The Lawkillers

by Alexander McGregor

  When the animals came to make their most spectacular discovery, however, Sergeant Fyffe wasn’t with them. That day, the second last of 1992, he was on other duties and the morning exercise stint had fallen to his young daughter who was only too glad to help fill in her Christmas school holidays by walking the dogs – they were as much family pets as an important working unit of the local constabulary. When they bounded away over the frost-covered grass, their panting breath vaporising in the chill December air, Dirk and Tyke did not deviate in the route they took. They went at once to three plastic bags which lay dumped behind a low pile of logs on the lower slopes just behind the allotments in Law Crescent, a long way from the war memorial at the top of the hill and a convenient place for disposing of unwanted rubbish.

  The Alsatians knew exactly where the bags were, for they had rummaged among them on the two previous days before called away by Sergeant Fyffe and his librarian wife Pamela. Their daughter did not follow her parents’ example and the animals quickly tore apart one of the bags. It did not contain the household debris her parents had imagined. Instead, a human arm with hand attached dropped out.

  Any child returning home from walking the family pets to tell her mother they have found part of a body is unlikely at first to be taken too seriously. Mrs Fyffe had no such inhibitions. Her daughter was ashen-faced and anxious and the words that tumbled from her mouth contained no trace of humour. Mrs Fyffe also recalled that the dogs had been reluctant to leave that part of the Law the previous evening. She immediately called the police. They arrived in strength a short time later and the two other bags were split open to reveal the upper portion of a human torso in one and the lower section, along with an upper arm, in the other.

  It is no understatement to say the grisly find was met with some consternation. The absence of a head was obviously going to make identification of the body portions difficult and New Year leave for the detectives in Central Division was about to be cancelled. They were confronted with a unique dilemma – they were not only looking for a murderer but also a victim. Putting a name to the partial corpse would clearly make the hunt for the killer easier and pathologists and forensic scientists worked round the clock to establish some sort of description which could be issued to the public, along with a plea for their assistance in determining who he was.

  Late the following day they released a number of details, including the fact that the dead man had at one time undergone surgery to his stomach and had suffered a fracture to four ribs. Marks on the left wrist also indicated that a thick bracelet of some kind had regularly been worn there. He had ‘well-maintained’ hands with fairly long, well-manicured fingernails, and was also suntanned. He was thought to be aged between 30 and 50 and about 5 feet 10 inches tall. By this time police also knew that the victim was probably homosexual because of evidence of recent anal intercourse. Another line of enquiry revealed that the plastic bags came from a batch which had been supplied to Spar shops in Dundee, and one such shop was in Hilltown, close to where the body parts had been found.

  While these details were being released to the public, an army of police officers embarked on a search for the remaining body parts. One of the most intensive hunts was conducted at the Baldovie incinerator, where the domestic refuse of Dundonians is cremated. More than 100 tons of rotting garbage was sifted through without result.

  The newspaper and broadcast appeals to the public brought much greater success. Within four days police had taken calls from ninety people concerned that the Law victim may be their absent friend or relative. One of the worried callers was James Dunbar, an art teacher from Carnoustie, who was anxious about his 52-year-old half-brother: Gordon Dunbar had been due to travel to Carnoustie to join the family for a meal on Christmas Day but had never arrived. When James contacted his brother’s landlord at the Anchor guest house in Victoria Road in Dundee, he was informed that Gordon had not been seen for about a week. Other information, including confirmation that his brother was homosexual, and had once had four ribs broken after being mugged, as well as having undergone abdominal surgery to locate an ulcer, prompted police to make an immediate swoop on the first-floor bedroom Gordon Dunbar had occupied in the guest house. Fingerprints and DNA tests taken from material in the room matched the body parts.

  The first part of the riddle was solved. They had the victim. Now the hunt for his murderer could be launched in earnest.

  The profile they built up of the man whose life had ended so grotesquely did not yield any immediate clues to the identity of the person who had disposed of his body. Dunbar had been born in the Belgian Congo, the son of missionary parents, but had returned to Scotland to live at the age of eleven. He was brought up by an aunt in Montrose and had studied architecture in Dundee. Going on to work for the city Corporation for several years, he played a major role in the design of Ardler Community Centre, among other projects. Later, after receiving an inheritance from his aunt, he moved to France to work with the War Graves Commission. Then he purchased a café in Arras which was popular with members of the gay community. But the business failed and his long-term relationship with a French male partner also disintegrated.

  He returned, disappointed and distraught, to Dundee, eventually moving into the Anchor guest house, which was largely a hostel for the homeless and unemployed. There, fellow guests regarded him as colourful in appearance but otherwise quiet and friendly. He was also responsible, troubled no one and appeared to be recovering slowly from the trauma of his experiences in France. He made no secret of being gay and, according to the guest house owner, was a model tenant who always paid his rent on time. He liked jewellery and wore an earring but his favourite piece was a 9-carat gold bracelet made from his grandfather’s watch chain. There was nothing in his lifestyle to suggest that he would meet a gruesome and untimely demise, or that he knew anyone capable of bringing that about.

  The last time he had been seen was on Christmas Eve, when he had set off from the guest house in the forenoon wearing his distinctive long overcoat for a visit to the city centre. He later met some of the other Anchor residents for a festive drink in the Club Bar in Union Street, leaving at around 6.30 p.m. to call at the Caledonian Bar a few yards further up the street. After fifteen minutes, he departed, apparently alone. It was the last confirmed sighting of Gordon Dunbar.

  A search of his bedroom produced only one thing of major interest. A bank account showed that he had deposited £60 that morning, but that at 9.22 that evening he had apparently withdrawn £150 from an autoteller in Commercial Street. Police were puzzled. Why would anyone go to the trouble of making a payment at a bank on one of its busiest days of the year, only to withdraw more than twice the amount later the same day?

  Whilst detectives built a picture of Dunbar’s last known movements, other officers routinely checked local and national crime files for people with previous convictions for offences of extreme violence, particularly any with a connection to Dundee.

  Among others, the computer at the Scottish Crime Records office delivered the name of Alastair William Thompson, a 43-year-old lifer out on licence. Almost twenty-five years earlier, as an 18-year-old in Edinburgh, he had achieved national notoriety after murdering his grandmother in a sustained, frenzied attack when he stabbed her sixteen times with a carving knife then smashed her skull twice with a hammer. Much of the sixteen years of the life sentence he had served before being released was carried out at Perth Prison. After being freed he married a social worker he met while in prison and they settled in Perth. The marriage did not last long, however, and Thompson moved to England. Significantly, he eventually returned north, to live in Dundee, and had become resident-caretaker of the home in Haldane Terrace in Kirkton which was used by the Scottish Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (SACRO) to provide accommodation for ex-prisoners.

  It was useful information but there was no indication of any link with the unfortunate Gordon Dunbar. The caretaker figured on the catalogue of suspects but did
not head the list. On 8 January, two days after the official identification of the body parts unearthed by the exercising Alsatians, police received a phone call which instantly gave impetus to the inquiry. The caller disclosed that a man named Alastair Thompson had spent the New Year holiday weekend in Perth and had spoken at length and in considerable detail about the Law murder in Dundee. Police rushed the twenty miles up the dual carriageway to Perth, where they traced some of those Thompson had spoken to. They also took possession of an antique gold chain which he had given to a female acquaintance on Hogmanay. It matched, identically, the description of the one said to have always been worn by Gordon Dunbar on his left wrist.

  That evening, a squad of detectives staked out Thompson’s house in Haldane Terrace and when he arrived home they pounced and led him away, amidst his protestations, for questioning. While that was taking place at headquarters in Bell Street, teams of police and forensic scientists combed the suspect’s bedroom. Among the intriguing discoveries were clothing and two holdall bags and a pair of shoes, all heavily blood-soaked. In addition they found an electricity bill bearing the address, ‘9L Butterburn Court’ – one of the city’s tallest blocks of multi-storey flats, built on the edge of the Law and overlooking the precise spot where the body parts had been dumped in the plastic bags. A set of keys, none of which fitted any of the locks at the Haldane Terrace address, was also found in Thompson’s room along with, intriguingly, a scrap of paper bearing four numbers. When the name of the person who was listed as the tenant of the Butterburn council flat was routinely checked with criminal records, it brought a startling result – the occupant was a ‘lifer’ out on licence after years inside for a murder.

  With mounting anticipation, the officers headed at once to the multi-block dominating the Hilltown landscape, taking the keys for flat 9L with them. When they effortlessly inserted them in the lock and the door swung open, the sound of thudding heartbeats was almost audible.

  They knew at once they had come to the right place. Inside were several plastic bags similar to the ones found on the hill. There was also a half-torn label which fitted with a label portion found among the severed limbs in the bags. A roll of tape, similar to the type used to seal the Law bags, also lay in the flat. Most chilling – and sickening – of all, they walked into a blood-splattered bathroom where body tissue clung to parts of a wall. More tissue almost blocked the traps of the drainage system and on the floor lay a blood-stained hacksaw blade. Never could a murder scene have spoken more eloquently of what had taken place there.

  It was quickly established that the tenant of the flat, despite initial suspicions, had played no part in the depraved activities that had taken place. He had departed for London two months earlier and had passed the keys to Alastair Thompson, the man who nearly quarter of a century earlier had been convicted of hacking his grandmother to death. It was never established how Thompson had come to know the tenant of the multi-storey flat, but it seemed likely they had become acquainted in prison or at the SACRO hostel for former inmates.

  Within hours of the repugnant discovery being made, Thompson once again found himself charged with the most serious crime in the statute book, this one even more monstrous than the first.

  Murder squad officers set about constructing a scenario of the macabre events of that Christmas Eve in 1992. They concluded that the pair had somehow met up in mid-evening after Gordon Dunbar had visited a grocer’s shop to purchase Camembert cheese, garlic granules and powdered soup, all of which were later found in Thompson’s bedroom. The two men had gone to 9L Butterburn Court.

  When the bisexual Thompson had taken Dunbar to the flat that night the atmosphere had at first been convivial and festive and homosexual activity had taken place. But during the course of the encounter, the mood turned from romance to robbery when Thompson threatened his companion with a knife and demanded his bank card and personal identification number – the same four digits as the ones, apparently meaningless, which had been on the discarded scrap of paper found in Haldane Terrace. After parting with the card and number, the terrified victim was stabbed to death through the heart. Thompson, wearing Gordon Dunbar’s long overcoat to conceal the blood stains on his own clothing, then made his way down town to the bank autoteller in Commercial Street, where he withdrew £150 in ten-pound notes.

  While others in Dundee made preparations to attend Watch-night services in churches across the city, the man who that Christmas Eve had murdered and robbed was on a mounting high that could not be further from the seasonal ethos of goodwill towards men. He returned with his victim’s groceries to Kirkton, still wearing the overcoat which he explained away to other hostel residents as being an early Christmas present from a woman friend, and waving the wad of crisp banknotes which he said were winnings from the horses.

  Thompson washed, changed clothes, then headed back to Butterburn Court to view his handiwork. That night he brought Christmas in at Arthur’s Night Club in St Andrew’s Lane. No one who saw him there could have remotely imagined what he had been engaged in a few hours earlier. He danced and laughed, wished other revellers a Merry Christmas and bought drinks for two women he struck up a conversation with. At 2.30 a.m., he and another male left the club with the ladies, going to the home of one of them where Thompson remained, the life and soul of the party, until departing at 5 a.m. Few females could have unwittingly spent Christmas morning in such deadly company.

  Whatever else may have been said about Alastair Thompson, he was not a stupid or unintelligent man. Although he had been detained in approved schools, borstal or prison for almost all of his life between the ages of twelve and thirty-five, he had benefited from a good education, gaining Higher passes in modern studies and geography and engaging in a detailed study of political development of the USSR. Reflecting many years later on his troubled childhood at home, he disclosed that the happiest period of his life had been when he was held in Loaningdale Approved School, remaining there longer than he need have done because he volunteered to do so. During his life sentence in Perth Prison he joined the Salvation Army for a brief period and then, after his release on licence and within a year of moving to Dundee, he landed a job at the large NCR factory in the city. Personable and persuasive, he could articulate his thoughts clearly on paper as well as vocally and he was elected by 97 per cent of the workforce as shop steward of his section.

  His obvious intelligence made it all the more strange that he seemed to do nothing to conceal the tracks of his iniquitous activities on Christmas Eve. Indeed, he appeared to leave a trail that would inevitably lead to him. In addition to the damning pieces of evidence he left behind, he spoke freely to acquaintances about some of what had taken place. On Christmas Day he borrowed a hacksaw from a friend, explaining that he wanted to cut up some kitchen pipes. The next day he complained that the blade had broken and he was given the loan of a second one. This time, he bizarrely revealed that the true purpose of his request was to enable him to dispose of a body, which he had volunteered to do for two ‘hit men’ from Glasgow who had killed a man. Pressed, he explained that he had made a night-time journey to Dudhope Park, about a mile from the Butterburn Court multi, where he had left some of the body. The head had been placed in a refuse skip in Kirkton, he said, close to where he lived and at that point the remainder of the body was still in a bath of salt and detergent.

  Recalling the conversation, the incredulous friend was later to say, ‘I took it all as a joke. He said he was going to have get rid of the rest of the body and said it would take three or four trips with it being heavy.

  ‘He said the Law hill would be a better place because he wouldn’t have so far to carry them.’

  Thompson even put the name of Gordon Dunbar to the remains of the corpse he was so anxious to dispose of. Later, he asked the same man if he had an open coal-fire in his house so he might burn a bank card. These were hardly the words of a man taking every precaution to ensure that his dastardly deed would go undetected.

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sp; It isn’t known just how many people ultimately came to suspect Alastair Thompson for the murder which attracted headlines across Britain. Police certainly received a number of calls offering information. One anonymous tip-off said some of the missing body parts could, indeed, be found at Dudhope Park. After officers hurried to the scene, they came upon a number of bags among shrubbery on an access road leading to the car park. These bags contained a lower leg, feet – one in a woman’s stocking – and the remaining arm.

  Thompson stood trial at the High Court in Edinburgh and the ghastly nature of the case guaranteed a rapt audience among those who packed the public benches and the thousands throughout the country who followed every word of the newspaper reports.

  It was not, however, a case which contained many complications as far as the evidence was concerned. Although he exercised his right not to go into the witness-box, Thompson’s admission to some of his friends – who were called by the Crown – made it clear his position was that he had dismembered and disposed of the body, but that he had not been the person who had carried out the killing. The possessions he had of the victim – the long coat, bracelet and a key-fob – had been found by himself. In the circumstances, it was probably the best defence he could muster. There was an abundance of evidence linking him with the sad figure of Gordon Dunbar and even more which pointed to him having cut up the body in the bathroom of 9L Butterburn Court. His incredible story that he had simply been assisting two ‘heavies’ from Glasgow, in return for them being prepared to assault a brother he despised, did not exercise the minds of the jury overly long. Although the trial had lasted for nine days, they took only seventy minutes to return with their verdict. As they filed back into court, each juror was treated to a penetrating stare from the dark, deep-set eyes of the grey-haired, bearded man in the dock. None of them returned his gaze. Juries which unanimously convict seldom look at the man they are about to despatch to prison; this jury was no exception.