Clifford was unremarkable in every sense during his time in military basic training (Image: Supplied)
“The banality of evil” is a phrase coined in the wake of the as academics tried to dissect how monstrous acts can be committed by seemingly ordinary people. The only extraordinary thing about is just how ordinary he was. I do not use that phrase lightly. But it is a phrase I’ve thought about a lot since July when Clifford mercilessly killed three women, one of whom was subjected to a sickening rape prior to her death.
was one of the first recruits I took through basic training as a Troop Commander at the Training Centre Pirbright. Often I have thought that I or my team must have missed something, a tell-tale sign of the evil which lay beneath his unremarkable exterior. But there was not. In preparing for this piece I have scoured the recesses of mind for hints and clues that could in hindsight go some way to explaining why he did what he did. There are none.
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It often feels strange to me that there were no clues of the evil which lay beneath the surface (Image: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)
But to put the onus on everyone around him for his actions which left a family eternally torn apart is to some extent to absolve of a degree of blame, a kindness he does not deserve.
Instead there are just memories of a young man who seemingly fit in with his peers, initially struggled to grasp basic military skills and required extra help getting to grips with simple maths.
An unexceptional individual, he seemed destined for a career of mediocrity and the fact he served just three years in the armed forces, the minimum term permitted, comes as no surprise.
Perhaps thinks that his crime and his subsequent despicable cowardice makes him in some perverted way exceptional but he is very much mistaken.
Because the sobering reality is that male violence against women is in itself ordinary.
In the UK, one in 12 women in England and Wales the victims of harassment, stalking, domestic violence or sexual assault every year. Although we may not know it, the uncomfortable truth is we will all know a woman who has been the victim of violence at the hands of a man. Its prevalence in society is a national embarrassment.
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Clifford’s cowardice through both trials is as disgusting as it is unsurprising (Image: Elizabeth Cook/PA Wire)
There is a special place in hell awaiting Clifford and men like him and I hope he only arrives there after experiencing a fraction of the terror the Hunt family were and will forever be subjected to.
While the memory of Carol, Hannah and Louise will live on, Clifford will be a mere footnote in the long history of male violence against women.
In the wake of the murders, the Home Office said Home Secretary was urgently considering tougher laws around crossbows, as if the weapon and not the violence itself was the problem.
Perhaps the killings will be a watershed moment, a wake up call for society to take its head from the sand and address the epidemic facing women every day.
Perhaps then, “shocking” cases like this will be shocking for their occurrence rather than the depravity of the violence.