The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  The police had an obvious suspect. Her husband, Charles McGregor, was arrested and charged with the murder. Two witnesses said that they had seen him beat his wife to death with a hammer, but retracted their statements in court. Another witness said they had seen Karen’s battered and bruised body, but grew fearful and ran off before observing the situation further. A woman testified that she had seen McGregor in the cemetery, crouching over his wife’s grave and saying: “I’m sorry, Karen. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” And a fellow prostitute gave evidence that Karen was fed up giving all the money she had earned to her husband to feed his drug habit.

  However, when McGregor appeared in court, he did not look like a junkie. He wore a smart suit and overcoat, and had his hair neatly cut – looking every inch the thrusting young businessman. The jury were impressed and returned a verdict of “not proven” – a third option allowed by Scottish courts. He later died of a drug overdose.

  On a warm summer evening in June 1995 the body of Leona McGovern was found in a Glasgow car park. She had been stabbed seven times with a screwdriver, then strangled. The petite 22-year-old, barely five feet tall, had been sleeping rough. Two weeks before her death, her boyfriend died of an overdose.

  “He meant a lot to her,” said Detective Chief Inspector Nanette Pollock, who was leading the investigation. “When he died she really lost it.”

  Then Leona had found her best friend dead in bed.

  On the night she died she owed her dealer money and asked her brother to lend her £35, but he could not give it to her. About 7 p.m., a security guard said he saw a man stabbing something on the ground. At the time he thought it was a bag of garbage as he could not imagine witnessing a murder take place in the street in broad daylight – even in Glasgow.

  A man was arrested and charged with Leona’s murder – but, again, the jury returned a not-proven verdict. He claimed the murderer was another man who had been seen with Leona in the last two weeks of her life. He was not her boyfriend, just another homeless person she hung around with. Inspector Pollock thought their relationship entirely innocent.

  “Homeless people tend to stick together,” she said. “They’re in the same situation. She’d lost a lot in her life.”

  The body of 34-year-old mother-of-two Marjorie Roberts was pulled out of the River Clyde in August 1995, four days after she drowned. Citywatch cameras taped her walking by the river with a man. A month later the same man was arrested after trying to push another prostitute into the river. She managed to struggle free and ran to a taxi driver for help. However, she did not want to press charges. As a prostitute and drug user, she did not want the glare of publicity.

  “She was a drug addict,” said Marjorie’s younger sister Betty. “They don’t care about their own life.”

  There were no witnesses and no marks on Marjorie’s body – nothing to indicate that she did not slip and fall into the water accidentally, perhaps, at night when it was pitch black, or even jump in and drown.

  “She had Valium in her body,” said Betty. “When she went into that Clyde she had no strength to fight.”

  It was Marjorie’s boyfriend who introduced her to drugs. At first, she took temgesics – a barbiturate used to treat withdrawal symptoms. Then people in the projects where she lived began selling heroin. Marjorie’s boyfriend left her and the children and she started letting prostitutes use the house to take drugs. By the time he came back Marjorie herself was on the game.

  “He just went, ‘Well, hen. As long as you’re using plenty of protection.’ He didn’t care,” said Betty. “‘She was dead shy and quiet. She never had any confidence. That’s how we couldn’t believe she could go and do that.”

  As her habit grew, her life slipped downhill. In her last few months, she slimmed down until she looked like a skeleton. She would sit motionless with her face covered for hours on end. Eventually, her doctor prescribed Valium.

  Like Karen McGregor and Marjorie Roberts, 26-year-old Jaqueline Gallagher had only been on the game for five or six months when she died. Jacqui’s own mother did not even know her daughter was a prostitute.

  “I know those girls,” she said. “See the way they’re dressed? When I saw Jacqueline she was never like that. She was always prim and proper. People used to say, my God, she’s beautiful. If she was a wee bit taller she could be a model.”

  Like Leona McGovern and Margo Lafferty, Jacqueline Gallagher was only five feet tall. She had met her boyfriend when she was just a teenager. He was ten years older and already on drugs – but then, so were most of her friends. According to Gordon, they were very much in love.

  “On our 10th anniversary she was running about and singing, ‘Our House in the Middle of the Street’,” he recalled. “She was happy. I came in with a big, massive card and I got her a gold necklace. She loved gold. I put bits of gold in her coffin, things that we’d given each other.”

  Their idyllic life together was marred only by drugs and the periods he spent in prison for shoplifting. While he was inside, she wrote hundreds of love letters to him that he kept in a plastic shopping bag. One read: “Gordon, I know myself it’s not going to be long till you’re walking through the door, and baby I will be there for you. I always will be, Gordon, no matter what. You know that yourself, baby.”

  However, on his last stint in prison Jacqui did not visit him as she had before.

  “She knew I hated this,” said Fraser Gordon.

  He knew the risk she was running, earning money as a prostitute.

  “I told her, I worry about you from the moment you walkout that door to the moment you walk back in,” he said. “It’s frightening. You don’t know how much strain you’re putting on me.”

  On the night she died in 1997, Jacqueline was picked up by car from the kerbside in Glasgow. Later her half-naked body was found on a grass verge near a bus stop in Bowling, a village four miles outside the city. She was hidden in shrubbery and wrapped in a home-made curtain. The fabric was pink and grey, and the lining white with blue polka dots. The police never managed to discover where it came from – even after it was shown on the nationwide TV programme Crimewatch.

  The police had a suspect – 43-year-old George Johnstone of Erskine, who was one of her clients. But he was cleared and the real killer is still at large.

  “Somebody knows who killed my daughter,” said her mother. “I didn’t know she was a prostitute but it doesn’t matter what she was doing. She was a lovely girl and didn’t deserve to be killed.”

  Gordon Fraser was devastated by Jacqui’s death. Six months later, he was found on the roof of his house, throwing down slates and threatening to kill himself by setting himself on fire.

  Twenty-one-year-old single mother Tracy Wylde was the only victim to be murdered indoors. Like Marjorie Roberts and Jacqui Gallagher, she was new to the game and only went out on the street a couple of nights a week.

  She lived in a top floor flat, which she kept impeccably. People were always trooping up and down the stairs to her flat, leading neighbours to wonder if she was a drug dealer. According to her friends she was not, just a timid girl who could not say no – though others say she was warm and funny, with enough confidence to talk to everybody.

  “I was shocked when I heard about the prostitution,” said a neighbour who lived downstairs. “I said to her about the risks she was taking, but she said she’d rather go out and earn money like that than steal it off anyone else. She knew what that was like.”

  But her work as a prostitute allowed to keep her three-year-old daughter Megan, who was always conspicuously well dressed.

  Tracy had had a troubled upbringing. She had been raised by her grandparents and called her grandfather “Dad”. He came up to her flat nearly every day and even dropped her off in the city centre sometimes when she was working on the streets.

  “I feel sad for her,” said her downstairs neighbour. “It couldn’t have been an easy life for her.”

  Tracy was killed in the early hours
of 24 November in her home. Strangely no one heard anything that night. Her block had poor soundproofing and residents could overhear neighbours’ conversations and footfalls. But not even her downstairs neighbour, a young mother who was kept up by her 11-week-old baby, heard a thing.

  After Margo Lafferty died on 28 February 1998, the police discovered that she had gone with two violent criminals that night. On the dark piece of waste ground where she was found dead, they picked up two condoms. One contained the semen of Brian Donnelly, who had previously tried to set fire to the house of his former girlfriend and their son, and he had also mugged an old woman. The other contained the semen of Scarborough construction worker David Payne, a convicted sex offender who had been jailed for holding up a woman at knife point and indecently assaulting her.

  That night Donnelly had been out celebrating his 19th birthday but went into a rage after being rejected by a couple of female work colleague. Instead he decided to go with a prostitute and was captured on CCTV with Margo before the pair went to the disused builders’ yard in West Regent Street for sex. The jury was also shown CCTV footage showing a man, who the Crown said was Donnelly, walking away wearing a leather jacket Margo had borrowed.

  The following day, work colleagues noticed the gouges on Donnelly’s face. He told one he had been involved in a tussle with a woman whose boyfriend had tried to jump a taxi queue before him. But he told another colleague he had been scratched by a cat. His workmates did not believe him and gave his name to detectives investigating Margo Lafferty’s murder.

  During the trial, Donnelly alleged that the murder was committed by David Payne, who had been working in Glasgow at the time. However, Payne was seen with Margo on CCTV before she was seen with Donnelly. Despite his previous conviction for a violent sex crime, Payne denied being the murderer.

  At his trial in 1998, the prosecutor Calum MacNeill told Donnelly: “We will never know why you killed her, whether it was a disagreement over payment, or your anger which lacks self control, or out of shame or disgust or contempt that you had for the heroin addict prostitute you had just used. You punched and kicked her and she fought back, scratching you. You were incensed, you 6 feet 3 inches and her only 5 feet tall. You were fuelled with anger and got out of control and banged her head off the wall before strangling her and finally dragging her body along the yard.”

  He was found guilty on a majority verdict, but in 2001 the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh overturned the conviction on the grounds that the trial judge, Lord Dawson, had misdirected the jury over the CCTV footage.

  Lord Dawson had told the jury that they were entitled to consider any evidence that Donnelly had any of the dead woman’s property on him or in his possession, saying specifically: “You’ll remember in that connection the video tape evidence where you saw a young man wearing a dark jacket.”

  Gordon Jackson, QC for Donnelly, told the appeal judges there had been no suggestion during the trial that the man caught on camera wearing a dark jacket was either young or was Donnelly.

  Lord Allanbridge, who heard the appeal with Lord Cameron and Lord Caplan, said: “We consider that the trial judge did misdirect the jury in inviting them to consider ‘the video tape evidence where they saw a young man wearing a dark jacket’. This was an open invitation to the jury to consider the 3.14 a.m. video recording and to recollect their viewing of it, so that they themselves might speculate about the disputed identity of a male person shown on the recording. Such a procedure is incompetent.

  “If the jury concluded that the recording showed the appellant wearing the deceased’s jacket after her death, this could have been a very persuasive factor in their deliberations on the murder charge. We are accordingly satisfied that the misdirection of the trial judge in this case has led to a miscarriage of justice.”

  They quashed the conviction, but granted the Crown leave for a retrial. At a second trial in 2001, it took the jury under an hour and a half to bring in a unanimous verdict of murder.

  After the trial, Margo’s mother said: “I always knew Donnelly was the monster who murdered my daughter . . . He wasn’t any innocent young boy. I hoped someone would kill him when he went into prison after the first trial. I was wishing retribution would be served in another way. There’s no closure in this for me. Not as long as he breathes. I believe in the Old Testament, in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth . . . She might have been a prostitute but she was still a lovely lassie with a heart of gold.”

  And Mrs Lafferty still has to live with the consequences.

  “You’re sitting in work and people are talking, new staff maybe, not the ones that were there at the time. And they always bring Margo’s name up if anything happens. They’ll maybe come across a wee caption in the paper and they go, ‘Look at that. These lassies deserve it.’ I just get up and walk away. Or occasionally I’ll say, ‘Look at it this way. They’re out there, taking the chance of being jailed, and there’s others sitting next to you that are giving it away for nothing.’ Margo could have been out mugging old folk or breaking into houses. But she didn’t do that. She went out and did a job of work.”

  Margo’s brothers did not know what she did for a living and had to read about it in the newspapers as well as living with the grief of losing their sister. Mrs Lafferty was afraid they would get themselves in trouble if they came to the court and the jury voted for acquittal, but the verdict was heard in total silence.

  When Margo died it was three months before the family could bury her. And they were not allowed to cremate her, in case the body had to be exhumed later to look for further evidence, though Margo herself would have preferred to be cremated.

  “She was afraid of creepy crawlies, couldn’t bear the thought of worms going through her body,” said her mother, but she now thinks the bureaucrats did her a favour. “Now I know I can go up to her grave and just stand there and talk to her. I know she’s never going to stand in front of me or cuddle me, which she always used to do. But at least I know where she is.”

  Margo’s mother also has a grandchild to bring up who reminds her of her lost daughter.

  “She’s so full of confidence. So was Margo, full of her own importance,” she says. “I hope she keeps that.”

  Meanwhile, the murder of Margo Lafferty led to the girls in Glasgow’s red light district being given lessons in self-defence by specially trained police officers. They were issued with personal attack alarms and leaflets offering practical safety advice. The leaflets provide advice on what clothes to wear, where to sit in a client’s car, how to deal with a violent client and how to protect their money.

  But that did not help 27-year-old Emma Caldwell, who went missing on 4 April 2005. Her badly decomposed remains were found on 8 May in thick undergrowth near Biggar, South Lanarkshire, over 30 miles away. It was found by a member of the public walking their dog in woods at Kilnpotlees, Roberton, at about 1 p.m., near two service stations on the M74 motorway link to the south at Happendon and Abington.

  Emma Caldwell grew up in Erskine, Renfrewshire. Her mother said: “She was just a happy, happy child – we had a happy life. She was a lovely child, full of fun. A magical child who loved horses. There used to be a thing in the family – we’d say, ‘What would you like, Emma?’ She’d say, ‘A horsy, a horsy’. We’d say, ‘When would you like the horsy?’ She’d say, ‘Right now, right now I’d like the horsy’.”

  Indeed she had worked as a horse-riding instructor before her sister, Karen, died from cancer in 1998. Then her whole world seemed to collapse. She left home, because she was a heroin addict and became a prostitute to support her habit. At the time she went missing she was living a women’s hostel in the Govanhill area. It was been reported that Emma may have been forced to walk to the woods before being murdered, but the police said she almost certainly died very soon after the last sighting of her in Govanhill.

  Officers studied CCTV footage and warned men who did not come forward that they would be visited by detectives. In any eff
ort to jog the public’s memory, the police projected a 60-foot image of Emma on to the side of a semi-derelict tower block in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.

  The BBC’s Crimewatch programme aired CCTV footage showing the last recorded moments of Emma’s life. It showed her leaving Inglefield Street women’s hostel for the last time, then talking briefly to two people outside before heading for the city centre. The driver of a BMW passed her, stopped and did a three-point turn in Inglefield Street. She was last seen at around 11 p.m. on 4 April, walking down Butterbiggins Road towards Victoria Road.

  Later the police came across footage of a woman getting into a silver Skoda Felecia car outside the Riverboat Casino on the Broomielaw, Glasgow’s historic quayside. Detectives have traced every owner of a silver Skoda Felecia car in Scotland, but have been unable to track down the driver. This line of enquiry might even be a blind alley.

  Detective Superintendent Willie Johnston of the Strathclyde Police said: “I am unable to say with any authority that the person who entered the car was Emma. However, I do know that she could have been in Broomielaw at that time.”

  The charity Crimestoppers offered a reward of £10,000 to anyone who could help track down her killer. But a year after she went missing 50 officers were still working on the case. The police then released recordings of 999 calls she made the weeks before she disappeared, expressing her concern about children playing on a railway line.

  The officer leading the inquiry said the calls showed the kind nature of the “caring” young woman and he hoped they would help to jog people’s memories.

  “I want to demonstrate to the public, who may still have reservations about coming forward, that despite her lifestyle, Emma was a loving, caring individual who was genuinely concerned for the children on the railway line,” he said. “It may also prompt people who recognize her voice and know something that could be relevant to this investigation to come forward. I make no apologies for constantly reminding members of the public of this crime and will continue to do so until the person or persons responsible have been brought to justice.”