Two men have been charged in connection with the recent murder of an Exeter resident.
Stephen Michael Crook, 43, was found with knife injuries by the police on the evening of November 21st inside a house on Alphington Road. He later died after being taken by ambulance to the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital.
Ryan Singleton, 25, of Coventry appeared at Exeter Magistrates Court, Monday 25th November. He has been charged with Crook’s murder as well as possession of an offensive weapon in a public place, Alphington Road and the Exeter Arms Hotel. He was carrying a large black handled kitchen knife.
Singleton appeared in court for a bail hearing on Tuesday 26th November. A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for December 12th in Exeter Crown Court.
Steven Webster of Okehampton has also been charged with Crook’s murder and remains in police custody. He will appear before Exeter Crown Court next month. Two additional Coventry men aged 39 and 17, continue to be detained by police for further questioning.
A heavy police presence was noticed in the surrounding area in the days following the incident. Police cars and a police cordon were sighted on the road from late Thursday night and 24 hour watch has been kept on the house since. Police have appealed to the public for further information, particularly persons in the area between 6pm-8pm on 21st November.
Sam House, former Exeter student and resident of Alphington Road told Exeposé: “Everyone in the road seems fairly unbothered [sic] by it, but it’s been something exciting to keep an eye on, as long as you don’t think about it too much. Then it gets a bit scary when you think about people being murdered 200 yards down the road.”
Liam Trim, Site Manager opens up on ITV’s latest hit drama Broadchurch, starring a stoney-faced David Tennant. Series 2 has already been confirmed, but with a few residents already dearly departed and a seemingly conclusive finale, where can it go from here?
ITV’s Broadchurch was a strange beast. On the one hand, it was just another standard ITV drama. A police procedural (hardly original) following the murder of a child in a coastal Dorset town. On the other, it seemed kind of different.
Image credit: Digital Spy
There was a scope that isn’t usually there. The plot thrust its slow, plodding face into the homes of lots of characters, practically the whole community in fact. There was also a shiny gloss to everything that doesn’t normally grace British telly. Beaches were shot in beautiful ways and waves washed in cinematically. With such a gorgeously crafted stage, the drama seemed all the more important and doom laden.
And then there was the soundtrack, which I could describe as intrusive, but I’ll instead call ‘emotionally piercing’.
Obviously, on ITV there are ad-breaks. Writers and directors must get round these pesky, profit driven interruptions by creating natural cut off points in the narrative. At times, Broadchurch had these mini cliff-hangers that worked well. You’d rush your cup of tea to get back to the sofa (not that I watch TV like that, it’s the 21st century after all).
But it didn’t matter if the narrative didn’t flow seamlessly into a break. The soundtrack would simply put in an ominous, Inception-esque ‘bwaaam’ over a picturesque rural background to signal the transition. It did this a lot, not just before ad-breaks. It would pile on the tension and the suspicion, quite often at completely inappropriate moments. It would tell you what to feel, rather than guiding the emotions supplied by the story.
Image credit: The Mirror
At other times though, the soundtrack worked brilliantly. Broadchurch was wonderfully hit and miss, addictively so. I’m convinced that was part of its mass appeal. Mostly though, people tuned in for the cast and the writing. David Tennant and Olivia Colman stole the show as the detectives but there were supporting turns from those in the victim’s family, as well as the journalists, shopkeepers and suspects.
Chris Chibnall, the writer behind the whole thing, also crafted a story with many layers, many possible suspects and lots of room for the actors to develop their characters, which seemed to draw people in.
Screen trivia for you: Chibnall, and the two directors who steered the episodes, have all worked on Doctor Who, and with Tennant’s central performance, plus Rory the Vicar, the show would appear to owe quite a debt to the BBC sci-fi programme.
And finally, as they say on the news, the Dorset accents must get a mention. As a born and bred Dorset resident, I was more intrigued than most by this aspect of the programme. Thankfully Tennant’s character didn’t require a Dorset twang but given his skill for accents in previous roles, he could probably have done a better job than many.
Image credit: Metro
Colman, who has received bucket-loads of praise for her performance, delivers an awful caricature, as did the actors playing the grieving mother and father. Eventually though, the accents stopped bothering me, merely providing the occasional laugh. And I must admit, there are people in Dorset who sound like the residents of Broadchurch, but not all of us sound quite that country.
Anyway, the big question now that the phenomenally successful series has ended is what on earth has Chibnall got planned for Series 2? A second series is not just a possibility, it’s already confirmed by ITV, always desperate for a hit, bless ‘em.
Chibnall claims to have a ‘very different story’ to tell now that detectives Tennant and Colman have (seemingly) left the Broadchurch bubble. But what could that story be? Another murder surely wouldn’t work.
Here are my entirely serious, speculative guesses about Chibnall’s plan for Series 2…
1) Toxic barrels wash ashore and Broadchurch is quarantined, closed off from the outside world. Chibnall’s script probes human psychology under pressure, as the residents prepare to fall out and presumably fight each other to death for food. But everything turns out alright, when the Broadchurch residents realise that they never leave the town anyway.
2) Terrorists in speedboats turn up from France, where no one would let them in. Broadchurch proves much more accommodating for the freedom fighters. The residents struggle to reconcile their sympathy for the gunmen’s aims, and their fear of them. The final episode is a huge shootout, as armed police finally arrive from London after 8 weeks of slow plotting.
Image credit: Radio Times
3) The town’s tech savvy vicar opens an internet cafe and slowly the whole town discover the joys of the web. The series takes a documentary approach, following the residents as they enter the modern world and start thriving businesses enabled by their internet skills.
4) One of the residents is an alien. We don’t know who. 8 episodes later we find out.
5) A child is killed. The residents decide that child murders are actually good business for the town, but an outsider working for The Jeremy Kyle Show exposes the cover up.
Liam Trim, Site Manager
Were you glued to Broadchurch? Tell us your Series 2 predictions on Facebook, Twitter or by commenting below.
Last week it was announced that Clive Sharp, who murdered Irish vet Catherine Gowing, has already been jailed twice for rape and sexual assaults. His string of previous sexual offences, encapsulating a dark and twisted life, first began when he was only sixteen. Sharp allegedly held sexual fantasies regarding gagging, raping and murdering women, which he eventually did to the tragic Catherine Gowing, his girlfriend’s flatmate.
Today, Mr Justice Griffith Williams jailed him for life and decreed that he serve a minimum of 37 years in prison as punishment for his horrific crimes. The judge described this murder as ‘a horrific, cold hearted murder, carried out to gratify your perverted sexual desires’.
It emerged that Sharp, having raped and then murdered Gowing, cut up her body before disposing it in several places along the River Dee. Several hours before this despicable crime, he had actually tied another woman to a bed and left her there after she refused to gratify his desires. In 1994 Sharp choked and assaulted another woman, before being jailed for eight years for false imprisonment and wounding two years later.
As someone who studied Law for two years, I’ve had my fair share of disgusting cases involving sexual violence, murder, and dismemberment – and yet cases like these continue to shock not only me, but the general public as well.
What does this say about our legal system, when someone like Sharp, who was clearly not only a sexual predator but someone unspeakably dangerous to women (and possibly even men, one might add, if they got on his bad side), is jailed only for a short time before being released again to further threaten helpless citizens? Someone whose first offence occurred at the age that most teenagers are studying for their GCSEs, someone who has had a history of violence towards women practically his whole life?
I’m not saying that capital punishment is correct; four or five hundred years ago, Sharp would probably almost certainly have been hanged, drawn and quartered, or killed in some other way, and many people might argue that this would only serve him right. But in our democratic society, where we look askance at the death penalty, the best our courts can do is hand out a mandatory life sentence for crimes as sickening as these and, in most cases, let the offender out early, to further threaten innocents.
Catherine Gowing will never be brought back – Sharp saw to that. And yet, I honestly feel that whenever I read the paper, or go onto the Telegraph or BBC or whatever website, all I see is harrowing pictures of smiling women – occasionally men – who have been raped, tortured and/or murdered in the most disgusting and unimaginable ways possible. I sound very naive in asking just why do things like this happen and why can’t people respect one another in a peaceful world, but it does beg the question – why do people commit atrocities like this? Does our weak legal system encourage such abominations, or is there something clearly wrong with our society, where predators like this dwell amongst others?
Sexual violence and murder, of course, is nothing new – in my research of Queen Katherine Howard, the supposedly notorious fifth queen consort of Henry VIII who many believe was a bit too free with her favours before losing her head aged eighteen, I’ve uncovered some evidence which actually suggests that this supposed ‘tart’ suffered what we would classify as sexual violence stimulated by aggressive male behaviour from aged at least thirteen or fourteen. It’s not something related solely to females, I’m not suggesting that. But does the British legal system mean that murderers and rapists commit their crimes without fear of the legal consequences? With defences such as loss of control (which includes the so-called ‘anger trigger’), diminished responsibility and even intoxication, many murderers can use these to play down their offences, even though they’ve raped and/or killed someone who is never coming back.
I’m certainly not the first to suggest the legal system may need reforming. And there is clearly an issue with values held in society – but perhaps this is an unfair comment to make when the vast majority of us are appalled by such offences. But surely something must happen in order to prevent innocent people like Catherine Gowing losing their lives so unfairly and brutally.
exeposedev 