Echoes

Listening to the "off the record" interview given to Radio 5 Live by Tom Stephens, the first man arrested in connection with the string of murders in Suffolk, brought back eerie memories of Ian Huntley's media interviews before he was arrested for the Soham murders.

But there's another echo too, that of Colin Stagg, who fitted the profile of a murderer so well that the police brought an absurdly constructed case against him for a crime that now seems likely to have been committed by a man already held in Broadmoor secure unit.

Stephens, however, accepts that he could be mistaken for a killer. In his [Radio 5] interview on Sunday, he said: "From the police profiling it does look like me. I know I'm innocent. But I don't have alibis for some of the times — actually I'm not entirely sure I have tight alibis for any of the times."

Dreadful crimes like the Suffolk murders are situations ripe for miscarriages of justice. Let's hope that this one plays out more like the Soham case than the Colin Stagg fiasco.