McCann troll commits suicide

It is the point ja. You asked "we're the young men who attacked Mary Beard on Twitter poor young men?" Answer, no they weren't. They didn't suffer for it as this woman obviously did.

Alas, the internet has become what driving used to be [remember all the cases of road rage?]. If only people followed a code whereby you only say something on the internet to someone that you would say to their face things like this wouldn't happen. I don't do 'Twitter' but I know people that have stopped using it because of abusive comments .

But jane there is a huge difference between the abusive tweets directed at Mary Beard and the tweets posted by Brenda Leyland. Mary Beard was called something like 'you filthy old slut' and threatened with rape and other acts of violence. If Brenda Leyland had called the McCanns 'filthy child murderers' and threatened to kill them and their children I would most certainly not be defending her.

In fact I'm not actually defending her actions anyway, simply pointing out that I think we are being fed a version of what she did that is not really accurate. I don't think she was a troll in the true sense of the term, she did not address any tweets to the McCanns directly, and she did not make any threats. I may not like the way she chose to express herself but I do think she was a very minor player in a huge Internet community of conspiracy theorists on all sorts of topics. In that sense I think she was an easy target for a campaigning journalist. I would not like anyone to think I agree with what she did, but I am trying to take a balanced view. I'm obviously in a minority of one on here, but that's fine.

Not that I know of jingl, but I don't think that's the point.
Of course I feel great sympathy for anyone who is desperate enough to commit suicide, and their families, but I don't think the fact that this woman killed herself lessens the harm she had done.

Did they commit themselves to a horrible death at their own hands when they were found out Janeainsworth?

But it's not her suggestion that the McCanns were implicated, but how she expressed herself and the relentlessness of it, surely nightowl? I have only seen a few of the tweets, but I understand that they were, shall we say, forcibly and viciously expressed.
Would you describe those who attacked Mary Beard on Twitter and were subsequently exposed, as 'poor young men'?

I don't think Brenda Leyland was necessarily mentally ill, nor do I think she was evil. Obsessed, yes, definitely, but her views were no more irrational than many others. There are people who firmly believe that Diana was murdered by the Royal Family, and who are very vocal about it. Do we think they are all mad, or that they should shut up? Their views undoubtedly continue to cause distress to her sons who even the conspiracy theorists woukd have to agree are completely innocent parties. Yet they do not seem to attract the hatred this poor woman has been the target of. Why is this case different?

I have a friend who lives in Germany who tells me that the media portrayal of the McCanns is much less sympathetic there than here, and it is common to hear people express the view that the McCanns may have been implicated in Madeleine's disappearance. Is that because Germans are more likely to be mad, or irrational? Or simply because we are all influenced by the particular version of events presented to us by the media.

I also get angry when people criticise the Sky reporter for doorstepping Mrs Leyland. He was an investigative reporter and doing his job, the same as the reporters who dug up all the disgusting stories about Saville etc. She knew what she was doing and it is too easy to find excuses. If we carried on that route we would excuse all people with criminal convictions as having some sort of mental illness. People who struggle with mental illness have enough on their plate without nasty people like her being given mental illness as an excuse.

Just read the article and seen that Brenda Leyland is described as a 'victim'.
Surely this use of the word is belittling the plight of real victims - victims of child abuse, or Ebola, for example.
The word victim implies that the sufferer has no control over their fate - well I'm sorry, but each one of us has the power to decide what we type onto our screens, and whether to press the send button.

I agree that it is too easy to blame everything on mental health problems; nor do I think that people who are evil are automatically also "crazy".

But, anyone who believes that the McCanns orchestrated the disappearance of their daughter/were in on it/want to benefit financially (as I believe was the case in this instance from many of the tweets posted) is definitely not rational. Surely? (forgetting for the moment about formal diagnosis, just as a general rule of thumb). I'm not saying that because I'm trying to excuse her behaviour, just trying to puzzle out why anyone would do something like that. Brenda Leyland would sometimes tweet incessantly from 7 a.m. to past midnight, that to me is not "normal" behaviour. If nothing else, it's obsessive.

I wonder if she might have been viewed as having a 'mental condition' if she was interviewed on some ' sink estate' in tracky bottoms and hoody instead of in her nice respectable village. Just wondering.

Or perhaps just humiliation?

I think it's unfair to the many many thousands of people who have mental health problems to assume that 'when somebody behaves in a vicious way, 'mental health problems' are at the root of it.
Shame is a very powerful emotion.
I think it is shame that Brenda Leyland couldn't live with.

I have refrained from setting up a twitter account, even tho' many of my fellow writers have done so, and some even go so far as to say it's a'must' in the social network toolbox. I actually hate the term'Social Network' . It smacks to me of a 'look at me, and how clever/successful/interesting I am'. I get fed-up enough with acquaintances (certainly not F&Fs) on Facebook pushing their latest self published book on Kindle, most of which have been turned down by umpteen publishers for the obvious reason when you start to read them. The so called 'friends' are only asking to join my FB account because they think I will help their sales.

IMHO what starts off as a 'fun' thing to do ...ie letting followers know what you're up to or tweeting inane comments, can become an obsession, picking up and commenting on every bit of news out there....with no moderation or censorship - especially if you don't have a lot else in your life. This is where Twitter can be so nasty. The publicity-seeking Sally Bercow came grievously unstuck when she leapt on the pedophile bandwagon and falsely tweeted a damning condemnation of Lord MacAlpine... a sick man who's accuser later admitted he was 'mistaken.'

So-called 'celebs' have a lot to answer for as they feed the 'followers' frenzy... X has a million followers, Y has 2 million and so forth. And what sad souls have the time or inclination to keep checking on who has tweeted what and where? I don't particularly like the expression but...Get a Life!

jingl This wasn't the first time I had reported an occasional faint smell of gas in the house but this was the first time it had been located as coming up through drains in the cellar, which meant it was a mains leakage.

But putting aside the my public service. It was seeing the utter chaos outside, hearing all the reports on the radio and the talk on the buses and in the street for weeks after and nursing in my bosom the knowledge that my phone call had been the catalyst for the chaos. I could have rung my local radio station, told them the part I played in the event, got my photo in the papers, but I didn't, I just kept quiet and gave a secret smile every time someone mentioned all the problems they had had and described the chaos. The sense of power it engendered in me, as I said, quite horrified me.

I suspect that is this secret sense of power that impells these trolls. None of them want to come out and talk big when they are discovered.

Anonymity has a lot to answer for. Why are we all so afraid of using our own names ? Do we have something to hide ? Is it so that no-one will know who it is when we are being unkind ? Or not telling the truth ?I am probably being very naïve but on Facebook people use their own names don't they? I certainly do.

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.

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).

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.

FlicktyB You have a good point there.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.