I got quite a shock after reading this… so don’t get murdered unless you know who it is…

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2962597/Police-survey-reveals-the-UK-has-1143-unsolved-murders.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_murders_in_the_United_Kingdom

I had no idea the crime solving success rates were so low.

It's hard to know how to measure rates, Norman, but that doesn't sound unduly high to me for a country of 65 million or whatever the UK is. That's about 15 times the size of NZ which would equate to an unsolved rate here of about 75. I'm sure we'd have more than that and less time to have them in too. As far as I know NZ has quite a reasonable rate of success in murder cases.

The only percentage I could see in those sites were 92% but it included those convicted and those acquitted, which isn't the same as cases cleared.

The unsolved ones are always interesting, partly because they are unsolved, but partly perhaps because the ones that are not easy to solve are likely to have unusual elements to them. I am a little surprised by that list from 1959 - 65 of Jack the Stripper; I don't seem to know them at all. I'm old enough to remember this time, so I wonder why I don't. Young enough to be protected from such news? And most of those women mentioned under Jack the Ripper's crimes are not considered his victims at all. That doesn't stop them being unsolved, of course.

The main ones here people remember are those of young women hitchhikers from the 1970s and 80s - there seemed to be a spate of them. And some odd ones, like a caretaker at the Wellington Trades Hall lifting a case which exploded; there's never been any idea at all what that was about.

While I was checking that, I saw that yesterday (18th Feb) was the last hanging in NZ in 1957. History site says "controversially convicted of killing his wife". She died of arsenic poisoning.

normanhurst wrote:

I had no idea the crime solving success rates were so low.

It is probably easy for us to get confused with TV murder and mystery and US cop shows though, where they always get the "badie" with wonderful guess work and super dooper forensics but, I think, the reality is very different.

Maybe it seems high to me on account of me leading a sheltered life… I suppose what you say is quite right caro, but when you first look at the figures I don’t automatically think of percentages and what a fair rate of detection is. Maybe I might after the initial shock, but it’s still one heck of a lot of undetected murders… and I do believe the detection rate is actually very good. Nevertheless with the detected and the undetected… there’s a whole lot of people getting murdered.


I’m not fond of US, TV of any sort and least of all the overabundance of cop shows that are screened over here… I can’t stand ‘Morse’, ‘The Sweeny’ only portrays the cops as a bunch of heavy whiskey drinking thugs… but most of the TV cop shows have a cast of so few that they all seem capable of solving the crimes singlehanded… so I don’t think I’m being suckered into that thought process. And as for the ‘Midsummer’ series… anyone living in a village with such a name… get out, leave, emigrate… you’re a crime statistic waiting to happen.

I do enjoy watching the latest cop shows with real as it happens filming… an I love to see the helicopter in action… once that things onto them… there’s no hiding place.

Caro, I'm sure I read somewhere that NZ has the highest per capita murder rate in the 'developed' world? Is that the case, do you know, and if so can you speculate as to why?

The info officer rang this morning to see if I could work for the day, so I haven't time to check this at the moment, ferval. NZ has a very high rate of imprisonment, but that is more to do with a high-profile group calling for longer sentences than with actual crime rates.

If we do have a high murder I put it down (as I do everything bad) with right-wing changes in the 80s leading to an unequal society. In my town of 350 people, three families have murdered daughters, which seems excessively high to me. (I think just one of the girls was killed here. Her father was the plumber I mentioned on the bar thread who died; he never really got over this dreadful crime.)

But I don't recall any murders in the 8000-population town I lived in earlier for over 20 years. Must have been some, but perhaps domestic or family and not so high profile.

Caro.

Historically, the unsolved crime rate must have been considerably higher than it is today though. Crime came into being at the same time as the first law was introduced so it is not a modern phenonema.

Would imagine that the rate of those wrongly accused or convicted of a crime must have been considerably higher than today also.

Ferval, it has proved rather difficult to find consistent figures for murder rates. I have seen sites which claim NZ's is the highest in the OECD, one that put it fifth, but the official OECD figures says it is slightly below the average. Some 'independent' figures seem to have agendas behind them. And somewhere it said our rate was 5.8 per million, but that seems to only mean about 24 a year - last year we had 35, which was down a lot from previous years.

http://oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/

That site goes through all the countries with their safety records, but I have brought it up on NZ's. I read that our rate, along with Britain's, Australia's and others has gone down in the last twenty years (despite media hoopla and people's fears), and that is put down to more people (till recently) in employment and fewer young men around who apparently are the most likely to run around murdering people (down from 12.2% of the population to 10%).

And murder is a good choice to check figures because generally murder is reported whereas other violent crimes might not be.

You would like to think that with modern detection methods there would be fewer people wrongly convicted of a crime, but there do seem a lot that still depend on a jury's opinions of circumstantial evidence. Maybe not murders so much.

Thanks for looking into that Caro, it was one of those vague recollections that it's so hard to pin down.

Quote :

and fewer young men around who apparently are the most likely to run around murdering people

That's something else I heard on some radio programme, that the fall in crime rates in America, Britain and the west in general has less to do with policies and policing than with the availability of abortion, now that's quite a thought isn't it?

I’m really surprised by what you say ref the crime rate in NZ. When some of my wife’s family were emigrating there in 1970… we were under the impression that it was a major incident if Mrs Browns cat got stuck up a tree and required rescuing, or that the paperboy had a puncture on his bike and was late delivering the mornings paper… crime rates were not talked about. There wasn’t any, so what’s happened in the last forty years… unless it’s the wife’s family going back to their old ways.

Islanddawn wrote:

It is probably easy for us to get confused with TV murder and mystery and US cop shows though, where they always get the "badie" with wonderful guess work and super dooper forensics but, I think, the reality is very different.

There was something of the dramatic this summer when a nonagenarian in Ontario apparently confessed to the 1946 shooting of Margaret Cook in London's Soho. After 69 years it is believed to be one of the longest, if not the longest, stretch of time between a crime and a confession:

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/07/17/ontario-senior-says-hes-the-soho-jack-who-killed-a-london-prostitute-in-1946-british-media.html

The story has subsequently gone cold, however, and with no further developments it is as yet unverifiable.

Every County has its unsolved murders. In Staffordshire perhaps the most famous dates back to 1948. It has all the makings of a Hollywood film, but it's all true.
In 1947 in British occupied Palestine a 16 year old boy Alexander Rubowitz was reported missing, inquiries unearthed sightings of a boy being bundled into a car by a British soldier who left behind a cap marked with the letters FAR on the inside. Major Roy Farran, 26, who commanded a group of Palestine Police was suspected and, despite the lack of a body, he was arrested by the Military Police and charged with murder.
He didn't help his case by going on the run for ten days before giving himself up to stand before a Court Martial in Jerusalem in October 1947. Evidence against him was contradictory and above all with no body there was nothing to suggest murder, so he was acquitted. 
Farran returned to his family home in Codsall, Staffordshire but under constant threat of reprisals from extremist Jewish groups, most notably the Stern Gang.
He wrote a book about his wartime experiences which was to be published in May 1948. On 3 May a parcel, addressed to R Farran, arrived in the post at their Codsall home, thinking it was an advance copy of the book his younger brother Rex opened it. It was a bomb, the 26 year old was fatally injured and died in hospital hours later.
Forensics showed that the book was a widely available copy of Shakespeare and had been posted in the East End of London. The Stern Gang was immediately suspected and there were uncorroborated phone calls claiming responsibility from the Gang. 
Police investigations failed to come up with any firm suspects and the murder, the killing of the wrong man, remains unsolved. 
Roy Farran emigrated to Canada in the early 50s where he was elected to the Alberta Legislative Assembly in 1971 serving in the Province's Cabinet until his retirement. He died in 2006 aged 85.
The 16 year old Jewish boy Alexander Rubowitz was never seen again, so he was probably murdered, but by whom?

Mark,

 have a read through:
   
https://aish.com/the-scandalous-murder-of-alexander-rubowitz/



Dirk

Interesting, but written from the point of view that Farran was guilty.

31 March 1922 - The Hinterkaifeck Murders, 100 years ago today.
One of Germany's most infamous unsolved murders.
On 4 April 1922, after the six inhabitants of Hinterkaifeck Farm, Bavaria had not been seen for four days, a search revealed the bodies of four family members in the barn and two in the house. Investigations concluded that they had been killed with a mattock on 31 March and that the killer(s) remained in the house for several days after.
A number of suspects were identified and questioned but no-one has ever been charged with the crime.   
The victims were -
Andreas Gruber, 63; his wife Cazilia, 72; their daughter Viktoria Gabriel, 35; her daughter Cazilia, 7, all found in the barn.
In the house - Viktoria's son Josef, 2 and the maid Maria Baumgartner, 44.

ferval wrote:

Caro wrote:

and fewer young men around who apparently are the most likely to run around murdering people

That's something else I heard on some radio programme, that the fall in crime rates in America, Britain and the west in general has less to do with policies and policing than with the availability of abortion, now that's quite a thought isn't it?

Over the last 120 years, family planning has almost certainly had an effect upon the rates of violent crime. Cambridge University's Mediaeval Murder Map project suggests that England in the middle ages was a society not unlike that to be found in parts of Africa and Asia today. A society comprising a large proportion of young men with an accompanying range of cultural phenomena such as being quick to take offence, juvenile codes of honour and the hue-and-cry etc all exacerbated by a tooled-up citizenry living in overcrowded dwellings and neighbourhoods:

Mediaeval Murder Map

The interactive maps cover cases in London, York and Oxford.