It is hard to imagine the burden Melody Casson has shouldered for the past 50 years. In 1963, as a mother at just 15 unable to cope with her crying baby Wayne, she suffocated him. An inquest at the time believed her story that she had accidentally killed her 18-day-old baby by falling asleep on top of him. Now, half a century later, she has admitted the truth.
“I’ve been living with this all my life,” she suddenly told a police officer making a routine inquiry at her home in Torquay in February 2014. “I can’t take no more of the pain.” A court this week gave her a two-year suspended sentence.
The case comes days after that of a 91-year-old man, now living in Canada, admitting to the murder of a woman outside a Soho nightclub in 1946, reckoned to be the longest period ever recorded in Britain between a crime and the conclusion of investigations. The Crown Prosecution Service has applied for him to be extradited, but Canadian authorities have yet to grant the request.
Why, then, do people admit to long-forgotten crimes? “For a particular generation, they might want to find some sort of absolution for their sins,” says Azrini Wahidin, professor in criminology and criminal justice at Nottingham Trent University. They are driven to open up the “Pandora’s box of secrets” by a desire to make a fresh start, or because they believe in the afterlife and want to wipe the earthly slate clean. The latter may apply to the man in Canada, so far unnamed, whose confession came shortly after he was diagnosed with cancer.
Wahidin says that these ancient cases will be treated no differently to any others by police and prosecutors. But she adds that a confession alone would never be sufficient for a case to be brought, because the dangers of old memories becoming confused are too great. The police would always seek corroboration.
In a third case aired this week, 31-year-old Merice Brown was jailed for 12 years for an attempted murder in a barber’s shop in south London a decade ago. Brown, who now lives in Leicester, went to a police station to admit the offence, saying he had found religion and wanted to clear his conscience. He even showed police where he had buried the semi-automatic pistol used in the shooting.
Attempted murder and posession of a firearm are, of course, serious crimes, but 12 years seems a long sentence. The shooting was not premeditated, Brown was only 21 at the time, and he appears to have made a clean break with his criminal past. As Wahidin says: “The issue really is: what is the purpose of imprisonment if these crimes have been committed many years ago?” Confessions, when there is otherwise no prospect of solving a crime, surely ought to count for something, and it should be possible to remake your life without spending a large chunk of it in prison.
