Thirty-two years after being locked up, Tonner embarked on an audacious bid to secure his release. A fellow inmate at Carstairs, Noel Ruddle, known as the Kalashnikov Killer, had won his freedom after exploiting a loophole in the law, successfully arguing that since his personality disorder could not be cured, he should be released. Within weeks of Ruddle being paroled, Tonner and two other Carstairs patients – one also a paedophile killer, the other a man who had stabbed a young mother to death and who also attempted the abduction of an eight-year-old girl – lodged appeals of their own on the same grounds, demanding that they, too, be set free.
Aware that the ground-breaking case could open the floodgates for a rush of similar appeals, the Scottish Parliament hurried through legislation to plug the loophole. The case ultimately went as far as the judicial committee of the Privy Council in London, the highest appeal court in the United Kingdom, where the five judges rejected the freedom pleas of the three killers.
Six years later, on 31 January 2007, Karl Anderson Tonner, then aged 61 and whose weight had soared to 20 stones because of lack of exercise and his hospital drugs regime, failed to turn up for an appointment within Carstairs. Staff went to his room and found him dead from a heart attack.
His funeral was one of the briefest on record. In a 10-minute ceremony, he was buried in an unmarked grave near the hospital. Only three council gravediggers and four hospital staff were present to watch his outsize coffin being lowered into the ground. No one attended from Dundee, where almost 40 years earlier he had nonchalantly admitted to taking the life of a little girl making her way home from school.
16
SUFFER THE LITTLE
CHILDREN – PAULINE
Sometimes the act that one person commits against another is so appalling it is almost beyond comprehension. When they learn of it, normal people are bewildered and repulsed in equal measure. They cannot take in what has occurred or understand the extent of another human being’s ability to remove themselves so far from civilised conduct.
Michael Wilkinson’s capacity for wickedness was all the more surprising because it followed soon after a display of self-sacrifice that was so heart-warming people praised him in the newspapers.
His story began in the autumn of 1971. Then aged 24, his marriage had broken up after he discovered his wife committing adultery with another man. He had assaulted both of them and they moved from Dundee to England, leaving him with three young children to care for. Soon after, the youngest, a boy, was taken to hospital to be operated on for a serious liver complaint. The two-year-old seemed to make a good recovery but one evening at home, without warning, he suffered a relapse. A short time later, he died in his father’s arms.
No one gets over that kind of experience, but six months later Michael Wilkinson thought he’d found a way that offered an unusual sort of solace. He read of a 12-year-old girl in Cambridge who was critically ill and required a kidney to stay alive. The appeal appeared to touch Wilkinson deeply and he immediately volunteered to donate one of his own.
‘I cannot sit by and do nothing while a little girl lies helpless. I know what the death of a child is all about …’ he told reporters. In the event, his organ was unsuitable for transplanting and the offer could not be taken up. His selfless gesture gained national headlines and his altruism was applauded in his home town and far beyond. Less than three years later, however, his words were to take on a chilling significance.
On the afternoon of 17 June 1974, six-year-old Pauline McIver failed to return home from school, prompting her worried parents to attempt to trace her movements. Their enquiries took them to a tenement flat in Gourdie Place, in Dundee’s Dryburgh estate, the home of one of her daughter’s young friends. Mrs McIver spoke to Michael Wilkinson, the child’s father, who at once said Pauline had accompanied his own daughter back from school and that the two little girls had played together in the flat. He helpfully explained that he’d sent Pauline home around 4.30 p.m. Mrs McIver, a 26-year-old nurse and the mother of two other young children, hurried back downstairs to pass the news on to her husband who had waited in the family car. The couple departed at once, anxious to continue their search. But by late evening, and having made no progress, Mr McIver, this time accompanied by his brother, returned to Gourdie Place to question Wilkinson once more. The man whose own son had died tragically a few months earlier, expressed concern at the lack of developments but repeated that Pauline had only played for a short time in the house before setting off for home.
At 10.45 p.m., with the late summer light finally fading, and chastising herself for not having done so sooner, Mrs McIver finally alerted the police. A full-scale search was quickly launched and brought almost immediate results. Shortly after midnight, a police sergeant searching in the back yard behind Wilkinson’s block of flats, came upon Pauline’s body. She lay beside two discarded sinks in a bin recess with practically no attempt having been made to conceal her body. Police were later to say her injuries indicated that she’d been assaulted ‘to an unnatural degree’.
Wilkinson was taken to police headquarters for questioning and over the course of the next 90 minutes made three statements. The first two denied any knowledge of Pauline’s death and amounted to little more than what he’d told her parents. Then, as he was about to end his explanation of events for the third time, his demeanour changed. He began to sweat profusely, his brow, upper lip and hands all becoming moist.
‘Now let me think,’ he told Detective Sergeant David McNicoll, wringing his hands nervously. ‘I will have to tell someone anyway. Wait a minute. I can’t remember it all but it was me that done it.’
When Wilkinson came to stand trial at the High Court in Dundee three months later, two other alleged offences had appeared on the indictment along with the murder charge, narrating how he had punched Pauline on the face and body with his fists and indecently assaulted her before strangling her to death. Allegedly, in the months prior to the killing of Pauline, he had used indecent practices towards two 12-year-old girls in his home and then, on another occasion, with girls aged 13 and 14.
Wilkinson never disputed in court that he had taken Pauline’s life but submitted a plea that he was insane at the time and therefore not responsible for his actions; a defence the Crown rejected.
A prime witness in the case was the accused man’s daughter, the playmate of Pauline, whose evidence was particularly harrowing. Describing the events of the fateful afternoon, she provided the jury of eight men and seven women with a traumatic account of what had taken place, her simple words illustrating the depths of her father’s depravity.
Questioned by Advocate Depute J.G. Milligan for the prosecution, she quietly explained what had occurred.
‘Pauline came home with me that day after school,’ she said. ‘We were playing in my room. My daddy was in the living-room and he gave me some money to buy sweets.
‘Pauline said she would stay with my daddy and I went to get some sweets for both of us.’
The young witness went on to tell how, when she returned home, she found her father and Pauline playing cards. He then took her friend into a bedroom and a short time later she heard screams. It sounded as though Pauline was calling out to go home, she recalled. When her father came out of the room he explained that he’d ‘put his hand across Pauline’s mouth.’
Asked to describe what she saw, the youngster said Pauline was lying on the bedroom floor.
Mr Milligan asked: ‘Was she awake or did she seem to be sleeping?’
‘She seemed to be dead,’ the little girl told the court.
The young witness recounted how her father then instructed her to fetch her skipping rope.
‘He put it round Pauline’s neck and pulled it tight,’ she said, adding that she also saw him punching Pauline on the head.
The girl’s evidence continued: ‘Daddy got a big case and put Pauline in it. He took her down to the backs and I stayed in the house. He came back and began to wash the blood from the suit
case. He had taken off her pants and socks. He put them in a bucket and put something in the bucket. He seemed to be cleaning it.’
Mr Milligan: ‘Did your father say anything more to you?’
‘Yes. If you tell anybody, I’ll do the same to you,’ was the response. It is difficult to imagine any other words which could be more despicable coming from a father to his young daughter and some in the courtroom were visibly stunned at their utterance. Yet, for all its vileness, the threat appeared to have done little to alter the natural feelings of affection most children have for a parent.
Continuing to describe the circumstances of Pauline’s death, the schoolgirl told how Wilkinson had instructed her to go over the house with an air freshener and to tell anyone who asked that Pauline had gone home of her own accord. Occasionally, throughout her evidence, she looked towards her father in the dock and smiled.
Cross-examined by defence advocate Mr Edgar Prais, she was asked where her mother was.
‘Mummy has been in England since I was five,’ she replied. Questioned further, she explained that her father had been looking after her and that she still loved him.
Wilkinson displayed little emotion during the trial. It was only when the prosecution later referred to the threat to ‘do the same’ to his daughter that he became agitated to any extent, calling out several times: ‘Keep my daughter out of this.’
Dr Hector Fowlie, a psychiatrist, told the court that at first, on the balance of probabilities, he had believed that Wilkinson would have been insane at the time he had killed Pauline but he had altered his opinion after hearing the evidence of the accused’s daughter. If her account was true, Wilkinson would have been sane but suffering from a degree of diminished responsibility, he said. The doctor went on to explain that in an interview Wilkinson had said he could not recollect killing Pauline but had spoken of ‘coming out of a blackout and finding himself kneeling over her body in a bedroom.’ He had then admitted to pushing the body under a bed, then later, to washing her socks and pants and body after seeing blood on them. Wilkinson had also confessed to placing Pauline’s corpse in a bin recess before returning to the house to watch television. Afterwards, he’d gone to a bar and consumed three pints of beer.
During their interview, Wilkinson had further admitted to lying to Pauline’s parents and the police about her whereabouts, saying: ‘By that time I was frantic because I thought I had killed her, though I didn’t know how.’
Dr Fowlie also advised the court that he had treated Wilkinson in psychiatric units at various times some two years earlier because of a personality disorder associated with epilepsy. After his first marriage broke up, Wilkinson had married an 18-year-old girl but that had lasted only about a month because of frequent arguments about her going out with other men.
The jury unanimously rejected the accused’s plea of being insane at the time of the killing and convicted him of culpable homicide on the grounds of his diminished responsibility. Lord Leechman sent him to the state mental hospital at Carstairs, ordering that he be detained without limit of time. The jury also convicted Wilkinson of the indecency offences against the two 12-year-old girls but, on the instructions of the bench, he was found not guilty of the charges relating to the 13- and 14-year-old girls.
Wilkinson’s impassive state had returned by the time the verdicts were announced. After being sentenced he said nothing, simply turning away from the jury to stride quickly across the dock and down to the cells.
However, like others before him from Dundee whose monstrous crimes had taken them to the high security hospital in central Scotland, it was far from the last the public was to hear about the paedophile killer with the Jekyll and Hyde personality.
More than two decades after being removed from society to be held at Carstairs, he was back in court, not as a result of any other offence but to argue for his freedom. Some months earlier a fellow inmate at the hospital, Alexander Reid, had successfully won a ruling for his release after being detained for 30 years for stabbing a woman to death. Reid had argued that he should be discharged from the institution because he was not receiving treatment which could alleviate or prevent a deterioration in his condition, his personality disorder being untreatable. Although Reid continued to be held pending the result of an appeal by the then Scottish Secretary, Donald Dewar, it provided Wilkinson with the legal precedent to launch proceedings of his own.
The Dundee child killer, then aged 50, claimed there were no grounds to prolong his confinement because sexual deviancy, such as paedophilia, was not a mental disorder covered by the Mental Health Scotland Act, the law under which he was being held.
The case and its possible consequences for others held under similar court orders, prompted considerable interest in Scotland and beyond, once again gaining Wilkinson national headlines. The prospect of Wilkinson’s release was said to have alarmed staff at Carstairs, one declaring publicly that he was a ‘dangerous psychopath’ and ‘a typical child killer who was a model patient never causing problems but never discussing his crime or expressing remorse’.
Five psychiatrists were consulted by the courts, three of whom said Wilkinson was suffering from a mental disorder, and two that he was not. No one disputed that he was a paedophile, nor that there was a risk he could once again offend against children. Ultimately, it was ruled by a bench of Appeal Court judges that Wilkinson should not be freed, on the basis that he was not being held solely because of his paedophilia but because of his psychopathic condition. Reid’s earlier successful plea for discharge from Carstairs was eventually overturned by appeal judges in the House of Lords, the highest court in the land.
Wilkinson was present at all the hearings when his case was being argued and the high profile nature of his attempt to return to society meant few with an interest in his abhorrent attack on Pauline McIver were unaware of when he would be brought out of the mental institution to attend court. A close male relative of Pauline had followed the various proceedings with considerable interest and when Wilkinson was taken to the Court of Session in 1997 for his case to be heard by Lord Marnoch, the man was seated in the public benches. When the court rose for lunch, and as the child killer was being escorted out, the opportunity to relieve almost quarter of a century of pent-up anger proved too great to resist. The man sprang from his seat, attacking Wilkinson and knocking him to the floor. Legally, the action constituted an assault. Morally, there were few who disagreed with it.
17
ARSENIC AND OLD MAIZE
For most of his forty years, Thomas Leith led a life that was remarkable only for its ordinariness. He lived in a house that was 150 yards from the shop where he ran his small draper’s business and where he worked long hours every day. Sometimes, he would not even return home, preferring to sleep in the tiny attic bedroom over the shop. It was one of the few changes in an otherwise unvarying routine.
When the time came for him to die, it was also within a few hundred yards of where he’d spent his entire existence. But that day there was nothing mundane about the events that surrounded him. He died spectacularly and before an audience of between 15,000-20,000, all of whom had travelled across the city specially to witness his passing. No one knew for sure if he deserved to die or if he really was the evil poisoner they said. It was even possible that he was the victim of someone altogether more wicked.
What can be said with some certainty is that if Thomas Leith had been born a century or so later, his story would have spread far beyond the boundaries of Dundee, doubtless attracting the interest of filmmakers and being argued over in the legal circles across the land.
His life began uneventfully enough. A child of the early 1800s, he was brought up in poverty after his father died at a young age, leaving his mother destitute. She had to beg for food and frequently went from door to door seeking scraps, carrying the infant Thomas on her back. He somehow survived such a troubled upbringing, learned his craft as a tailor and, thanks to an industrious and frugal nature, managed
to scrape together enough money as a hawker to eventually buy his own drapery shop at the city’s busy West Port. He married at the age of twenty, his wife Ann being the same age and the daughter of a respectable working family in the area. A year later, their first child was born and named after him. In the years that followed, Thomas and Ann went on to have eleven other children but six of them fell victim to the poor health that blighted Dundee at that time and subsequently died.
Such tragedies, like the inexhaustible production rate of many childbearing women in Dundee, were not untypical and the Leiths at first enjoyed what appeared to be a settled and comparatively loving relationship before a gradual deterioration set in. The decline became more marked towards the end of 1845, when a young woman, Isabella Kennedy, went to work in the family shop. It was to be an event that would prove pivotal in the traumatic demise of both the Leiths.
The newcomer and her employer became lovers, inevitably leading to an acceleration in the breakdown of Thomas and Ann’s marriage. He became distant towards the woman who had borne him a dozen children and began verbally abusing her and keeping her short of money. It was also said that he had taken to striking her. Unsurprisingly, Ann suspected that her ill-treatment may have been due to a liaison between her husband and the girl who had taken up employment in his shop. She did not know, however, that Isabella had given birth to Thomas’ child. Or apparently not.
The Lawkillers Page 18