Policing the unpoliceable – technology and the ever-changing mechanisms for murder by Marnie Riches

 Given The Lost Ones is my tenth crime-thriller, it’s an interesting exercise to reflect on the way crime itself has subtly changed since I was first published in 2015, and even earlier - back in 2009, when I was writing the first draft of The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die. Back in 2009, I’d only just joined Facebook, and it was a place where everyone went to share cute photos of their children/pets and to humble brag. Twitter was a means of shouting into the void – I still hate the place and still don’t fully understand the point of it. Now, however, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, SnapChat and WhatsApp are all platforms where elections are won or lost, where hatred is disseminated and where people organise to create change, for better or for worse. The people using these social media aren’t always law-abiding citizens, either. So many violent criminals have become more dependent on the internet and social media to enable their nefarious deeds – from Daesh to the EDL to drug-dealing gangs. 

So, how did my process for coming up with a story idea in 2021 differ from 2009? Well, in 2009, I was influenced by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and all things Scandi-Noir. I was influenced by the Taliban and 9/11 and the West’s obsession with Muslim fundamentalists and the War on Terror – my cues all came from newspapers and the television. Fast forward to 2021, and I started with the kernel of an idea for a new story after having re-read online the details of Jeffrey Dahmer’s atrocities. I knew that I wanted to write a serial killer thriller with a strong female detective – those are the sorts of books I like to read, so naturally, they’re the books that I want to write. I knew that I wanted to depict society’s most vulnerable members being picked off by a predator, as is so often the case in real life serial killings. Yet my focus has shifted over the course of 10+ years to how technology enables murderers. At the heart of The Lost Ones is a story of grooming – made easier with mobile phones and social media. Murder has upped its game.

As I was writing, I think I must have been subconsciously affected by the story of a fourteen-year-old boy called Breck Bednar, who was groomed online and murdered in 2014. Breck loved gaming, and like most teenagers, he was gullible and too quick to trust. A man who ran an internet gaming server manipulated Breck so that the boy no longer listened to his mother’s warnings that he was being groomed. Eventually, despite his mother’s best efforts to keep him safe, Breck was lured to the man’s home and was murdered. My friend, Sarah, works for the Breck Foundation and helps to deliver talks in schools to pupils – tweens and teens who are similarly at risk of being groomed online. She tells me that from 2019-2020, there were over 10,000 reports of children being groomed online – a fraction of the true number of cases, given the extent of under-reporting. During lockdown, the number of children being groomed online for sexual abuse increased by as much as 70%. It’s horrifying, and children with learning difficulties or other disabilities are disproportionately at risk.

The victim who is, in many ways, at the heart of The Lost Ones is a seventeen-year-old Down’s Syndrome girl called Chloe, who is similarly lured to her death by someone she thought she could trust, and despite her devoted mother’s best efforts to keep her safe. Her case resonates with my detective, Jackie Cooke, whose own Down’s Syndrome brother, Lucian, had disappeared decades earlier. While I was writing, I realised that what terrifies me as a mother is that, even with parental controls, it’s almost impossible to keep tabs 100% on the sites your children are looking at and who they are speaking to, thanks to an internet that is impossible to police. And if you try to police teenagers’ surfing habits, you run the risk of alienating them and having them speak to inappropriate people and visit inappropriate sites behind your back. All they have to do is use friends’ devices or find some way of circumnavigating your parental controls. Kids aren’t stupid, after all. They are more technologically savvy than us, and many will be drawn to rebellion like the proverbial moth to a flame, even if that rebellion takes the form of knowingly engaging in risky behaviour.

As a writer, I’ve therefore moved from a twenty-year-old student in my debut crime-thriller, to a pregnant detective, nearing forty and hunting the killer of a teen, who uses social media and the Dark Web to evade detection. Out go the rather clunky emails and below-the-line comments on blog-posts, and in come the end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages that are impossible to hack, and the shadowy maze of the Dark Web, with its horrors hidden behind heavily encrypted, password protected paywalls. Now, it’s far easier for murderers to conceal their identities, should they wish, behind catfishing avatars that lead investigators down blind alleys.

I hope to be writing crime-fiction in another 10 books’ time, and I’ll be interested to see how the mechanisms of murder for the violent criminal will have changed yet again.

The Lost Ones by Marnie Riches (Published by Bookouture) Out Now

The girl is sitting upright, her dark brown hair arranged over her shoulders and her blue, blue eyes staring into the distance. She looks almost peaceful. But her gaze is vacant, and her skin is cold… When Detective Jackie Cooke is called to the murder scene, she has to choke back tears. Missing teenager Chloe Smedley has finally been found – her body left in a cold back yard, carefully posed with her bright blue eyes still open. Jackie lays a protective hand on the baby in her belly, who seems to kick out in anguish, and vows to find the brutal monster who stole Chloe’s future. Breaking the news to Chloe’s mother is heartbreaking, and Jackie is haunted by the woman’s cries. She knows too well the terrible pain of losing a loved one: her own brother went missing as a child, the case never solved. Determined to get justice for Chloe and her family, Jackie sets to work, finding footage of the girl waving at someone the day she disappeared. Did Chloe know her killer? But then a second body is found on the side of a busy motorway, lit up by passing cars. The only link with Chloe is the shocking way the victim has been posed, and the mutilated body convinces Jackie she is searching for a disturbed and dangerous predator. Someone has been hunting missing and vulnerable people for decades, and only Jackie seems to see that they were never lost. They were taken. Jackie’s boss refuses to believe a serial killer is on the loose and threatens to take her off the case. But then Jackie returns home to find a brightly coloured bracelet on her kitchen counter and her blood turns to ice. It’s the same one her brother was wearing when he vanished. Could his disappearance be connected to the murders? Jackie will stop at nothing to catch her killer…unless he finds her first…

More information can be found on her website.  You can also find her Twitter @Marnie_Riches.