Yesterday saw the conclusion of a criminal case that for some unknown reason I have been following quite closely. It was the case of a 16 year-old who was accused of luring his ex-girlfriend to the woods near where they lived and bludgeoning her to death in an attempt to win a free breakfast off a mate whom he’d bet with that he would kill her.
Well Joshua Davies has been found guilty of the murder of Rebecca Aylward and you read the story and just can’t stop shaking your head is disbelief. A crime that makes no sense in any way imaginable and just goes to show us all just how little we know about other people at times.
Now it has been a fair while since I was 15/16 I will admit but I was blissfully naive of the dangers of the world. I know my mum didn’t want me meeting people I’d spoken to from the internet because I didn’t know who they really were but this was someone this girl already knew and her parents knew and trusted him. It just goes to show that for the 99.9% of us who are safe there is always that 0.1% that have a hidden side to them – a hidden side that is violent.
It is one of the flat-out saddest cases that I have come across for a long time. I know plenty of people are murdered and in the end the result is the same but this had been planned so coldly and there were so many opportunities for someone to smell a rat. I mean if any of my friends even at the ages of 15/16 had even hinted that they wanted to kill someone then I’d be smelling a rat and making bets like a free breakfast for it and then saying ‘Don’t say anything but you may just owe me a breakfast,’ to the person whom he’d made the bet with surely his friend should have worked out something was afoot. His friend – who cannot be identified for legal reasons – said that he thought Joshua was just mucking about. Holy shit Batman are you for real?
I know teenagers sometimes aren’t the brightest section of society but really you wouldn’t think something was wrong when someone said such things? He had been banging on about killing her for months and had slowly become more cold and serious about the whole thing but still none of his friends even thought to speak to an adult about it? I just don’t get it I’m afraid.
As for the blurred lines between the internet and reality then I quite frankly do not find that an acceptable excuse. Some comments on the stories I linked to earlier blamed the death on Facebook, well I’m sorry middle-class folk of England but Facebook is not to blame for this murder. The person who hit her repeatedly over the head with a rock is and that man is seemingly going to spend a long time in custody whether it be in a young offenders institution, jail or in a psychiatric unit.
The internet is not to blame. The person wasn’t driven to kill by the internet. He was driven to kill by either his own insanity or his evilness or a combination of the two. That is sadly the only question that is left to answer.
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