In praise of … amateur sleuths

Whether it is shrewd spinsters (Miss Marple), curious clergy (Father Brown) or high-schoolers with hunches (Nancy Drew), the world of fiction has its fair share of amateur detectives, outwitting the local plod. In real life we rarely hear about crime-solvers in the community. But the conviction last week of William Melchert-Dinkel in a US court, for aiding the suicides of Mark Drybrough, from Coventry, and a Canadian student, Nadia Kajouji, highlighted dogged digging by a 64-year-old Wiltshire grandmother, Celia Blay. First alerted to Melchert-Dinkel's activities in 2002, after encountering a depressed teenager who had met a "female nurse" online who "advised" them to take pills, Blay trawled chat logs to unearth the trail of a character who turned out to have morbid fascinations. He would befriend vulnerable and often young victims, feign sympathy and then enter into one-sided suicide pacts. Despite rebuffs from both the FBI and British police, Blay persisted for eight years until the Minnesota police took up the case and arrested Melchert-Dinkel on her evidence. Blay's tenacity echoes that of housewife Susan Galbreath, who tracked the perpetrators of a heinous murder in her hometown of Mayfield, Kentucky to justice over seven years , long after official law enforcers had given up. One striking feature of both cases was the police's initial reluctance to grapple with evidence amassed by amateurs. Melchert-Dinkel's conviction proves beyond reasonable doubt that this needs to change.