Blay trawled chat logs to unearth the trail of a character who turned out to have morbid fascinations
Whether it is shrewd spinsters (Miss Marple), curious clergy (Father Brown) or high-schoolers with hunches (Nancy Drew), the world of fiction has its fair share of amateur detectives, outwitting the local plod. In real life we rarely hear about crime-solvers in the community. But the conviction last week of William Melchert-Dinkel in a US court, for aiding the suicides of Mark Drybrough, from Coventry, and a Canadian student, Nadia Kajouji, highlighted dogged digging by a 64-year-old Wiltshire grandmother, Celia Blay. First alerted to Melchert-Dinkel's activities in 2002, after encountering a depressed teenager who had met a "female nurse" online who "advised" them to take pills, Blay trawled chat logs to unearth the trail of a character who turned out to have morbid fascinations. He would befriend vulnerable and often young victims, feign sympathy and then enter into one-sided suicide pacts. Despite rebuffs from both the FBI and British police, Blay persisted for eight years until the Minnesota police took up the case and arrested Melchert-Dinkel on her evidence. Blay's tenacity echoes that of housewife Susan Galbreath, who tracked the perpetrators of a heinous murder in her hometown of Mayfield, Kentucky to justice over seven years, long after official law enforcers had given up. One striking feature of both cases was the police's initial reluctance to grapple with evidence amassed by amateurs. Melchert-Dinkel's conviction proves beyond reasonable doubt that this needs to change.