The two women in the podcast sound fun. They're the type I would gladly meet because they turn everything into a laugh.
They have one of the key facts wrong: Julie didn't take months and months to go to the police, it was more like three or so weeks after the event (though she did also claim that Jeremy had been indicating for months that he might kill his family).
I find myself agreeing with the main thrust of what they say. Julie Mugford was a 'Ghastly Woman' (though I disagree that this judgement should now apply to Julie Smerchanski - the very different, mature adult she has become).
Mugford was Ghastly, but not because of her failure to tell the police immediately. This is the usual basis for criticising her, and I don't agree with that particular criticism. On the basis of her own story, she wasn't completely sure about her suspicions and one thing led to another and so on. Suspicion can build up in one's mind before forming into something one is sure of. We can argue back and forth about whether this is what really happened. It seems plausible on its face, but in the context of Jeremy's relationship with her, you have to question why Jeremy would be making these disclosures to a mere girlfriend. Maybe he loved her and that's why. Yet he was sleeping with and expressing romantic interest in others, and he then broke up with her. Furthermore, the defence are now saying it wasn't Julie who went to the police, but someone else who was reporting her suspicions.
I think, if we're honest, we would have to admit that for Julie to stand up in court and lie and accuse Jeremy of mass murder and condemn him to imprisonment, would be a lie of such proportions that it almost boggles the mind, but at the same time we know from common and shared human experience that people do lie, and we also know that witnesses do tell outright lies in murder trials. I gather that at least two of the witnesses in the first trial of Michael Stone admitted immediately after he was sentenced they had lied and he had not confessed to them. Stone was then re-tried and re-convicted on the basis of the one witness, a prisoner, who claimed Stone had confessed to him through the inter-cell drainage after Stone had been put there in isolation because he was worried that another prisoner would lie and make up a confession by him. Are we to conclude that this witness alone is telling the truth, or shall we conclude that this witness has just not yet confessed his lie? As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to own up and tell the truth because the consequences of the lie become greater as each year passes, indeed as each moment passes. If a lie is too much, then the truth is too much sometimes too.
My main criticism of Julie is on the ground of what one of the women in the podcast mentions: her interview with The News of the World, which was offensive and insensitive. She allowed herself to be photographed provocatively, which seems very inappropriate and hypocritical immediately after the conclusion of the trial. She also allowed the court to be misled about her dealings with that newspaper and was not forthcoming on the issue in 2002, when I think she should have been - for one thing, it would have assisted the prosecution had she been more honest by allowing that particular point to be laid to rest for good.
