The Neil Entwistle case has gripped us all – and particularly America – ever since the corpses of his wife and their baby daughter were found entwined under a white duvet in the four-poster bed in the master bedroom of a pristine five-bedroom house on Cubs Path, Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

For the news anchors, bloggers and public this Euripidean tragedy was a primetime gift. Here was an Englishman who’d had the best of America – a beautiful wife, Rachel, a baby daughter, Lillian Rose, and loving, hard-working, family-minded inlaws. And Entwistle repaid his host family’s hospitality, affection and trust by exterminating his wife and daughter with his father-in-law’s own gun. Then he fled, failed to attend their funerals, sought casual sex, and compounded his crimes after his conviction for double murder last week by claiming that Rachel, not he, had killed their baby and then herself.

This sorry saga has played very big everywhere. The transgressions of the baby-faced, luxuriantly thatched Entwistle are heinous – somehow worse than the grisly, increasingly commonplace child-killings carried out by fathers poisoned by bitterness and rage towards their estranged spouses; on Father’s Day earlier this month, for instance, Brian Philcox, 53, murdered his two children Amy and Owen.

He left a message for Mrs Philcox, saying: “I’ve left you a present. I’ll make the papers, just you watch.” At the time, Fathers4Justice and many men in internet chat rooms suggested the reason Philcox had brutally taken the lives of his children was because he had “an issue with his divorce”. The implication was that he killed his children because he faced losing everything.

In a similar case Perry Samuel, another father estranged from his wife, babysat for his small children and asphyxiated both of them; their bodies were found in a bathtub. In Samuel’s case the judge attributed the motive to malice against the children’s mother.

At least these cowardly murderers have an identifiable motive – which is to inflict a punishment far worse than death on the mother of the murdered children: a lifetime of agonised bereavement.

However, in Entwistle’s case, as Judge Kottmyer said of the killings, “These crimes are incomprehensible. They defy comprehension because they involved the planned and deliberate murders of the defendant’s wife and nine-month-old child in violation of bonds that we recognise as central to our identities as human beings – those of husband and wife, and parent and child.”

I agree. The Entwistle murder case is a story the grimmest of film-makers would hesitate before consigning to celluloid. I would argue this is not because it is beyond our realm of experience (mothers and fathers do kill and abuse each other and their children, violating sacred bonds) but rather because it reveals something about the dark side of suburbia that we would rather not see.

In the films Blue Velvet and American Beauty we saw the horrors that lurk behind wrap-around porches and picket fences. Desperate Housewives showed us the secrets and lies of life inside the colonial-style residences of small-town America. We all know in fact that visual signifiers denoting the American dream – the clapboard house, the boy hurling the paper onto the lawn, Pop watering the roses – are there to signal to us that soon something terrible is going to happen.

These days the internet makes the denouement even nastier. Life on Wisteria Lane is not as rosy as it was before – if it ever was, that is. I know from living in the American suburbs myself that while they are the perfect habitat for mothers and small children, the cul-de-sac smothers the hunter-gatherer instincts of the roving male. According to the FBI, violent crime in the US suburbs is rising by 10% a year.

So to me the causes of the Entwistle tragedy are not incomprehensible, but almost too clear. The internet revealed to Entwistle – weak, out of work, living a lie, and tethered by the humdrum demands of a wife and new baby – everything he wanted but didn’t have. For only the internet brings all those dark desires that used to lie beneath – or were manfully suppressed for long years of frustration – to the surface in an instant.

So it was he could type in “How to kill with a knife”, and days later actually do it (with a gun). He perused swingers’ websites and was prepared to lie, deceive and kill in the hope of “a bit more fun in the bedroom”.

It’s a horrible story, but far from being incomprehensible, it explains something we prefer not to dwell on, especially not in the leafy, smug suburbs where nuclear families are supposed to be living perfect lives. In front of computer screens, behind study doors, men are unleashing their dissatisfaction by logging on and freaking out.

I’m not doing Wimbledon or Glastonbury this year, nor did I do Ascot, Hay or any other of the 400 or so festivals and outdoor jollies that punctuate this time of year.

No, I leave that to my 67-year-old dad, who as I write is under canvas at Glastonbury, no doubt having grooved on down to the banging Jay-Z set and the Ting Tings with gusto, being many years younger at heart than I am. It’s not just that I’m square and middle-aged – I have my doubts about the entire summer season.

I can see that it must be satisfying, in a Challenge Anneka way, to buy tent and wellies, drive to Somerset, locate hat and pashmina, queue, exfoliate and fake bake, trail after lost friends, sit around the campfire, queue and so on.

For me, though, more reliable pleasure is to be had reclining in bed watching events on a flatscreen TV, with Doritos and proper toilet facilities within easy reach. I couldn’t bear to get there and think: “Mmm, wish I was at home.”

So this summer I went to Germany instead. Twice. Last week I went on Air Berlin (£50 return from Stansted). And everything about my trip met my expectations. I went to Nuremberg. The town is delightful, the weather tropical, the Nazi parade grounds bonkers and the food . . . Well, Nuremberg is Shangri-La for sausage-eaters. We had grilled local bangers for breakfast, and then at the restaurant at lunch (called the Bratwurstglocklein) I had sausages again.

When I touched down in England on Wednesday night, on time and on schedule, Germany had beaten Turkey in the semi-final of Euro 2008; and as I walked home, everyone was spilling out onto the pavements, partying.

Yes, the English season is glamorous and fun, but it’s too unpredictable for me at my age. You know where you are with Germany.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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