ABSTRACT
Joanne Lee’s parents described her as a “lovely daughter” and “very caring”. They also claimed they had no idea that their daughter was having problems. Nevertheless, Joanne Lee had an eating disorder, and her neighbours described her as “painfully thin”, to the point that she had begun to lose her teeth. Both Lee’s parents’ and Steve Lumb’s father’s reactions suggest that there was considerable denial within each family of anything that was going wrong with their children. The fact that Lee and Lumb were strangers may have been an advantage. Being strangers, they could both be stand-ins, acting out their own respective dramas that happened to coincide. What is different in the case of Lee is that she was looking for an accomplice to commit suicide with her. Although suicide is certainly a desperate act, it is also an act performed before an imaginary audience.
