, found dead on the steps". The newspaper was also now
able to identify who was involved in the other tragedy.
The previous week it had been a 25-year-old student who had just
finished a PhD in pure mathematics at Lancaster University where he
had achieved a first-class honours degree. His supervisor said: "He was
an extremely able student studying pure mathematics." At the inquest
the student's father told the court his son was a virtual recluse who had
been introverted from a very young age. He told the Lancaster inquest
there was no reason why his son should have killed himself.
Six days later the 69-year-old pensioner who was severely
depressed and had tried to kill herself on three occasions, jumped to her
death from the same balcony after allegedly reading about the student's
death in a local free newspaper, not the Lancaster Guardian.
It
was
reported that she had been visited by a community health nurse and a
psychiatrist just hours before she died. They told the inquest that they
had been considering 'sectioning' her "but decided against it as she
seemed more alert". A couple of hours later she was certified dead at the
Royal Lancaster Infirmary.
The North Lancashire coroner said: "As 20 years as coroner of this
area, I have never before had deaths relating from fallsfrom theAshton
Memorial. We now have two in the matter of a very few days and one
can't accept that was merely coincidence ... these are known as copy-cat
deaths where someone a short time afterwards chooses the same way of
ending their life and it seems to me almost certainly what happened in
this case." The coroner added that both the student and the pensioner
had to climb over the balcony's 4-foot balustrade and there was no
possibility they could have fallen.
January 2000 The Police Journal 77
To continue reading
Request your trial