Six weeks later, at the High Court, Mullady pled guilty to a charge of murder and robbery. The proceedings lasted barely two minutes and the 17-year-old who had gone to ‘help police’ after reading in an evening paper that they were looking for him, was ordered to be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure – the equivalent of a life sentence for someone his age.
Everyone connected with the case felt immense sympathy for the family of Diane Graham, who died for no other reason than that she happened to get on a particular bus. Among those most deeply affected was Chief Inspector David Fotheringham. Later he was also to admit to feeling considerable compassion for the youth who had been so willing to confide in him.
21
LITTLE BOY BLUE
Evil dwells in unlikely places. It takes no heed of geography or seasons and often announces its presence when least expected. It inhabits improbable minds and is no respecter of age. It penetrates the soul of the young just as readily as it infiltrates the psyche of the mature …
That bright summer’s evening in 2001 it lurked at its most menacing – and most unforeseen. On the sunny slopes of the Law, dog walkers exercised their pets, children frolicked and couples meandered hand in hand. It was 6.30 p.m. in the middle of the trades holiday fortnight and the city was at play and at peace. No one spotted the powerful figure wearing the blue baseball cap and matching top and trousers who padded lightly through the undergrowth bordering the paths that criss-crossed the hill. He moved swiftly and silently and in his hand he carried a knife.
When he suddenly burst into view in front of the woman walking her dog, he paused for only a moment. Then he grabbed her, dragging her roughly back into the bushes from which he had unexpectedly emerged. He brought the knife swiftly across the throat of his petrified victim – then he started to swing it as though he was possessed by the Devil himself. He didn’t stop until it had flashed twenty-nine times. By then the poor woman was dead. She lay on the ground bleeding profusely from wounds to her head, throat, face, chest, back, abdomen and an arm. She had not cried out, for the first thrust of the blade had severed her voice box. Before he departed, the figure in blue stamped on her face. Then he ran away down the hill, his urgent footsteps making no sound as he ducked and swerved through the heavy bushes.
It was some time before anyone became aware of the evil that had descended on the popular beauty spot that August night. The body of 34-year-old civil servant Anne Nicoll, whose home was only a few hundred yards away in Byron Street, lay undisturbed in the brushwood for almost an hour. At first she had the company of her beloved Sophie, the Airedale terrier she walked morning and evening on the Law, but the pet, distressed at the lack of response from his mistress, had finally retreated whimpering from the scene. Sophie remained in the vicinity and was still there when Anne’s partner of four years, 33-year-old Gordon McKenzie, anxious at their failure to return home, came looking for them, retracing their usual route. The terrier led him through the woods to the thicket where Anne lay crumpled and bleeding on her side.
He did not know that, as he desperately tried to revive the woman he loved, his every move was being watched by a figure crouching behind a bush a short distance away. The silent observer no longer wore blue, for after he had run from the hill the disciple of the Devil had hurried to his home nearby and showered. Then he returned to watch and await the discovery of his handiwork.
The savage and apparently motiveless killing stunned the city. It was murder at its most wicked. The victim was liked by all who knew her, a decent woman who took pleasure from the simple things in life and who never had a bad word to say about anyone. Police were only too aware that anyone who could take a life so randomly and with such unbridled ferocity was perfectly capable of repeating the act. Dog walkers deserted the hill and children were kept indoors.
More than a hundred detective and uniformed police officers swamped the area in the following days, with reinforcements being brought in from a neighbouring police force. Hundreds of people who frequented the Law or lived in the area were interviewed. The response from the public, outraged by the indiscriminate attack, was unprecedented. Four days after the fearsome stabbing, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Allan announced a breakthrough. One of those who answered the press appeals was an elderly lady who had also walked her dog that night and had been alarmed after an encounter with a stranger. The 68-year-old told how she had spotted a figure in a brilliant blue tracksuit and baseball cap flitting through the woods. Then he had suddenly appeared on a path in front of her and instinctively she had said ‘Hello’. He did not return the greeting, but had grunted and stared at her. After he passed, she turned to find that he too had turned and was continuing to look at her.
The woman, who had walked her dog on the hill for eight years, became frightened and hurried away. Describing her encounter, she said: ‘I thought to myself, “I had better get out of here quick”. I don’t know why.’
Police immediately issued a nationwide appeal for information about the ‘man in blue’. It brought instant results. Others came forward to say they too had become anxious after sighting a suspicious figure in a corresponding outfit – except it wasn’t a man but a youth. An 11-year-old girl told how she had been on the hill with her 12-year-old cousin when a teenager clad in blue suddenly came out of the trees to appear behind them. He started to follow the children and the 12-year-old, frightened and apprehensive, keyed the 999 emergency number into his mobile phone, keeping his finger on the ‘call’ button ready to connect the call in case anything happened. A 15-year-old, who had been walking his dog with two other teenagers, told how they too had become afraid when a menacing figure in blue had passed them on the hill, moving fast and constantly looking behind him. Crucially, one of the trio said the stranger seemed to be aged about 15 or 16 with red or blonde hair, and with a pierced eyebrow. It was a major lead. Police had suspected from the moment the murder hunt had been launched that the perpetrator probably lived locally and knew the hill intimately because of the apparent ease with which he had moved across it. The likely age of the person who had become their prime suspect indicated he may even be one of the teenagers from the area who used the thickets of the Law as a gathering place for assorted activities, including the consumption of drugs and alcohol.
Police concentrated their investigation on the movements of youths who frequented the area. Among them was Robbie McIntosh, a 15-year-old schoolboy who lived in Kenmore Terrace, less than 200 yards from the murder scene and in a house whose window looked directly into the home of victim Anne Nicoll’s father. He had red-blonde hair and a pierced eyebrow. His mother was a social worker at HM Young Offenders’ Institution, Castle Huntly, Longforgan, a few miles from Dundee, and he was the dominant figure in a gang of teenagers who roamed the hill. Locals knew him as a sullen troublemaker who became difficult when he didn’t get his own way. Some said he had an evil streak.
The burly teenager had been among the first people the murder team had spoken to after the discovery of the mutilated body. He had been part of a group of ten youths who gathered on the hill to spectate as police taped off the death scene. All had their names and addresses taken as potential witnesses and in the following days McIntosh, among others, was interviewed on several occasions. He became of particular interest after eyewitness descriptions of the ‘man in blue’ began coming in, and his status changed from important witness to prime suspect.
McIntosh admitted to having been on the Law prior to the discovery of the body, but each time he was questioned he gave a different account of his movements on the night of the killing. He described how he had seen Anne Nicoll walking her dog and watched as she had a conversation with another woman who had also been exercising her pet. He told of a man sitting on a bench near the spot where the corpse had been found. Later, he said, he saw a well-known ‘junkie and weirdo’ who sniffed gas from a canister. Each interview brought a new explanation of his movements and variation in timescales. He spoke of a suspicious figure
he had spotted while he strolled the hill in early evening. Finally, he confessed to having gone to the Law to smoke a joint of cannabis.
Police decided to round up all the young witnesses and interview them individually again, this time simultaneously so there could be no exchange of stories. They called at McIntosh’s house at 7 a.m., only to learn he had departed for Glasgow Airport to bid farewell to his sister who was returning to her home in Canada after holidaying in Scotland. Uncertain about whether he might return to Dundee, detectives rushed to the west and brought him back from the airport for interview at police headquarters. He was arrested the same day.
Nine days later, McIntosh appeared before a sheriff to be judicially examined by a procurator fiscal, a procedure which allows an accused person to give an account of any circumstances relevant to the case, such as a plea incriminating someone else for the crime, or that the accused had acted in self-defence or had some other justification for what may have happened. McIntosh was advised that if he did not answer any questions at that stage, but later said something at the trial which he could have disclosed at the examination, that this omission could go against him. Citing the advice of his solicitor, the teenager declined to answer any questions. By the time the long-awaited trial opened at the High Court in Forfar the following April, McIntosh had turned sixteen and his protected status as a juvenile had expired, allowing him to be publicly identified.
Being charged with murder did nothing to lessen his arrogance. On his first appearance in court he laughed and joked all his way to the dock. During his journeys to and from court, he blew kisses to photographers and when his friends took their seats in the public benches he greeted them with a grin, acknowledging their presence with a knowing nod of his head. Nor was he overawed by the solemn majesty of the High Court. While some of the teenagers who gave evidence against him were in the witness-box, he fixed them with a brooding, unwavering stare. At one point, the proceedings had to be interrupted after McIntosh sat making obscene gestures to a young witness under the pretext of moving his hand round his face.
Some of the young witnesses related how the swaggering McIntosh had arrived in the vicinity of the Law at around the time the body had been found with a ‘red and puffy’ face and had explained that away by saying he had just showered. Staff in a chip shop recounted how he had appeared in the shop that evening to tell them that a woman had been stabbed to death on the nearby Law, a seemingly inconsequential remark – except that it had been made before any member of the public could possibly have known. Police had meticulously checked the timings, even down to the running time of the TV programme EastEnders, which a witness in the shop had been watching, and examined the movements of emergency vehicles in the area, to conclude that McIntosh had jumped the gun with his news. The case against him was slowly building.
Then came a bombshell. In his plea of not guilty at the outset of the trial, McIntosh had lodged a special defence of incrimination, naming as the killer one of his friends, a 16-year-old former classmate who looked not unlike him and who also had a pierced eyebrow. The incriminated youth was called to give evidence and described himself to the jurors as a meat technician, which most assumed meant a butcher.
He described how he had been at his grandmother’s home between six o’clock and nine o’clock on the night of the murder, but admitted he had gone to the Law later to watch the police activity. He also revealed that on the day after the murder he had been drunk and had boasted that he had been the killer. On top of that, he confessed to having had a homemade knife in his possession, before and after the attack, and that his mother had disposed of the knife down a drain following the launch of the murder hunt.
Cross-examining the 16-year-old, Peter Gray QC, McIntosh’s counsel, suggested to him that he and McIntosh had met that night and had gone to part of the Law known as Dead Man’s Cliff where they had smoked cannabis together. While they were in the midst of preparing a joint, Anne Nicoll had passed by and, seeing what they were doing, threatened to tell their mothers.
‘You were not happy and as she walked past you, you took your knife out of your back pocket, you came up behind her and drew it across her face, and then you butchered her, didn’t you?’ posed the QC.
The teenager denied every part of the suggested scenario and explained that it would be of no consequence to him if someone told his mother they had seen him smoking cannabis, since she already knew he did so.
Later, an 11-year-old boy, shielded by special screens round the witness-box, revealed that he had met the trainee butcher on the night of the attack and noted that he had a bruise on his cheek and a cut lip. He also had a ‘shiny thing’ in his back pocket. It was almost possible to feel the current of excitement which ran along the packed public benches in the courtroom. Folk leaned forward to catch every word. They gasped inwardly when the 11-year-old went on to say that he met the 16-year-old the following day. Then he told the court: ‘He pulled out the knife and said, “It was me that killed Anne Nicoll.” ’
It was all startling evidence and completely changed the complexion of the trial. Now the jury were aware that two teenagers, friends who were remarkably similar in appearance, had one way or another admitted to being near the murder scene that night. One of them – and not the one in the dock – had apparently even announced to young acquaintances that he was the murderer. But which, if either, was actually the killer?
A strong indication that it was McIntosh came, as it so often does, with the presentation of the forensic data. A meticulous search of his house had not unearthed any blue top and matching bottoms – but it had produced a baseball cap and rolled-up sock, both bearing minute specks of blood. DNA tests revealed that the blood on the sock was, with a billion-to-one certainty, Anne Nicoll’s. The trace of faint bloodstaining on the baseball cap was less conclusive because the sample was incomplete and showed a mixed profile – but it was still a thousand-to-one probability to have been a mix of McIntosh’s and Ms Nicoll’s.
Before the jury retired to examine the enormous amount of evidence they had heard over the eleven days of the trial, they were invited to consider a possible explanation for the presence of Ms Nicoll’s blood on the accused youth’s belongings. Defence counsel suggested that he might have been at the scene, and close enough to have picked up specks of the dead woman’s blood, but only as a spectator while the friend he had accused carried out the murderous onslaught. It was an intriguing proposition.
McIntosh himself was unprepared to shed any light on what had taken place on the Law that summer evening, exercising his right not to give evidence and declining to go into the witness-box.
The jury retired with a lot to think about.
What they did not know was that before going out onto the hill that evening, McIntosh had spent twenty minutes on his home computer accessing a number of pornographic sites depicting torture and violent sexual acts of rape, where the victims included children. McIntosh had tried to remove the images, but specialist forensic computer unit police officers were able to retrieve the sickening pictures. Significantly, they were also able to extract data showing that in the months leading up to the slaughter on the hill he had visited sites referring to stalking and rape. The prosecution had hoped to lead evidence during the trial about what had been found on McIntosh’s computer, but it had been ruled inadmissible on the basis that there was a material difference between viewing violent sexual conduct and being a perpetrator of it. Furthermore, there was no indication that the attack on the unfortunate Anne Nicoll had been sexually related.
Others who knew McIntosh could have told the jurors it wasn’t surprising he found himself in the dock of a High Court – especially a neighbour who five months before the slaying of Anne Nicoll had warned that he was on a course to commit an ‘unpleasant’ act against someone. The fearful resident had even penned a letter intended for McIntosh’s mother, but it had been placed through the wrong letterbox, arriving instead at a neighbour’s. The recipient passed it
to a local councillor, who forwarded it to the police. The text of the anonymous letter read:
I think it’s about time something was done about your son. He has brought nothing but trouble to this street.
Him and his friends make people’s life a misery, running through people’s gardens, closes, etc, vandalising the park and people’s cars. The language is terrible. I have heard they take ecstasy tablets on Friday afternoon. Check out the condoms in the park along with the drink cans.
Someone is going to end up getting something done to them and it won’t be pleasant.
People are wondering how you managed to get a house in this street. Other people wait years. Your son is an unsociable tenent (sic). We need to petition to get you out.
Other residents in quiet Kenmore Terrace, where McIntosh lived with his mother, shared the letter-writer’s unease about the youngster in their midst. One householder described him thus: ‘He is evil. I said that laddie was evil before anything happened.’
His schoolteachers could speak of him as a ‘walking nightmare’, a swaggering thug who insulted staff and bullied smaller and younger pupils. He had had no interest in learning and was unreceptive to any kind of discipline. At Harris Academy, which he attended for a few years, he was frequently sent to a special windowless room for misbehaving where there were only two desks and two chairs – one for the errant pupil and the other for a supervising teacher. The regime removed contact with other children, except during the lunch-break, and the time was spent in solitary study. Most pupils sent there seldom returned after a single day in the ‘cooler.’ McIntosh was a regular occupant, put there repeatedly for offending and apparently unperturbed by the harsh routine. Eventually, he was expelled from the school and moved to the city’s special unit for disaffected secondary pupils.
The Lawkillers Page 22