by Tom Wood
In 1972, I got my break. After just a few years’ experience, but with a good grounding in basic policing, I was posted to Drylaw which, even in the pre-heroin era, was one of the busiest police stations in Scotland, covering, as it did, the vast sprawling area of post-war housing estates of Muirhouse, Pilton and West Granton, all with high crime rates.
It is often said that experience is about concentration and not duration and, if that’s true, six months at Drylaw was worth years in most other policing areas. There was a rich mix of crime to deal with in a generally very supportive community. It was there that I found out one of the great truths of policing – the rough areas, where there are real victims and where the police are needed, are where there is most support and understanding for the police. Later in my career, I was to work in communities that really didn’t have a crime problem but spent much of their time bemoaning their perceived lack of security and fears.
A fairly accurate portrayal of the bleakness of life in Drylaw and Muirhouse and the devastation that heroin brought to these and many other housing schemes throughout Scotland is to be found in Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. In the early 1970s, heroin was just emerging but, in hindsight, all the signs of the problem it would become were already there. I particularly remember how we Drylaw cops were amazed when one of the local criminals turned up with a brand-new E-type Jaguar. It was a pillar-box red convertible and it stood out like a sore thumb among the drab grey council houses. The owner was a second-rate criminal and local thug and, as we speculated on how he had managed to afford it, we never considered that he was one of the first heroin dealers in Edinburgh. In fairness, a handful of insightful drug squad detectives had been warning us about the danger of drugs and of heroin in particular but their message was heard too late to prevent what has become the curse of many of our communities and the only really significant new challenge to policing before the age of computers.
But the experience of my excellent apprenticeship was now bearing fruit and I managed to pass the stiff selection procedures for the national accelerated promotion programme. It led to a year at the Scottish Police College where the eight of us selected that year were given intensive instruction in everything from constitutional law and management theory to public speaking. At the end of the course, I was a brand-new sergeant with everything to prove.
A brief return to Drylaw followed and then, as I realise it now, it was directly to the CID as a guinea pig. Up to then, the CID and other specialisms like the Traffic Department had been seen as forces within the force. Officers, once in the CID, seldom returned to uniform unless on promotion or punishment. The system had strengths but it also had weaknesses as it allowed the growth of cultures that could sometimes be very dangerous. The various scandals that beset the Metropolitan Police in the 1960s were a prime example of what could happen in an organisation with strong internal culture but without proper governance. The problem of corruption, either to defeat the ends of justice or for personal gain, was not prevalent in Scotland. I saw very little evidence of it throughout my career but, nonetheless, police chiefs everywhere were shaking up the CID and, in a very small way, I was part of that new regime.
So it was that, in October 1977, I was working in CID administration, keeping my head down and awaiting release as a fully fledged detective.
On the day the murders broke, there were few dealings for the new boy in the CID administrative office with the crime that was gripping the whole country but I still remember the tensions and the huge charge of energy that this crime created in the CID block of the then new force headquarters building at Fettes. There had simply not been a crime like this in our force area. I, of course, had no idea that the World’s End case would run the entire length of my police career and that I would have a role to play in the final investigation.
The murders were going to be the first major challenge for the newly formed Lothian and Borders Police, just two years old at this point. It was to be a challenge that would live with the force for many more years to come.
As I detail the way this first inquiry developed, it is important to put the events I describe into the context of the times we are discussing. Certainly looking back at the newspaper cuttings of the investigation is to peer into another world. The black-and-white images carried by the Edinburgh Evening News, the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald seem old-fashioned, almost antique, when viewed today. Police techniques and procedures have probably advanced more in the last thirty years than they had in the previous hundred. This was a major inquiry conducted in its initial and most crucial stages without the benefit of computers, employing scientific techniques that were limited to say the least and at a time when DNA was hardly a concept, let alone the major investigatory tool it is today.
Those were the days when senior investigators had no formal training in the investigation and management of major cases. Detectives learned as their service went along. The CID was still mainly a career within a career with some officers spending the vast majority of their time exclusively in CID with little or no interchange with other branches of the service to build a more rounded experience. The consequence of this was that the quality of CID officers was very varied. Yet, as I look back, it is remarkable how many fine natural detectives there were at all ranks. Putting aside the rose-tinted spectacles, there were some excellent investigators and leaders across the Scottish service but they were hopelessly handicapped by a lack of technology and the systematic approach now accepted as commonplace in criminal investigations.
Some things, though, change little – like the protocols and procedures for investigations that cross the boundaries of police forces or even their internal divisional areas. Police procedures then, as they do to this day, give ownership of a murder inquiry to the force or the division where the body was found – where the body lay, not where the person was last seen alive or their place of origin. This, in all truth, gave the World’s End inquiry, as it became known, another large hurdle to overcome from the very outset.
Local government in Scotland, and the police service along with it, was undergoing a period of enormous change. A Royal Commission headed by the distinguished Scots judge Lord Wheatley had come up with a plan to replace the country’s old burgh councils and county districts with a slimmed-down number of ‘super regional authorities’, each charged with running an area’s major services, including the police. So it was that a series of amalgamations were enacted and a massive exercise was going on to try to harmonise working practices and end old rivalries between the newly combined eight forces.
Lothian and Borders Police was formed out of three old forces – Edinburgh City Police, Lothian and Peebles Constabulary and the Berwick, Roxburgh and Selkirk Constabulary. Each, of course, felt they had the business of policing down to a fine art and were reluctant to give up their ways for those of another force. In the west of Scotland the service was facing an even bigger challenge as seven forces worked to become one. Strathclyde police covered a massive area ranging from the tough inner-city challenges of Glasgow to the remote and beautiful islands of Argyll.
Integration is the key word in any merger, be it in the private or public sector. The people at the head of their own little empires are always reluctant, to some greater or lesser extent, to cede power or control to a new and perhaps little-known person. Nonetheless, efforts had been made to mix and match senior officers of the new forces even though practicalities made this a slow process.
These were the tensions lying behind what was going on as the investigation to find the killers of Helen and Christine was being established. The solving of crime is often dependent on what happens in the first few hours of any major inquiry. The protection of the crime scene and the fast establishment of the basic facts to allow the initial inquiries to be channelled in the right direction are vital if a solution is to be reached quickly.
The World’s End inquiry was one police operation split into two from the very start. The Edinburgh end was run by
a highly regarded city detective chief inspector, Bert Darling, while the East Lothian part, the main part of the inquiry because that was where the bodies had been found, was headed by Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Suddon. He was a man of equal competence but his background was in the less demanding rural force, which was much smaller in size and without many of the back-up facilities of the larger City Police. Though both men came from solid investigative backgrounds, they were very different in style and temperament. Acting as officer in overall command was Detective Superintendent George MacPherson, a tough man who had the difficult task of bringing the two teams together to act as a single unit.
Whilst the county division was nominally in charge of the direction of the inquiry, they were the least involved in the first phase to establish what had actually happened in the case of the World’s End killings – the effort in those first days to find witnesses and investigate the backgrounds of the girls. It was quickly established that there were no witnesses to the dumping of the bodies, no hint of the vehicle that had to have been used. The place where Christine’s body was left on the beach was yards from the roadside on a section of the route between two coastal villages. The actual piece of road where the killer’s vehicle would have stopped commands a very good view of the route in both directions, allowing whoever was dumping the body to be certain that his work would not be witnessed. At night, the lights of an approaching car would be seen some distance away. Helen’s body had been left in a remote field on a quiet country road nearby.
On the other hand, a great many people in the pub that night were traced and a clear picture of the girls’ evening was established. Not only were customers of the World’s End traced but hundreds of people who had been drinking in the other pubs visited by the pair that night were also interviewed to see if any of them had an inkling as to who the two men they were seen with may have been. They appeared to have met the men for the first time that night in the World’s End and fallen into conversation with them. Within a short space of time, both of the men were well described – to the extent that the Edinburgh Evening News was able, with help from the police, to print an artist’s impression of the scene in the bar that night with the suspects, as they had been described by witnesses, clearly seen talking to Helen and Christine. It quickly became apparent that these men were not regulars – in fact, no one had a clue who they were. They seemed to be strangers to the Old Town area of Edinburgh, not knowingly seen by any of the pub patrons before that night. They had been observed clearly by so many people that a photofit picture of the pair was released by police in the weeks after the killings. Photofits are a mixed blessing for detectives. All too often the images created by witnesses in a genuine attempt to assist are so short of the mark that they can actually hinder the inquiry by erroneously deflecting attention elsewhere. In this case, though, we would eventually see just how accurate those photofit images actually were.
One major issue in a prolonged or high-profile murder investigation is that of public confidence. Murder, particularly multiple murders or the murder of a child, still rightly excites the public imagination. The coverage crimes such as this and the Soham and West murders get on radio, TV and in the newspapers stimulates the kind of media and public frenzy that can drive and distort the course of an investigation. However, this is not always the case. Some recent killings, like the murder of petty criminals or internecine gang murders, demonstrate that the public makes a fine judgement about the worthiness of the victim. In one recent Edinburgh case, where the victim was himself a violent criminal, the overwhelming belief that ‘he had it coming’ led to a poor public response and little information coming forward despite the best police and media efforts.
The very high-profile murder investigation can really be traced back to the original 1880s Whitechapel Ripper case. The unique combination of multiple and gruesome crimes with a taunting killer or killers and, crucially, an emerging tabloid press, featuring lithographs and graphic illustrations, combined to give the Ripper case a horror status that still endures today and which, at the time, must have overwhelmed the small amateur group of detectives dealing with it. Today, over a hundred years later, new theories and suspects still emerge with all the racial and class stereotypes intact – the Mad Royal, the Homicidal Foreigner and the Stranger. It’s the nearest thing to the original bogey man.
Since the Whitechapel Ripper, there has been a succession of notorious cases – the Moors Murders, the Black Panther, the Yorkshire Ripper, Soham and, in Scotland, the Bible John Murders of the 1960s, the World’s End case and the abduction and murders of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper. All these cases, in their own way, established a place in the folk memory of the public.
The successful investigation of murder and the murder clear-up rate have always been of special importance to police forces – they are perceived as an index of proficiency and success. It is ironic when considered objectively because murder is generally not the most difficult crime to solve – the majority of killings are in a domestic situation or where the victim and offender have some degree of relationship so it is not hard to have a good murder clear-up rate. It’s much more difficult to solve offences like housebreaking and robbery – crimes which also have a greater social impact because they affect a far greater number of people.
Murder, however, remains the benchmark and crimes which catch the public and media imagination place an enormous strain on the investigation team, the police force and the community. Two things are essential to maintaining public confidence – the demonstration that police are prioritising the investigation and signs that the inquiry is making progress. The importance of the investigation is frequently gauged by significant police presence, incident caravans, reconstructions or the more recent and sometimes mawkish practice of parading relatives before the media to make tearful pleas for help. The demonstration of progress and new lines of inquiry is sometimes more problematic for there is a real media pressure to come up with a new line every day and this can be both dangerous and, in the long term, counterproductive.
A number of investigations I have been involved in were distracted and sometimes misled by red herrings that had been originated by the police because they were trying, in good faith, to demonstrate their progress and satisfy an ever voracious media. Vehicle inquiries are classics of the type. In every long-running investigation, there is at least one sighting of a white van or a red car and not infrequently complicated and lengthy inquiries are made to trace them. As a senior officer, it’s hard to resist the temptation of these leads. It may be crucial but very often it takes the investigation down a very long cul-de-sac. Just as importantly, features associated with the case that are misleading can also lodge in the mind of the public. This is one reason why police are always reluctant to issue photofit likenesses of suspects. If the photofit is a good likeness, that’s fine but, if not, then the public is looking for someone that does not exist and that, by default, excludes everyone else.
As the World’s End investigation developed, vehicle inquiries and one particular vehicle would be crucial and photofit impressions would also play an important role.
The murders of Helen and Christine were entirely different from the usual domestic killings. From an early stage, it looked as if this crime had resulted from a chance first meeting between two men and two women. It seemed likely the men had a plan to abduct a victim or victims based simply on the fact that, between the four leaving the bar that night and the bodies being found the next day, there were no sightings of them at all. There could not have been a struggle in a public place so they must have been able to persuade the pair to go with them willingly – probably in a vehicle which they knew would be safe for their evil purpose. In all likelihood, the perpetrators would have had a plan – certainly a rough idea of what they were going to do that night if they got the opportunity. One thing is striking, especially in the light of cases that came after this one. Often men seeking a victim to abduct, abuse and mur
der have a kit in their possession – rope for bindings and other paraphernalia. The child killer Robert Black had just such a kit in his van when he was eventually arrested. In addition to the bindings and tape for gagging his little victims, there was also a sleeping bag in which to conceal them.
The World’s End killer/s got round the need to carry such items by using their victims’ own clothing to suppress them – their tights became bindings, their underwear gags. So, within hours of the bodies being discovered, there were in effect two large-scale inquiries going on. There was the East Lothian-based forensic examination of the discovery sites and searches of the nearby areas to find any clues that may have been left behind and, in Edinburgh, the huge investigation focusing on the World’s End pub and the city centre.
In these days of spacious modern incident rooms with air conditioning and the most up to date of computer equipment, it’s easy to forget that such advances only began in the 1980s. Back in the 1970s, teams investigating murders and major incident worked out of small offices and all the data was kept on card index systems and in bulky paper files. This worked well enough for a simple domestic crime but was seriously inadequate for large or complex investigations. The manual card system dated from the 1940s and, although updated in the subsequent years, it was basically the same and it depended on the skill and experience of a small administrative team usually made up of an experienced detective sergeant and two detective constable clerks. It was the members of this small team who read the statements of witnesses and created ‘jobs’, the name given to further inquiries, arising from them. The senior investigator or his deputy also read the statements and might add further lines of inquiry and that was it. There were no further fail-safes, no automatic review process and no high-tech safeguards. It was a rudimentary and very basic system but it worked amazingly well and was a great testimony to the expertise of the staff who operated it. So crucial was the admin role recognised to be that senior detectives invariably had a favoured sergeant and team to work the admin of his squads – people he knew and trusted and who, above all, had the experience and track record to do the job. This arrangement established a common fund of shared experience but no unified system. The manual card index system met its nemesis on the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry in the 80s. The sheer size of that investigation swamped the manual index and culminated in a number of satellite incident rooms being crammed with tens of thousands of cards. The shortcomings were evident for, no matter how able the operators were, it was clear that the scale was beyond human capacity and, in the aftermath of the trial and conviction of Peter Sutcliffe and in the knowledge that the killer had been overlooked in the system, the Byford Report recommended a computerised major inquiry system. Thus was born HOLMES, Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, a system which, with regular modernisation, is still used today.