Murder in the Badlands

This four-part TV documentary series (available on Netflix), directed by Brendan J. Byrne, traces the stories of the unsolved murders of four women in Northern Ireland. The four women, Lisa Dorrian, Arlene Arkinson, Inga Maria Hauser and Marian Beattie went missing between 1973 and 2005. The bodies of Lisa Dorrian and Arlene Arkinson have never been found.

The series is sensitively made, beautifully shot and has very high production values. The anguish of the four families is conveyed with respect and candour.

Any human tragedy has many dimensions but what I want to focus on here is how the political backdrop may have been a factor in these stories. The period of the murders corresponds broadly with that of ‘The Troubles’, the ethnic and sectarian conflict that beset Northern Ireland from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Final decommissioning of paramilitary weapons was not confirmed until early 2010.

The police investigations into these crimes were compromised by many factors arising from the overall context of a society caught in the grip of warring paramilitary factions. There was, in many tight-knit communities a distrust of the police and a fear of being seen to be co-operating with them. There may well have been a shielding of potential suspects due to their links to these factions. Policing resources were also already stretched to their limits investigating other crimes arising from the conflict.

These conditions in themselves allowed those with a propensity for violence towards women to act with a certain degree of confidence that they would not be brought to justice. Watching the documentaries, one gets the feeling that one might be just looking at the tip of an iceberg. How many other acts of violence, either ‘domestic’ or involving strangers, went unreported or largely uninvestigated during The Troubles?

This raises the question of the culpability of those who differentiated their actions as ‘political’ for creating a climate in which those vulnerable to other acts of violence suffered at the hands of evil opportunists. And such evil does exist, but by its very nature, it goes unreported and largely unnoticed. One thinks of Marcel Petiot, who took advantage of the vulnerability of Jews trying to escape Paris in World War II. He was convicted of 26 murders after the war and suspected of killing many more. He claimed he was working for the Resistance but was, in fact, just robbing and killing desperate people under the cover a larger umbrella of a society at war.

The programmes are engrossing and thought-provoking and while they present the ongoing suffering of the families in a very moving way, the viewer (this one at least) also inevitably gets drawn into the ‘enjoyment’ of the whodunnit aspect of each crime. This is line that any true crime film must tread carefully lest it lapse into a kind of pornography. If anything, this series made the concept of ‘violence towards women’ more immediate and urgent to me. It provoked me to do something more than I would normally do, and write this. And its impact has stayed with me in the weeks since I saw it.