Have you ever met a killer?

My sister lives in Somerset, and when she and her husband were building their house, she worked part-time in a pretty seaside pub. On account of an Irish girl being behind the bar, the pub began to get popular with some Irish expats who'd settled in or around the town. Among them, a middle-aged, good-humoured Irish handyman, 'Jimmy', had heard about the barmaid from his Irish hometown, and so he came accustomed to drinking in the pub.

On account of being from the same Irish town, my sister made it especially her business to befriend Jimmy as she befriended all the elderly Irish customers. After a few months, she' bring from her trips to Tipperary the local newspaper, and local creamery butter. He had a bad leg, so she'd sometimes give him and one of his mates a lift.

His name wasn't known to be local to our area, and when she was asked, our mother had no idea who he was. But nobody thought much of this. Perhaps all of his family were dead? Perhaps, like many Irish in Britain, they had all emigrated? Nobody likes to pry.

Jim was, so I have been told, mostly a very cheerful & a jovial man. He could be sullen and irritable after a few drinks, as is common with men of his generation, and no more was thought about that.

Well, to cut a long story short, one evening my sis arrives into work, and two grave-looking detectives are lined up at the counter. They tell her that her mate Jimmy has been charged in connection with the murder of a Lithuanian woman in London ten years previous. My sister thinks they must be joking, but no, their expression is dead-pan.
And does she know, they ask, that he'd been convicted of the rape of two women in his hometown in Tipperary, thirty years previous? No. And that his real name is not Jimmy C____, but James K____? No.

Yes, so it was all true. When my sister was a little baby girl playing beside the lake near our house, this monster had tried to drown a woman by the shore just a few kilometres downstream. He had raped his teenage victim and pushed her head underwater. When, somehow, she survived and tried to crawl to shore, he tried to bash her head with a rock until a farmer intervened, and he fled.

My family, and all of the local community, recall that incident well. Such a sadistic rape convulsed the small lakeside community, and is still recalled today in grave tones. (I should also say, one month later, this degenerate man struck again, and raped a hitch-hiker on the road outside the town.)

Oh well he was put in Portlaoise jail for a token length of time, was promptly discharged & left Ireland forevermore.

He changed his surname before he landed in Somerset, which is why my sister never cottoned on to his real identity. Police in the UK say they don't know how many other women he may have killed and raped, but needless to say everyone feels incredibly lucky that she was never harmed by him. The Police have little doubt but that he would have struck again, and that there may be more victims whom have not come forward, or worse, are dead. The sentencing judge described him as a dangerous & wicked man, before committing him to prison for life.

I know it all reads like a bad episode of Emmerdale Farm, but that's the story as it has been told to me, and I tell it to you in kind.

I personally have never met a killer, nor do I want to. I believe there are sociopathic creatures out there who must never live in our society. They have no place in this world at all.