THE relationship between media and the police has forever been of an enigmatic nature. The two routinely work in unison, yet the two are always looking for opportunities to expose each other. The media does it in a blatant manner while the police, given their circumstances, have to be low-key. That doesn’t mean, though, that they do not get the message across when the chance presents itself.

There have in recent times been two horrifying incidents of brutal murders in Lahore’s Jauhar Town. On March 5, a woman was arrested after she confessed to killing her two children, because she could not feed them. This was when the police and media were in agreement on how to go about pursuing the case. But just 20 days ago, they had been eager to follow two divergent paths, also in Jauhar Town.

In mid-February, the bodies of eight people belonging to one family were discovered from a house here. The police said there had been seven murders. This was a hint for the duly agitated press corps about the possible truth that the eighth body found could have been of the killer who may have ended his life after killing seven of his relatives.

For many hours television channels competed with each other over the number of corpses. There were news flashes that reported that the eight people, including children and women, had been gunned down. The police’s insistence about there having been seven murders was ignored and the media appeared keen on unearthing a crime that was bigger than an ordinary murder or set of ordinary murders.

The media’s failure to find terrorism or failing that, an old-enmity angle to the February murders, was the police’s gain. The police like to keep their investigations short and not too expansive. Investigators are visibly relieved when they are able to find clues that save them the hassle of having to look for leads too far way from the scene of the crime. The farther the leads go, the less likely it is that the case will be solved.

The choices the law-enforcers in Punjab are stuck between are clear: a crime, when it is inevitably committed, ideally for police ought to be committed by an insider or alternately by an outsider raised and fed and armed with a motive outside of Punjab. Also, in either of the two cases, it has to be portrayed as a product of some dangerous societal trends the police have no control over. And the police knew how the seven murders were tied to the general dangerous tendencies nurtured by an increasingly cruel society which has the media as its prime shaper.

The findings of the investigation were an anti-climax for media hounds who had sniffed something big here, even if it was a relief to the public who, it will be said, by and large stood by the truth the police had been pursuing from the start: of an insider going mad and on a killing spree.

The general public, given their own defence mechanism, would also rather have an insider commit the crime every time. People are loath to thinking otherwise, always frightened of being confronted with a credible source that there is a random killer roaming the streets and stalking houses indiscriminately — something which will make them feel as if they were also exposed to the danger.

Thus, as far as the police and people generally go, the confirmation that the multiple Jauhar Town murders were committed by a seemingly deranged relative who had been struck with cancer was a source of relief. The truth of the killer then ending his own life was a tragic but not at all an unwanted finale that was received well by the captive but relieved audience.

The police were from the outset banking on the fact that there was only one body among the eight that bore no marks of torture — a point the media initially sought to ignore in its search for a story bigger than just an ordinary inside murder. Some chemical was found on the scene which created a strong suspicion of the murderer having killed himself by taking poison.

During the course of investigation was discovered another piece of evidence, ‘clinching’ evidence as it is called. It was a confession letter by the killer, written not just before the murders — not on the spur of the moment, not a few hours before the crime — but scribbled a whole ten days before the murders were committed.

The letter listed the killer’s grievances against his relatives who he was “about to” exterminate. The discovery provided reason for another of our favourite crime-related debates: the state of society and the mental health of the people who make up this society. But in the context of the media-police relationship, the most significant part of that murder-suicide note was when the killer identified the source of his inspiration: an American film that he had watched in which, apparently, a man was shown to be avenging himself by resorting to multiple killings.

The police — berated and ridiculed and the favourite whipping boy of the media and society at large — had found fresh evidence of getting something to hit back with at critics. The message was that the police were out there trying to deal with a situation telecast and created by media.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.