Your Shannon Matthews Theories Go Here VVV

What are "Shannon Matthews theories"?

Originally Posted by Tommei-UK
This is just my initial theory, going on instinct.

I think the step-dad was abusing Shannon. The mother kept it quiet because she was afraid of him and/or was so desperately infatuated with him that she'd do anything to keep him happy. The abduction was arranged by the step-dad to punish both her and the mother for something (threatening to go kick him out; threatening to go and report his abusive behaviour; just thought Shannon was getting in the way of their cosy new life). It is possible that the mother found out about the plot at some point and had no option but to go along with it and maintain the pretense for the safety of her daughter.

http://images.ctv.ca/archives/CTVNews/img2/20080314/160_matthews_080314.jpg

My one overriding theory:

All the theories, whether they prove to be true or not, are generated because / derive out of / "Shameless" plot devices.

The people had John Stalker 'backing up' the hoax theory. Well, he said they had to look at all the options but they decided to go with that one.

Oh the people at work are just full of interesting theories regarding cases like this.

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk.politics.misc/browse_thread/thread/808ba173b2a6142a/0e38f661ae9e9994

Asian paedo conspiracy!

Just seen Sky News in which the local police superintendant gave a
tense and edgy statement about the Shannon Matthews case. Behind him
stood three shifty looking Asians who appeared to be with him in the
role of minders. I've seen other reports where groups of Asian men
stand watchfully in the background. There's talk of growing tension
within the area though it's not specified what this is.

Just down the road from Dewsbury is Keighley where, as Channel 4
reported, Asian gangs operate paedophile prostitution rackets
involving under age white girls. Now I know the child was found at the
home of her stepdad's uncle but is there more to this business than
meets the eye?

It all seems a bit fishy to me. Anyone in Dewsbury able to enlighten
us?

http://www.batleynews.co.uk/news/Man-found-39crucified39.3815481.jp

ok wtf

they didn't confirm it was dominik diamond

end times

"It all seems a bit fishy to me."

A bit wtf when people say this talking about child abduction cases, as if otherwise the whole situation is perfectly normal.

http://editorial.jpress.co.uk/web/Upload/BATL//TH1_262200859bat%20breaking%20news%20general%20.jpg

^^^new drudgesiren.gif?

Police accident! The worst kind!

I am SO fucking glad I'm not working in Yorkshire local news anymore.

Do judges really deliver judgments by banging their gavel down on the appropriate side of the scales of justice?

not before shouting "tubular...BELLS!!!"

Viv Stanshall is a judge?
Surely he is dead? - actually maybe he is a judge (Dail Mail reader old duffer judge joke number 7)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7326006.stm

Detectives investigating the disappearance of Shannon Matthews have arrested her stepfather on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

Craig Meehan, 22, was arrested after officers on the Shannon Matthews case carried out inspections on a number of computers.

Mr Meehan was arrested at the family home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Michael Donovan, 39, of Lidgate Gardens, Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, has been charged with kidnapping Shannon.

West Yorkshire Police said in a statement: "During inquiries by the Shannon Matthews investigation team, the contents of a number of computers have been examined.

"As a result of this work, police have arrested a 22-year-old man from the Dewsbury Moor area on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

"He is currently being questioned at a West Yorkshire Police Station."

Social services

Officers said they did not believe any of the images found on the computer were those of family members.

Crikey

All the theories, whether they prove to be true or not, are generated because / derive out of / "Shameless" plot devices.

Hmmmmmm

I'm sad it was as true as it seems to be.

Still, it's now open season for the papers to get all "we can say what we like, they haven't got a "Maddy's parents style 'innocence' to them or the money to sue us, let's go" um, hat.

Hours of fun and millions of column inches ahead for the Why-Oh-Why Brigade

Yeah Tom D, those fucking Daily Mail readers disapproving of cooked up kidnap plots and child porn. Scumbags!

The Why oh Why Brigades assumptions/suspicions were right.
You've got to take it on the chin and shut up I'm afraid.

^^^ Torypinions4U

Wooooh, nooooo, I've been called a Tory!

Mr Goose asked Ms Matthews if she was confused about which versions of events she had given and she said: "everything".

She's clearly not enjoying being Goosed.

Mother guilty over Shannon kidnap

eagerly awaiting the response from insane, torture-obsessed women on Facebook

surprised ilx has so little to say about this

OK, so now the lawyere has helpfully stated that Mrs Mat is "pure evil" and the Sun has run with it.

Um, she didn't kill or rape anyone.

I'm not defending her. She's getting (or will do once sentenced) what she deserves.

Still, one more hero: the first one that beats her up in prison, right?

Unsurprisingly I have a different perspective on this from the PURE EVIL Sun (you said it, Rupert!).

The incestuous relationship between the media and the police is at root to blame - the police jumping on any case that will give them good publicity (and up their conviction rates, enabling them to meet their targets) and feeding them to a willing media ever in search of A Good Story, regardless of whether it's true (Soham) or false (Sally Clark, the whole Jersey business).

As the Good Stories become ever more gruesome to attract ever more readers, basics of morality and responsibility became lost.

So I can't excuse Mrs M for what she did but undoubtedly her simple mind was led and dazzled by all this babble about fame and money.

She deserved her sentence but she also deserves compassion, proper guidance and rehabilitation.

Instead she'll be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life in case someone decides to do her in.

How does that protect any children?

The same with Baby P - the system was rotten and needs changing, and I'm not saying that managers who can't manage shouldn't be replaced, but it's the system (which the Government instituted in the first place, and which Haringey Social Services were only following) that needs to be overhauled. Instead people's reputations and future job prospects are ruined. How does that save any children? And Baby P's killers need to be taught basic lessons about human behaviour and re-integrated into civilised society. Vilifying them and/or beating them up isn't going to save any children in the future.

All this will do is make people more and more wary about doing any work with children. The number of teachers is steadily dwindling and who can blame people for not wanting to go into the profession? Pitiful pay, never thanked, always picked on by inspectors, and why try and discipline a class when kids know they've got a licence to misbehave on the grounds of making an accusation which might lead the teacher to prison or worse if they get punished?

Who cares if society is deteriorating into barbarism and has lost the ability to tell fact from fiction?

As long as it's A Good Story - that's ALL that matters.

There's been a lot of stuff about Social Services again, this morning.

But, in actuality, it seems they did the right thing: Stepped in when needed, stepped out when not.

It'd be easy to insist theye should have stayed ethere for ever. But theye have too much to do, and in any case, they can't stop people from coming up with chronically daft ideas.

(bloody e button)

The Sun's doing a pretty good job of making sure nobody ever trains as a Social Worker in future

And of course, for every Baby P that gets missed due to mistakes (or, as seems to have been the case in Haringey, due to understaffing, overwork and - only very slightly possibly - less than ideal management practices) there are hundreds of kids whose lives are saved by social workers on a daily basis, but since none of these is A Good Story, we never hear about them.

Might also have something to do with client confidentiality that though.

Apart from that phrase "suspended on full six-figure salary"

That's gotta attract some people, right?

I think kidnapping your own daughter, drugging her and tethering her to rope in order to make a few quid comes close to any definition of evil you care to run with other than "caused by Satan".

So you're all for rehabilitating child killers but think convicted fraudsters are beyond hope?

xxxposts

Um "Caused by Satan" is the definition of "Pure Evil" as stated, yeah?

I don't get your second sentence derivation at all.

Some words have more than one definition Mark.

e⋅vil   [ee-vuhl] Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective
1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.
2. harmful; injurious: evil laws.
3. characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days.
4. due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation.
5. marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He is known for his evil disposition.
–noun
6. that which is evil; evil quality, intention, or conduct: to choose the lesser of two evils.
7. the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin.
8. the wicked or immoral part of someone or something: The evil in his nature has destroyed the good.
9. harm; mischief; misfortune: to wish one evil.
10. anything causing injury or harm: Tobacco is considered by some to be an evil.
11. a harmful aspect, effect, or consequence: the evils of alcohol.
12. a disease, as king's evil.
–adverb
13. in an evil manner; badly; ill: It went evil with him.
—Idiom
14. the evil one, the devil; Satan.

There was an interview with two of Mrs M's ex-friends, as from her documentary.

They were both intelligent and reasoned people (they were also that in the original doc), and for all that they felt betrayed and humiliated etc, they did also state that it was nobody elses fault but Mrs M.'s

(xpost yes, but there being scales of 'evil', it's the word 'pure' I felt was wrong)

Dudes there isn't actually a Satan.

xpost again.

This evil = 1.

Pure evil = 14.

(cigs = 10. (!))

People like the Mears know exactly what they are doing, and whatever else they might contribute to society it's clearly a mistake allowing them to go into a position where they can do the same thing again.

I'm not convinced that Mrs M ever had a clear idea what she was doing. She saw what she saw in the media and she was clearly deluded and desperate.

It doesn't EXCUSE or ABSOLVE her from what she did but she needs help not damnation.

I don't think this issue is as cut and dried as Marcello is making it out to be. Elephant in room = Madeleine McCann case which surely was front of mind in the Matthews' thinking, and the McCanns willingly played the media and made as big a story out of it as possible in order to try and get their daughter back.

Of course, the McCanns got fucked over by the media in the end as well but that's by the bye.

Of course it was.

My one overriding theory:

All the theories, whether they prove to be true or not, are generated because / derive out of / "Shameless" plot devices.

― Mark G, Monday, 17 March 2008 10:20 (8 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

..still applies.

when your parents/parents friends are kiddie porn fans who give you temazepan and kidnap you, you can see why the presumption falls down sometimes.

And yet here we still are. I've known other cases nearly as head-fucked.

It's complicated, yanking children out of families willy-nilly isn't exactly great for the children either

Like I said, yeah it's complicated and the alternatives aren't generally brilliant but condemning children to spend their lives with fuckwits and worse because you're worried about the psychological harm of taking them away needs more thought than it's currently getting.

The care system having such an unblemished record when it comes to child protection an' all

This needn't be an either or between family molestors and institutional molestors. The point isn't that children aren't removed because the alternatives are so terrible, but because there is an almost unexamined belief in the importance of the relationship between a child and its biological parent/s.

Blame psychology for that one

i'd assume that the costs involved are prohibitive, more than any ideology problems with it.

completely agree with NV- some of the most disputed the issues surrounding the case in ireland are to do with the unquestioned assumption that the family unit had to be maintained regardless of the demonstrable harm being done to the kids involved.

This still doesn't address the question of whether this was, legally, "kidnapping."

Unlawful imprisonment? Undoubtedly. Abuse? Debatable. But not, technically, kidnapping, and therefore carrying different penalties.

Abuse? Debatable.

What?

http://www.insidesocal.com/prepsports/coin%2520flip.jpg

if she was found guilty of kidnapping, i'm going to go ahead and just assume that it falls under whatever category they needed.

Which is why we have laws - things which define crime that has been proved beyond reasonable doubt, rather than things which are "assumed." A process which takes due note of reasoned evidential argument, as opposed to pandering to whipped up baying mob hysteria.

We also have a jury system, where people can make up their own minds

Unfortunately juries can be swayed by populist opinion. When you have a situation where the chief police officer investigating the crime describes Karen Matthews as "pure evil" and a media shrieking in pseudo-righteous outrage for Justice then it's hard to stay objective.

This is getting silly

Not at all, Tom.

That she committed an awful crime and should have been punished in some way or another is not in question.

Stupid? Yes. Deluded, greedy, craven, naive, obtuse, cruel? Yes. "Pure evil"? No.

I believe in proper justice. I also believe in the due process of fair trials and verdicts arrived at through reason and precedent, not to satisfy slavering newspaper editors hungry for a Good Story.

fuck sake

no, no, hear him out.

http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com/villain/pics/two-face.jpg

Pure evil? No

One stupid policeman said this, who else did? The trial judge even dismissed this comment as bollocks

how is this 'not' kidnapping? seriously i want you to tell me.

I'd like someone to tell me how it is kidnapping, when she was never actually separated from her immediate or extended family.

As I said, book her for unlawful imprisonment and whatever child abuse-related crimes apply, but kidnapping?

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

shut up

thanks dan

Interesting that it's still a common law in the UK rather than a statute.

Unfortunately because there has been so much projection, speculation and fabrication surrounding this case - on both sides - it's never going to become clear what actually did happen. And the only person who could know for sure what actually happened - the child herself - was not called to the witness box.

What I do know is that the sentence is out of all proportion regardless of what did happen and that a silly woman who needs help and rehabilitation is going to get none. And I propose that the sentence would have been nowhere near eight years had the media not been screaming for a "result."

"a silly woman who needs help and rehabilitation is going to get none"

^this. and her six other kids? goes back to what was said upthread. but where did they figure when she was sentenced to eight years?

There's silly and there's, uh, silly

Marcello should write a David Peace style novel about this.

Or maybe David Peace should write a novel about Marcello.

I could coach Michael Sheen on Marcello's accent and mannerisms

Damned Utd style tale of his time at Uncut.

And the only person who could know for sure what actually happened - the child herself - was not called to the witness box.

yeah, the kid obviously knew the ins and outs of the whole thing.

NOT!!!!

I heard she masterminded the whole thing

woah, maybe shannon has munchausen's

trying to make her maw look psycho

her six other kids? goes back to what was said upthread. but where did they figure when she was sentenced to eight years?

― yungblut, 27 January 2009 15:14 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

that they'd be better off, probably.

And the only person who could know for sure what actually happened - the child herself - was not called to the witness box.

― Ben E Gesserit (Marcello Carlin), Tuesday, 27 January 2009 15:05 Bookmark Suggest Ban

"Sorry your honour, I'm afraid was out of my fucking skull on temazepam and tethered by a noose to the ceiling so I might have missed a couple of the finer points..."

If you look at the police reports they variously state the following:

a) Shannon wasn't harmed;
b) Shannon was drugged;
c) Shannon was taken out of the house regularly;
d) Shannon was tied up;
e) Shannon was just staying with her relatives and wasn't worried;
f) Shannon suffered a "terrible ordeal."

Some of these conflicting points would go together, but not all of them.

Possible explanations:
a) The police were telling the truth as they initially believed it at the time and for obvious and entirely understandable reasons it took Shannon a while to disclose the whole story;
b) The events were, um, embellished a little in order to achieve a fast conviction, meet police/CPS targets and satisfy the media.

As I say, we're probably never going to know the full story, but this doesn't detach from the fact that eight years is out of proportion to the crime that was actually committed.

Far easier and far more convenient to make an example of the shambolic, devious and gullible "chav" mother rather than offer her the psychiatric help that she clearly needs.

perhaps instead of wasting your time here you could more profitably set up an appeal fund?

Proper thread

:D

iirc this is where the 'darragh is the earl of limerick' tory shit really took hold

Im neither ftr

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

shut up

― Barack You Like A Husseincane (HI DERE), Tuesday, 27 January 2009 14:31 (4 years ago)

decontextualised this is a wonderful post

The same with Baby P - the system was rotten and needs changing, and I'm not saying that managers who can't manage shouldn't be replaced, but it's the system (which the Government instituted in the first place, and which Haringey Social Services were only following) that needs to be overhauled. Instead people's reputations and future job prospects are ruined. How does that save any children?

And of course, for every Baby P that gets missed due to mistakes (or, as seems to have been the case in Haringey, due to understaffing, overwork and - only very slightly possibly - less than ideal management practices) there are hundreds of kids whose lives are saved by social workers on a daily basis, but since none of these is A Good Story, we never hear about them.

In the Sun: references to "SHANNON FREAK" and "FREAK OUT" and, apropos Baby P/Haringey, lots of GOTCHA!-type crowing over Shoesmith losing her job.

Never mind that social services in general will find it harder to attract workers and thus more children will die as a result.

Condemn, vilify, smear, crow.

And circulation and therefore profits go up.

Because that's what it's all about - nothing to do with the genuine welfare of children, and everything to do with it being A Good Story.

Marcello Carlin very otm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04n6sm0/baby-p-the-untold-story

http://i.imgur.com/NHmxo7X.jpg

so probably happened

one detail about this case I totally missed at the time was that Michael Donovan, the deeply unpleasant looking dead-eyed Shannon Matthews abductor from Batley, was originally born Paul Drake and had changed his name by deed poll in tribute to a fictional character he strongly related to (Mike Donovan - heroic leader of the human resistance, lol) from 80's lizard alien invasion sci-fi series V.

I'd completely forgotten that June Chadwick (Jeanine from This is Spinal Tap) was in V! I'd also forgotten about Shannon Matthews, the entire family I hope are currently residing in the "where are they now?" file.

A couple of weeks back on a Sunday afternoon, a large part of Dewsbury town centre was cordoned off and I had to get off the bus in Savile Town, it wasn't going any further. The police were searching the Calder for human remains, some random bloke told me and I said: suicide, is it? and he shook his head quizzically. Asda was almost empty and unusually library quiet. I thought Dewsbury is back, baby! (it's only ever back when something shit happens here)