Real Hard Cases

by Robert Jeffrey

  This book is dedicated to:

  Moira Anderson

  Annie Davies

  Innes Ewart

  Jacqueline Gallagher

  Pamela Hastie

  John Kidd

  Renee and Andrew MacRae

  Kevin McLeod

  Tracey Waters

  Ann Whittle

  Sadie Young

  CONTENTS

  TITLE

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  1 FATAL FALLS AND POLICE FLAWS

  2 PIRATES OF THE LONDON ROAD

  3 LIFE AND DEATH ON THE STREETS

  4 HELL IN A HOLIDAY CAMP

  5 MYSTERY IN THE SNOW

  6 THE GIRL WHO WENT TO THE PUB

  7 WHO WAS THE RUNNING MAN?

  8 SERIOUS RETAIL REFRESHMENT – FREE

  9 DEATH AT THE FRUIT MARKET

  10 THE VAN THAT NEVER WAS

  11 AN ARMCHAIR, A FILM ON TV AND A DOG

  12 INSIDE JOB ON AN INSIDE JOB!

  13 DEATH UNDER THE WHEELS

  14 THE BODY BEHIND THE DOOR

  15 WHAT LIES BENEATH THE A9?

  INDEX

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  Once a detective, always a detective. The buzz of an investigation never goes away. A mystery is hard to resist, an unsolved mystery even more so. After twenty-six years in Strathclyde Police, mostly dealing with murders on the streets of this violent city, I retired from the force. There followed seventeen years working for the Federation Against Copyright Theft. The mysteries I encountered in this work may have been less bloody but they were often just as intriguing and it was certainly more entertaining trying to curb video pirates and the like than it was hunting down axe murderers and perverts.

  Once this second strand to my career as an investigator ended, it was not long before I was back in the thick of violent death and unsolved mysteries. The tabloids always have close links with what is going on in the streets and, when the Sunday Mail highlighted the death of Annie Davies of Erskine in May 1998 in a series of features on this unsolved case, they turned to me – four years later – for help. As part of their ongoing examination of the case, one of their top reporters, Marion Scott, asked me to visit old Annie’s family to see if I could help in a mystery surrounding her death – murder or accident? – which seemed to be defeating the police. The publicity surrounding all this resulted in the forming of an organisation called A Search for Justice. Initially, it was started by me and Annie’s son Bryan who was relentlessly pursuing the mysteries surrounding his mother’s death. Others who felt they had been ill served by the police or other investigators soon joined A Search for Justice. A professional computer consultant was brought on board and grateful relatives of the victims of crime donated money to finance the work. We had a big caseload though some requests were politely declined – like the case of a Bearsden man who wanted help in a battle with his neighbours over the height of a hedge. ‘We don’t do hedges,’ he was told.

  But, in early 2006, came trouble. I took it upon myself to agree to help the staff of the Scottish Criminal Records Office in their fight for what they saw as justice in the controversial Shirley McKie fingerprints case. This did not please Bryan Davies and the others in the organisation and a decision was taken to disband it. I learned of this on the organisation’s website. I have not spoken to Bryan Davies since that day. Sadly, an organisation dedicated to helping victims of injustice had been swept away. But this book tells some of the intriguing stories I investigated for the group and covers many other mysteries from my long and satisfying career as a detective.

  Some of these tales are critical of the police but the reader should be aware that there are a million reported crimes every year in Scotland and, as in every walk of life, things can go wrong on occasion.

  Les Brown

  1

  FATAL FALLS AND POLICE FLAWS

  High on the list of scenarios for the perfect murder is death by falling from a high place. ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’ is no joke. Some of the most difficult crime investigations have centred on incidents on mountaintops. When two people are in a high, dangerous place, there are no witnesses on a bleak windswept mountain and not a CCTV camera for miles around. If someone falls to his or her death, who is to know if it was a slip made by a perhaps inexperienced mountaineer or if the fatal plunge came after a gentle nudge by an enemy?

  And it is not necessary to fall thousands of feet to die or even to slip off a cliff. In my ‘search for justice’, I came on two truly puzzling cases in which the victims did not fall too far but it was far enough for them to die. Both involved young men from the north of Scotland. Both appear to show that the police investigations, from as far apart as Wick and London, were sadly lacking in commitment. And they also show, to my mind, the classic error in an investigation of making up your mind too quickly and accepting a convenient explanation for facts that are much more complex than they might appear at the moment of the discovery of a death.

  The first of these mysteries concerns the fate of twenty-seven-year-old Innes Ewart, a personable young man from Inverness brought up by loving parents in that most pleasant of areas. He was found dead on a pavement adjacent to a car park several storeys high in Stratford, East London, on 21 January 2001, not far from what will be the site of the 2012 Olympics.

  He was only supposed to be passing through London that tragic weekend. Innes was intelligent and well educated with many friends in Scotland and abroad. Like many of today’s youngsters, his field was information technology and he worked in the industry for a computer outfit in Munich. He was undoubtedly good at the job and he was held in high esteem by his employers and colleagues. But, like a lot of young folk, he may have been a tad impetuous and, at short notice, on 19 January, he suddenly decided to leave Germany and return home. A good-looking young fellow, he had a girlfriend in Germany and perhaps one of the reasons he decided to go home was that they had fallen out. Alternatively, he could simply have been homesick and, working in an industry where it is relatively easy to switch jobs, he just chose to head home to Scotland.

  At any rate, with his mind made up, he acted decisively. He handed in his notice, cleared out his flat and withdrew 3000 marks from his bank account. He travelled to London with the intention of catching the overnight sleeper north to the Highlands. He then discovered that the sleeper did not run on the Saturday night. So he changed his plans, intending to stay in London that night and take the train on the Sunday night. It was a move that was to cost him his life. On arrival at Euston, he left his suitcase in the left luggage there.

  By this time, he had converted his German marks into sterling – around £1000 – and, with the cash in his wallet and carrying a holdall filled with computer programmes that represented his life’s work, he then did something that remains unexplained – he travelled to Stratford in the East End. It is an old joke that tourists in London see Stratford on the destination board of a red bus and assume that it is going to the birthplace of William Shakespeare. But Innes Ewart was clearly not that naive. Maybe he was en route to a look up an old friend or maybe he had just seen a film that he wanted to see advertised as showing at a cinema there. Maybe he felt it would be better to go the cinema there than in the expensive West End. Whatever the reason for the so-far unexplained journey, he arrived in Stratford around half past two in the afternoon and bought a ticket in a multi-screen for a film that was due to start in ten minutes’ time. He never saw it. A few minutes after he had bought the ticket, two men unloading a delivery van nearby, at the rear of some shops, heard a thud and saw the body of Innes lying on the ground a few yards from them. His personal belongings were not with him – the £1000 in cash w
as gone as was the holdall with the IT material that was so valuable to him. There was also no sign of an expensive Raymond Weil wristwatch his mother Pat had given him as a Christmas present. The police were alerted and an officer travelled in the ambulance taking Innes to the hospital.

  The immediate assumption of the London cops was that Innes had thrown himself off the roof of the car park and his mum and dad were informed by the police in Inverness that their son had committed suicide. Right from the start, this was strange. You don’t need to have been in the police force for very long when you realise that suicide jumpers tend to choose really tall buildings to jump from. They will do so to ensure that they die rather than risk survival and the painful injuries that throwing themselves from more modest heights might result in.

  So it is little wonder that, 600 or so miles away from the scene of their son’s death, Ron and Pat Ewart could not believe what they were hearing. The incident, in their view, had not been properly investigated and countless pleas to the authorities to conduct a more thorough investigation went unheeded. They turned to me as the co-founder of A Search for Justice and someone known to be interested in taking up unsolved ‘hard cases’ for help. I travelled north where, naturally, I found Innes’s parents distraught. It is always difficult to cope with such shocking news, especially when it is delivered on your doorstep out of the blue. I was immediately struck by this likeable couple’s totally unshakable conviction that their son would not and did not take his own life. They were sure he was not on medication or depressed. At that first meeting, they convinced me Innes would not have committed suicide and, in the years since, I have continued to believe, as they do, that this was no suicide.

  I made myself as aware of the details of the case as I could. I then contacted Stratford police and I was put through to a senior female police officer who, on listening to me introduce myself and my interest, said, ‘Yes, the boy who jumped off the roof of the car park.’ I did not like this one bit and, after some argy-bargy, I asked if there was a Scottish police officer available to talk to me. I was put through to a guy who was originally from Coatbridge – progress. He confirmed that the consensus of opinion in the local CID was that Innes had committed suicide. I said to him, ‘If you can tell me what happened to his watch, I’ll hang up and that’s the last you’ll hear from me.’ He couldn’t and I didn’t.

  I made the obvious points. Why would a person bent on killing himself buy a cinema ticket minutes before his death? Why would he jump from a roof that wasn’t particularly high? Why was there no money on the body minutes after he’d paid for his ticket? I got no satisfactory answers.

  I thought long and hard about the perplexing facts before coming up with, to my mind, a more realistic scenario than that swallowed by the London cops. I figured that, after he had bought the ticket, Innes must have stepped outside the cinema for a moment and been mugged. Muggings are not in the least unusual in this area. One man, or perhaps two, armed with a knife or firearm, could have spotted the holdall and taken it and the money and the watch. My training as a detective and my instinct make me believe the mugger(s) may have been watching the cinema queue looking for suitable targets. The flashy watch may have caught their eye and perhaps Innes’s accent convinced them that here was an out-of-towner ripe for attack. It is common for folk attacked in this way to try anything to get their property back. Innes could have run after his assailants to try at least to snatch the holdall with his valuable computer programmes back. Muggers like a quick getaway and perhaps they had left a car on the roof of the car park and Innes could have caught up with them there. I believe this is what happened and, when he challenged them, the muggers then threw Innes from the roof.

  I told my theory to the London detective and said that it would suggest that such attacks were far from rare in the area. I was staggered on the reply – ‘In a good week, we get fifty such robberies and, in a bad week, we can get eighty.’ My next question was obvious – ‘Is all this consistent with my theory of what happened to Innes?’ ‘Very much so,’ was the answer. Incidentally I later discovered that the late Tony Banks, former Sports Minister, had been the victim of a similar attack – and he was the MP for the area.

  At a Coroner’s Inquest in Walthamstow in August 2001, an open verdict was recorded. After numerous meetings with Innes’s, parents, we decided to try to enlist the help of the TV programme Crimewatch UK. In particular, we thought the exposure might help to trace the distinctive watch but, unfortunately, we never ended up on the programme. Inverness MP David Stewart helped in the search for new evidence and he even spoke to the Home Secretaries David Blunkett and Charles Clarke about it.

  There was, however, another line of inquiry. I had been shown photographs of the area and it was obvious that there were CCTV cameras galore in the area of the cinema and the adjoining streets. The car park had cameras covering entrance and exit and one of them had caught Innes leaving the lift area for the top floor of the car park. The image showed that he was not carrying anything. One of the police officers attending the death scene spoke to the assistant manager of the cinema who confirmed that the camera covering the premises’ entrance was operating. He assumed the police would take it but they did not.

  The years of anguish continued for Innes’s parents and, in October 2005, a divisional commander travelled all the way from London to talk to them but his visit did not really shed any light on the situation. As a former serving detective, I find such a visit odd – could this have been the London police showing signs of a collective guilty conscience?

  The Ewarts have not given up trying to find out what happened to their son and they are hoping a second inquest will be held. In July 2006, Mrs Ewart told the Sunday Post that they had spoken to lawyers in England about such a move which the Attorney General could grant if he feels ‘there has been a lack of investigation’. She said that it is a last resort and, even if it didn’t provide all the answers, ‘it could point the finger at those who didn’t do their job’. At the original inquest the coroner, Dr Elizabeth Stearns, said she returned an open verdict because she was not satisfied that Innes killed himself, albeit that there was no evidence of third party involvement. In her view:

  [T]he police may have concluded that the death was not suspicious but they should not state that Innes killed himself. I believe the evidence has not fully disclosed how Innes came by his death. I would support any measure which might shed further light on the death.

  David Stewart MP has fought hard for the Ewarts, a pleasant well-to-do couple with a successful business background. The MP says there has been a serious miscarriage of justice. I agree and I think anyone who has looked at the story will too – except perhaps the Met. That police force, which closed the case a few short hours after the finding of the body, said of the request for a second inquest:

  The death was investigated and a full report submitted to the coroner. An inquest recorded an open verdict. There are no further active lines of inquiry. However, we would support anything the family seek to achieve regarding further information.

  In my view, a proper investigation back in 2001 would have solved the problem.

  The mysterious of the death of Innes Ewart was played out in the grubby streets of London’s violent East End. Some four years earlier, in far different surroundings, an equally puzzling death occurred, again after a fall. This time the scene was the picturesque harbour of Wick in far north Scotland, a place that attracts tourists to stroll around breathing the fresh air whistling in off the cold North Sea. It is not the sort of place you expect to find a mystery of the did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed? variety. Yet the unexplained death of twenty-five-year-old electrician Kevin McLeod is a classic of the kind.

  Kevin had been born and raised in the fishing town, the oldest of three sons of Hugh McLeod and his wife June. He left school at fifteen and served his time as an electrician and, at the time of his death, he was working with a company called Rockwater at Wester.

  In view of wha
t happened to poor Kevin it is important to say right away that his family were adamant that he was a good son and known for his good behaviour. In particular they say that they had never seen him under the influence of drink. A great passion in life was his car, a speedy Ford Sierra Cosworth, which he lavished much time on, keeping it well fettled and using it mainly at weekends. He had a fiancée, Emma, who worked in the town as a nurse. They had planned to marry on 30 May 1997. They had been allocated a council house in Wick and, in time-honoured fashion, they spent time preparing it for the big day when they would move in after their wedding and honeymoon. Like many young folk, they roped in the family to help with the wallpapering and painting. They had a happy future to look forward to.

  The dark cloud that was to burst over the lives of Kevin and Emma formed at the beginning of February, some three months before the wedding. It was Friday the seventh and weekends were always busy for Kevin’s dad who played guitar in a local band. Early that evening, he was setting up for a gig in a local club where the band had been booked to entertain the punters that night. Kevin and his mum took the opportunity to pop up to the new house to do some decorating work and Emma was down south in Glasgow for a fitting of her wedding dress. Kevin returned from the new house around 10 p.m. He had a quick shower and he was barely dry when his friend Mark Foubister called to pick Kevin up for a game of pool at Carters’ Bar in the town.

  The first signs of concern emerged on the Saturday morning when there was no sign of Kevin looking for his breakfast and then it was found that his bed had clearly not been slept in that night. Hugh and June were anxious – this was not normal – and they tried to contact Mark by phone but without success. They then decided to get the car out and go looking for Kevin. By sheer luck, they soon came on Mark sitting in his car parked at the roadside and they drew alongside.