Every year in this country, several hundred people are murdered. Of the hundreds, only a minority are ever widely reported. Of the minority, only a handful imprint themselves upon the psyche of a nation. And of the handful, only one or two in a decade become so infamous that they become the emblematic murders of their era. The killing of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by Ian Huntley in the village of Soham is one of those cases. No murder investigation has ever been more lavishly reported. No murder victims have ever acquired the iconic status of Holly and Jessica in their Beckham shirts. (Would the crime have captured the nation if they had been Norwich City fans?) Few murder trials have dominated the news for so long as the one that ended at the Old Bailey yesterday.  Ian Huntley has now been instantly consigned to a very select national pandemonium of the nation's most loathed killers. Some of his more recent fellow inmates include Fred and Rose West, Dennis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe, Harry Roberts, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. More distant denizens include Dr Harvey Crippen, Jack the Ripper and William Corder of Red Barn fame.  Like them, Huntley will now become a byword for evil and Soham a place like Cranley Gardens and Saddleworth moor, remembered for one awful thing alone. Already last night, the broadcasting schedules were cleared for extended special reports, a rare and revealing tribute to the case. Books will now be hastily written about Huntley's crimes. Official inquiries will be held into how such a man could do such things. In time, criminologists, cultural commentators, novelists and film-makers will all rake over the case in their own ways.  Though the trend in murder is upwards, it remains a very rare crime. Holly and Jessica were two of the total of 1,048 homicides in 2002-03 in England and Wales (the figure has been greatly inflated by the work of Dr Harold Shipman). Their chance of being a murder victim - like yours and mine - was around one in 60,000. Yet murder is obviously also the gravest of all crimes, one of the only serious offences to carry a mandatory sentence. For all their rarity, that select group of emblematic murders has always reflected something special about the dangers, fears and myths of the society in which they took place.  In his 1946 essay on the decline of the English murder, George Orwell reflected on the characteristics of the killings that, then as now, filled the pages of the News of the World. The English murderer, Orwell wrote, would normally be a "little man of the professional class", living a respectable and conformist life in the suburbs. He would "go astray" through cherishing a passion for his secretary or another man's wife. He would bring himself to the point of murder only after great wrestling with his conscience. Having determined on murder, he then planned   the crime - normally a poisoning - with the utmost cunning, only to be undone by some small unforeseen error. Such dramas, Orwell concluded, proved irresistible to the readers of middle Britain because they were the "product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them".  Nearly 60 years after Orwell, we are still mesmerised by murder. But the characteristics of the emblematic murder of today are very different from those noted by Orwell. This is strikingly true of the Soham murders, which were committed by a minor public official rather than a professional person, apparently answering to his sexual demons not a cherished passion, and carried out seemingly on the spur of the moment rather than after great planning. If the distinguishing feature of the emblematic murder of the past was its careful premeditation, the equivalent feature of today's is its randomness and its opportunism.  This is why the unprecedented intensity of the coverage of the case is so important. Roy Hattersley rightly observed last week that there has never been anything like it. Day after day the case has dominated the airwaves and the front pages. For sheer volume Soham has eclipsed anything generated by the Wests or even by the murder of the toddler James Bulger, never mind the Moors murders or even the penny dreadfuls long ago.  The volume of coverage has been matched only by its often provocative stridency, especially in the weeks that followed the arrests of Huntley and Maxine Carr. This led the attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, to tell journalists last month that "at times some of the reporting of the investigation and trial has been quite frankly unacceptable". It was hardly surprising that Carr was taunted in Holloway before the trial as a second Myra Hindley. Carr was manifestly no such thing, but the tabloid depictions of her in the autumn of 2002 left no doubt that, for some newspaper editors and their readers, Carr now filled the post of national female demon left vacant by Hindley's death.  With every possible due respect to the murdered girls and their families, it has to be aggressively stated that the coverage of this case has been wholly out of proportion to its implied meaning. The subtext of the case is that your daughters are at risk of being murdered if they go out alone, even in a quiet East Anglian village, never mind on the mean streets of the inner city. Yet this is scarcely more true today than it has ever been.   Holly and Jessica, both aged 10, fell into the category of the population - girls aged between five and 16 - that is least likely of all of us to be the victims of murder. When young people are murdered, which after the age of 12 months they rarely are, by far the chief threat to them comes from their parents, then by other adults known to them (as Huntley was), but not from strangers. Boys, moreover, are more likely to be murdered than girls.  "It was the powder keg waiting for the match. I was the match," Dennis Nilsen wrote about his own murder spree 20 years ago, implying that someone like himself lurks around every corner of every street. Some will say the same about Huntley's opportunist killings too. The persistent implication is that something like this can happen to anyone, any time, anywhere.  But the reality is that it can't and doesn't. Huntley's was an exceptionally awful crime, but it was also exceptionally unusual. It has been invested with national meaning less because of the crime than because of the way it has been reported. Under pressure from 24-hour news TV channels and the tabloids, the mainstream TV channels and what were then all still broadsheets bowed before the storm. The episode certainly tells us something about the kind of society we have become, but the truth is that it tells us rather more about the decline of the English media than it does about the decline of the English murder.    <BR>