Real Hard Cases

by Robert Jeffrey

  Detectives from ‘A’ Division concentrated their investigations on Gordon Street and the nearby area, including doing a careful check on the results of enquiries into cars stolen from the area. It was thorough work. We made door-to-door enquiries in houses both at the scene of the original accident and around the area where the car was found. We found one witness who had been walking in Caledonia Road and described a car driving past at speed and making a noise consistent with something being dragged underneath it. This witness claimed to be able to give a detailed description of the driver despite the fact that the interior of the car was in darkness. It didn’t seem possible but, in our efforts to solve this horrific crime, we tried an experiment. I arranged for a detective who I did not know to drive a car at a fast speed along Caledonia Road in a recreation of what had happened when Sadie Young died. Along with Detective Superintendent Alex Sampson, I walked the route and waited for the cop car to hurtle past. When it did, neither of us had a ‘Scooby’, as they say, who the driver was. Our witness was either a fantasist or an optimist.

  We had little to go on and soon realised the only way ahead was the sheer slogging hard work of turning over anything that could remotely help. We went to the extent of producing a list of all known car thieves on the south side and they got a knock at their doors. Every car that had been stolen from Gordon Street in the immediate past was traced and gone over forensically and, in particular, searched for fingerprints. Active criminals, bank robbers and the like, who were known to use stolen cars on jobs, were traced and interviewed. Even the most hardened criminals had been sickened by the details of Sadie’s death and they helped us as much as they could – some even suggested the names of possible suspects.

  There was an interesting sidebar to this aspect of the enquiry. We lifted one suggested suspect who had been fingered by the underworld and he was put into an identity parade but not picked out. However, a few weeks later, as part of another investigation, this guy took cops into a remote woodland in Aberdeenshire and pointed out the grave of a man he had murdered and whose body he had buried.

  We kept the file on the death of Sadie Young open for a long, long time and we threw everything we had at it but no one was ever brought to book for her death. This was a hard case indeed – too hard for us to crack. But I had my theories. Many armed robbers were active in the south side at the time. The incident happened on a Sunday night. Was the Cortina stolen for use on a robbery at a post office or bank on the Monday morning? We arrested all the members of one particular gang in connection with an armed raid on a post office van in the Gorbals. This lot had a flat in the Dennistoun area and were responsible for several such robberies. Prior to each hit they had gone to the city centre to steal a car – the way they operated fitted a pattern. But they were no ordinary armed thugs – they were part of a paramilitary group with political leanings and their robberies had a political dimension. The stolen cash was to be used in attempts to overthrow the government. They were very dangerous people – something that was corroborated by the fact that no one ever grassed on them. The consequences would be too dangerous. However, after their arrest, they were found guilty of the raid on the post office van in the Gorbals and given long sentences.

  Because of my theory, I interviewed the ringleader but it was a waste of time. He was not talking about hit and runs or indeed anything at all. On the day after his arrest, this guy attempted to jump through the court window. Only an alert escorting officer stopped him making it out on to the streets.

  Car thefts, then as now, were appallingly frequent. Teenagers are often to blame and a frequent ploy was to nick a car and do a few speedy blasts cruising around seeking some old lady who looked as if she had a few dollars in her handbag, snatch the bag and then disappear into the distance in the stolen motor. I remember one such incident well. This time we took the stolen car back to the scene and set up a roadblock. Every motorist who passed through at the material time was stopped and interviewed. We created massive tailbacks but, when Joe Public learned of the cause of the delay, they had no complaints. ‘Catch the bastards!’ was the most common comment.

  This sort of stop-and-search exercise can produce some surprises. The massive one during the search for Sadie’s killer uncovered numerous incidences of stolen cars in the city. One thief admitted having stolen around fifty cars in the previous six months – two a week. Another was ‘motoringly challenged’ as he told us he could not drive a car with a manual gearshift but he had still managed to steal twenty vehicles from the city centre! We got all sorts of strange tales. One guy said he had been a passenger in a stolen car when it was in a collision. Naturally, in these far off days, he was not wearing his seat belt and he went through the windscreen headfirst into the front garden of a house. His driver had not hung around after the crash and the passenger had lain unconscious for hours before he was discovered. We had to check this one out and we got another surprise. What he had told us was true and we discovered that a female passenger in the other car had died as a result of the collision. We arrested him on the spot and then handed him over to the division concerned.

  Hit-and-runs are, sadly, too common but, at one stage in the Sadie Young case, it almost became a strange case of ‘hit-and-tell’ rather than hit-and-run. A suspect, a well-built youth around six feet tall and sporting a heavy growth of beard, had been brought into the office. He looked at least eighteen but turned out to be fourteen. He said he was the driver of the hit-and-run car. We were immediately suspicious. We grilled him on his story and it wasn’t long before we could pick holes in his claim – he simply did not know the details of the crime. After a while, he gave in and told us that he was anxious to help us solve the crime. He was some talker and his next tale was to the effect that he had stolen a van-load of furniture from the Govanhill area and taken it to Easterhouse where he had given it to a priest as a gift, no doubt for distribution to the poor or whatever. This time he was telling the truth. The owners of the van and the furniture were reunited with their property and the priest got a word in his ear about accepting such gifts from fourteen-year-olds.

  This youngster was obviously at the start of a career in crime and I remembered him a couple of years later. A girl had been raped at knifepoint and when she described her young attacker – now apparently six-feet-four tall – I remembered the would-be hit-and-run driver. We put him into an identify parade and he was picked out, locked up and sent to a young offenders’ institution. At least that was a success but it still rankles with me that our fourteen weeks of relentless grind, all the door knocking, all the searches and all the road traps, had not uncovered the monster who drove a car with a horribly injured and dying woman trapped underneath it around the streets of Glasgow.

  14

  THE BODY BEHIND THE DOOR

  When a detective looks back on a life of crime fighting, it is natural that the hard cases, the big mysteries, the complex investigations, the times when the head hits the brick wall, are those that are remembered best. Easy cases? Yes, I encountered some in my many years in the police and other investigative organisations but not many. Crime is seldom simple and the harder the case, the more impact it makes on your life. Some can actually change it completely and that’s what happened with my involvement in the hunt to find the truth about the death of old Annie Davies, a hunt that was a turning point in my life. It was to draw me into years of private detection with A Search for Justice. During those years I tried to bring some mental peace to victims of violent crime.

  Like many a life-changing moment, it started with a phone ringing and, as is often the case with interesting calls, this one came from a reporter – Marion Scott of the Sunday Mail. Down the years, the paper has kept a close and efficient watch on the criminal goings-on in Glasgow, a city whose crime scene is as active now as it has ever been. The date of the fateful call was 8 March 2002. For years, the Mail had been taking an interest in the suspicious death of eighty-three-year-old Annie Davies. Now they wanted my help and
Marion asked me to contact old Annie’s son, Bryan, at Erskine.

  I was aware of background to the case, as were the many thousands of the Mail’s readers who followed the story. Old Annie had been found dead behind her front door at the foot of a steep staircase on 30 May 1998. The discovery was made on a Saturday, not the best of days to get the assistance of top policemen. Crime and crime fighting are round-the-clock operations but the cops are only human and, later in the story of the strange death of Annie Davies, I speculate what effect the day of her death had on the investigation.

  As the Mail had asked, I visited the Davies Family and met Bryan and his wife Lesley. After the usual introductory remarks from both sides, we got down to business. According to Bryan, the police had come to the conclusion, right from the start, that Annie had lost her balance when going down the stairs and fallen heavily. This had led to her choking to death on her dentures.

  Bryan went on to explain that, on the day of the discovery of her death, Annie’s postman was doing his rounds as usual at 7.30 a.m. when he noticed Annie’s door was slightly ajar, held open in that position by a pair of specs which were folded, not open. Postmen and milkmen are not strangers to unusual sights on doorsteps but the postie admitted later that he had seen many a thing behind or around doors but never a door held open by a pair of closed specs. However, he didn’t open the door any further and it was late afternoon before the body was discovered.

  A next-door neighbour, whose front door shared the same foyer, noticed the specs jamming the door and pushed it open to find the horrifying sight of the eighty-four-year-old lying dead. The neighbour picked up the specs, climbed the stairs to Annie’s flat and telephoned an ambulance and also put a call through to Bryan and Lesley. The paramedics and Bryan and Lesley arrived almost simultaneously and it was perhaps fortunate that it was almost dark by now and the family was spared the full horror of the terrible injuries to Annie’s face.

  Soon after, two uniformed cops, a detective sergeant and a woman detective constable, arrived. The ambulance crew confirmed to them that old Annie was dead. The detective sergeant told Bryan, ‘Your mother has fallen downstairs.’ and went on with the routine ritual of getting family details etc. into his notebook. On 1 June, Bryan and his brother Fred, who had travelled up from England, were given back the keys of the house. It is of some significance that these keys were a spare set held by Bryan in case of an emergency. To this day, Annie’s own keys have never been found. During the sad and emotional task of looking round his late mother’s house, Bryan discovered that not only were her keys not to be found, there was no sign of her handbag or purse.

  The realisation that something was seriously amiss and that it was too pat to say the old lady had fallen down the stairs began to dawn on the two brothers. Annie often carried large sums in her bag or purse, something that was known to local folk. And there is the fact that, when she went to the local shops and paid for her shopping, it would be easy for folk to see that the old lady had quite a bit of cash on her. By checking back from the entries in her bankbook, it could be calculated that she might have had around £2000 in cash in the house at the time of her death.

  Like all detectives, I believe that little things can tell you a lot and, during my first meeting with the Davies Family, I was intrigued by the situation of the specs. If, as the police believed, Annie had fallen down the stairs, how had she managed to open the door? If she had been expecting a caller or had wanted to let somebody she knew in, she would have used the intercom at the top of the stairs to open the door. Right from the start, I suggested to her family that the more likely thing was that she had come down the stairs, holding the folded specs in one hand and using her free hand to grip the wall rail. This scenario had her opening the door and, just as she did so, someone on the outside kicked it in so hard that it smashed into her face, causing her to fall backwards with the specs spinning from her hand to land at the door. The assailant would then run upstairs, see the handbag or purse, which he may have known to be normally well stocked with readies, lift it and exit the house as swiftly as he could. The door had a spring to shut it and this could have led to the specs being pushed into the position in which they were found.

  It was all a puzzle and it seemed like a good idea to go back to the house. There, with the permission of the new occupant, we experimented with the original specs, dropping them from various places and heights, but we never got them to finish up outside the door. There was another astonishing development – when you looked at the outside of the door from an oblique angle you could clearly see the outline of the heel of shoe on the paint at the appropriate height for someone kicking the door in. Remember this was four years after old Annie had died. I levelled with Bryan and told him that, at this stage, I strongly suspected his mother had been robbed and murdered.

  On hearing this, Bryan remembered a strange conversation back at the time of the discovery of the body. He told me that, when a cop returned the keys of the house, he said, ‘Your mother was murdered. We call it a run-through robbery.’ He then pointed out that he didn’t work for the division handling the case. I asked Bryan to describe the officer who had handed over the keys and he did, saying, ‘He was about six foot four and looked like a film star.’ In a moment of light relief, I figured he had just eliminated ninety-nine per cent of the members of Strathclyde Police Force. More seriously, later on, when Bryan was attempting to identify this officer, he was told by a senior officer that the description did not match anyone on the inquiry or in ‘K’ Division. On hearing this, I was a bit taken aback and drove to Barrhead Police Office in time to catch the back shift being briefed. The officer on duty gave me permission to speak to the guys and, when asked about this so-called tall cop with the Hollywood good looks, three people said they recognised the description and they all named the same person! He did exist but his observation did not significantly affect the case. I did not make contact with this officer – at this stage, it was enough to know who he was.

  From the moment I first met him, one of Bryan’s strongest complaints against the police was the accusation that proper procedures had not been carried out at the start of the investigation. I set about a paperwork search, reading all the various statements and reports I could get my hands on. This confirmed that I needed to speak to the authorities. I got an appointment with the regional procurator fiscal at Paisley.

  I found him to be a man I could talk to and my first question hit the mark. I wanted to know who from his department had attended at the scene of Annie’s death. I knew the answer already and he confirmed that the department had not been notified till the Monday though the death was discovered on a Saturday. Years of police work meant I knew fine well that Saturday is not the best of days to get the assistance of senior detectives. The detective chief inspector or detective inspector would be available but not necessarily in the police office. My imagination took me into a scenario. A detective sergeant would have phoned the DCI to report a death such as that of Annie. The DCI would ask if the officer thought it was necessary for him to attend the scene. If he was then told it looked like she fell down the stairs, he would then be quite likely to say, ‘Let’s see your report on Monday.’ It could happen.

  This hard case had been causing anguish to run through the family for years. Frustrated at the lack of information and progress over a long period of time, the Davies Clan had blitzed all sort of people and organisations with letters in which they set out their worries and complaints. During this time-consuming and tiring work, they sent letters to the police, the procurator fiscal, all sorts of folk in the media, MSPs and MPs. Much was promised as a result of this paper war but little achieved. The police offered some odd scenarios which, in my view, simply clouded the issues. For example, there was a claim that Annie was having trouble with her bifocals. According to the family, this was not true but it would explain why she was not wearing them as she went down the stairs. Anyone who wears specs will tell you that they often take them off g
oing down stairs or escalators to allow them to judge the height of the step more accurately.

  What was more important to me was the whereabouts of the money and her keys. I learned that, on the Tuesday following the death, a post-mortem was carried out at the city mortuary by Dr Alan Cromie and Dr Marjory Black, both of the university’s department of forensic medicine. Each of them found that Annie’s injuries were consistent with falling down the stairs but could not rule out a violent act. By the time I was on the case, Dr Cromie had returned to Ireland with his family for personal reasons but I spoke to him by phone. After we had discussed the injuries and how they might have been sustained, the doctor asked me why I thought it was murder rather than an accident. I told him all about the specs. ‘What specs? I wasn’t told about any specs,’ he said. This was despite the fact that he had visited the scene and had been shown round the house by two officers. It was an unsettling conversation.

  At a later date, I spoke to him again. This is part of our conversation:

  Les Brown: Was this an accident or was it a murder?

  Dr Cromie: She was murdered

  Les Brown: How was she murdered?

  Dr Cromie: Exactly as you have described – struck by the door.

  A key move in the whole sad Annie Davies saga had taken place in Belfast in 2003. Dr Cromie, armed with documents and photographs, supplied by the procurator fiscal in Paisley, held a seminar in a hotel attended by forty medical colleagues. After all the presentations and argument going to and fro among the assembled experts, the conclusion was unanimous – all agreed that the death of Annie Davies had been ‘homicide’. This was real progress and the media began to give new, serious attention to what was turning into a major news story.