Attenborough's Stealth

Shhh! Stealthily does it, David. If in doubt, use a sledgehammer...

 We’ve said many a time for the fact that if it weren’t so very tragic, if five people hadn’t lost their lives, if two little boys had not died in their sleep and had an innocent man not been stitched up to face decades in jail for all of it despite going through the trauma of losing his whole family – if it weren’t for ALL of that…. You’d have to say the case of Jeremy Bamber is right rip-roar, a real laugh.

It’s full of comedy moments – you know, like the Let’s-convict-a-man-with-no-evidence-only-heresay-and-conjecture sort of stuff. Good job the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is coming up cos’ some of the people who thought this lot up really should be on stage.

Let’s look at another aspect – STEALTH! You know, what David Attenborough uses when he interviews rhinos and lions for the telly and that. When he sits down and whispers really quietly so they don’t eat him up. That’s stealth for you.

Dictionary definition: “movement that is quiet and careful in order not to be seen or heard, or secret action.” Yes, yes, that’s stealth for you.

Wanna know what isn’t stealth?

Smashing a door down with a sledgehammer! That’s how the firearms team chose to enter the Farmhouse at Whitehouse Farm. Funny, really, cos one statement that says that the use of “hand signals and whispers” was employed because they believed Sheila to be alive and/or armed inside the house.

Fair enough, you might well think that it is perfectly reasonable to approach the house using STEALTH and then bash your way in and you may be right but even in amongst all my teasing above, we all miss the point… The point being that whether they used whispers, a sledgehammer or a bloomin sausage roll – they all believed Sheila to be alive.

Why did they believe she was alive? Maybe because they saw her in the house? Maybe because they were in conversation with her? It really matters not – the fact is, she was alive.

But we aren’t allowed to say that! No, instead in this comedy world we’re asked to accept that Sheila was never moving between downstairs and upstairs, several officers were hallucinating when they saw her body in the kitchen, she was never recorded on the open line inside the house, tapes of which we’ve never, ever been able to hear and Jeremy Bamber is almost certainly responsible for all of it – this is what we’re told to believe.

Yes indeed, it would be funny if it weren’t so very tragic.