ABSTRACT

Few people have heard of John Barr. 1 Even fewer will associate his name with late capitalism, vulnerable populations and crime – even if his crimes were neither violent nor predatory in any orthodox criminological sense. Yet Barr was responsible for the deaths of twenty-one people – many of them elderly – in Wishaw, Scotland, in circumstances that started ordinarily enough. In November 1996 a group of pensioners gathered for lunch in their local church hall and ate stewed steak in puff pastry, all of which had been supplied by their local, prizewinning butcher, John M. Barr and Son. Within weeks, six of the lunch party were dead. More deaths followed, and even today many others in Wishaw who had been supplied with meat from this same source still suffer from kidney problems and fatigue as a result of what has been described as ‘the world’s worst recorded outbreak of fatal E coli food poisoning’ (Seenan, 1999).