Talk:List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom

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Notes[edit]

I many other articles the "Notes" column in a table is used to add a few small details for context. In this article it's obviously used for the substantive part of the descriptions of the crime. What might be reasonable word limit to suggest for these entries? If every known detail was included, we'd have a very long article indeed. And one that would almost certainly only get longer and longer. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:57, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion a good rule of thumb could be a single sentence for victims who have a full article devoted To them and 3-5 sentences max were a full article is not warranted. I would be interested to know what other people think.
--Nacentaeons (talk) 11:40, 10 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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Disappearance is not necessarily a murder[edit]

I've removed a couple of entries dealing solely with disappearances of people. For someone to be listed on the page, there must be hard evidence that they were murdered - if a body has not been discovered, there is no evidence/no one has confessed to foul play, and the coroner/police have not officially listed the disappeared person as murdered, then it doesn't belong here. It belongs on the list of people who have disappeared mysteriously

FirefoxLSD (talk) 03:43, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Marie Wilks[edit]

Murdered 18 June 1988. This case is missing from the list. see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/articles/2008/05/14/m50_marie_wilks_timeline_feature.shtml146.198.87.134 (talk) 12:50, 20 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

External Links Modified[edit]

I cleaned up the External Links section and in so doing removed one and moved it into the body of the article as an inline citation attached to new content (Janet Rogers, the subject of said external link). Matuko (talk) 20:16, 11 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Length[edit]

This article is becoming WAY too long. Needs splicing into (perhaps) decades (certainly after WW2 years). Redirects at header of articles to content of this matter in other centuries and decades could then suffice?--Kieronoldham (talk) 03:16, 22 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Splitting proposal[edit]

I propose that this article be split into List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (before 1990) and List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (1990–present) for reasons of size. --Numberguy6 (talk) 15:08, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I was considering splitting the list into three: Before 1980, 1980s and 1990s, and 21st century, as one of the articles of the list is becoming too massive. zsteve21 (talk) 20:57, 14 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

James Brodie[edit]

Wanted in connection with the 2003 murder of Nottingham jeweller Marian Bates. Police believe he was murdered by a criminal organisation from Nottingham and have searched for his remains at several locations across the UK. One man was arrested and charged for his murder with the crown court later dismissing the case. I think he would be a worthy addition. – 2.O.Boxing 19:55, 13 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

How to define "unsolved"?[edit]

It's a straightforward question. I believe the entry relating to Lyra McKee should be removed from List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (1990–present), as a suspect has now been charged. While obviously the case isn't officially closed until a conviction has been obtained, continuing to include it in the article would set an unusual precedent, namely that every murder in the UK would need to appear in the article until a conviction has been obtained. Any objection to the removal of cases where a suspect has been charged? FDW777 (talk) 20:58, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Since there were no objections, I have removed Lyra McKee. FDW777 (talk) 10:22, 13 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Length and tone[edit]

While I agree that splitting the two articles because of how long they have become is desirable,† I'm not convinced that their entries are also too long on the whole. If the consensus is that they are, I suppose making them more like those in a police database compiled in response to an FOI request could be worth doing, although I do fear that any drastic shortening of the entries would risk leaving some people a tad frustrated about how little info there was on each case.

Length aside, what I think is most important when it comes to the content of an entry is whether it is factual, relevant, and backed up with what appears to be a reliable source, as well as whether slang and language that may reasonably be viewed as biased or emotive are avoided. In these respects, I suspect that there are not very many entries that fail miserably. If they all went that bit further by reading as though they were from an academic journal, they might be better for it, but would the average person find them any more pleasing? It seems doubtful.

†Saying that, I wouldn't be surprised if each article has many visitors who skip most of it not because of length, but because they're only really interested in cases from one or two parts of the country or from a particular era. 81.102.108.42 (talk) 17:55, 28 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Inclusion criteria?[edit]

Has there ever been a discussion about inclusion criteria for these lists? They are frankly unmanageably long: already split out into six sub-articles, and the most recent (List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (2000–present)) could already do with splitting again. Most of these entries are of non-notable people killed in non-notable crimes.

At minimum I would propose not including any case where there isn't a source from significantly after the killing describing the case as unsolved: there are several cases in List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (1990s), for instance, which are sourced only to contemporary newspaper coverage, with no indication that the case is still unsolved, e.g. those of George Pugh and Hannah Deterville. More radically, I'd like to cut everything where there's no wikipedia article on the victim or the murder. Certainly in the modern cases the news is constantly reporting on murders. There are several hundred homicides in the UK per year, and this Home Office report suggests that 20% (over 100!) remain unsolved after two years. Listing every possible one fits uncomfortably alongside various parts of the What Wikipedia Is Not policy, particularly WP:NOTNEWS, WP:INDISCRIMINATE, and WP:NOTMEMORIAL. (I would also note that the various top-level List of unsolved murders articles, e.g. List of unsolved murders (2000–present), are already explicitly restricted to notable cases). Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:37, 9 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have put pointers to this discussion on the talkpages for all of the sub-lists Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:43, 9 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This all seems logical. I've done some copyediting on these articles (particularly the 2000–present one, if I recall) but not really taken content/context into account. A quick look at the 2000–present article shows that it's not really a list of unsolved murders – the second entry, for example, is supported by a single source that verifies a murder took place. The source does not verify that this is an unsolved murder, either at the time or now. At the very least I think we should not be listing murders that are not verifiably still unsolved.
There's also the issue of whether or not we should classify [some or all of] these as murder; "murder" is specific in its definition and we should consider whether or not calling these murders in the absence of a murder conviction (as is unavoidable with the term "unsolved murder") is appropriate. There is clear consensus with recent UK articles that "Murder of X" is only named as such when a conviction is secured; else the title "Death of X", "Killing of X", or similar is used. In the context of the 2000–present article, the Cheryll Grover listing is perhaps a good example – despite being treated as a murder, the inquest returned an open verdict. Ditto Abdul Bhatti – "No one has been convicted of his murder or manslaughter" – if there's a chance this could be manslaughter, then "murder" is wrong. Can we rightfully list these as a murder with that information? MIDI (talk) 12:23, 17 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I've already removed some entries where the "murder" status was questionable for exactly that reason - e.g. here, where the cited source says that the death was being treated as manslaughter. The Cheryll Grover one looks like another candidate for removal to me: the news report on the 2006 re-investigation carefully calls it a "suspicious death" which "was investigated as murder at the time". The Bhatti case is more defensible: though our article said "murder or manslaughter", the cited sources do uniformly describe it as murder (and I've edited our list to reflect that). There's certainly an argument that we shouldn't consider news reports reliable to determine whether a death was murder rather than manslaughter or justifiable homicide, but at that point we're pretty close to the question of if we can call anything an unsolved murder, and if not should the articles be deleted entirely? I wouldn't necessarily be opposed, but that's a much more drastic step than simply trimming out the badly sourced stuff. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 13:44, 17 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think you've nailed it with "More radically, I'd like to cut everything where there's no wikipedia article on the victim or the murder". We can safely assume that listings with a bluelink in the "Name of victim(s)" column are notable and worthy of inclusion; I can't think of a justification for keeping those cases that aren't linked. The 2000–present article has about two dozen linked articles; that's roughly one notable event per year. If this average is the same for the other articles on decades (why isn't List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom (2000s) a thing?) then I foresee us merging into List of unsolved murders in the United Kingdom for one list.
Also, I appreciate I digressed a bit with my second paragraph in my first reply (17 May)! While establishing a threshold for inclusion would fix a lot of this simply by removing the majority of these events, I think we need to give some thought to certain instances – we can't label the Death of Stuart Lubbock as murder (yes there were arrests for murder but no convictions). There seems to be three categories of article in these lists – 1) unexplained deaths, 2) unexplained homicides, and 3) unexplained homicides which have been widely reported as murders. tl;dr – would "homicides" be a better word for "murders" in the title of these lists? MIDI (talk) 15:30, 23 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The murder of Jacqueline Nyeko (died January 2002, entry removed May 2023) was still undetected nearly a decade later according to this Met Police list from October 2011, and the Blackpool Gazette article here indicates that Roger Ormsby (died January 2000, entry also removed recently) is another whose murder is yet to be cracked.
That being said, I have become partial to Caeciliusinhorto-public's idea of keeping these lists but making each one less bloated by limiting it to unsolved cases considered notable enough to have Wikipedia articles about them. Merging the articles back into one, as MIDI suggests, might be desirable in the event of such trimming. Though I've enjoyed helping to bring long-forgotten killings out of obscurity a little by creating entries for them, narrowing the inclusion criteria does seem sensible in view of how vast the (ever-growing) number of unsolved murders in the UK is and the policy of not using Wikipedia pages as memorials. 82.47.248.228 (talk) 20:28, 23 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Would there be any objections to my beginning the process of shortening these lists by removing victims whose cases have no Wikipedia articles? While I don't have the know-how to merge or rename pages and will therefore be leaving such things to another person regardless (if they are done at some stage), I'd still be happy to spare someone the job of removing a load of entries in the meantime.
Should anyone object because they would rather see everything done pretty much in one fell swoop, I'd be quite content to sit back and let it happen that way instead. There may even be people who wouldn't want the number of entries to decrease to a great degree because their preference is for the lists to carry on as they are. If no one does object, however, I will likely start deleting entries sometime between a week and two weeks from now unless what I'm thinking of doing has been done by someone else by then. 82.47.248.228 (talk) 19:57, 27 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Made an attempt to remove the bulk of the contents of one of these lists except entries for victims with Wikipedia articles, but the edit was not allowed – most likely I'm guessing because it was an IP edit as opposed to one made using an account. Even so, something tells me that making such an edit from an account would probably not be possible right from the moment of its creation – that the account would have to have had a fair amount of use first, in other words.
Anyone else up for taking the initial steps towards (and perhaps also completing the process of) turning these lists into ones where a Wikipedia article on the crime or the victim is necessary for someone killed in an unsolved homicide to qualify for inclusion? 82.47.248.228 (talk) 19:58, 9 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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