These commentators, on both official and unofficial channels, are seriously missing the point.
Hamish Wolfe wasn’t running a one-man campaign against fat women. He was too intelligent for that sort of nonsense. He was a killer and, like every other serial killer of our time, he had a victim type. Zoe, Jessie, Chloe and Myrtle rocked his boat. He liked them. Unfortunately for them he had a very warped way of showing it.
There’s a lot of evidence, and much of it came up at his trial, that Hamish Wolfe had always had a bit of a thing for chubsters. Our size-obsessed society found it hard to believe, given his own Greek-god looks, but like them he did. (Don’t be fooled by press photographs of him with his reed-thin fiancée – some men are remarkably good at using their partners as smokescreens.) Wolfe dated quite a few larger ladies at college and there was even a rather seedy video found, allegedly, of him having sex with a Rubenesque young lady.
What he did was dreadful. Shocking. But it says nothing more about our society than occasionally we produce something that is twisted and broken. There is a great deal wrong with Hamish Wolfe, but no serious commentator has ever suggested there was anything wrong with his victims.
Eat up, ladies. You’re as safe as any of us.
Comments . . .
‘No. No comments. Stop right there.’
Maggie shuts down the site. ‘I’m done.’
‘What did you make of Detective Sergeant Weston then?’
She tries, and fails, to stifle a yawn. ‘Haven’t really thought about it. Seemed sensible enough.’
‘Think there’s anything in this idea that Wolfe’s supporters might come and bother you here?’
‘I doubt it. Why?’
‘Oh, I’m just wondering how long you’re going to ignore the crunching on the gravel, the knocked-over flowerpot and the sound of several door handles being tried. How long before you admit that, for the past half-hour, someone’s been wandering round outside?’
At first, there is nothing outside that Maggie can see. The night is too dark. Nor can she hear anything, except the click and rattle of the central heating system as it cools. Then a pinpoint of light appears from around the side of the house as a solitary figure heads towards the road.
Maggie watches as, not once looking back, her midnight visitor walks away down the street.
Chapter 5
People of Our Time magazine, December 2014
HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLFE?
Silvia Pattinson braves Parkhurst Prison to meet the infamous Mr Wolfe.
Hamish Wolfe receives over a hundred letters a month, over 90 per cent of them from women. Most of his correspondents, he tells me when I meet him at HMP Isle of Wight (Parkhurst), believe him to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
‘Sometimes the truth is obvious,’ he says. ‘Only those with a vested interest of their own remain blind to it.’
When I question the extent to which we should rely on the opinions of people who’ve never met Wolfe personally, who’ve never studied the case and its evidence in detail, who might be – I’m sure I blush as I say this – more influenced by his good looks than by any real sense of justice or truth, he denies that his personal attributes are the issue at stake.
‘When a body of people believe something to be true, it’s usually because it is. I’m the victim of a narrowly focused, cost-pinching investigation that went for an easy and obvious solution.’
When I ask why, then, he hasn’t appealed against the verdict, he tells me that he fully intends to. ‘Sometimes the dust needs to settle. I’m thinking carefully about who I’d like to work with in the future. I want my lawyer to be the best and I can wait. My liberty is too important to throw away on a rushed appeal.’
While he waits, he has no shortage of women only too happy to help him pass the time. Women send him money, write letters of support, suggest escape plans and even propose marriage. Each assumes that she is the only person who has taken an interest in him, that he must be lonely, longing for her letters.
I suggest that giving this interview might let the cat out of the bag on that one, but he just shrugs. I get the feeling he is unmoved by the adoration of women he will probably never meet. He responds to very few, he says, only the ones who strike him as being intelligent and sensible, and then usually just to thank them for their good wishes. Many of his letters he gives to fellow inmates, particularly the lewder ones.
When I question the morality of doing so, he looks at me sharply. His green eyes narrow and for the first time I remember that I’m in the presence of a convicted killer.
‘If a man sent you his boxer shorts,’ he says, ‘along with a note telling you he’d worn them two days in a row and then masturbated in them, what would you do?’