PETER HITCHENS: We have always had murderers – but as the ‘Attacker Smoked Cannabis’ website records, now something far more cruel is in our midst
When Freda Walker opened her back door to let her cat out one night last January, she let Hell into her home. It came in the form of Vasile Culea. He seems to have sneaked in while she was not looking.
Not long afterwards, he subjected Mrs Walker, 86, and her husband Ken, 88, to a night of merciless torture. He was a retired electrician and former district councillor. She was a retired seamstress. They had come through all those decades, and might have thought they were entitled to a peaceful final few years together. They did not live in some inner-city gang-infested zone, but in the kind of street and the kind of house that millions inhabit.
She was 5ft 2in tall and yet Culea, a fit young man, killed her. She had 25 distinct injuries. Bizarrely, Ken Walker’s later death in hospital was listed as being from ‘natural causes’, despite the fact that he suffered a brain injury during the invasion of their home, and had been beaten bloody, before, or possibly after being tied up and gagged. He never went home from hospital, though he lingered there for seven months. I have my own theory of what he died of, and I would not call it ‘natural causes’, but what can I say?
Ken and Freda Walker, pictured, were tortured at their home in Derbyshire by Vasile Culea
Vasile Culea, 34, pictured, appears to have been trying to get the couple to tell him where they had hidden some money. He never found it
Culea appears to have been trying to get the couple to tell him where they had hidden some money. He never found it. News accounts of this event stress that Culea was an indebted gambler, supposedly ‘addicted’ to this stupid amusement. ‘Addiction’ is a word used far too often to excuse wilful self-destruction by people perfectly capable of controlling themselves, if they thought it worthwhile.
More from Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday…
I doubt whether Culea’s ‘addiction’ will trouble him much in the prison which will now be his inadequate punishment.
The couple, living in an ordinary suburban home in a Derbyshire village, were just respectable, straightforward British people from a generation who grew up when burglary was a rare and major crime, drugs unknown and gambling a minor thing on the edge of society, bookie’s runners, football pools and bingo. They perhaps had not realised that there has been a revolution since then. They made the mistake of thinking they could leave the back door open for a minute or two while they put the cat out.
Derbyshire Police, to their credit more forthcoming than most forces I approach about this, tell me that drug abuse by the killer ‘was a line of enquiry within the investigation and no evidence came to light that Vasile Culea was a drug user’. Well, OK, if they say so.
All I can say about that is that the grotesque fury and savagery of his behaviour is horribly like that of many criminals whose merciless actions are listed on the website ‘Attacker Smoked Cannabis’. This is compiled from hundreds of local media reports by Ross Grainger. Yes, our society has always had murderers and thieves in it, but something far more cruel is now in our midst. Who will put this right?
Are dozens and half-dozens disappearing? I have noticed that some supermarkets now sell eggs in tens, rather than half-dozens. Is this because, even where they still do times tables in school, they only go up to ten? Have millions grown up not knowing what twelve twelves are? I fear far too many no longer know that there are 12 inches in a foot, and those of us who remember 12 pennies in a shilling are dying out fast. Yet there are still 12 months in the year, and 12 apostles. And 12, which can be divided by three, is a much more useful number in practice than 10. Save the dozen.
Are dozens and half-dozens disappearing? I have noticed that some supermarkets now sell eggs in tens, rather than half-dozens
Busybodies trying to mess up your life
Their fashionable spectacles glinting, think-tank fanatics have spent the past few months saying: ‘Let’s leave the clocks where they are and stop all this changing about.’ But they don’t quite mean that. They have another purpose in mind. Beware of them. I will explain why.
When you got up today after an extra hour’s sleep, and noted that the mornings are now pleasantly lighter after weeks of darkness, I bet you also felt a lot better for it. That is because you are now on natural time, the true time for our patch of the Earth’s surface. This really exists. Noon is a real event, a measurable relationship between the sun and our bit of the world. If you declare it is in fact one o’clock in the afternoon, you are falsifying reality, just as if you rigged your car speedometer to say 30mph when you were doing 40.
When, next March, the clocks are jammed forwards again, you will – by contrast – feel worse. Some people will be seriously ill. The wonderfully named Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York tracked 6,000 patients in their 60s over a seven-year period. They reported in 2020 that putting the clocks forward was followed by a notable increase in a heart disturbance, atrial fibrillation, associated with strokes. In 2014, a study in Michigan showed that switching over to ‘daylight saving time’, so losing one hour’s sleep, raised the risk of having a heart attack the following Monday by 25 per cent, compared with other Mondays.
This doesn’t happen when the clocks go back.
Let’s leave the clocks where they are today, on proper British time. And if the think-tankers don’t like it, let them move to Madrid, on Berlin time because the Spanish dictator Franco wanted to suck up to Hitler, another equally mad reason for this strange unhealthy practice
It seems to me to confirm my view that people are happiest on organic natural time, based as closely as possible on local conditions. We can’t go back to sundials and local times – public transport and broadcasting would be impossible. But why should we spend every summer – as we now do – working, living and sleeping to the rhythms of Berlin? It is because those glinting busybodies in the think-tanks, usually childless Londoners, want to mess up your lives to improve theirs. They don’t commute. They have no need to get children up to go to school. They never see the dawn, except on the way home from an especially good party, when they wonder what that strange glow in the sky can be. Ignore them.
Let’s leave the clocks where they are today, on proper British time. And if the think-tankers don’t like it, let them move to Madrid, on Berlin time because the Spanish dictator Franco wanted to suck up to Hitler, another equally mad reason for this strange unhealthy practice.
Slowly, oh how slowly, the truth about ‘antidepressants’ is beginning to emerge. Even The Economist magazine, the weekly journal of the smug elite, has now conceded that maybe these pills are prescribed too much, that their effectiveness is overrated, that their side effects can be horrible and some people face real difficulty if they try to stop taking them. I would put all that much more fiercely. My own guess is that within 50 years they will be looked on with the same disdain we now reserve for barbiturates and lobotomies. Such a pity it will take so long.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click here
Source: Read Full Article
