The news that a man who murdered eight women has been handed a life sentence should, on the surface, be a cause for celebration. But let us not mistake the closing of a chapter for the triumph of a system riddled with decay. The convicted killer, a predator who stalked his victims across county lines, was finally brought to justice not by some grand new policing strategy, but by the old-fashioned grit of detectives who refused to let bureaucracy hinder their hunt.
That is the true story here: a rare display of cross-border cooperation in an age where our institutions are too often paralysed by silos and self-interest. The police forces involved deserve praise, but let’s not pretend this is the norm. It is a rebuke to the rest of our creaking criminal justice apparatus.
In the fall of Rome, such cooperation would have been routine; here, it is a headline. We celebrate the sentence, but we mourn the eight lives, and we wonder how many other monsters remain at large, shielded by jurisdictional pettiness. This case is a mirror held up to our own fragmented society a society that talks of unity, but acts in shreds.
