Will Egghead CJ de Mooi regret admitting he might have killed somebody?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2015/sep/07/egghead-cj-de-mooi-might-have-killed-somebody

Version 0 of 1.

“This is the one incident of my life I do regret,” writes CJ de Mooi, star of the BBC’s Eggheads quiz. “I was in a phone box and this old guy, obviously a massive drug user, came up behind me with a knife in his hand … he told me to turn around, open my bag and give him whatever was inside … I punched him so hard in the face, knocked the knife out of his hand and threw him in the canal. I fully suspect I killed him. I’ve no idea what happened to him.”

Being homeless and desperate, as De Mooi was at the time, perhaps explains why he did what he says he did, although he has never been charged with anything. The incident, described in De Mooi’s just released autobiography CJ, allegedly took place in Amsterdam 25 years ago, but according to the Daily Mirror, which is serialising the book, Dutch police will now investigate. The most perplexing aspect of his story, however, is the fact that he chose to share it.

Yet those who kill – or think they’ve killed – often find a way to tell the story. Consider the case of the Polish writer Krystian Bala. In 2007, Bala was convicted and jailed for the sadistic murder, seven years previously, of Dariusz Janiszewski, a man he suspected of beginning a relationship with his ex-wife. Bala was caught because, after committing the crime, he wrote a novel called Amok, in which the narrator does something very similar – and afterwards goes online to sell the murder weapon. Bala (who continues to insist he is innocent) had sold Janiszewski’s phone in the same, very traceable way. It proved to be the vital connection between them. Besides echoing the real killing, Amok also mimicked Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov – drunk on philosophy like Bala – cannot stop himself confessing to a murder.

Probably unknowingly, Bala was also copying the behaviour of the Dutch novelist Richard Klinkhamer, who in 1992 submitted a book to his publisher in which he speculated about the ways in which he might have killed his wife, Hanny, who had gone missing the year before. In 2000, her remains were uncovered during building works in the couple’s former garden, upon which Klinkhamer confessed everything.

In Nebraska in 2013, Hannah Sabata recorded her own distinctly 21st-century confession. Having stolen a car, and then robbed a bank, Sabata drove home and posted a video to YouTube, in which she described in detail what she had done. The video went viral, the car was found at her home, and she was jailed for 10-20 years.

Sabata had a history of mental illness, but it is clear that in some cases a kind of pressure – perhaps guilt, perhaps uncontainable pride, perhaps something else – seems to build up in people, leading them to what seem like absurdly unwise confessions. In retrospect, even Jimmy Savile now looks like he flirted repeatedly with the truth of his appalling crimes. Louis Theroux has described how Savile used to “tantalise you by giving the impression he did have secrets”. In his autobiography, Savile even talked openly about keeping a runway girl at his house overnight “as my reward”, and of another time when he demanded and received a tent full of six young girls in return for a public appearance.

Beyond his own words, there is no evidence that De Mooi committed a crime in Amsterdam. If any is found, however, he could soon have not one but two regrets.