Jane take the blinkers off a second. Your boyfriend tells you he is planning to murder his family. The murder occurs. Even if you dismissed his earlier threats as ' complete bollocks " would you even want to be in the same vicinity as him, let alone accompany him to Amsterdam???
Let me just say that when I first joined, I believed Jeremy was innocent. Indeed, for personal reasons, I was so desperate for him to be that I heard myself making excuses for him. It was at that point when my protests started feeling hollow.
Now, I've looked at Julie's relationship with Jeremy from several angles. The first -and I'll own up before Adam drops me in it!!!- involved me being disparaging about the clothes she wore to court. I may even have said that she had the beginnings of a moustache!!! You may guess, correctly that I didn't like her. Then I took a gooood, deep look at her life. I started to see a different Julie.....................
....................Undoubtedly, she was a clever girl, but her life hadn't been exactly cushioned. She was doing a second degree but was having to do casual work to fund it. It was at on such that she met Jeremy. When he showed an interest she probably thought all her Birthdays and Christmas's had come at once. I think she may have begun to envisage a different life for herself. One in which she didn't have to struggle for every penny -whilst Jeremy may have complained bitterly about being short of money, he actually had NO idea what it felt like because the family 'cushion' was always there as a safety net- and one where she was whisked off to exciting places at a moment's notice. For a while life must have been good.
Would she have believed him when he first said he wanted rid of his family? At 20 years old, I don't somehow think she'd have taken him seriously. After all, what reason did he have? He was doing very nicely............by her standards. In any case, what was she going to do? She might have gone to the police but they A) probably wouldn't have believed her, and B) there was nothing they could have done until/unless a crime had been committed. She allowed him the use of her sleeping pills, however, I can't be sure if it was an active or passive thing. What I'm certain of is that she didn't believe he'd go through with what he told her he was planning. In fact, I don't think he dotted any I's or crossed any T's until the moment he made up his mind to do it, by which time she was caught up in it and it was too late. It's likely that every time she thought of walking into a police station -and I believe she must have- she probably saw herself throwing up.
I don't know how she lived with it for as long as she did. I can only think that she still felt that as long as they were together, somehow it would all come right in the end. I make no excuses for her. She behaved very badly. She flaunted herself like a tramp. I wouldn't have wanted her teaching my children. But it wasn't she who committed the crime, HOWEVER! I'm inclined to believe she MAY have known rather more than she revealed because I find it very odd that Jeremy has never said anything derogatory of her. If he knows she has something more on him, to me, it suggests his guilt.
