THE hunger, among both viewers and broadcasters, for true crime documentaries shows no sign of easing up any time soon.

Bombastic multi-part true crime documentaries are now as important a subscriber magnet for Netflix as its library of movies or lavishly produced drama series. Broadcasting behemoth Sky created a whole channel, Sky Crime, dedicated to true crime.

In recent years, even HBO, which used to be all about prestige dramas and daring comedies that wouldn’t be made by any other broadcaster, has got in on the true crime act.

Meanwhile, the British terrestrial broadcasters are churning out considerably more true crime series than ever before.

Leave it to TG4 to come up with a rather different spin on the genre with its new four-part cold case series Marú Inár Measc (Murderers Among Us).

There was nothing lurid or sensationalist about the opening episode, which looked at the murder of Ann “Nancy” Smyth in Kilkenny in 1987. The approach of the programme-makers was low-key, the tone of the interviewees – who included Nancy’s neighbours, friends, family members and the gardaí who investigated the case – a mixture of melancholy and quiet relief.

Nancy, a 69-year-old widow with no children who lived alone (her husband Dick, who kept and raced pigeons, died a year before she was murdered), was well-known and well-liked around Kilkenny, which at the time, said one contributor, was more akin to a large town than a city.

She enjoyed socialising and had been out for a drink with some friends in the pigeon-fancying fraternity the night she was killed. She was found dead in the fire that destroyed her small cottage on Wolfe Tone Street.

At first, it was thought the fire was a tragedy and that Nancy had died from smoke inhalation. But when her nephew, Des Murphy, went to the morgue to identify her body, he noticed marks on her neck. Nancy had been strangled.

Her killer, a nasty piece of work called John Joe Malone, who, in the familiar parlance, was “known to the gardaí”, was the chief suspect from the start. He was known to be hostile towards Nancy (something to do with an argument over pigeons and a particular trophy in her home), and he’d been seen and heard arguing with her on the night of her death.

But with no forensic evidence to link Malone to the murder, gardaí had no choice but to release him without charge. It would take 30 years, a television appeal and a relaunched investigation for him to be arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to life on the strength of witness testimonies.

In a sense, describing the murder as a cold case is misleading. The trail was very much red-hot from the beginning. Everybody in the community knew Malone had murdered Nancy, and everybody was appalled at the idea that he was walking around a free man, going in and out of pubs and shops as if nothing had happened.

The bottom line appears to be they were all too afraid of him to come forward. As time wore on, there was a reluctance to even talk about Nancy’s murder. "It was as if Kilkenny city had gone cold,” said one contributor.

Geraldine Brennan, one of Nancy’s neighbours, witnessed Malone banging his fists on the door and windows of her home in the hours before her death. At the time, however, her mother told her not to say anything about this to the gardaí, for fear of being dragged into it and having to appear on the witness stand.

The fear that Malone would be brought to trial only to be found not guilty seemed to paralyse people. “A lot of people said, ‘If he gets off, he’ll come after you’,” said Geraldine.

She wasn’t the only person who kept quiet. It transpired that Malone had privately confessed to murdering Nancy to a number of people over the years, including his brother, fellow members of a Presbyterian bible group he’d joined and his friend Jude Curran, who told the programme: “I was afraid he might petrol bomb my house.”

It’s easy, at this remove, to be judgmental. But those people’s fears are perhaps understandable. During his trial in 2017, Malone had his bail revoked for threatening an 81-year-old woman who was due to give evidence against him a few days later.