From ‘forensic narratives’ to ‘narratives of forensics’: telling stories about the murder of Gay Gibson

This chapter critiques crime in the media by identifying the origins of damaging narratives which blame women victims for violence by men. By tracking stories about the 1947 murder of Gay Gibson by James Camb from news media and archived trial documents, through iterations of the narrative over more than seventy years, I identify the forensic contexts of courtroom and capital punishment as critical to comprehending the construction and reincarnation of misogynistic tropes. Moreover, overlooking these contexts in favour of overstating DNA and other scientific evidence has consequences for contemporary justice. By restyling the Gibson murder as a ‘cold case’, selectively reinvestigating partial evidence and jurifying the public via social media, a tabloid press publisher and television documentary have retrospectively re-silenced Camb’s victims. This article argues that stories about historical crime in the media are telling of attitudes to gender and justice in the present as much as the past.