When a man loves a woman. Violently
by Elizabeth Alley

The New Zealand Listener 15 May 2004

CARRION KISSES: A true story of love and murder, by Kate Lock (Ebury Press, $34.95).

Blood. A "droplet" here, a “splattering” there. To most of us the difference is only semantic. In fact, it can hold the secret to the nature of violent crimes. In the evidence given by forensic experts in the murder trial of Tim Franklin, it was crucial in showing that a death had not been accidental as Franklin claimed, and revealed a murder that was violent in the extreme.

At face value much mitigates against a book that appears to be crime fiction, and is marketed like melodrama. It is neither. Kate Lock is a 20-year-old student of philosophy at Exeter University when she becomes captivated by Franklin, a man nearly 30 years her senior. He makes no secret that he’s a “lifer”, but maintains that he was the innocent party in the accidental death of his former “mistress”, for which he served a term of imprisonment before his release on parole. He is attractive, amusing, -sociable, intelligent and plausible. He fools most people, most of the time.

The book is further described as a “memoir of love and darkness”. Memoir is an odd genre; it seems to occupy a kind of grey area between the slender vignette and the fully developed biographical or autobiographical lifestory, and suggests something gentle and perhaps reminiscent.

In this context, Carrion Kisses becomes shocking. Despite some shortcomings there is an engaging momentum to the work, which is a tribute to Lock’s ability to make compelling sense of a story that could well have had a more tragic end. Partly the compulsion is to discover how she persisted with and survived a relationship that involved extreme verbal violence and devastating psychological cruelty – despite her attempts to support Franklin. Lock becomes the possum caught in the headlights, fascinated and appalled by a Machiavelli she both loved and feared. She half-attempted to escape, but only to where she knew he could find her.

There is some comfort for the reader that Franklin’s ashes are thrown to the winds on page one. (He eventually commits suicide and the story is told retrospectively.) What follows is an almost classic story of entrapment and the growing suspicion that there had been very nasty goings-on indeed.

In the vocabulary of the 80s, Franklin was a dangerous psychopath – a pathological liar with a violent and uncontrollable temper, a recovering alcoholic whose lapses fuelled his violence. To boot, he had a promiscuous obsession with very young women. He was also formidably intelligent and, according to his psychiatrist, capable of “running rings around most of us”. He stage-managed his appearances and meticulously edited his past. He wrote a published thesis called Scapegoating in the Criminal Justice System, justifying himself as victim.

Some years after Franklin’s suicide, Lock, by then a journalist, revisited the court records of his trial. More significantly, she hired a private investigator to track down the policemen and the QC involved in the case. For the first time she discovered that Franklin had not only committed violent murder, but buried the results under (where else?) the rose bushes. The autopsy and court reports revealed details of the life of a brutal sociopath, and a murder of nightmarish horror. This, then, was the nature of the man with whom she had shared five intimate years of her young life.

Although the crime was committed some years before Franklin and Lock met, it’s a mystery how the detail was not revealed to her at some stage, particularly as her father was a policeman and the trial had been widely publicised at the time. There are other minor quibbles. Her timeline is clumsy. Her sentence construction sometimes reveals grammatical lapses. And her prose tends towards the tinted until the last third of the book, which contains a more journalistically disciplined account of the courtroom evidence.

But there is a youthful urgency and energy to the writing. She graphically captures the conflicting characteristics of this dreadful, attractive man, and evokes the tone and mood of the university environment and social imperatives of the time with verisimilitude.

The most salutary aspect of the memoir is its contemporary relevance to the sad, bad record of domestic violence in this country, and the dilemmas faced by those within abusive relationships. Lock confronts her culpability in allowing herself to fall for the evil father figure, for “playing the little girl to his pervy parent”. She claims he educated her, taught her how to think and opened up new possibilities for her. Although her naivety is astonishing, it is also somehow understandable.

Much of the compulsion for the reader is generated by the knowledge that this awful story is true. Barbara Vine or P D James would have been delighted to get such great raw material. It would have been far more comfortable to read it as fiction.