Acid Attack

by Russell Findlay

  Ross asked what I would say to the suggestion that I had a photo of Burns in a clinch with a woman who was not his partner and that I was using it to get information from him. What would I say – Are you out of your mind?

  I suddenly became conscious of the jurors gazing right at me. My God, they might actually swallow this stuff. I denied it as naturally and calmly as possible, trying not to splutter, bluster or guffaw in case it was perceived as protesting too much.

  During his 12 months in prison, Burns had cooked up another layer of lies on top of this nonsense. What, I was asked, if the jury was to hear from another witness called Sean Alexander who could say that I had demanded he give me a phone number for Burns? Apparently, this would be because I was seeking information about a particular murder (a murder I had never even heard of). I flatly replied that it was completely untrue, later wishing I’d added that if Alexander planned to say this under oath, he would be committing perjury.

  The defence case unfolded further. As Burns was underneath me and surrounded by witnesses when the police arrived, it would have been impossible to argue that he had not been there. With a flourish, Ross put it to me: ‘Mr Burns does not dispute he was the person at your door, but he will tell the jury there was no liquid, no delivery card, no knife.’

  Again stifling the instinct to snigger or react with a volley of incredulous expletives, I replied, ‘He was wearing a Royal Mail uniform, had a delivery card and threw acid – if that’s the best you can come up with, then good luck with that.’ My impudence earned a ticking off from Ross, who sniffed that it was the prosecutor’s job to question his defence and address the jury, not mine. That was me told.

  The lawyer also reeled off each of the injuries suffered by Burns, which caused me to brighten when I learned that he needed some stitches on his chin from my citizen’s arrest. If this was to hint I had been too rough towards his client, I suppressed the urge to express regret at not doing any real and permanent damage.

  During two hours of questioning and cross-examination, I recalled my humiliating question, ‘Why did they send a fat clown like you as a hitman. Is this all I’m worth?’ – a soundbite which gave a nice line for stalwart reporter Wilma Riley of the court press agency – but I forgot other snippets which seemed important at the time yet would surely have made no difference given how desperate the defence was. I was free to go.

  The next witness was my daughter. After months of being misled and messed around by the Crown, she had been due to give her evidence ‘on commission’ but, at the 11th hour, the defence conceded it was not necessary and that her police interview would suffice. This was not due to any outbreak of decency but pure pragmatism. While her taped police interview was damaging to the defence, there was a risk that formal testimony could backfire by being even worse. It was a case of the defence deciding to stick or twist, and they stuck.

  I went straight from the stand to the public seats to watch the video of my daughter’s police interview. Her articulate account elicited a mix of heart-bursting pride and dark anger towards Burns and Porter. She said, ‘It caused the biggest fright of my life. All I could think about was my dad. I was crying and I couldn’t stop.’

  There was a flash of humour when the hushed court heard about her seeing ‘this thing’ on top of her dad. The ‘thing’ sat blinking in the dock. One damning recollection was her hearing Burns ask me to sign the Royal Mail delivery card, punching a hole in the defence position that he had turned up without it, the bottle of acid or the knife.

  That night there was another episode of inexplicable Crown behaviour. They sent two more police officers with the message that my daughter was required to attend court to give evidence after all. It actually crossed my mind that these might have been fake cops from some kind of hidden camera TV show. It was about the only credible explanation for such crass misinformation one night after a similar experience. On both occasions, the police were blameless – just following Crown orders. I emailed the Crown to say, ‘I do not know whether these two episodes of misinformation are due to incompetence or something more serious.’ But they did not provide any explanation.

  A major problem for the defence was the ‘Wee Jamie sends his regards’ comment. This had to be denied by Burns in order to maintain the big lie that he had been invited to my home. Ross had already pushed me on this to no avail and suffered another blow when two of my neighbours both recalled Burns saying it.

  Over the following two weeks, the jurors heard from more than a dozen other witnesses. A police officer who dragged Burns away from me told how he was wearing surgical gloves underneath a black pair and had just £3.05 cash and no keys or public transport tickets on him. An eye doctor said I could have lost my sight if it had not been for neighbours quickly fetching a basin of water to rinse away the acid. A chemist confirmed sulphuric acid was the substance used, while a forensic expert said the DNA of Burns was on the Royal Mail jacket and that a pair of glasses inside the mail bag had his and Porter’s DNA on them. Damningly, Porter’s DNA was also found on the handle of the knife. Had it not been, the defence might well have suggested I was wielding it when I answered the door in my pyjama bottoms.

  The trial took a dramatic turn with a jaw-dropping revelation. Burns and Porter had been under surveillance by an elite police unit at the time of the acid attack. At any one time between 29 October 2015 and 25 January 2016, up to seven organised crime and counter terrorism officers were tracking the pair’s movements. The day before the acid attack, CCTV footage showed what appeared to be Porter’s gold Volvo driving near my home at 8.30 a.m. on an apparent reconnaissance run. It was 10 minutes later that the surveillance team got into place around the Paisley addresses of Burns and Porter. At 9.28 a.m. they watched Porter driving the Volvo along Paisley’s Greenhill Road. Moments after that, Burns got out of the car and went into a shop before walking towards the street where he lived. The next day, the surveillance officers began their operation at 9 a.m. Too late. Burns and Porter had already left for the day for the same destination as before. Half an hour before the surveillance team began its shift, Burns had thrown acid in my face.

  I was not surprised that Burns and Porter were meriting expensive and intensive surveillance, but my head was spinning with ‘what ifs’. What if the surveillance officers had been in place earlier? What if they had followed Burns and Porter to my home the day before the attack? Would they have realised what was being planned? Could it have been averted? What if the police team had tracked them on the day of the hit? Would they have foiled Burns before he even reached my door?

  When the prosecution of the acid attack ended, it was a Friday and time to hear evidence of the primary school shooting of the Daniel mob associate Ross Sherlock. After the macer’s call for Sherlock went unanswered, the judge sent everyone home for the weekend.

  That same day, a strange figure was seen loitering outside a primary school in Penilee, Glasgow. A concerned parent filmed the man, who was pushing a buggy but drawing suspicion by his furtive behaviour and the fact that his face was completely hidden by a scarf.

  On Monday the macer again called for Sherlock, but he was nowhere to be seen. Another Crown witness was also missing. Later that day, the masked buggy-pushing man was back outside the school. Mirroring the attack on Sherlock, he pulled out a gun and shot a parent collecting his child. The victim was Lyons gang member Ross Monaghan – cleared of the Asda assassination of Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll, the Daniel henchman and a close friend of Sherlock.

  Back in court, the judge was left with no option but to abandon the trial. The past two weeks of evidence had counted for nothing. The time of 15 jurors; the cost to taxpayers of four defence lawyers, a prosecutor, court staff and a judge; the time, inconvenience and stress endured by around 15 witnesses – all a complete waste of time and money.

  I learned of the unfolding debacle from a court contact. There then followed a sheepish phone call from the Crown. I hung up in contempt when they refused to identify
the AWOL witnesses, who I knew to be Sherlock and another man.

  The next day, in desperation and disgust, I wrote to Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC, the head of the Crown Office, to complain that the simple prosecution of Burns for the acid attack had been complicated by the decision to pair it with the school shooting of Ross Sherlock. Given Sherlock’s blatant disregard for conventional justice, I urged Wolffe to consider separating the two cases. I wrote, ‘Had Mr Burns been prosecuted for my crime alone, he would have almost certainly been convicted, perhaps even without the need for a trial. Myself – and other witnesses – were cynically used by the Crown in order to prop up a shooting case which cannot be prosecuted in isolation due to sparsity of evidence.’ It took over two months to receive a reply on behalf of Wolffe. In the meantime, Sherlock had been tracked down and remanded in prison. In mealy-mouthed language, the Crown said the trial debacle was merely ‘regrettable’ and rejected my request to prosecute the crimes separately.

  The festive panto had been a costly dress rehearsal – just another episode of high farce in Scotland’s dysfunctional criminal justice system. There was a long and tedious wait ahead. Would we have to do it all over again in six months? Oh yes, we would!

  27

  DIRTY DEAL

  After suffering decades of violent domestic terror followed by a campaign of gangland threats and shabby legal games, Jane Clarke had lost faith in justice being done. She knew, better than anyone that Frankie Donaldson would stop at nothing to cheat the system and grind her into the dirt. Jane had lost count of the number of times the Crown Office stated that Donaldson’s trial would take place, only for his lawyers to conjure up yet more delays. Then, one day, it finally happened. Donaldson ran out of stunts, there were no more excuses and he had nowhere left to hide. An extraordinary 1,159 days after his arrest, Donaldson was forced to stand in the dock and admit being a bully who punches, chokes and terrorises women. So much for the reputation that causes knees to knock in the underworld.

  Until that day, Jane believed he would never accept his guilt. In the end, he had a simple choice – either suffer the humiliation of every nasty detail of his brutality being played out in open court, which would almost certainly conclude with a guilty verdict, or seek to minimise the damage by sitting down behind closed doors in order to scratch out the best possible deal from the Crown. The spectre of the court hearing a terrified child’s 999 call during one of Donaldson’s explosions was probably a sobering factor in his decision to pick the latter option. As well as damage limitation, a guilty plea also maintained a vestige of power in Donaldson’s hands – hugely important to a control freak.

  The indictment contained 16 charges spanning 12 years. It alleged numerous acts of violence and threats against Jane, her sister Liz and a child. According to the painstakingly constructed police case, he punched, kicked and choked them, threatened to blow their heads off, rammed their car and used everyday items – car keys, dumbbells, a phone, a TV remote control – as weapons.

  Yet despite abusing his wealth to contemptuously undermine and mock the courts and Crown for more than three years, he was still allowed to strike a favourable deal. Donaldson cherry-picked which charges to accept and which would be binned while also taking a red pen through some of the most toxic elements of those he admitted. The secretive plea bargain between Donaldson’s lawyers and Crown prosecutors was appalling. The victims were never even told the full details of which charges were dropped or exactly how others had been amended. Only now, in this book, are the details being made public.

  The Crown casually agreed to drop seven of the 16 charges, which meant that he pled guilty to nine. Of those, five were admitted in full, without any alterations. They were:

  Charge #1 – seizing Liz by the neck, dragging her to a front door, punching her face and then forcing her outside.

  Charge #6 – assaulting Jane by sitting astride her and injuring her by repeatedly hitting her head with a car key.

  Charge #9 – injuring Jane by repeatedly punching her on the head and body.

  Charge #11 – seizing Jane by the throat with both hands, pulling her out of bed onto the floor, holding her throat, punching her head and pulling her ears, causing injury.

  Charge #13 – repeatedly punching Jane’s head and body and repeatedly striking her head with a mobile phone and remote control, also causing injury.

  While those five charges paint an unpleasant picture, the dropped and altered charges are more shocking still. Of the seven ditched by the Crown, three were relatively minor breaches of the peace but four were particularly lurid and varied in their nature. They were:

  Charge #7 – alleging Donaldson assaulted a child, aged between eight and 12, by throwing and pushing him.

  Charge #8 – chasing Jane and a child in a vehicle then ramming into it with his own. This was described as being like a scene from Grand Theft Auto.

  Charge #12 – punching Jane, dragging her by the hair and repeatedly slamming her head against a car steering-wheel.

  Charge #16 – threatening to shoot Jane and her family in the head, when they were dragged out of the panto, prompting his arrest in December 2013.

  Just as galling as the dropped charges was the sleight of hand applied to four of Donaldson’s nine guilty charges. His lawyer and the Crown conducted a process of sanitisation, softening or deleting the worst elements, often distorting their tone entirely.

  Charge #3 concerned seizing Liz by the throat and threatening to throw her from a second-floor window. This was altered to say first floor, even though it happened in the second-floor flat of Jane and Liz’s mother. Also deleted from this charge was the reference to pinning Liz against the window.

  Charge #5 saw Donaldson admit hitting Jane on the body with a wet towel and wrapping it round her neck, restricting her breathing. But the Crown removed the word ‘repeatedly’ and that he had struck her head with it. Also excised was reference to the attack endangering her life.

  Charge #15 was distorted beyond recognition. While Donaldson admitted assaulting Jane by pulling her body and striking her with a TV remote, the Crown deleted reference to him punching and kicking her head and body.

  The most unpalatable amendment was to charge #14. Donaldson had been accused of repeatedly striking Jane on the head with a dumbbell, but this was removed, leaving a reference to throwing the dumbbell at her. Perhaps the Lord Advocate could then explain the permanent indentation in Jane’s skull caused by the heavy weight crashing down upon her?

  This was not justice but a gentleman’s agreement carved out between a defence lawyer and a Crown prosecutor who ought to have known better. One justification for such deals is to give an accused person some benefit and reward for pleading guilty at an early stage, thereby saving court time and expense and reducing the distress of victims and witnesses. Clearly, Donaldson’s three-year game of churn was the opposite of swift justice and victim consideration, and should, therefore, have precluded any goodwill from the Crown. Sadly, this was not a one-off but an example of Scotland’s usually unseen, parallel justice, of clandestine pacts between lawyers.

  Once the deal was rubber-stamped by Sheriff Joan Kerr, Crown prosecutor Harry Findlay provided a narrative of events which reflected the distorted indictment. The sheriff allowed Donaldson’s bail to continue after hearing he had not breached the conditions since they were imposed.

  Yet during those three long years of attrition, Jane and other witnesses had reported dozens of serious acts of intimidation, menacing texts and vandalism, including the threats to have acid thrown in her face at the school gates and for William ‘Basil’ Burns to shoot a child witness. At the time of writing, another Donaldson crony is still due to stand trial for allegedly threatening Jane and telling her to back off.

  Clarke and her sister each submitted victim impact statements which set out the extent of their suffering and which the sheriff sees prior to passing sentence. Jane told the sheriff how Donaldson tried to control every aspect of her exis
tence for years and how she only went to the police after he spent months bombarding her with threats and abuse while refusing to accept their relationship was over.

  Much of Clarke’s statement related to injuries she suffered. She wrote:

  It is very difficult to remember the amount of physical injuries I received during my 22 years with Frankie. I have three disfigurements on my face, two scars and one where a [dumbbell] weight was used as a weapon. Throughout the years, the amount of one-off slaps and full-blown assaults are too many to be listed.

  This obviously had a serious impact on my day-to-day life, causing me to change from an outgoing educated young woman into a frightened nervous wreck. I had to attend hospital, a psychologist and a counsellor to try and help me cope with my life. My mental health really deteriorated.

  Talking about the detriment to her daily life and the nuclear option on the table of having to accept a new identity and life under the police’s witness protection system, she wrote:

  It is virtually impossible for anyone to understand the severity and ongoing torture I am subjected to. I have a [police] panic button, and cameras fitted where not even I know where the box is which constantly records. My only option is to enter into witness protection where I have been offered the full package. I think I have been isolated enough, however I still have to keep this option open.

  As a qualified social worker, Jane has advised other women to leave abusive partners. She struggles to reconcile this with her own inability to do the same. She wrote:

  The only way I could begin to describe or explain my situation is to say that I felt that I was in a cult. I felt brainwashed. I genuinely don’t know who I was. I have been terrorised, left like a shaken, depressed and anxious woman. I am permanently anxious, I constantly risk-assess both me and my son’s day-to-day survival. I don’t ever believe I will return to the person I used to be but all I can hope for it that I can stay safe, sane and be a good mother.