Katie: Coerced And Killed

Anthony McIntyre 📺 Four women have been murdered in the space of six weeks in the North, the latest being twenty-two year old Mary Ward.

BBC Spotlight
Slain in her home in Belfast's Melrose Street, Ms Ward had previously alerted the PSNI to the danger she was under as a result of domestic violence. The PSNI believes that while her body was not discovered until October-1 her life had been snuffed out approximately a week earlier. The PSNI has since referred itself to the police ombudsman for the purpose of having its response to Mary Ward's distress call examined.

It is vitally important that the PSNI, which proclaims its own hot pursuit of others (but not the homicidal misogynist Jonathan Creswell) for their alleged transgressions, should have its feet held to the fire over any shortcomings in its policies and practices when dealing with violence against women.

A recent BBC Spotlight documentary raised serious concerns about how some elements within the PSNI had failed to take seriously the very real possibility that a woman, Katie Simpson, was the victim of murder, preferring instead the self-serving narrative of her killer that she had committed suicide at her home in August 2020. A journalist elsewhere, Tanya Fowles, who had made numerous attempts to get the PSNI to act, found the force's response to be one of indifference and hostility towards her for having the temerity to ask it to do its job. Distilled down, it simply did not give one flying fuck about the circumstances that resulted in the death of a twenty one year old woman. If her killer said it was suicide by hanging despite his own history of violence against women including strangulation, for which he once served a prison stretch, that was good enough for the PSNI: move along, nothing to see here.

These are the issues that Jennifer O'Leary so brilliantly brings to the fore in Katie: Coerced And Killed. This is not the first time the BBC investigator and her team have shone the Spotlight on violence and abuse inflicted on women. She was the journalist who in 2018 played a huge role in bringing the experience of Mairia Cahill into the public domain.

Katie: Coerced And Killed took almost an hour to present, so detailed and forensic was its composition. It was a story of violence, bullying, intimidation, coercive control, rape, murder, and ultimately police incompetence.

Equestrian Katie Simpson's killer was Jonathan Creswell, also from the horsey world. He took his own life at home shortly after his trial had started, initiated by a new PSNI team that picked up the baton dropped by the first eleven. For the women in his life, even the cultic crazies who flocked to his defence, this was the partner from hell, a man who immediately brings to mind the quip from the US writer H.H. Monroe: he is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

Spotlight makes it crystal clear that this was a death that from the outset screamed out for investigation. Yet until a new PSNI team usurped the first lot, none was forthcoming. Hospital staff, friends, family, journalists, tutti quanti recognised the evidentiary signs. The cops failed to.

Maydown PSNI Station in Derry was appropriately not named Mayday. It was not fit for purpose. The Alliance Party MLA, Nuala McAllister, told Spotlight:

I am aware that there was an individual officer who did a lot of work and actually brought it forward to his superior to say: ‘This isn’t right here.’ He met a lot of resistance, not from his superior but from within the team around the district in which Katie lived and where the death actually occurred. There was a police team in the PSNI who just didn’t want to know . . . I’ve been informed that it was DCI John Caldwell who led that team. It has been alleged to me that it was DCI John Caldwell himself who put up the most resistance and acted in the way, I have been told, that was not befitting of a senior ranking officer.

While John Caldwell disputes the accuracy of such allegations, there remains a certain irony. John Caldwell was shot and seriously injured last year in an Omagh attack by republicans wedded to the homicidal ideology of physical force. The energy and rapidity with which the PSNI hared off in pursuit of those it believed responsible for the non-fatal attack contrasts vividly with the tardy nature of its response to the Katie Simpson fatality.

In the past week the PSNI has been the object of scrutiny in London by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal because of its perfidious pursuit of journalistic material through spying. The irony will not be lost on women that those who have been doing what the PSNI should be doing - calling time on violence against and murder of women - have to contend with the force using espionage to find out what journalists are investigating.

Jennifer O'Leary, like Tanya Fowles, has performed a huge public service in drawing attention to PSNI inattention. Harrowing as it is to view, Katie: Coerced And Killed is a most valuable contribution to the health and safety of women in circumstances where those on watch are not watching.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.