Uncomfortably numbed...

Des (TV Mini-series; 3 episodes, 2020)

This dramatisation of a 1983 real case from the police files of a seemingly boring man who carried out gruesome murders of equally unimpressive men in a most deliberate manner. He is credited to have killed at least 12 men. An ex-army cook with a short stint as a policeman and a civil servant invites young men to his apartment, makes them inebriated, kills them in various manners, and disposes of them in equally grisly ways. His activities came to light when a drain was blocked. Police were called in when human remains were discovered. The suspect, Dennis Nilson, is quite nonchalant about all his pursuits. He boasts about his crimes and even speaks to an author in the hope of publicising his feats. 

The murders and the investigations were later described in a best-seller titled 'Killing for Company'. The TV series shows how all the police investigations and this case, in particular, left a bitter after-taste in his mouth in the chief investigator, Detective Chief Investigator Peter Jay. Two years after Nilson was sentenced, he quit for force. In one of the closing scenes, Jay returns to the crime scene with the biographer, Brian Masters, where some of the victims were buried under the floorboard. The case never really left much resolution the many of the victim's families. Many of Des' victims were never identified. Masters quipped, "I can still smell the stench." implying the purifying bodies once hidden under the floor. To this detective, Jay replied, "Funny, I don't smell it anymore!"

It made my mind go asunder.

We are the company we keep with. My wise mother used to tell us when we were young about choosing the right friends. We became the persons that we befriend. She often quoted a famous somewhat brash proverb, "a calf, when it wanders with piglets, will soon be scavenging around dumpsites!" Cows, revered by Hindus, are given divine status. Pigs, on the other hand, are looked upon as dirty and shunned by most societies. By the association one keeps, he is lured to venture into the majority's habits as we, human beings, are social animals.

I feel for the many of the frontliners, the health and police personnel,  who have to deal with many of the unsavoury characters they have to deal with daily. Their clients come in as helpless, broken souls needing fixing. Once they regain strength, they bite the hand that fed them. The frontliners know that they should not be their own yardsticks to judge their clients. But with constant exposure to the nerve-numbing tragedies daily, are they at risk of becoming numb to the very struggles they are trained to handle. Are they at risk of becoming another file in the statistics in the annals of time?

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