Real Hard Cases

by Robert Jeffrey

  Suspicion soon fell on McDermott who had been so quick to get on the right side of the cops by offering his services to identify the body. A married man with two children, he lived near Tracey Waters. He appeared to have no obvious scratches but he was arrested and charged. He spent eleven weeks in Barlinnie before being released on the instruction of the Lord Mackay, the Lord Advocate. It became a big drama with mysterious overtones. McDermott’s legal team had made pleas for the charges to be dropped but without success but then Lord Mackay instructed the procurator fiscal at Paisley to order Adam McDermott to be released from jail. The precise reasons for this are not known but it was arranged. However, when the official instruction came through, it did not contain the vital words ‘No further proceedings to be taken’. I have some thoughts on that later in this tale.

  For eight years, McDermott continued to live locally at Kilbarchan, not far from Johnstone, but suddenly, in the late summer of 2001, he disappeared off the local radar. He was spotted visiting a post office and then he just appeared to vanish. By this time, he was divorced. He was a keen hillwalker and mountain biker who particularly enjoyed exploring the Loch Lomond area. This offered endless theories on what might have happened to him but disappeared he stayed.

  Three years after this new mystery, I was approached by Tracey’s mother. She told me what she knew of Tracey’s death and asked me to take a look at the case. Despite the fact that it had happened in the eighties and all the problems that can arise from following a cold trail, I said I would help if I could and so began a new investigation into a chilling crime. I wanted to help Margaret who, even after all the years, was still upset at the thought that she had been the cause of her daughter leaving the safety of their home.

  The close family all appeared to blame McDermott but I was not so sure. There were some things that just did not add up to a detective like me with so many years on the murder beat in Glasgow. Back to the Sherlock Holmes footprint bit. This footprint, which was found in the garden and attributed to the man the dog-walker had seen running away from the murder scene, had been made by a size ten shoe. McDermott’s shoe size was seven – small for a man. It could be argued that the act of running might have made the print larger but this did not wash with me – there could have been some small difference but not the difference between a size seven and a ten.

  McDermott’s lack of obvious scratches seemed to me highly significant. I was also aware that, fifteen months before Tracey’s death, there had been another murder – that of Pamela Hastie which is dealt with elsewhere in this book – and McDermott was not connected to this in any way.

  I contacted the CID at Johnstone and, even though so many years had gone by, I was delighted to find them prepared to assist and answer all my questions – something that doesn’t always happen when you approach a force about an unsolved murder on their patch. I asked if McDermott was still alive and it was established that, if he was, he was not drawing funds from any official source. The Waters Family believed that he was still alive and being supported by others. There was a theory that he was living with a woman in Helensburgh but the woman was traced and she had not seen him for years. An ex-associate of Adam McDermott calmly told me, ‘He was shot and buried in a shallow grave.’ He gave no more details and my suspicion is that it was not true but who knows?

  I have always been very interested in the increasing importance of DNA evidence in enquiries, especially some murders and serious crimes that, in the past, did not have the advantage of the latest developments in that field. I figured DNA might have been found on Tracey’s clothing and asked the Johnstone guys if that was the case. The reply was unexpected. ‘As far as the DNA goes, that line of inquiry has been exhausted.’ I suspected a problem and, a short time later, I put it more bluntly, asking, ‘Have you got Tracey’s clothing or not?’ I was told, ‘I can’t comment – let me get back to you.’

  It all became a little clearer on 13 April 2004. I was in Margaret Waters’ house that day when she was visited by two senior police officers. At my suggestion, she asked if they had Tracey’s clothing or not. She was told, ‘No, we cannot find the clothing.’ Any chance of a DNA match providing a new clue to this puzzling hard case had gone. It also sparked a thought in my inquisitive mind – could this be connected with the release of McDermott all these years ago? Was he freed when the police were instructed to lodge the productions in the case and some could not be found? Conjecture but …

  If Adam McDermott is or was innocent, then who killed Tracey? According to Johnstone CID, there was another suspect who took a size ten shoe and who did have scratches. However, the man was able to explain these potentially incriminating things away and he was cleared – though some locals still seem to believe he was the guilty party. The man with the dog who had seen the running suspect was sure the person he’d seen was too big to be McDermott. This curious case has sparked theories galore and still holds the attention of that odd little town Johnstone and anyone with an interest in justice. Would this truly hard case ever be resolved?

  Early in 2006, it was announced that a special cold case squad had been set up by Strathclyde Police. It is being led by Detective Superintendent Ken Watters, a man I know and a man respected by me and his colleagues as a dedicated and hard-working street-wise detective expected to achieve successful conclusions to a raft of difficult cases he has been given to examine. The case of Tracey Waters is on his list. I wish him well and will do anything I can to assist. For the sake of the still grieving relatives this is one case crying out for closure.

  7

  WHO WAS THE RUNNING MAN?

  In the tale of my investigations into the death of Tracey Waters, I made some observations on the little Renfrewshire town of Johnstone, mainly on the physical appearance of the place. But, back in the early eighties, Johnstone had another characteristic – for a long time it was a place gripped by fear, haunted by the fact that two young girls had been murdered there within fifteen months of each other. People looked over their shoulders and, in homes, pubs and shopping centres, folk speculated on why it happened on their patch, whether it could happen again and, most importantly of all, who the killers were – or, indeed, if the killings were linked, who the killer was. Murder in a small community can affect everyone, not just the families of the victims. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, many question marks still hang over the death of eleven-year-old Tracey in 1983 but equally puzzling was the death of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Pamela Hastie, late in 1981.

  It is odd that, in a place that does not normally make the headlines, two young girls should have been murdered so close together. It is almost spooky that, in each case, a suspect had been arrested and there is now real doubt whether or not the cops had the right guy. With the possibility in my mind that there might be a link, I, nevertheless, decided to investigate the murder of Pamela Hastie separately from that of Tracey.

  On a cold November day in 1981, Pamela took a decision that was to cost her her life. Walking home from school to Tower Road, Johnstone, she took a short cut through an area known as Rannoch Woods, an inhospitable and threatening spot at the best of times but an ugly place in the November gloom. She never got home. The inevitable search of likely areas for a missing body began and she was found raped and strangled in the woods.

  My inquiry got an early break when I learned that the officer who had initially been in charge of the murder investigation was Detective Superintendent Jim Brown. Jim and I went a long way back, as they say, and, indeed, he had been my boss when I worked out of Cranstonhill Police Station many years before in the early days of my career as a detective. Jim had been a good boss. We worked well together and had a measure of success on the tough streets around Cranstonhill. Being able to talk to him in 2003 was a great help.

  We both looked back over what had happened in Johnstone in the 1980s. In the autumn of 1981, a local youth, Raymond Gilmour, was arrested on several charges of indecent exposure. Some of the incidents were alleg
ed to have taken place in Rannoch Woods. It is worth noting that, at this time, Gilmour was known as a ‘flasher’ and one of the places he would do this was in Rannoch Woods. He was such a familiar figure that it was said schoolgirls using the short cut used to wave to him in his hiding place in the bushes and have a good giggle. They were clearly unaware of the potential danger of their actions. Gilmour pled guilty to the indecent exposure offences and was placed on probation. Shortly after this, he was arrested and charged with the murder of Pamela Hastie.

  In June 1982, he was found guilty and sentenced to life. By a remarkable coincidence, I was in the High Court that day as a witness in another trial. I was sitting beside Jim Brown when the verdict was declared. Brown gasped so loudly that the judge looked over to where we were sitting but the significance of that gasp of shock was only to emerge later.

  Gilmour’s defence team had claimed that a confession he made had been beaten out of him by the police – a common enough plea in murder cases when all else fails. Every cop knows the dangers of that game. Indeed, on one occasion, I was the victim of such a false claim. That time a murder suspect had given a voluntary statement before his solicitor arrived at the police station. When the man’s legal representative did arrive, this legal eagle, in front of me and without turning a hair, calmly told his client not to worry about what he had said as ‘we’ll just say the statement was battered out of you’!

  In the Johnstone case, Gilmour’s so-called confession featured large in the legal processes that eventually got him out of jail after twenty-one years. It was riddled with inaccuracies that destroyed its credibility and it looked as if it could well have been forced out of him.

  But back to my Search for Justice investigation. I knew how Jim Brown worked and beating confessions out of an accused was not his style at all. Once I’d got further into the case, I discovered something that made me think again about the confession and whether or not it was obtained by duress. It appears that, for some reason, the top men at police HQ were unhappy about the pace of Jim’s investigation. They instructed Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Craig to take over the case. Craig, now dead, was a cop of different stripe from Jim Brown and me – where we were painstaking investigators who were prepared to take our time, Craig was always a man in a hurry. He had already had a controversial career and I surmised that, once Charlie Craig was in charge and with Gilmour a strong suspect, Craig would have gone for the jugular.

  I was aware that, at the time when Gilmour was brought to the police office, Brown had remarked that he, Gilmour, had a slight bruise on his face. When asked how it happened, Gilmour said that one of the officers had struck him.

  But the Search for Justice inquiry turned up another remarkable piece of evidence that would work in Gilmour’s favour. My co-founder Bryan Davies had heard a story in a pub about a man who was driving a hospital van past Rannoch Woods at the approximate time of the murder. This driver told of a man running from the woods and colliding with his van. The running man was knocked to the ground but he picked himself up and disappeared into the distance before the van driver could do much about it. The national and local press are always helpful in inquiries with appeals for witnesses and the like. It helps them to keep stories going and it make for good PR with police and public. And, if the press appeal turns up anything of significance, the paper can trumpet its success.

  In this case, the place to start was with the popular local Paisley Daily Express. If we could find the van driver, it could potentially be dynamite. But this was September 2003 – more than twenty years after the murder. Were we on a wild goose chase? Apparently not! On the very day the front-page story appeared, the reporter who had written it phoned to say the van driver wanted to speak to me.

  I went to see Andrew Henderson in his home and the first thing he said was, ‘Mr Brown, why are you doing this?’ My reply was to the effect that I was trying to find the man who had murdered Pamela Hastie. The response I got to that was, ‘That’ll do me – how can I help?’ I took an instant liking to this guy – he struck me as a good witness and, believe me, I have had a lot of experience in this area weeding out the chancers from the real thing. Henderson was a solid witness.

  What he went on to tell me and the manner he used will stay with me for a very long time. On the day of Pamela’s murder he had been driving his NHS van through a T-junction adjacent to Rannoch Woods when, without warning, a man, coming from the direction of the woods, collided with the front offside of the van. For a few seconds, this man’s face was pressed against the windscreen of the van, about eighteen inches from Andrew himself. There is no doubt that Andrew Henderson had a good look at the running man and he described him as aged around forty and heavily built. The man’s eyes had made a particular impression on Andrew – he said they ‘burned right through me’. The man was wearing a jacket with a hood and both men swore at each other about the collision before he moved off. One thing was certain – this was not Raymond Gilmour.

  I listened to all this and then asked Andrew whether he thought he would know the man if he saw him again. The reply was chilling. He claimed, ‘Yes, I have seen him again since that day – on television. The man who ran into my van was Robert Black.’ He elaborated on this and explained how, years later, he had been watching TV with friends and a news programme showed a prisoner being escorted into a prison van. He immediately exclaimed to his friends that the man on the screen was the man who ran into the van. The man on the news was Robert Black, the infamous child killer. Black, a lorry driver from England, had been convicted of murdering three young girls and attempting to abduct another. He is serving life with a minimum of thirty-five years and, since his conviction, Black has kept making headlines and has been linked with as many as fifteen other child murders in six countries.

  The next part of the story made unpleasant listening. The day after the collision with the running man, Andrew had taken his van to the police command vehicle where the inquiry was being coordinated and told the cops there what had happened the day before on the edge of Rannoch Woods. He suggested that, since the running man had placed both hands on the bonnet of the van, it might be possible to obtain fingerprints from it. Amazingly, this obvious suggestion was ignored.

  Telling me all this brought back memories for Andrew and he became visibly upset. He explained that he felt he could have done more at the time of the murder. I pointed out he had properly reported the matter and given the police access to the van to look for prints. He was blameless. What else could he have done? Nothing. But, nonetheless, Andrew Henderson said to me, ‘If it was Robert Black, these other murders could have been prevented.’

  We went on to talk further and I said I had to point out that now everyone knew about Robert Black and his murderous activities he, Andrew, might be accused of jumping on a bandwagon when he claimed a similarity between the running man and Black all these years later. With another remarkable disclosure, he seemed to blow that notion out of the water right away and he also showed just how reliable a witness he was. He told me that if I checked with the police, I would find that, a few weeks after the murder, he had been asked to help produce an identikit picture of the running man. He asked me to compare the picture he produced with Black’s picture.

  Naturally, I went to the cops about this and they confirmed that there had been such an identikit made but now they were unable to find it! I have, however, to say that identikits are subject to wide variation and can prompt incorrect identification. Remember the famous Bible John poster? The lives of dozens of innocent folk who did bear striking resemblances to the image were thrown into turmoil. The likeness to the poster was so strong in these cases that neighbours or workmates reported them to the police.

  In the midst of all this I telephoned Jim Brown at his home for another natter on the case. I got straight to the point and asked if he thought Raymond Gilmour had murdered Pamela Hastie. My old boss was unequivocal and said, no, he didn’t and this was from the officer initiall
y in charge of the investigation. When I asked him if he had a particular reason for this stance, he then made some telling points. One of them was that Pamela’s body was found at a spot thick with the plants known as sticky willies. Jim told me that everyone who attended the scene was covered in the little sticky balls that come off the plants and cling on to your clothes. Days later, cops were still picking sticky willies off their uniforms. There was no trace of this on Gilmour’s clothing or in his house or anywhere else he had been.

  I went on to ask Jim if he was aware a witness had come forward on the day of the murder claiming that a man, running from the direction of the Rannoch Woods at the material time, had collided with his van. Jim Brown replied that he could recall the incident and that some of the detectives working on the case thought this running man was a viable suspect. All this begs the question: why was this lead not followed up? Jim Brown told me I would need to ask others that question. Finally, I asked if, at a later date, it had ever been suggested that the running man was Robert Black. The answer was no.

  In addition to Jim Brown, I spoke to other retired senior detectives who had worked on the case. They could recall the running man colliding with the van and remembered that they had called him the ‘puffing man’. It seems incredible now that this line was not followed up. One reason was obviously that Gilmour had come into the frame and other suspects were not investigated thoroughly enough. To me, it seems like what you might call a rush to injustice.