Last Tuesday morning, every national newspaper - including the Guardian - made the Soham murder trial its front-page lead. Some of the headlines were written in taut American colloquialisms, which, as well as saving space, convey an impression of dramatic urgency. The Manchester United replica shirts, in which Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman died, had been "binned". Ian Huntley, the principal defendant, "took the stand". The effect was so startling that, for a moment, it seemed irresponsible not to read what one tabloid called "the chilling details". Most of the stories were illustrated with two photographs. One was of the bath in which Holly Wells was said to have died. The other - reproduced in colour - showed, half-burned at the bottom of a school dustbin, the shirts in which the girls were last seen. I do not follow murder trails with the care that would make me an authority of their coverage by the press. But I cannot recall any recent prosecution being reported in such detail. And Tuesday was only one day in the continuing saga. In the next week, after the judge has summed up and the jury announced its verdict, we can expect the coverage to be augmented by an avalanche of comment.  Newspapers fill their front pages with stories that they judge will attract readers and increase circulation. So we are required to believe - as a result of last Tuesday's unanimous editorial verdict - that the British public, whatever its general taste in journalism, combines in its enthusiasm for information about human suffering. Accounts of Ian Huntley "sobbing in court", admitting responsibility for the two girls' deaths and expressing his bitter regret that he cannot "turn back the clock" to the time before they died, apparently sold newspapers. It seems that large sections of the great British public have an inexhaustible appetite for horror.  Newspapers have a duty to report the trial of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr and the right to describe it in whatever way they choose. In a democracy, justice must be done in public. Newspapers often pretend that their penchant for sensation is essential to the national interest rather than to circulation. But, while we are entitled to deplore their hypocrisy, we should not complain too loudly about the run-of-the-mill revelation and routine expos. They have to sell copies to survive. That explains their readiness to supply the salacious details of murder, rape and assault cases once the stories can be legitimised as court reporting. But what about the demand? There is only one word with which to describe the desire for details of the   Soham tragedy. The word is prurience.  All decent people felt unmitigated horror when they heard the simple fact of the two girls' deaths. And no one who has not endured a similar trauma is fully able to imagine the depth of grief in which their parents must still be engulfed. The Chapmans and the Wellses deserve our unqualified sympathy. Absorption in the squalid details of Ian Huntley's behaviour is a strange way in which to show it. Reading his explanation of how he fitted the girls' bodies into the boot of his car is hardly an expression of condolence. The lawyers have to argue about his conduct. But there is something sick about the casual reader following him on that last tragic journey.  Poring over every detail of the evidence and cross-examination - "Had you disturbed the clothing of either girl before they went into the ditch?" - is not very different from standing outside the courthouse in the hope of catching a glimpse of the defendant through the window of the prison van or waiting at Tyburn to see the week's hangings. Last week,   the country was awash with sedentary voyeurism.  The vicarious emotions that the accounts of the trial provoked range from the honourable, through the ignoble to the thoroughly perverse. Sentimentalists will claim that by learning of the two girls' suffering they share the parents' grief and loss. Can they really believe that families bereaved by such tragedies want complete strangers to read the necessarily sordid arguments about their children's last hours? It has to happen in court. And the families have shown admirable courage in being there to see justice done. But they are unlikely to find much consolation in headlines such as "I put the body in the ditch and rolled her down".  If people really enjoy reading that sort of thing, there is no way in which we can stop newspapers publishing such stories. Nor, in a free society, should we wish to do so. But I resolutely refuse to believe that fascination with the details of vicious death is an inherent part of human nature. How many sales would a serious newspaper lose if, in the days ahead, it reported the result of the Soham trial unelaborated with the salacious details that we must brace ourselves to expect? Regrettably, we shall never know.