Murder most foul: contrasting treatments on two channels

True crime has always attracted great interest whether in book form or in documentaries and there appears to be a glut of these programmes on our screens these days.

So because of a local connection, I tuned in to two such programmes during the week.

The first was Crimes that Shook Ireland on TV3 which dealt with the murders of Mayo girl, Mary Duffy and Dubliner, Elizabeth Plunkett, by the Englishmen, John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, who were captured by Salthill Gardaí on the Prom in 1976.

This was a repeat but my first time seeing it and only for it had a local interest, the slow pace of it almost put me off.

The programme makers could surely have fitted it all in a one-hour slot but chose to build it around two episodes.

The narration was painfully slow and the contributors to the programme, including the now retired Garda Jim Boland whose quick wit and observant eye led to their capture, must surely have been coached to speak s-l-o-w-l-y.

There was archive footage of Gardaí doing door-to-door calls in Castlebar, where Mary Duffy was abducted and of the search for Elizabeth Plunkett in Brittas Bay.

These evil men had a string of convictions and had purposefully come to Ireland to rape and kill one girl a week. Considering this was before the Internet and mobile phones, the Gardaí did well to catch the pair who had vowed to kill one woman a week in Ireland.

Though the case of these two men and their horrendous crimes is well known, the TV3 programme lacked pace to keep viewers gripped. It basically lacked the style of the much pacier true crime programmes made for US TV.

And while the programme lacked pace, it certainly looked like something from the seventies with its reconstruction appearing like old footage, complete with the styling of the actors and the cars.

TV3 dragged it into a second programme the following week, which really doesn’t work in this fast paced world.

It should have piqued our interest with hints of what was to come in programme two but it didn’t so in all likelihood, most viewers wouldn’t have bothered to tune in the following week.

However, Cracking Crime – Cold Cases on RTE One is a highly polished series and last week looked at the death of 23 years old GMIT art student, Emer O’Loughlin in Tubber.

Her body was found in April 2005 in a burnt out mobile home, not far from her own one, which she shared with her boyfriend.

It is believed that she went to John Griffin’s mobile home to charge her phone – hours later her badly charred remains were found with no sign of the neighbour.

He was later found in Galway city but days later it appears he staged a fake drowning on Inis Mór and he is still at large.

Granted, this is a more recent crime and it is an open file, but contributions from Emer’s family made it a much more poignant programme.

The parents and her siblings were bravely open on camera. They talked about the heartbreak, the frustration of not knowing what really happened and how it had caused a wedge in the O’Loughlin family.

It was also a much shorter programme, a half hour, but it was, as a programme much more satisfying because it had a focus – it tried to refresh people’s memory to help solve a crime.

The TV3 programme obviously didn’t need to solve a crime but it should have thrown a light on what made these two evil men tick.