It seems Liz Jones’ article may have been edited by the DailyMail before it went live. I think they made her look bad, so I thought I’d re-edit/improve it for her. You can read the original article on the Daily Mail’s website. I’m not going to link to them though.
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Joanna Yeates murder: Becoming just another thumbnail on the police website?
By Liz Jones
It’s Friday night and I’m in the Ram bar on Park Street in Bristol.
This is where Joanna Yeates spent her last evening before she set off up the hill (as that’s the direction she lived in), past the shops and bars (a Habitat, a Greggs, a Riley’s, a Wetherspoons; Bristol is nothing if not like most other UK cities) towards her death.
The bar is dull. The wine list, chalked on a board, is poor. The most expensive thing on there is Moet. Frankly I’d rather drink my own piss, so I ordered a glass of room-temperature water, which came chilled! The bastards!
I wish she had spent what were probably her last hours on earth somewhere much more lovelier. This place isn’t even Michelin-starred. The food is awful (I ask for a veggie burger and it comes with no ketchup!) but the young women behind the bar are sweet with huge, pretty tits.
One innocent young girl, Chantelle, who can’t be older than 36, is working her way through uni, where she is studying German Soap Operas of History. She comes from London and her parents are now terrified something is going to happen to her, despite the higher crime rate of London.
She was working on the bar’s busiest night of the year, December 17, when Joanna was having a drink before heading home. I ask her if she remembers one individual customer, personally, from a month ago. ‘It was so busy that night. I don’t remember her,’ she says. The heartless bitch!
I leave the bar at 8:14pm and retrace Joanna’s steps. Even though it’s a Friday night – the start of the weekend – in January, the streets are surprisingly packed. People are still going outside, not listening to sane advice to stay in with all the doors locked! There are a couple of women joggers out, but they are safe, protected by their boyfriends or husbands who probably work in something manly like IT or document management.
I walk past the university building on my right, with Waitrose on my left. If you’re following me on Google Streetview, it probably still shows up as the Better Food Company. I wander the bright aisles, full of terrified fragile young women rushing round after work, leaving with carrier bags of Duchy Original organic products. I buy a copy of Heat, and 18 copies of the Daily Mail.
I head up the hill towards Clifton, the rich part of the city. It’s quieter now, and darker. This is probably because it’s night time. I find Tesco, and go in. I almost buy that upmarket pizza that Jo famously purchased; but then I remember I ate in the Bristol Ram, earlier in this tedious article. Something about Jo’s choice of pizza tells me she was a lover of ham. Or pineapple. Or both.
There is only one police van on the green as I turn right into Canynge Road. As I near her basement flat, the road is quiet. Earlier in the day there had been an ITN news van here but it has gone now. I just don’t feel safe without news vans and Sky copters, and the DailyMail reminding me to breathe and telling me what stops cancer.
I’m reassured to see two policemen standing vigil at her iron gate, either side of a small, discreet pile of flowers in varying degrees of decay. I don’t add any myself, or do anything about this. Why haven’t people come back every day and added more? Don’t they remember?
I tell the police I’m spooked, walking here. ‘Don’t be spooked,’ one says. ‘Residents are campaigning to get electric fences installed. To keep the nosy fucking so-called-“journalists” out.’
That afternoon I had gone to the lane where Jo’s body was found. It was horrible and windswept. I don’t know what I had expected but not this. Not in the middle of the countryside. Windswept! Wind! What!!??
There was no ceremony here, no policeman. Don’t they watch empty land 24/7? I got the feeling the world is starting to forget Jo.
I’d have expected the cars to slow down here to show respect but they sped past. Disgusting!
The lane is narrow, and cars beep at me as I fanny about in the middle of the road, during rush hour. How did a killer, in the middle of the night manage to not be seen by these people who wouldn’t have been here? I can’t fathom it out.
Leaving Jo’s flat, I return to my car. I attempt to get to the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It’s only a street away, and it’s well sign-posted but I can’t figure it out, so I use my sat-nav.
The theory is the killer took the long route from the flat to where he dumped the body to avoid the CCTV cameras. Perhaps he really only wanted to avoid the extortionate 50p toll. 50p! It’s not even 100m long!
I don’t have 50p and try tossing 30p and a White Company button into the bucket. It doesn’t work. Typical – whites get no preferential treatment these days, in broken Britain.
There is now an angry queue behind me. Isn’t it unrelated that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her children she hasn’t had yet, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure that lazy journalists can’t steal from a city by refusing to pay the bridge toll. Finally, a man in a taxi jumps out, and runs to me brandishing a 50p piece.
‘Get out the way you silly cow – I’ve got to pick someone up and get them to the airport,’ he says, angrily. All men are clearly arseholes.
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If it wasn’t obvious, this is a joke – much like Ms Jones’ original article. I do feel sorry for those relations or friends of Jo Yeates most affected by this tragic case, but are we all expected to live in constant fear, as the killer(s) has not yet been caught? More specifically, she only seems to care about women. Her article goes to some effort to make it seem like it’s dangerous for any woman to be out on her own, without the protection of a man. Isn’t it 2011?
The police are still working on the case, nobody has “forgotten” about it, but the media have long since ran out of things to report about this case. I’d really like for the next news I read about this, to quote police evidence or legit sources, instead of yet more tenuous links, and journalists shoehorning themselves into a non-story like this tripe, to sell papers.
RIP Jo.