Evil Under the Sun

Evil Under The Sun was a thirty-minute documentary broadcast on 'Tonight with Trevor McDonald' on ITV on May 12, 2003. This programme conducted original research in order to explain the deaths of two British subjects, Linda and Anthony O’Malley and to dramatically (yet factually) contextualise that explanation within the narrative of the surviving family’s efforts to find closure for the ordeal and obtain justice. The research methodology involved recording extensive interviews which, when edited and sequenced, could be juxtaposed with footage of the family travelling to Spain in order to retrace their relatives’ last steps before they were killed. Their journey culminated in the discovery of the house where the O’Malleys were imprisoned and tortured. One of the fundamental research questions encountered related to how to reconcile the potentially opposing imperatives of the ethics of care that involved respecting the families’ grief with the objectives of truth-telling that involved investigating the crime and its context. To arrive at a balanced response to this research question required the researcher to consider a number of innovative approaches to both the responsible gathering of evidence and to the presentation of that evidence through the construction of meaning and truth on screen