Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb. Friends, you could probably guess that I'm someone who's

interested in violence. I'm someone who writes about it, and I have lots of other writers and

filmmakers and thinkers who are concerned with violence on the show. And I wonder why our

imaginations bend towards it so much.

More specifically, why do our imaginations bend with the contours of murder?

Murder is something that is once melodramatic, preposterous, horrifying, cruel,

and it's something I and so many of us are interested in, deeply interested in. Why? This is something that I explore on this episode of the

show with Mark O'Connell, who in the writing of his new book, A Threat of Violence, A Story of

Truth, Invention, and Murder,

found Mark face-to-face literally with someone who has murdered two people in an almost

absurd, chaotically cast web of rage, desperation, lies, violence, and deception.

If you live outside Ireland, you probably don't know the story of these two murders in 1982.

So here's the bare bones of it.

Malcolm MacArthur was, at the time, a sort of man of leisure and an estate, who, upon finding his finances and the finances of his

family dwindling, created this strange and erratic plan to commit armed robbery for more money.

But his plan didn't just go haywire like some heist movie.

He decided, as this non-plan, didn't even come close to unfolding, to kill two people,

as if possessed, murdering Bridie Gargan with a hammer after stealing her car, and shooting

Donald Dunn with his own shotgun.

After killing them, the series of events didn't get

any more mundane. Instead, it continued to be what was called here, grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre,

and unprecedented. That actually gave rise to an acronym, Goubu in Ireland, that a lot of Irish people just know,

...