Recep Cetin was said to be totally infatuated and very possessive.
Authorities are trying to make sense of a double homicide pursuant to a young Turkish man, 17 year old Recep Cetin who it is said had been involved with one of the murdered victim’s daughter, Shannon Graham, taking the life of his 15 year old girlfriend’s mother, Marion Graham and her friend Kathy Dinsmore, both 54.
It all started 3 years ago when Marion Graham and her daughter, Shannon, both from Northern Ireland, would take summer vacations in Turkey. It was there that Shannon Graham became smitten with one young man whom she met at a restaurant where he worked. Showering her with devotion and attention, Shannon Graham would plead to her mother to return every school holiday to spend time with her lothario.
Yet what may have been love at the beginning turned into a kind of possessive, tainted preoccupation that sullied the context of the two young teenager’s relationship. In a country widely known for its abuse of women and subordination of their rights it wasn’t too long before Recep Cetin began to also treat Marion Graham’s daughter in a derogatory way that must have left her very unsettled, but perhaps may have felt quite normal to him.
Things are said to have come to a head pursuant to one nasty falling out between the teenagers where the young man is said to have kicked Shannon Graham. That’s when Marion Graham intervened and told the young man that he would never lay a finger on her daughter again, thus dashing his hopes of marrying the young Shannon Graham whose proposal was obviously vexing the young teenager’s mother.
The young man in turn is said to have reacted by threatening to kill Marion Graham should she intervene in his relationship with her daughter. At some point after the altercation, the 17 year old boy lured both Marion Graham and her friend Kathy Dinsmore into the forest whereupon he is said to have confessed to slaughtering them.
All of which raises a series of questions, wasn’t it obvious to Marion Graham that her daughter was far too young to have a boyfriend in the first place (she must have been 12 or 13 when she first met Recep Celik), that as charming and charismatic as the young man may have been he was bound to have been groomed (or at the least overtly cognizant ) in a type of ethos which is preternatural in Turkey where women are often treated as second class citizens whose rights pale in relation to men?
Or it could have all been in the end a crime of passion, a type of ironic passion which would see a young man kill the mother of a young woman he was wildly in love with. But then again what type of love is that in the first place…?