Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  The passage of time and age give us the perspective to reflect more dispassionately on our own lives and on how, in our childhood, we might have laid down our own traumatic memories in our bones. Biological healing and remodelling may remove the physical evidence, but the mental scars are much harder to erase.

  I have often wondered if my tibia or my radius developed a telltale Harris line or two when I was nine. If they did, I know now that they were probably eradicated by the growth and regeneration of my bones by the time I was a teenager, and all physical proof would have been gone. My mental Harris lines will remain with me for the rest of my life, but I have learned to live with them in peace and accept them as a part of who I am.

  It was a sunny day, one of those carefree days during the school holidays when a child is blissfully unaware that something is about to happen that will change their life for ever. My childhood had been sheltered and happy, and I had no concept that there were people in the world with malicious intent in their hearts.

  At that time my parents ran a hotel on the shores of Loch Carron, on the west coast of Scotland. I remember walking round the back of the hotel, past the door to the public bar. I was heading for the hotel kitchen and the milk churn that had been delivered by train the day before, which was kept in a big fridge by the back door. In those days, fizzy drinks were a rare luxury but fresh, cold milk, sometimes so cold that little ice crystals would form in it, was irresistible—the perfect drink on a hot, lazy summer’s day. I would grab a glass from the shelf as I passed and fill it to the brim, using the metal ladle that hung from the lip of the churn.

  There were always tradesmen in and out of the hotel and that day some boxes of fruit and veg were being delivered. I recognized the lorry driver because I had seen him many times before, although I had never really engaged with him. He had never seemed particularly friendly. My mind focused on the cold drink I was going to fetch, I thought nothing of brushing past him on the pathway—until he grabbed me by the arm and pinned me against the wall with such force that my head cracked against it and I could feel the pebbledash pressing into my shoulder blades.

  He told me that if I made a noise I would be in so much trouble with my parents. If I close my eyes now, I can still feel his vice-like grip around my wrists. I remember the searing heat of the pain as tissues ripped and I remember a scream forming somewhere deep inside me that rose up through my body like a head of steam with no outlet for escape. To this day, I have a fearsome tolerance of pain and a tendency to endure it soundlessly.

  When he had finished, he brought his face down to mine. I can still recall the stench of his breath. He said I was to blame, that I was dirty and disgraceful. He said I had to keep what had passed between us a secret because if I told anyone I would never be believed. It would hurt my mother, she would call me a liar and she would never forgive me.

  I remember the sensation of warm blood trickling down my legs and a crushing feeling of shame mixed with fear as I ran up the back stairs to the bathroom on the first floor and locked the door. I stripped all my clothes away. I had to get clean so that nobody would ever know. I had to keep the secret. I tried so hard to wash the blood from my clothes so that my mother wouldn’t see it but I couldn’t get it all out and I began to panic. I realized I would have to “lose” them and think up a lie if my mother asked where they were. He was absolutely right: I was a liar.

  I ran a warm bath and I remember the shock of pain when I lay down in the water. I hadn’t been expecting the bubble bath to hurt. I lay there, alone. Traumatized but in control and thinking fast. I was not sure what had actually happened but, whatever it was, I was certain it was wrong and utterly convinced that I was guilty of something bad, which I could never share with anyone because I would be in awful trouble. I couldn’t cry. I chose to own both the physical and mental pain. I grew up that day. I may have gained a Harris line or two but in the process I lost my childhood.

  In many ways, it was a reflexive decision to leave those days of innocence behind me. With my friends I took on the role of the “sensible” one, the mother figure, the quiet one, the introvert and the thinker, and I carried the secret for nearly ten years, never uttering a word to a soul, trying hard to protect myself and those I loved from what I had done wrong. But then one day my mother threw one of her resentful comments at me—“Do what you want, you will anyway”—which was her way of rebuking me for my remoteness and self-sufficiency. By now I was a young woman. I decided it was time to tell her the truth.

  Then came the second wave of pain and the chilling acceptance that he had been right all along: she didn’t believe me. And she was clearly hurt. She accused me of making the whole thing up. Looking back, I think it was more a case of her not wanting to believe me. It was easier for her to tell herself that I was lying than have to face the ugly truth that I had been violently abused at such a young age and had chosen to lock it inside me for all those years rather than take her into my confidence. To be honest, I don’t think she would have coped either way as she never acknowledged the pain of life.

  What she said next was perhaps a clue that her reaction was born of defensiveness. While still refusing to accept that this had really happened to me, she made an oblique attempt to find out who was responsible. She threw a name at me and said that if this were true, it was probably him. That hit me very hard. The man she named had never been anything other than kind to me. A good man, a kind man, a flirt, a funny man who liked a good drink, but he had never hurt me. I was enraged on his behalf that he could be so glibly accused of someone else’s heinous crime. It instilled in me an early awareness, even if I didn’t at the time appreciate its full implications, of just how easy it can be to accuse someone wrongly, thereby setting up a chain of events that may ultimately destroy their life.

  The response of the second person I told couldn’t have been more different. I was a young woman and he was a much older man, a police officer. Jim tried to persuade me to identify my attacker so that he could be brought to justice. I simply couldn’t. There was no evidence, it would be his word against mine, and I just could not bear to relive every sordid detail with strangers who might judge me.

  But my policeman was what I needed: a father figure who was gentle, kind, caring, patient and understanding. Many did not understand our relationship, and most disapproved of the twenty-five-year age gap, but Jim was the one who held my hand and my heart until I healed as much as I ever would, and I will always be grateful for his genuine love and care. He died a couple of years ago at the good age of eighty-two. I wish I could have seen him just once more to tell him what a difference he made to my life.

  I have found myself able to be less cautious about acknowledging my experience as I have grown older. The man responsible is probably long dead, my parents have passed away and can no longer be hurt, and I have accepted that the guilt was never mine to own.

  I spoke of it in public for the first time while being interviewed by Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservative party, a tremendously caring and compassionate woman. I was astounded to find that I could talk quite openly, calmly and rationally to her about something that had been locked inside that box in my head for so long. I wish I’d had more courage when I was nine.

  My husband has been my best psychiatrist and counsellor over the many years we have been together, but the final healing is here, in these written words, almost exactly a half century later. Sharing my experience in this way is a conscious decision, and I do so with a salute to my long-lost, but never forgotten, Harris lines.

  Ruth asked me if the work I do on paedophile identification stems from my past. I had to think long and hard about this but I am certain that it does not. I didn’t become involved in that forensic area until I was well into my forties and already a longstanding wife and mother of three. The images I have to look at are, of course, distressing, but I do so with a detachment that confirms to me that it is work, not a personal crusade. In my job I have seen the
results of all manner of human suffering and in order to do it effectively, you have to be able to compartmentalize, and to focus on the life stories that both dead and living bodies have to tell you, at all times keeping them separate from your own life. As a head of CID once told me: “Don’t own the guilt. You didn’t cause it and you are not responsible for it.”

  Where my personal experience does have a bearing is in reminding me of the damage that can be done by those who accuse wrongly, or without evidence, or out of malice, and who may in the process ruin the life and reputation of an innocent person. So perhaps my sense of justice has its roots back in that dark and lonely childhood place, inhabited now by nothing but my memory. But I genuinely believe that the whole ethos of forensic science is to be unbiased, and what we strive to achieve is to see the right people on the right side of our prison bars. You are innocent until proven guilty by a jury of your peers, and that is the way it should be.

  ◊

  Forensic anthropologists know that the long bones of the limbs can be important in the analysis of human remains, yet they are frequently overlooked by other professionals. When they do take centre stage, it is often because there is no other part of the deceased available for examination.

  One such collection of limbs was discovered, ironically, by a police diving unit on a training exercise. Police officers working in all specialist areas, including mountain rescue and searching for and recovering bodies, train regularly to maintain and extend their skills, and this unit was diving off a pier on the shores of Loch Lomond.

  On their first dive of the day, they retrieved several packages wrapped in black plastic bin bags which, not surprisingly, they assumed had been dropped into the loch by training staff for them to find. However, once on land, they quickly realized that these were nothing to do with any training exercise.

  Inside the bin bags were real human body parts. The first to be uncovered was a severed hand, followed by another hand attached to a piece of forearm, then a foot and partial leg and, finally, a section of thigh. The officers immediately switched from training into operational mode.

  Further dives turned up all of the limbs, but as yet no head or torso. These two areas of the body are critical as they frequently bear the evidence of manner and cause of death, as well as being more likely to aid identification. The divers would keep searching.

  I was called to the mortuary to assist the pathologist in extracting what information we could from the dismembered sections of the upper and lower limbs. Identifying the victim was the priority, and any evidence we could find at this stage might put the police investigation on the front foot.

  Fingerprints and DNA did not match any records on the police databases, which meant that this was unlikely to be anyone with whom they’d had previous dealings. But as the remains were relatively fresh, I was able to advise that if this was someone listed on their missing persons database, it was likely to be someone whose disappearance had been reported only recently. This enabled the police to swiftly narrow down their search for individuals whose descriptions might match our body. And it turned out that the limbs had indeed been in the water for only one or two days.

  I was able to establish that the remains were those of a male, and that he had dark hair. This was evident from hair patterning on the forearms, hands, thighs, legs and feet. I could estimate his shoe size and calculate his height at just over 6 ft (1.8 m). His long bones had stopped growing but the fusion between the different parts was relatively recent, so he was likely to have been in his late teens or early twenties. Even though the hands and feet had been severed, which clearly pointed to murder and dismemberment, we detected extensive chafing marks. Had the young man been restrained and struggled forcefully? It was possible that the motive for dismemberment was in part to attempt to conceal these marks.

  A hit came back from the missing persons database suggesting a possible name for the victim. Barry, who had been missing for just a few days, was eighteen, had dark hair and was 6 ft 2 ins (1.9 m) tall. DNA was successfully extracted from the limb muscles, and a comparison with samples from his parents confirmed their worst nightmare.

  Barry’s torso was found further down the loch some days later, but this offered no further clues as to either the cause or the manner of his death. Several days after that, a woman was walking her dog along an Ayrshire beach, many miles south of Loch Lomond, when the dog showed interest in a plastic bag lying below the high-tide line. A quick kick to check what might be in it revealed what looked to be a human head. A DNA comparison with the limbs confirmed it as Barry’s. All the body parts had finally been recovered.

  By this time, from what they had learned of the killer’s modus operandi, the police had a strong suspect. It was accepted by criminologists and experienced police officers that William Beggs, a sexual predator who revelled in inflicting excruciating pain and torture, was well on his way to becoming a serial murderer. He had exhibited both the pattern of behaviour and the appetites associated with sadistic killers and being caught and imprisoned did not seem to deter him. It is likely that many of his early victims never came forward to report what they had witnessed or endured, through either fear or misplaced shame.

  Beggs liked to pick up young men from bars and nightclubs and take them back to his flat. He may have drugged them. One of his victims spoke of waking up in agonizing pain to find Beggs cutting symbols into the skin of his leg with a sharp blade. Beggs told him not to worry, it would all be over soon. The victim was so certain that his attacker’s intention was to kill him that he jumped, naked, from a second-floor window. If he was going to die one way or another, he reasoned that at least if he fell to his death they would find his body and Beggs would be caught. Against all odds, he survived and Beggs was duly arrested, convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.

  Beggs had served his time but he had learned from his mistakes and would continue to do so, improving his technique and taking care to reduce the risks of being caught. In a classic example of the pattern seen in serial offenders, his behaviour escalated and his rituals evolved. For example, he took to handcuffing victims at both the wrists and the ankles, perhaps to enhance the sexual theatre but also to prevent them from escaping.

  One night he picked up a young male student in a bar and took him back to his flat, where he manacled him before sexually assaulting him and, again, making cuts in his skin. He then cut his victim’s throat. Beggs tried to dismember this body but evidently found it more difficult than he’d expected.

  The human body is basically constructed of six parts: the head and torso form a midline axis, while the paired upper and lower limbs stick out from the side. The four limbs make a dead body a terribly unwieldy and heavy object to move, and difficult to hide. So when somebody decides to cut it up to make it easier to dispose of, separating it into five of its constituent parts is the most common approach. Dismembering a body into all six sections involves removing the head as well, which proves a step too far for some.

  The inexperienced dismemberer, and let’s face it most of us are, will probably attempt first to cut through the long bones. If they do, they will very swiftly find that this is an extremely difficult task. It requires the right tools, plenty of time, a suitable location and a good deal of stamina.

  On this occasion, Beggs gave up and dumped the body to decompose in woodland, where it was found by a member of the public. He was arrested and found guilty of sexual assault, aggravated murder and a long list of other charges. Someone with this past pattern of behaviour should clearly have been identified as a risk, yet he was to serve only two years of his sentence before being set free because an appeal was upheld on legal technicalities.

  It was after his release from this spell in prison that he encountered Barry, a popular teenager who was working in a local supermarket while he decided what he wanted to do with his life. He was considering a career in the Royal Navy. It was close to Christmas and he had been to his work’s party. By all accounts, he’d had
a good time and didn’t want the evening to end, even though he had already had a lot to drink. A friend offered to give him a lift home but Barry decided to go on to a local nightclub. It was the last time he was seen alive.

  Initially, his parents were not too concerned as they knew he’d been to the party, which he’d been looking forward to. They thought he had probably drunk too much and would be sleeping it off at a friend’s place. But when he failed to come home the next day they started to become concerned and, unable to track him down through his friends, they finally reported him missing.

  At the nightclub, Barry had somehow been befriended by Beggs and ended up back at his flat. There it is likely that he was drugged, handcuffed by his wrists and ankles, sexually assaulted and murdered. This time Beggs’s dismemberment technique was more successful. He cut Barry’s body into eight parts, removing his head. Removal of the head may have made a cut to the throat difficult to confirm as the evidence may have been obscured by the decapitation cuts. It is likely that he severed the hands and feet to obscure the marks of the manacles. Beggs wrapped the limbs and the torso in bin bags and dropped them into the loch. It was unlucky for him that this was precisely where the police divers would be training just a couple of days later.

  He kept Barry’s severed head for a little while longer. This he threw it into the sea from the back of a ferry to Belfast, which explained why it was found so far away. Shortly afterwards he fled to the Netherlands. He was extradited, brought back to face trial in the UK and jailed for a minimum of twenty years. With his sentence now approaching its end, there are, not surprisingly, concerns about the prospect of his release. Can someone demonstrating this pattern of perverted behaviour really be rehabilitated? I sincerely hope so.