Having recently watched and written about How to Catch a Serial Killer, a British TV crime movie (or at least episode of a TV series, I’m not sure), I follow it up with The Interrogation of Tony Martin, which is the same.
How to Catch a Serial Killer was never more than mildly interesting to me. I felt considerably more engaged with The Interrogation of Tony Martin. That’s not to say I would rank it all that high, but I’d put it considerably higher than How to Catch a Serial Killer.
Both are about 47 minutes long, though listed as an hour long on IMDB (presumably because they were initially telecast—with commercials—in a one-hour block).
The Interrogation of Tony Martin felt considerably more real to me. For one thing, a large percentage of the dialogue in the docudrama portion of it is taken verbatim from police interrogation sessions. Secondly, the real Martin is interviewed late in the film, returning to the scene of the crime.
Martin was a farmer, living in an isolated farm house nicknamed “Bleak House” (like the Dickens novel). In 1999, after he had reportedly had his house broken into by burglars multiple times, he was awakened by what turned out to be two intruders again intent on burglary. He opened fire on them with a shotgun, killing one and badly wounding the other. He was convicted of murder, but served only about three years in prison after the crime was reduced to manslaughter on appeal.
Neighbors seem to have regarded him as kind of an eccentric guy, a loner, high strung, perhaps a bit on the paranoid side. In that sense I don’t think it was a big surprise to them that he would be the one to shoot people in these circumstances.
In the interrogations, he seems on the verge of a breakdown. He’s one of those people who seems unable or unwilling to answer a direct question. I don’t think it’s that he’s purposely being evasive per se in order to keep them from finding out what he did; there’s really no mystery about that. It seems more like it’s just his verbal style, like he isn’t able to follow a logical chain of questions and answers, or like in general he instinctively shies away from admitting anything explicitly, committing himself to anything clearly.
Like they’ll ask him “What was your intention?” (in coming downstairs with a loaded shotgun after he heard noises). (Or maybe it was “motive,” I don’t recall.) He mutters something irrelevant, they repeat the question, and he exclaims, “I was in fear for my life!”
OK, that’s not an “intention.” An intention would be something like intending to find out what had caused the noise, intending to confront whoever was in his house, intending to shoot whoever was in his house, intending to be prepared to shoot back at anyone who was in his house if they first shot at him, intending to slip out of the house and escape without being seen, etc. “I was in fear for my life” might provide some help in understanding the frame of mind he was in when he formed his intention, but it’s not itself an intention.
He gives mostly meandering, at best partly responsive, answers. Ultimately you can form a decent picture of what he’s claiming happened, but it takes repeating questions multiple times and reading between the lines of his responses.
Again, it feels less like he’s being consciously deceptive and more like he’s a little “off,” just a guy whose thinking is more muddled than logical.
Plus he seems genuinely overwhelmed emotionally by what happened, dazed, in shock, muttering to himself more than to them, trying to understand what has landed him where he now finds himself.
I expected going in that someone who had done what he did would self-righteously justify himself—“Damn right I shot them! A man’s home is his castle! I have every right to kill someone who breaks into my house!” etc.
There’s some of that, I suppose, but he comes across as more distraught than defiant. He recounts—in his stream-of-consciousness, disjointed manner—that he was fed up, that he felt terribly unsafe in his own home and it was killing him, that it felt like everyone including the police had abandoned him, that he just couldn’t allow himself to be abused any longer, etc. But there’s not that bravado you invariably see in online comment sections from random gun-loving yahoos relishing how much they’d enjoy blowing away anyone who threatens them, their family, or their home.
Granted, a lot of those blowhards would shit their pants if they ever were in fact confronted by intruders in their home, gun or no gun. And maybe he would have sounded like them before the fact, and then after it happened the enormity of taking a life got to him in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
It’s interesting that he’s as out of sorts about it as he is, and especially that he was convicted of murder, because I would think that the vast majority of people would agree with what he did. I’m a pacifist and a believer in nonviolence, so on principle I object to shooting people and I hope—I don’t know—that I would have the strength not to respond violently myself in a threatening, highly stressful situation like that. But pacifists are a tiny minority of the population. If you believe that violence in self-defense can be justified, as almost everyone does, this seems like it would be a pretty easy case. I’m surprised it even went to trial, let alone led to a conviction.
According to his account, the downstairs of the house was completely dark. When, with trepidation, he slowly descended the stairs, suddenly a flashlight was shined in his face. So they could see him and he couldn’t see them. He had no way of knowing if they were armed, how many there were, etc. He knew only that they were in his house, and that, given that they had broken in, they very likely had criminal intentions. The police challenge him on why he didn’t use the shotgun to capture them at gunpoint and hold them for the police, why he didn’t fire a warning shot, etc., but come on. He was completely vulnerable with a blinding flashlight shining in his face by criminals he couldn’t even really see. He fired instinctively and frantically in the direction of the flashlight, knowing that any hesitation could mean his death.
Now they did find upon forensic examination of the crime scene that there were some discrepancies between what he said and what happened (for example, he likely had reached the bottom of the stairs and was closer to them when he fired than he claimed), but I don’t know that there were any major, relevant discrepancies.
But the film really doesn’t delve into the trial, the defense case, legal theories of what constitutes self-defense, etc. It’s almost entirely a re-creation of the interrogation, a study of how intensely it can affect someone emotionally to do what Martin did, to experience how traumatic it can be to take a human life even when at some level you consider yourself justified.
Then when they interview the real Martin at the end of the film, over a decade after his release, his attitude seems far closer to what I would have expected all along. You no longer see the ambivalence, the despair, the moral weight that was evident in the reenactment of the interrogation (which, remember, is taken word for word from the transcript so we know that’s how it happened). He’s colder now, like prison and the many years of reflection have hardened him, given him the opportunity to more fully justify his actions to himself and become comfortable with what he did. Now he’s almost flippant about it—they got what they deserved, what goes around comes around, if you don’t want to get shot don’t break into someone’s house, the criminals have to know that sometimes the good guys shoot back, etc. No regrets, he insists. Yeah, it’s too bad someone had to die, it’s sad for his family and all that, but it’s his fault, not mine.
An interesting case study psychologically. As far as the right or wrong of it, though—and maybe I’m mistaken about this—it still feels like with the exception of the 1% or 2% or whatever of the population who have embraced a philosophy of nonviolence, for the overwhelming majority of other folks this wouldn’t be a close call at all. It’s presented like a moral dilemma, like a controversy—and as I say, somehow he got convicted—but I picture almost everyone in the general public being on his side, and the law for that reason being on his side.
Philo on Movies 