By murdering Marion Hopwood, Billy Dead Women proved the validity of my adapted nickname for him. For those of you who aren’t following each new permutation of the story, Billy has now murdered four women. In chronological order: Linzi Birrell from Combingham, Rhian Douglas from Poole, Angela McCabe from Chiswick, and now Mrs Hopwood. And just as Billy’s latest foray into brutality shows us, as if we were in any doubt, that ending the lives of women is his top priority, it shows us something else about him too. It’s not enough for him that women’s lives should be snuffed out; he personally wants to be the one to make it happen. He’s even willing to put himself out to achieve that goal, being no slouch when it comes to practical misogyny.

How do I know this about him? Because Marion Hopwood was in the process of dying of cancer when he killed her. She had somewhere between twenty and seventy hours left to live when he injected her with poison. All Billy had to do, if he wanted Marion dead, was wait. Like so many violent misogynists, however, he craved more than that. He needed to feel his own power surge through him as he played God with a helpless, terminally ill grandmother’s life. After all, belonging to the superior sex class is more fun if you get to exterminate the subordinates once in a while – right, guys?

This latest murder enables us to draw a further conclusion: if you want to be a killer who gets away with it apparently forever, kill women. It’s that simple.

For the ambitious career murderer, targeting women is a sensible move. Does anyone honestly imagine the police wouldn’t have caught Billy by now if it were men he was shooting dead? Of course they would; like the rest of us, all the investigating officers were born and socialised into a world that believes men’s lives matter and women’s don’t. I’m the first to admit that it’s hard to train yourself out of thinking that way. Evidently the police have failed to do so.

Marion Hopwood’s life mattered. She was a devoted wife until her husband died in 2008, a loving mother, a beloved grandmother. She never worked outside the home, but spent her whole life doing the unpaid work expected of women: caring for her family, bringing up her grandson Drew when his teenage mother couldn’t cope with the responsibility.