Peter Manuel was a cool customer. It has been said that he ran to the gallows when he finally knew the game was up. He had defended himself in court and had faked mental illness all in a well-thought-out and desperate effort to escape the gallows. But, in the end, with all hope gone, he remained cool. Tom Goodall interviewed Peter Manuel in-depth in the death cell and questioned him about many unsolved murders without any success. He was even questioned about the Moira Anderson case. Tom Goodall told me that his last words on his way to the rope were, ‘Turn up the wireless and I will give you no trouble.’ An evil life ended seconds after that and the city struggled back to normality after years of fear.
As a detective, I was often embroiled in controversy so it is interesting for me now to see how this case is picked over in fine detail and how the police are regularly regarded as not having got the serial killer behind bars and at the end of a rope quickly enough. I will say it again – and it comes from the heart and long experience – hindsight is a fine thing. Some of that long experience was garnered in the company of Joe Beattie. Like Goodall, he was another legend who played such a pivotal role in the Bible John hunt.
Back in 1976, the year Renee MacRae went missing, I was sent on a course at the police college at Tulliallan, near Alloa. The course was intended for sergeants who seemed destined for higher things so to be there at all was a real privilege. I enjoyed it hugely. The college is housed in a converted castle. It is an impressive pile with huge halls and reception areas and acres of beautiful well-kept gardens to stroll in. During the Second World War, officers and men of the Polish Army were accommodated there and, for a time, it was a hospital.
Now, despite its age and its baronial feel, it is a place where would-be lawmen get a grounding in the job using high-tech aids like video recreations of high-speed chases and lessons in traffic police work. There is even a realistic bar area for the aspiring officers to act out scenarios like dealing with pub trouble and enforcing the licensing laws. And, for lovers of television whodunnits, there is a real bonus. One of the huge rooms has walls lined with books and in behind the shelves there is a secret door leading to a hidden cubbyhole – eat your heart out, Agatha Christie!
Right from my first visit I loved the place. We each had a room of our own and meals were taken gathered together in a huge dining room. On my course, there were thirty of us from forces around the country and we had all been talent-spotted and earmarked as destined for greater things. I knew most of the west of Scotland guys of course, but there were many officers from county forces who were strangers but who became friends and valuable contacts down the years of detective work that lay ahead.
The regime, however, was fairly strict and, at that time, the deputy commandant was the famous detective Joe Beattie who was to spend years on the tenement-lined streets of Glasgow. On that first visit to the college we had a enjoyable day of introductions and pleasantries before the hard grind started the next day. We were split into groups of ten and each group had an appointed class supervisor, a role that was filled by a different officer each day. I was at an immediate disadvantage. After each day’s work, we had to write up a report and at night the chatter of old-fashioned manual typewriters echoed down the corridors. Unlike most of the guys from the county forces, I could not type. I went to the typing pool supervisor, a helpful woman, and explained the problem and she asked me to give her my reports on a tape and she would type them up. It worked like a dream though some of the guys – the ones who were destined to be really good detectives – were suspicious of the neatness of my reports and the lack of typewriter chatter from my room. I explained I had one of the latest state-of-the-art electric machines! I got away with it.
We had one grim shadow hanging over what was generally a good time in rural Clackmannanshire. On a day when I was designated the class supervisor, it was discovered that a sergeant from Glasgow was missing. The instructor that day was an inspector from Edinburgh and I explained to him that Sergeant X was unwell and I had told him to stay in his room. Wanting to save the missing man from getting into trouble, I left a note on his bed saying, ‘You are ill – stay put.’ On his late return to the college, he discovered the note. It turned out the delay had been caused by some domestic bother.
However, there was to be a truly tragic incident at the end of the course when the inspector from Edinburgh went missing himself. For some unknown reason, he had hurled himself to his death off the Forth Bridge.
I was still attending the course when the Renee MacRae story broke. The link was Donald McArthur, a sergeant from Inverness. We got up to some high jinks on that course and became good friends. However, one part of the course involved each of us giving a fifty-minute lecture to the assembled students. It wasn’t too fearful a prospect for the Glasgow cops who were well used to giving evidence in court and standing up for themselves in public but the country cops were a bit scared by having to do it. You had to give a choice of three subjects and I boldly picked (a) the Battle of Bannockburn, (b) William Wallace and (c) the Loch Ness Monster. Donald found the choice less easy and, after suggesting (a) camping on Skye, followed by (b) around Skye on a canoe, he was stuck. I convinced him that (a) would certainly be chosen and said he might as well make (c) anything at all – something like the life and times of Joseph Stalin. He wasn’t too sure but eventually agreed.
A week later I was told my choice (a) was requested. I always like to do a bit of research and visited museums and the like to gather notes on the battle. I was surprised to find that no artefacts have ever been found to confirm that what we now call the site was where the battle actually took place in 1314. In my opinion, the exact site had never been identified. People often accuse policemen of having no sense of humour but they had that day. In an effort to distract me as I spoke, members of the audience held up signs bearing legends so that I could see them but the instructor judging me could not. The least offensive of them simply said, ‘crap’.
This section of the course had traditionally proved a bit of fun. At a previous course, Jim Binnie, who went on to head the CID in Glasgow, spoke on whales. He contrived to have an officer in the audience ask him which was the largest species of whale to which Jim would reply that is was the blue whale. But, instead, the questioner asked him about how the blue whale mates. Jim rose to the occasion. ‘The participating whales, male and female,’ he said, ‘swim away from each other for a mile, turn and swim back towards at each other at speed. When they come together head-on, they rise out of the water and make sexual contact.’ No wonder he got to the top.
Naturally, Donald was asked to pontificate on Stalin and, when he learned this, that’s when I learned how a Highlander could swear. But, before he had had time to give his lecture, Donald was promoted to inspector and called north. His first job: to help in the investigation of the disappearance of Renee MacRae and her son, Andrew.
I was soon to head north myself on a visit to various police offices in the Northern Constabulary area to study what was on offer for officers in terms of sporting or leisure facilities and compare notes with other forces. I was teamed up with officers from Lothian and Borders and Central Scotland. My fellow officers on the trip decided to drive up overnight but I fancied a flight north the next morning. The plane was due in Inverness at 9.30 a.m. and getting to the police HQ in the Highland capital for the 10 a.m. start was going to be really tight. In fact, it was pretty well impossible even if the ‘budgie’ used on the Highland routes was on time and I was lucky enough to get a cab right away. The plane landed on time but, outside the airport, there was a long queue for taxis. As I waited my turn, a police car drew up and a uniformed cop got out and went to hand in a letter to the terminal. I nabbed him on his way out and told him I was a detective from Tulliallan and I had to be taken to HQ. I made it with minutes to spare, the siren screaming all the way. The chief constable asked us how we had travelled up and seemed impressed when I said on the nine-thirty flight.
Life up there was a bit differe
nt from the streets of the Gorbals or Castlemilk. In one remote office, we were given a welcoming dram – in a teacup! Even in country stations in the far north, the chink of ice on crystal early in the day would have raised a few eyebrows.
It was a nice little trip and it gave me one insight into a hard case you might not expect to find in a book like this – the Loch Ness Monster case. We had been given an official driver – the guy would have been the top wheels man in any gang. He could shift in a car and safely. He was impressive and it was interesting to hear him tell of seeing the monster while on duty. It was not something he spoke much about in public for fear of ridicule but, in a cop-to-cop natter, he told us he was sitting on the lochside when an animal rose out of the water close inshore. He told us it had ‘the head of a giraffe, skin similar to a seal, huge round eyes and a long neck’. He was reluctant to call it the monster but insisted he had seen an animal as he described it. I was glad I was not on the case!
During the visit, the chief constable told me of a case of a young girl of four who had gone missing after a row between her parents. Apparently the child’s home had been searched but there was no sign of her. Later that evening, traffic cops found the wee lassie in a car with her father and they were shocked to hear that, when the house had been searched, the girl had been hiding in a cupboard under the stairs. The chief told me that a senior man from Strathclyde was coming north to investigate this failure. I knew the officer and said that they should not expect too much help as I suspected this policeman would not have found her either. Searches can be a problem. I always told my guys to work on the assumption that what you were looking for was always there and that you will find it.
We returned to Tulliallan for the completion of the six-month course and the final part involved an interview with the commandant, an ex-military man who’d held a top rank. My pal Joe Beattie complimented me on my work during the course and gave me a hint for the final hurdle. ‘Make a fuss of his dogs’ was his advice. Sure enough, two beautiful golden Labs were present at the interview. I spent much time stroking them and telling them what fine fellows they were and they responded by swishing their large tails from side to side, almost sending ornaments and the like flying. Most of the interview then turned to a conversation about our mutual love of dogs and stories of my Alsatian, Rory. Joe thought I had done a good interview and done enough to pass out with flying colours. But the Labs played a role.
When I was back in Glasgow and busy with the serious crime squad, I got an intriguing call from Donald up in Inverness. The Renee MacRae case was taxing them to the limit – something we were well aware of because the case was big in the papers and on TV. Donald wanted advice and he had come to the right place as we were averaging a murder every five days at the time. Violent deaths and disappearances were everyday events in the city.
Donald ran over the details of the case. Renee and her husband, Gordon, were separated and they had two children, Andrew, aged three, and his older brother, also Gordon. Mr MacRae was a wealthy businessman. His company secretary, William McDowall, was supposedly having an affair with Renee and local gossip suggested that it was McDowall who was Andrew’s father.
On the day that Andrew and Renee were last seen, Renee had told a close friend that she and McDowall were going to start a new life together and intended to meet in Perth. Renee drove a swanky and very noticeable BMW and, later that evening, the Beemer was seen ablaze in a lay-by ten miles south of Inverness. Neither Renee nor the boy was in the car and neither has been seen to this day. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this could have been the result of foul play. The police mounted a massive search of the area, including extensive visits to a nearby quarry called Dalmagarry.
Having listened to what Donald had to say, I suggested that he should speak to his chief constable personally and ask him to contact the chief in Glasgow and to see if he would be willing to put in a request for the serious crime squad, hopefully my team, to be sent north to assist.
That was thirty years ago and the debate about a national crime squad is still going on to this day – chief constables continue to resist letting outside experts on to their patches. The predictable answer to Donald’s suggestion in the MacRae case was ‘We don’t need outside police forces to solve our crimes.’ The answer might have been predictable but it was also wrong. The fact is that, if you are dealing with murder enquiries on a day-to-day basis, you are in a far better position to solve difficult cases than you are in a force where a couple of murders a year are the norm. But the fact that it is a clear no-brainer doesn’t make it any easier to get it over to the smaller forces.
However, Donald and I still talked about the crime on a regular basis. The main problem was the lack of bodies and, as the old saying goes, ‘no body – no murder’. The only slight lead came from witnesses who spoke of seeing a man dragging what looked like a dead sheep in the direction of the quarry. On the night she disappeared, Renee MacRae was wearing a jacket whose colour and texture could have resulted in the witnesses mistaking her for a dead sheep.
There were reasons for both the husband and the lover being suspects. And there was also the possibility that a hit man might have been involved. Such theories are not as far fetched as they seem. A search of the archives will show that there are people around who, for the right sum in readies, will take a life, cover up a murder and get away with it. But the stark fact remains that the police are no nearer to solving this thirty-year-old mystery.
A retired policeman, Sergeant John Cathcart, who was initially involved in the case and who has followed the twists and turns in the saga over the years, is convinced that the bodies are in the nearby quarry. He pushed his theories so hard that excavations were carried out and 40,000 tons of earth moved in the search for Renee and Andrew MacRae. Two top experts were there when this dig went on – forensic expert Susan Black from the University of Dundee and Professor John Hunter from the University of Birmingham. Both of them had assisted the Manchester Police in 2001 in the search for more victims of the Moors Murderers and Susan had assisted me in the Moira Anderson case.
John Cathcart based his belief on the fact that he had, in the early days of the investigation, smelled decomposing human flesh at the quarry. That is not a smell that you mistake or forget in a hurry – ask any murder squad man. But maybe, as that major search of the quarry seemed to suggest, the bodies were elsewhere.
Local farmer Brian McGregor was a man with a close interest in the case and, over the years, he had followed it, like Sergeant Cathcart and thousands of others, in the newspapers. His ground was near to where the burning BMW had been found. This gave him a special interest in the case and, for various reasons, he also did not see eye to eye with the Northern Constabulary. He conducted some amateur investigations of his own and discovered that workmen, returning to the site of the car fire on the A9 which was undergoing some reconstruction work at the time, claimed to have evidence that someone had interfered with the foundation rubble and infill preparatory to the tarmacadam being re-laid. Brian actually traced some of the workers and got confirmation from them of the exact location where this was supposed to have happened.
He was pretty convincing on the phone so I went north to visit him at his farm. If there is one thing that year after year of murder investigations does, it is to give you a pretty good understanding of witnesses – you can soon spot the phoneys and crackpots. Brian was a genuine guy.
Before we met, he had sought my advice on the phone on marking what he regarded as the suspect area on the A9 with a large yellow circle. I told him that, if he was determined to do it, he should do so in the dark as the local cops would arrest him if he did it during the day. He painted the circle and the local press photographed it.
Later we discussed whether there was anyway of finding out what lay beneath the circle without actually digging it up. I remembered seeing a radar device being used in Edinburgh that seemed to do just that. The machine looked like a large lawnmower. I su
ggested trying to get a university or a newspaper to give financial assistance in mounting a search with such a machine.
Then, on another visit to the farm in September 2006, I asked him how the underground search was going. He told me he had contacted a company in Dublin with expertise in this area. Two men with the appropriate equipment had travelled to the Highlands and he had guided them to the area he wanted searched. Here is what he had to say about the outcome: ‘They found that there were three unexplained items under the road surface that were not consistent with the materials used to build the road.’
It had cost the farmer more than £1000 to have this search carried out. I told Brian McGregor that his investigation had now reached the stage where he needed to involve the police. If all this had nothing to do with the MacRaes, why would anyone interfere with the foundations of the road? What lay there now? In the category of Real Hard Cases, this one takes some beating.
INDEX
Anderson, Moira (i), (ii), (iii)
Armstrong, Richard (i)
Aurora (fishing boat) (i), (ii), (iii)
Barras (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Barrowland Ballroom (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Baxter’s Buses (i), (ii)
BBC (i)
Beattie, Joe (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Bekier, John, Detective (i)
Beltrami, Joe (solicitor) (i)
Bible John (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Real Hard Cases Page 14