McCann troll commits suicide

I agree a very sorry situation. How unhappy this lady must have been to have started on this course and to see no other option than to take her own life. I also think its very disturb for the McCanns on many levels.

She, and others like her, have caused untold misery to a family suffering the most dreadful pain and grief and guilt. If you've ever read some of the comments they posted you'd be shocked at the sheer vitriol.
Her suiduce is to be regretted, however, as I'd rather she had faced prosecution.

DT article today says she was estranged from her son so maybe she was bitter about that but I would have thought that might have made her more sympathetic to others who had lost a child forever.

"4000 vicious tweets"! 4000!!!!

Unbelievable! She must have been in a sorry state to do that. Shame her account wasn't closed down by the Twitter owners.I guess there has always been mentally unbalanced people in society and these days the technology is just there literally at their fingertips.

Cruel of the Sky people. They should have attacked the owners of Twitter.

The world of conspiracy theorists is truly weird. I think people like this woman must have mental health problems, surely? (not trying to make excuses, just trying to understand it).

[And oops, I have just noticed a stray apostrophe in my OP - McCann's instead of McCanns. I must be suffering from the effects of seeing so much incorrect usage, that it has become normalised in my poor old brain].

It's dreadful! I agree with the rest the comments made.
I think poison pen letters have always been around though.

The internet just makes it so very much easier nowadays.

Virtually every newspaper yesterday had 'McCann Troll found dead' or similar on its front page. I found that in itself rather shocking. No matter what she'd done this woman was a human being.

Quite right Ana.

It said on our local news (East Midlands Today) that her son was in America studying law and that he had posted a nice message on her FB page.

You're right re the article title ... and I have fallen into the trap too.

I'm going to be careful what I say here, but there are many people who have very strong feelings about the McCanns, both positive and negative. Of course it is wrong to use the anonymity of the Internet to 'troll' others (I'm not even sure whether troll is a verb in this context), but from what I have read, there are far worse tweets and comments out there about the McCanns and I can't help feeling that she was perhaps an easy target for the media - she didn't hide her identity very well and could be dismissed as a 'mad old woman'. She may or may not have had mental health problems but either way, can it be right for the media to hound people? Slightly hypocritical when this is what they accused her of doing?

In old-fashioned terms this lady chose to write poison pen messages to a family who suffered every parents nightmare.

People who write poison pen letters must expect at sometime to be identified and to be prepared to face the flak when that happens. Remember she sent out 4000 offensive messages, some very offensive about the McCanns. Would we have been so compassionate if #sweepyface had been identified as a 25 year old unemployed loner?

The man who has been accused of killing Alice Gross committed suicide, should we be sorry for him? Do you not think that he had mental health issues? Hasn't he been denigrated by the press in his absence, even though, as far as I know, he is only suspected not accused and could prove to be innocent?

If you commit crimes of hate, whether poison pen or murder, you must be prepared to deal with the fallout. Committing suicide could be seen as wimping out, not prepared to face other peoples justified reactions but going for the sympathy vote by killing yourself. That could apply to Alice Gross's killer as well.

I might add my sympathy is with the families, her son, the McCanns, Alice Gross's family and the family of the Latvian suspected of her killing. They are the ones that are really suffering.

Flickety I think a mental disorder was probably involved in both cases - this one and in the case of the presumed killer of Alice. So, yes, a little sympathy should perhaps be allowable.

"The quality of mercy....."

Actually "sadness for" is what I mean rather than sympathy.

She did not send any messages to the McCanns. She wrote about them on the Internet, which seems to be allowed in our weird system. Some of her messages actually defended the McCanns. There are other far worse messages still out there and forums that flourish on this kind of thing. Perhaps that is what needs to be looked at, as well as a system that condones trial by media.

nightowl I don't think that any of the messages she posted online defended the McCanns. I mean apart from not having read that anywhere else, it just wouldn't make sense. They showed some if her tweets in the news report and they were particularly hatefilled.

I've also been thinking about the headlines and Ana's comment - if people like Brenda Leyland identifies themselves as "trolls" and wears that badge (some might say with pride) then is that an acceptable way to announce that news? If it was announced by using her name, then all suicides should be announced like that instead of e.g. "Teacher commits suicide".

You can read some of her tweets here:

www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/read-the-deleted-tweets-brenda-leyland-sent-the-mccanns?s=mobile#44hru9e

One example of a tweet where she defended them:

'As well as delivering strongly worded attacks on the McCanns and their actions, Leyland sometimes stuck up for them. On 20 November 2013 she asked why some people were laughing “like demented hyenas” at the McCanns’ plight.'

This woman did no more than the many journalists and authors who have published (and thereby profited from) their views about the case of Madeleine McCann. She stated her views, based on what she had read. She may have expressed herself in very unpleasant terms but she did not contact the McCanns or address them directly. I don't think she deserved to be hounded by journalists and I don't think she deserved to die for her actions. She was not a murderer, unlike the suspected killer of Alice Gross, so there really is no comparison between the two cases.

I'm not defending this woman's actions, but nor do I want to join a lynch mob.

I see now. I also see that - unbelievably - she didn't believe their version, so she was a conspiracy theorist. Poor woman was clearly not well and the Sky journalist should probably have sensed that (seeing as he followed her Twitter account).

I read recently about a woman who started writing a blog as a way of dealing with having been in the July Tube bombings, and she suffered so much abuse from online conspiracy theorists, that she agreed to meet them to try and persuade them face to face that there really had been a bomb in the train. That was a huge mistake of course. She 'lost it' with this group in the pub where they met, which led to more abuse and a near break down for her. She shut her blog page, which had provided her with support too plus the therapeutic aspect of it, down because of this.

It's a strange, strange world we live in sometimes.

It says much for poster's compassion and concern, but to me it raises another question. Why do we assume that when somebody like us acts in an unacceptable way, the rationale for which defeats us, we tend to assume that the person who committed the deed must have mental health problems?

What are we afraid of? That all of us, deep within us, has a capacity for evil that we do not want to be reminded of? A desire to place the evil-doer at arms length and say 'They are different from us, there mind is disordered' because it protects us from grappling with the nature of evil? What?

No evidence has been published that suggests this lady had mental health issues. Could the explanation for her behaviour be that she was an unpleasant person, who enjoyed the sense of power that trolling the McCanns gave her, knowing that while she lived a quiet and blameless life in her neat house in a nice village, she had the power to make other people's life a misery, yet nobody but her knew.

Some years ago I reported a gas leak. After investigation it was found that the cause was a leak in the main gas distribution pipe in the road. My house overlooked the junction of two major roads coming into Reading. One was already shut for roadworks. When the other one was partially closed because of the gas leak half of Reading was brought to a grinding halt for 5 or 6 hours. I stood at my bedroom window looking on the chaos and listening to local radio and thought:I caused all this with one phone call and only DH and I know this and the surge of power that ran through me, shook me with its intensity. I wonder whether it was this feeling of power, that nobody but she knew of whether was what this lady was enjoying. It is as reasonable a supposition as assuming she was mentally ill.

FlicktyB You have a good point there.

I don't whether this woman had a mental disorder, or an unfortunate character trait. I'm not even sure whether you can separate the two. You would probably need a trained psychologist to find that out.

I can, however, imagine how awful it would have been for the woman once an unforgiving media had got hold of the story. She probably felt suicide was the only way out. So, yes, I feel sorry for her. And I think a lot of blame lies with Twitter for allowing these things to run on.

To be honest Flickety, I don't think I would have felt any sense of power over the gas repairs. I think I would have just felt relieved they were fixing it!

(I would have felt a bit of pride that I had done my duty as a citizen).

Whilst this woman's death is to be regretted and all sympathy sent to her family isn't this a case of "the biter bit"?

Of course she was entitled to post her opinion on what had happened to Madeleine but did she have to do so in such an objectionable way? She did so because she thought she would never be brought to account for it, and was happy to join in with a witch hunt against parents who had just suffered every parents' nightmare. The Sky reporter who tracked her down gave her the opportunity to put her side on camera which she declined to do.