Real Hard Cases

by Robert Jeffrey

  I had several meetings with the procurator fiscal at his offices in Paisley and one of the outcomes was that he travelled to Belfast to personally precognose Dr Cromie. This was an unusual procedure and I could not recall anything similar in twenty-six years with the police and seventeen years with FACT. Normally, such statements are gathered by what are known as precognition agents, often police officers or retired police officers. The fact that he had done the precognition himself was an indication of how seriously the matter was viewed. I was interested to learn that two detectives from Strathclyde had also travelled to Belfast to precognose Dr Cromie.

  The doctor called me after this to say he was unhappy about the way he was questioned by the police. He said their questions were all pre-prepared and that, just before they left him, my name came into the conversation and one of the officers remarked, ‘He works for the Sunday Mail.’

  However, we were making progress of sorts. Dr Cromie came over to Glasgow and he and I went for a meal in a south-side hotel where we met the procurator fiscal for Paisley and discussed the case. He asked, ‘You think this is a homicide, don’t you?’ The doctor said he did and I recollect that the procurator fiscal said that he did too. This was sensational stuff. After all these years, here was the regional procurator fiscal agreeing with me and the Davies Family that old Annie had been murdered.

  We were now galloping ahead and the legal implications were moving up a notch or two. Next, Bryan Davies and I were asked to travel to Strathclyde Police headquarters for a meeting with an assistant chief constable (crime).

  The start of our meeting was pleasant enough and we exchanged some shared memories but, from our point of view, the meeting was a disaster. He took us through the circumstances surrounding the death and told us that, in his opinion, old Annie ‘did not have injuries to her face consistent with her having been struck by the door’. I could not believe what I was hearing. Realising we were wasting our time, I drew the meeting to a close by saying to the assistant chief, ‘Why don’t you look Bryan in the eye and apologise on behalf of Strathclyde Police for their mishandling of the case?’ He replied that he could not do that.

  Despite this negative meeting, we were still getting material to back up our belief about what really happened the day Annie died. On 18 May 2001 (a year before I came on board), Mr William Gilchrist, who, at that time, was the regional procurator fiscal at Paisley, wrote to the Davies family and said, ‘I am satisfied that the circumstances of your mother’s death are very highly suspicious and I have instructed Strathclyde Police that I do not think that this death should be described as accidental.’

  This had been an extensive period of legal nit-picking. Many letters and documents had been exchanged and there had been several lengthy discussion meetings but then a new piece of information emerged to strengthen our beliefs. An acquaintance told Bryan that, a few days after Annie’s death, his son had given him £2000 for safekeeping. The son was suspected by the folk in Erskine of being a drug dealer. However the police response to this was that they had interviewed the son and he had had a reasonable explanation for where the money came from. I wonder what that was!

  But Bryan Davies was not easily put off. The urge to find out the facts of his mother’s death had almost become an obsession. To illustrate the pressure he was under, I can point to a letter he received away back in the winter of 2000. The Crown Office wrote to him saying, ‘The decision to take no further proceedings remains in place. Please do not seek to have this decision continually reviewed.’ He was not to be pushed aside though and, three years to the day after the death, Bryan received a visit from three police officers.

  Detective Superintendent Bert Dickov was leading a team taking a fresh look at the case. They went over all the old ground, all the old doubts and all the old evidence with the family and, out of it, came a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. The possibility of applying to Criminal Injuries Compensation Board (CICB) was raised. The cops pointed out that the conclusion of their inquiry was that the interpretation of the death was open to it not being an accident. This meant that making a claim was a legitimate thing to do. Bryan had never been driven to seek compensation – his motive was getting justice, not money – but, in light of the findings of the latest inquiry, it seemed like the right thing to do. He applied and the application was turned down.

  He asked if I could find out why. It seemed that now almost everyone involved was agreeing that the death was ‘very highly suspicious’. The one exception was the procurator fiscal who now appeared to have changed his opinion from the one that he had held when we had met over a meal with Dr Cromie. He had written to the CICB expressing a view that the death was accidental. I wrote to the Crown Office confirming our dismay at this outcome.

  But, before this complex case was to move to a final outcome, there was to be another highly unusual series of events. During the Dickov investigation, Bryan had been asked if he owned a typewriter. He did not but the police fingerprinted every member of Bryan’s family, including two grandchildren. DNA samples were also taken and, over a period of a couple of weeks, Fred, his brother, who lived in Lancashire, had twice been visited in his home by female officers. A third visit by three officers followed and then there was a fourth with four detectives, including Bert Dickov. Fingerprints and DNA were again taken. Considering it is said that getting a DNA sample tested costs around £500 a time, this was turning into an expensive business. All that travel, too, must have been costly.

  Back in Scotland, Marion Scott and a Sunday Mail photographer got the same treatment and tests. Obviously something serious had happened.

  A Search for Justice never got to the bottom of all this. There is, however, a suspicion that, somewhere along the line, the police received an anonymous letter of some kind. This could explain the questioning about a typewriter. It is also a fact that DNA can be recovered from a stamp. It was an odd episode indeed but a clearer picture of what had happened was emerging.

  During my initial investigation, I learned that the police surgeon who had attended the murder scene and had examined Annie’s body was a Dr Gavin Watson, a medic know to me in my days in the CID. He was now a GP with a practice in Paisley and, when I visited him at his surgery, he remembered me. He confirmed he had been on duty on the day of the death and that he had been asked by the police to go to the house in Erskine. His job was simply to confirm that Annie was indeed dead and he did not immediately realise that she had serious injuries to her face. I asked if he had had any other connection with the case and he mentioned that, eighteen months or so before, he had been interviewed by two detectives, probably part of the Dickov team. I asked the doctor what they had wanted and he replied, ‘Apparently money was missing from the house and it was to eliminate me as a suspect.’

  This shocked me and I said, ‘What on earth made you think that?’ He said that the cops had asked him if he had looked round the house and, when he told them he had, they asked if he had been accompanied by a police officer! What nonsense.

  We were at last reaching a conclusion and the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board agreed to another look at the case. On 28 June 2005, a full day’s hearing heard evidence from the family, a member of the Dickov team and Dr Alan Cromie who had travelled over from Belfast to support the family. It all ended with a simple statement from the chairman of the panel to the effect that they had accepted that Annie Davies had died as a result of an act of violence and compensation would be paid. It was.

  This remarkable story of a long and tortuous hunt for truth was the spark that started the now defunct A Search for Justice. It also played a role in the formation of Strathclyde Police’s Cold Case Squad whose remit is to investigate unsolved murders. The long battle had proved worthwhile with one of the hardest of hard cases now being re-examined by the Cold Case Squad as a result of our efforts.

  15

  WHAT LIES BENEATH THE A9?

  Football managers cover their backs in case of an unexpected def
eat by trotting out, at every opportunity, the mantra that ‘there are no easy games at any level’. It is not quite as bad as that in the detection game. There are murder investigations that almost solve themselves – cases where there is just one suspect and he or she has had both motive and opportunity and evidence against them is easy to find. It is also surprising how often a killer will start an interrogation with a vigorous denial of involvement and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, blurt out the truth. But, then, there are also cases, real hard cases, that remain unsolved for years despite the cops throwing everything at them. During such investigations, all leave is cancelled, uniformed officers are taken off other work to provide foot-slogging manpower for ‘door to door’ inquiries, the forensic experts are called in and there is massive help from the press and public. Yet what those footballer managers like to call a ‘result’ remains elusive.

  Two cases, in particular, in my long career particularly spring to mind – the ongoing mystery of the Bible John murders in Glasgow in 1968 and 1969 and the mystery of what happened to Renee MacRae and her son Andrew in November 1976 up in the Highlands. In the first case no murderer or murderers have been found and, in the second, not only has the killer escaped detection but Renee MacRae’s body and that of her young son are also still missing. I had some involvement in both these famous cases from the start and right up until 2006. One curious link to both cases is that, in all the years since they started making headlines, they frequently resurface in newspapers and television documentaries with new theories and sometimes new leads. But, at the moment, they are still unsolved murders.

  The current thinking on Bible John is that he may not have existed and that the murders of Patricia Docker, Mima McDonald and Helen Puttock were not, after all, committed by the same man, as had previously been believed. At the peak of the investigation into what was thought to be serial killings of girls who liked a night out dancing at the Barrowland Ballroom in London Road, there was, however, no doubt in the minds of public or police that Bible John did exist. There was good reason for this since there was an apparent pattern to the killings. All the girls had been at the famous ballroom above the Barras market, all had been raped, strangled and their bodies dumped after they left the dance hall and there was a series of small, but significant, similarities to the modi operandi of the murders. And, at the time, it was felt no one other than the cops knew what these were and this meant the killings were not copycats.

  Looking back, you can’t be sure of that and the co-author of this book, Robert Jeffrey, has written extensively about his belief that, while two of the murders may have been the work of one man, there is reason to believe that one murder may have been committed by someone else. His theory – and I agree with it – is that the belief that the murders were the work of one person impaired the investigations of the second and third deaths and, if they had been investigated by different teams of detectives approaching each crime without baggage from previous investigations, they might have arrived at a different conclusion.

  I was in on the Docker case, the first in the series of Barrowland murders, and made inquiries under Joe Beattie who ran all three investigations. However, our role in the Docker case was to eliminate one suspect from the inquiries. Joe and I had spent time together long before this (as I tell later in the chapter) and I find it of enormous significance that, before this legendary detective died, many years after the Bible John murders, he was publicly speculating that they were, maybe, not all down to the famous figure of Glasgow folk memory – the man in the identikit poster of a clean-cut sandy-haired young man with piercing eyes who the press had dubbed Bible John.

  Later, I was involved when a guy who had been lifted on suspicion of being involved in one of the murders was released simply because he didn’t fit the description of the serial killer in just one respect. In my opinion, he should have been investigated further. And other lines of enquiry into the murders of Mima McDonald and Helen Puttock were perhaps not followed up as strongly as they should have been because the people concerned did not seem to fit this Bible John creation.

  Bible John scared legions of dancing daft Glaswegians away from the bright lights and big band swing of the ballrooms they loved. Police and public, at this time, all felt that they almost knew him. It was quite amazing and the city had a strange atmosphere about it for a period of three years or so. The impact of the hunt for the strangler on the public cannot be underestimated – during the furore surrounding the murders 50,000 people were interviewed and a hundred detectives were involved. The papers were filled with it day after day. Looking back, it seems we all seemed to know so much about the man called Bible John that maybe it led to folk – especially the police – not being able to see the wood for the trees, as they say. At one stage, Joe Beattie asked whether I would have done anything differently. I told him I would have gone on TV and appealed for women who may have been in Bible John’s company and lived to tell the tale to come forward.

  If Bible John did exist, he was a serial killer but not one in the same class as Peter Manuel who died on the Barlinnie gallows in 1958. Like Bible John, thirty-two-year-old Manuel killed for twisted sexual gratification. But the enduring mystery in his case is not about whether he was a killer – there’s no doubt about that – but about how many he killed.

  Scotland’s most evil serial killer was actually born in New York in 1927 but came to Scotland when his family returned to Lanarkshire after a transitory spell in England. To anyone in the police at the time of his killing spree, the hunt for him was an endless source of speculation and conversation. He dominated the canteen talk in every police station in Glasgow. I was lucky enough to hear many an inside story of Manuel from Tom Goodall when, for a spell, one of my duties was to drive him around. Goodall, one of the best and best remembered of Glasgow’s detectives, played a major role in sending Manuel to the gallows.

  Everyone knew how dangerous Manuel could be. I had a bit of a scare myself when in the Gorbals in the late fifties. A car had been stolen from the home of the Smart family – the Smarts, Peter, wife Doris and young son Michael, who was only ten, were all slaughtered by Manuel – and it was found abandoned in Adelphi Street, on our patch. I was one of a team sent to secretly observe it in case the thief, possibly Manuel, returned. No one ever came back to the car and we heaved a collective sigh of relief. Had it been Peter Manuel and had he been carrying a gun, he would, no doubt, have tried to shoot his way out of an arrest. Goodall was always of the opinion that Manuel had killed outwith Scotland and that one victim had been Sydney Dunn, a taxi driver of Durham, but no charges were ever brought against him for this.

  With Manuel free and the papers reporting the regular break-ins, attacks and murders that seemed to be his work, the city was in the grip of a remarkable attack of collective nervous tension. A sergeant in the traffic department told me of returning to his home in Dennistoun one night. Arriving at his top-floor flat, he heard a scream from a neighbour’s house across the tenement landing. The copper smashed in the door with his boots and ran into the house just in time to get a look at an intruder scrambling through the kitchen window and shinning three floors down the rone pipe to the street. The sergeant was convinced the man he had seen was Peter Manuel but all the enquiries we mounted come to nothing.

  In Glasgow Crimefighter, my previous book on my career, I told of a close relationship I had with the colourful bank robber Samuel ‘Dandy’ McKay. He used to meet me secretly to give me tip-offs – usually ones that would get some rival locked up for a bit. McKay had a lot of the old fashioned criminals’ code of honour about him: robbing banks and the like was OK but knocking little old ladies on the head was not, so Manuel’s penchant for breaking into houses and shooting men, women and children was definitely not Dandy’s style.

  In fact, along with other career criminals outraged by the serial killer’s reign of terror, he was of great help to the police in the Manuel hunt. Like everyone else, Glasgow’s sizeable criminal c
ommunity wanted the killing to stop. McKay knew Manuel and often spoke to me about him. Dandy had a financial interest in a gaming place called the Gordon Club in Gordon Street, near Central Station, and Peter Manuel went there from time to time. Dandy McKay was quick to tell Tom Goodall that Peter Manuel was the serial killer who was costing the police and public such grief. I was also interested to hear first-hand from Dandy that Peter Manuel was the only man he had ever met who scared him. That is saying something for Dandy McKay was no soft touch, a quick thinking and physically strong hard man. He did not scare easily.

  The Manuel inquiry had started out in Lanarkshire and there was concern that, although he was a stand-out suspect in the early murders, it was taking too long to nail him. Indeed, again with the assistance of that wonderful thing hindsight, there has been much serious criticism of the way the murder hunt was handled in the early cases. Goodall was moved on to the hunt when it seemed stalled and he was the man who was really responsible for catching the killer. Help from the likes of McKay and other clues turned up under Goodall would bring the serial killer to his fate.

  After the Smart murders, a search of the home of Peter Manuel’s parents found a distinctive type of lighter that had come from the Smarts’ house. Many on the team hunting him thought that this was enough to lock Manuel up. That wily sleuth Tom Goodall had a better idea – lock up the parents. It was a masterstroke. With his parents now implicated, the killer gave himself up to Goodall and started to confess to his evildoing.

  Manuel stood trial for eight killings and was convicted of seven. The one charge that did not stand up in the High Court of Glasgow was the murder of Anne Kneillands. In fact, the psychopath had confessed to killing this pretty young East Kilbride teenager but there was no corroborating evidence for the confession and the charge was dismissed. The actual trial of this fiend was one of the most heavily reported cases of the last century. As in the MacRae and Bible John cases, Manuel and his murderous career are regularly revisited by criminologists and there is now a consensus that he killed up to fifteen people.