Casual murder of an innocent - Karen Buckley’s killer sentenced

THE idea of a killer selecting a victim at random; the idea that the desire to kill or rape is so powerful, that the identity of the victim is irrelevant to the murderer, is so alien to anything we might regard as normal.

Such random savagery and indifference to a fellow human being, and their family and friends left to grieve the loss of a loved one, is so far beyond our comprehension that we struggle to find a framework to express our reaction. We struggle to process the idea through the innate humanity that anchors the great majority of us to civilised behaviour.

Yet that situation, coping with the loss of a child through random murder, is the fate of Karen Buckley’s family. She was murdered in Glasgow last April in a chilling mix of casualness and brutality. Less than two years earlier the family and friends of Jill Meagher, the 29 year old murdered and raped in Melbourne faced the same horror.