Thunder rumbled beyond Dalkey quarry as I walked into the village: a storm was threatening to move in from the south. It was almost tacky, like a bad special effect, but matched the gloomy mood about the place on Thursday.

A group of subdued young people in black crowded around a gate. The funeral of Shane Clancy had taken place that morning in the church. The suicidal student murdered Sebastian Creane in Bray last Sunday in a jealous rage over his ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Hannigan. I presumed these young people were mourners. They may have been the young voices extolling Clancy's virtues the previous day on Joe Duffy's Liveline. "He was a great man," said 'Phillip'. "An all-round really nice guy," said 'Jennifer'.

Phil Coulter also came on air to lament tragic Sebastian Creane, the innocent friend of his children. "It's the kind of unreal thing you read about in the papers that always happens to somebody else, but when it comes to your door…" he said.

Headlines become three dimensional when you live in a village. I walked down Castle Street to buy the papers, past The Queen's where Sebastian spent his final hours with teetotaller Clancy on Saturday. As they left at 3am, I was leaving a party nearby. I might have passed them, I thought.

I eat in restaurants within feet of Clancy's house and occasionally drink in The Club, where he and Jennifer worked. He may have packed my shopping during a charity drive in EuroSpar. He lived half a mile from me and knew people I know. Even as a cynical hack, it's shocking to find a murder story on your doorstep.

I fine-combed the papers, wanting to understand Clancy and his crime. There were grainy photos and timeline maps in the Independent. The Irish Times carried the story about him buying knives at 4am on page one. The Daily Mail painted a picture of an enraged stalker – the Evening Herald that of a teetotal charity worker who had gone psychotic. It also carried an interview with a Jesuit who had strident views about the case.

What had started in the village rumour mill as a crazed stabbing, the papers fleshed out as a crime of passion.

Around the country, others pored over the details too, trying to understand. Interest was so great that the murder eclipsed a spate of stabbings on the streets of Mayo. Stabbings don't normally happen in Ballinrobe. Why was Bray more newsworthy?

The reason is that the Mayo attacks happened on the street – where we expect them. The Clancy stabbing, on the other hand, happened in a suburban home and involved a jilted lover from a 'celebrity' village. The story has an obvious, tabloid attraction.

However, once you strip away the voyeuristic aspects, another reason for our fascination with this type of story emerges – fear. This was a 'next-door killing'. We subconsciously fear that something similar could happen beside us or, worse, in our own homes. Therefore, we forensically examine the story to make sense of the crime. What was the reason? We have to have a reason, because if there isn't one, it will haunt us.

Ten years ago, almost to the week, Raonaid Murray was murdered a mile from Dalkey. No motive or killer has been found. Every year her story is republished and every year we read it, hoping for a breakthrough. Until her mystery is solved, there is a killer still living among us. We read hoping for closure.

Whenever the Herald carried a Rachel O'Reilly story at the peak of the interest in her murder, sales increased. Raonaid, the Robert Holohan tragedy in Cork, Siobhan Kearney in Goatstown and the Club Anabel's death of Brian Murphy all did likewise. Sales were boosted by people's need to make sense of the seemingly senseless. If Rachel's husband didn't murder her, who did? Is there a serial killer on the loose? And so on.

Ireland is becoming more violent. We fear confronting car thieves or kids vandalising a Dart carriage. We fear intervening in street fights. Most of all, we fear violence creeping into safe suburbia, as it did with Bray. As readers, we have the closure we need with this case. It wasn't random: we have motive and killer. The families are not so lucky and other questions remain. Why were the warning signs not spotted? Should a young man be able to buy a block of knives at 4am?

In his homily, Dalkey's parish priest spoke of Clancy's psychotic state and prayed for him to be at peace.

Jesuit blogger Fr Fergus O'Donoghue was not so kind. "All the psycho-babble explanations in the world will not take away from the fact that this killing was pure evil," he told the Herald. "Some will want to take comfort in a psychological explanation, but that won't help."

Statements like that won't help Shane Clancy's friends and family either as they deal with their grief. His final acts defined his short life, but branding him evil on the day they buried him is brutal and grossly insensitive. The theological discussion about Clancy's character could have waited until the mourners had gone home and the clay had settled.

I'm sure Joe Duffy would have handled the debate admirably.

dkenny@tribune.ie