The Barlinnie Story
Page 16
‘If he had told the truth and admitted he had this illicit liaison with this woman McCluskey then he would have got off. The very first question the prosecution asked him was “what was Miss McCluskey to you?” He replied: “A casual acquaintance!” The prosecution used this phrase like a knife: every time he mentioned the phrase “casual acquaintance” he turned the knife and it was dreadful to see. Had the jury known of the relationship they might have viewed the killing in a different, more sympathetic light. There could even have been a lesser charge or sentence. But at the trial Robertson would only allow the jurors to see him as a cold-blooded killer of a casual acquaintance rather than a man in a tortured relationship between wife and mistress.’
Laurence Dowdall added: ‘Robertson was about 6’2” and by the time counsel had finished with him he looked about 5’2”. He would just not admit he had been carrying on with this woman. I saw him three or four days before he was hanged and he asked me to thank Jock Cameron and Manuel Kissen, his defence team, for the work they had done. He also thanked me and said, “I know I am going to hang in three or four days’ time, but I am still glad I did not let my wife down in public.” It was extraordinary.’
An ex-policeman, Robertson was not in the mould of the stereotyped Glasgow hard man. His immediate predecessor in the Hanging Shed, Paul Christopher Harris, was just that. He was renowned as a fighting man. His story was largely forgotten until the newspapers started to look back at the history of the Hanging Shed on the news that it was to be demolished as part of a modernisation process. Harris’s daughter, Mary McCallum, was anxious to find out exactly where his body lay inside the prison. The Herald took up the case and their reporter’s research indicated that the ten bodies of the men who had died on the Bar-L gallows were buried side by side, wrapped in rough Hessian, along the outside of D-Hall. Sometime in the sixties, after capital punishment had been abolished, the plaques bearing the names of the men had been removed. As part of the capital punishment ritual the victims were denied civilised burial. Their bodies were covered in quick lime and buried in unconsecrated ground.
All the evidence pointed to Harris lying with others including Lyon, Carraher and Peter Manuel. The story of Harris and his brother Claude (Paul Christopher and Claude – odd Christian names for hard men!) says much about the Glasgow slums of the forties and fifties. The brothers had been convicted of acting in concert to kill a Martin Donleavy of Neptune Street. Both had previous convictions for violence. And both were sentenced to hang. Paul confessed to the murder in a somewhat dodgy confession that was criticised by a Scottish Home Department official as ‘couched in sanctimonious platitudes not to be expected in a man of Harris’s type’. Dodgy or not it was enough to convince the Scottish Secretary to postpone Claude’s execution for several days while Paul’s death row statements were studied. This resulted in a reprieve. Did one brother sacrifice his life for another? Who knows?
Prison records of the time show that both brothers had behaved with a degree of dignity in the final days and even seemed to have won some sympathy from the prison staff. Paul played the hard man to the end, showing no fear of the rope and urging his brothers who visited him in the death cell to ‘be smiling at eight o’clock’. In view of the relationship he had held with the staff on the death watch it is poignant to report that he went to the gallows, not with these men at his side, but with his arms pinioned by officers who were strangers. Paul’s confession seems particularly unconvincing due to the victim’s deathbed assertion that more than one man had been involved. Maybe then it really was a final act of compassion to save a brother.
It was a sad end to an all too frequent occurrence in those days, a tawdry fight to the death in the worst of the Glasgow slums. Mary McCallum was only 12 or 13 when she learned of her father’s fate. Not surprisingly this revelation blighted the rest of her life. It is only to be hoped that finding her father’s unmarked grave at least finally brought her some peace.
The most infamous man to die in the Hanging Shed is without doubt Peter Manuel. He breathed his last at 8.01am on 11 July 1958. He was hanged by Harry Allen. Legend has it that Peter Manuel ran the last few yards across D-Hall to his death. Few who were in city at that time will forget it. As the minutes ticked away, hundreds of thousands of Glaswegians watched the clock on their wall, imagining the grim happenings out in the east end. Manuel had in a curious way become part of the city’s life. His reign of terror had filled the newspapers for years; his capture and trial had attracted worldwide interest. His death brought a curious form of release to the city. For years there had been a climate of fear nourished by the thought that there was a serial killer at large in the area. But there was still a large percentage of the population against capital punishment. I remember the famous author, artist, and columnist Jack McLean telling of the occasion when as an 11-year-old on holiday in England he asked his father, a stern Calvinist, ‘Is this the day they hang Manuel?’ McLean Senior sagely made what Jack called an uncharacteristic reply: ‘It was a terrible thing which this poor man did, son. But God have mercy on him. We are doing worse.’ The sentiment of millions of abolitionists, exactly.
Others would see it as justice. And in terms of the evil he did many thought he simply got was coming to him. Even Manuel himself seemed to in the end accept the inevitability of it all. Strangely Peter Manuel, something of a real-life Walter Mitty, had invented a death penalty background for himself. In a spell in Peterhead he told lurid tales to fellow prisoners of his father dying in the electric chair in America. The only truth in this fantasising was that the Manuel family had indeed had a spell on the other side of the pond where the mass murderer’s father had moved to find work in a car factory in Detroit before returning to Motherwell with his family in 1932. But the fact is that Scotland’s most infamous killer had been born in Manhattan of all places. An imagination could run wild on the prospect of what might have happened if Peter Manuel had grown up in the stews of the Big Apple and moved on to the killing fields of the Mafia.
He did enough killing in Scotland, however. In May 1958 he was in the dock charged with eight killings: Anne Kneillands (17), Mrs Marion Watt (45), Vivienne Watt (16), Mrs Margaret Brown (42), Isabelle Cooke (17), Peter Smart (45), Mrs Doris Smart (42) and Michael Smart (10). It was the finding of the body of Anne Kneillands on a snow-covered golf course in East Kilbride two years before that had brought Manuel to the serious attention of the general public, though he had been making headlines since he was a boy – he had convictions for burglary from the age of 12 and was in and out of approved schools. He also showed a penchant for attacking women from an early age. He had confessed to killing Anne Kneillands but since there was no corroboration, Lord Cameron told the jury to acquit him on that particular charge. The verdict on all the other capital charges was guilty. He paid with his life for these killings but, since his death, the total number of his victims keeps getting revised upwards. It seems certain that he also killed a Durham taxi driver, Sydney Dunn, and the usual suspects on the internet speculate that he could have killed up to 15 people. Or more.
The hunting down and trial of Peter Manuel brought into prominence the remarkable story of William Watt, no doubt not the first innocent man to spend time in Barlinnie, but certainly one of the most harrowing tales of wrongful imprisonment you could find. Ask a prison officer on patrol inside the big house if there are any innocent men in his care and you will get a shrug of the shoulders and the reply: ‘Son, they are all innocent in here’. It is recorded that even Peter Manuel in his many stays behind bars brooded alone, loath to mingle with other prisoners and remarkably claiming time after time to anyone who could be bothered to listen that he was innocent.
But William Watt was innocent. Not only did he lose his wife, daughter and sister-in-law, shot in the head at close range by Peter Manuel, he found himself in Barlinnie suspected of the murders himself. How it all came about is a story of a series of remarkable coincidences and of police desperation to find a scapegoat,
a desperation that not for the first time in Glasgow’s criminal history led to an innocent man being accused. The nightmare William Watt endured is horrific. You wonder how anyone could endure the hell of being behind bars in a tough jail accused of murders you did not commit and being reviled by millions outside unaware of the real truth. Ironically, the real killer, Manuel, was in Barlinnie at the same time in a cell not too far from William Watt accused of the less dramatic crime of housebreaking.
When Manuel was on a bloody rampage in the Watts’ Burnside bungalow, the head of the house, dubbed by the press the ‘Master Baker’, was taking a fishing holiday break in Argyll from his bakery business in September 1956. Looking back it seems incredible how a case against him was built up, seemingly without recourse to common sense. The fishing holiday was based at Cairnbaan near Lochgilphead and the police at the time believed he had returned to Burnside on the outskirts of Glasgow to kill his family and then driven back to Argyll to establish an alibi. The impossibility of this is demonstrated by the fact the Watts and Mrs Brown were killed at 6am and that the Master Baker had his breakfast at 8am in Lochgilphead. Even Formula One’s finest would find that impossible in a fifties saloon, especially if the long road journey included a river crossing by ferry. In addition, at daybreak in Argyll, William Watt’s car was seen parked and covered in frost.
The police were taking too seriously some totally unreliable reports that Watt had been seen driving around Loch Lomondside that night and that he had been on the Renfrew Ferry. They seemed also to ignore the fact that the so called witnesses could not even agree on what kind of car he was supposed to be driving. The fact that William Watt’s photograph had appeared in the newspapers, and its effect on potential witnesses, was also ignored. It was all hysterical nonsense and it led to a bereaved father and husband spending 67 tortured days in Barlinnie.
Watt’s release and the dropping of charges against him came about in a remarkable way. He had retained the legal services of Laurence Dowdall, as noted perhaps the most successful defence lawyer in Scottish legal history, certainly the most celebrated by the newspapers. Amazingly Manuel, a suspect in both the Watt and Anne Kneillands cases, was in the Bar-L on housebreaking charges, but here he was asking for a meeting with Laurence Dowdall to discuss the Watt case. At the meeting Manuel showed to the legendary pleader that he had knowledge of the inside of the Watt house. He even let slip that Mrs Brown had been shot twice. Dowdall was unaware of this, but when he checked with the police they confirmed it. It seems that Manuel’s motive in talking to Dowdall was to plant the idea that someone else had committed the burglary but instead boasted to him about it.
The defence lawyer naturally told the police about the content of the meeting but the detectives on the case did not respond by immediately arresting the serial killer. This was surprising but after one wrongful arrest in the case – that of the Master Baker – they were perhaps overcautious. From what Manuel had told Dowdall there seemed no doubt about his involvement in the Watt murders but, no, the authorities wanted even more evidence. This was a tragic misjudgement since with the killer still at large another five people were to die before Peter Manuel faced a jury. Later in ‘57 Manuel is believed to have killed a taxi driver in Durham. An attractive Mount Vernon teenager, Isabelle Cooke, was strangled and at New Year Peter Smart, manager of a civil engineering firm, was shot in his Uddingston home together with his wife and young son.
The trial of Peter Manuel eventually began on Monday, 12 May 1958 with the accused shuttling day after day in that famous blue bus from Barlinnie to the High Court with a heavy escort. Manuel had plenty of time in his cell to consider his response to the charges, which ran from mass murder to housebreaking. In his previous life of crime he had shown a keen interest in the law and some ability to defend himself. There were many sensational moments in the trial, but the history of Manuel made it not all that surprising that at the end of the day he would sack his defence team (led by Harald Leslie QC, who later became Lord Birsay). After all, the rope beckoned and the evidence against him was heavy. A man known to enjoy notoriety and limelight grasped a final chance to surprise the court, the press and television reporters, newspaper readers and the hundreds who flocked to the High Court on a daily basis to peer through the railings at the comings and goings and throng the entrance to Glasgow Green, just across the road.
If William Watt’s Barlinnie ordeal had not been enough, nor the loss of his family, the monster that was Manuel had not finished with the Master Baker. Manuel was still desperate to convince the jury that Watt had something to hide. Their first joust in court took place before Manuel had fired his defence team. Watt and Manuel, in the dock, were face to face as the Master Baker told of the series of coincidences that cast wrongful suspicion on him, and resulted in that Barlinnie stay. Watt spoke from a wheelchair, which added some poignancy to the legal duel – he had been injured shortly before in an accident. At times Watt broke down and wept and was given water by court attendants. A doctor also stood by. The grilling on this occasion took a tiring two hours. The wrongful Loch Lomondside identification was discussed, as was the state of his marriage and his finances – the total insurance on his wife’s life was a mere £50 or £60. He described Manuel’s insinuations as a lot of nonsense and the jury agreed.
Later the killer sacked his legal team and it is possible to speculate that one of the reasons behind this act was, as well as the inevitability of conviction, one last chance to torture William Watt face to face. The judge agreed to a re-examination though restricted it to certain points and the Master Baker was brought back into court, still in his wheelchair. The two men stared at each other, a mere six feet apart. It was an electric moment. At one stage the evil mind of Manuel allowed him to suggest: ‘Was it not the case that at one stage Watt had said that after he had shot his daughter it would have required very little to have turned the gun on himself?’ William Watt was on the verge of a breakdown at this twisted, outrageous accusation and the judge told him to reply merely with an affirmative or a negative. William Watt’s loud ‘No’ echoed round a shocked and silent court. The Master Baker recovered his composure and went on to demolish, to the jury’s satisfaction, the farrago of lies and evil insinuation that Manuel was throwing at him.
The trial came to its conclusion and the jury was despatched to consider their verdict. It came at 4.45pm, two hours and 21 minutes after the jury had retired. A bell sounded, the unmistakeable call for all concerned to return to court. Every seat in the place was occupied and people in the overflow stood beside uniformed policemen on duty at the entrance doors. Peter Manuel, soon to face death on the Barlinnie gallows, chatted with police officers in the few moments before the judge returned. There was only one possible sentence. Lord Cameron, the judge, was one of the county’s most tough and stern judges, but when he soberly donned the black cap to pronounce sentence of death by hanging he was said to be ‘visibly moved’.
The inevitable appeal was later thrown out. Back in the death cell in Barlinnie, Peter Manuel was woken to be told that the Crown saw no grounds for a reprieve. Despite the current distaste for capital punishment you suspect that in 1958 that would also have been the verdict of what we now call ‘the court of public opinion’. The news was conveyed to the death cell in D-Hall by Bailie Blas, who travelled from the city centre to Riddrie with the town clerk depute Joseph C Dickson. Bailie Blas undertook this sombre duty in the absence of Lord Provost Myer Galpern who was on holiday. Only 12 people were outside the prison at one minute after 8am as Harry Allen activated the drop and the monster died. The first official indication that the execution had taken place came at 8.50, by which time there were 30 people milling around the gates when Bailies John Paterson and John Macdougal left the prison.
Asked if Manuel had said anything before his execution Bailie Paterson said ‘No’ and Bailie Macdougal said, ‘He made no reference to anything.’ The local politicians then said the hanging was carried out in ‘a satisfactory
and expeditious manner’. So ended the life of a serial killer.
11
THE BSU – SO SUCCESSFUL THEY SHUT IT DOWN
With the possible exception of the execution area, aka the Hanging Shed, the most famous part of Barlinnie is, or was, the Special Unit. Here, for around 20 years from the early seventies to the early nineties, was conducted one of the world’s most important and controversial experiments in penal theory. The experiment was followed by all those interested in rehabilitation, especially the rehabilitation of murderous hard cases who had been transported into the toughest of jails, with the keys figuratively thrown away. Its place in history is secure. But if you visited it today you would be significantly underwhelmed. The small area that held such infamous prisoners as Jimmy Boyle, Hugh Collins, TC Campbell and Larry Winters is now mainly used as a storeroom. The cells, once partly the cause of huge criticism because the lifers were allowed to add some little touches of home comfort, like a battered armchair, are now the repositories of prison service paperwork, cardboard boxes piled high. You can’t get more mundane than that.
It is a remarkable, stop-you-in-your-tracks moment actually to see the Special Unit for yourself these days. Back in the seventies on the streets of Glasgow, if you had listened to pub talk, or even read some apoplectic broadsheet columnists, you might have got the idea that life in the Wendy House or the Nutcracker Suite, as it was variously nicknamed, was a cross between the five-star luxury of the Beverly Wilshire in LA and the Grosvenor in Mayfair. Garbage.