Ghosts & Gallows

by Paul Adams

  Throughout March and April 1967 the hunt for the missing girl intensified. Police held press conferences and combed the countryside and farmland around Dalton. Ditches and rivers were dragged and digging was carried out in wooded areas and fields, but nothing came to light. Both Pat’s parents and the police were disinclined to believe she had left home on purpose. The Daily Record printed hundreds of leaflets and posters with Pat McAdam’s photograph and description and distributed them throughout the country, but as the weeks went by with no breakthrough, it seemed almost inevitable that the young factory girl would never been seen alive again. Like Frederick Nodder forty years before, the one man who seemingly knew the real truth of what happened on the afternoon of 19 February 1967 had taken it with him to a jail cell, in this case one in Peterhead Prison. All this would have been running through Frank Ryan’s mind as, on 16 February 1970, almost three years to the day that Pat went missing, the journalist walked into the small consulting room at Croiset’s house at 21, William II Street in Utrecht and came face to face with Holland’s most famous psychic detective.

  Through an interpreter, Croiset agreed to try and help and looked at one of the Daily Record’s ‘Have You Seen This Girl?’ posters that Ryan had brought with him. As the Dutchman looked at Pat McAdam’s photograph, Ryan confirmed she had gone missing three years before but through the interpreter, Croiset asked only if her home life had been happy and the location of where she was last seen; he was quite adamant that he didn’t want to know anything else. The journalist took out a map of Scotland and pointed out the general area between Annan and Dumfries where Pat lived and also where Thomas Young had dropped off Hazel Campbell before driving away. Croiset immediately began describing and sketching on paper the impressions which were coming into his mind and which related to the young Scottish girl’s disappearance: there was a café where Pat had had a meal, then an area where a river ran between the slopes of hills that were wooded with fir trees; in particular the river banks were eroded and the roots of the trees that grew near the water were exposed in a distinctive way; then there was a flat bridge over the same river at the foot of one of the hills – the bridge had a balustrade made from lengths of grey tubular steel, part of which was bent down, and the road over it led to a building like a cottage which had advertising hoardings on it and was surrounded by a white-painted wooden fence. Croiset stated that to get more he would need to handle something that had belonged to Pat McAdam personally. He also asked that nothing be made public until the journalist had checked the area and seen if his impressions were accurate. Ryan thanked the Dutchman for his time and, taking the drawings, he started on the trip back to Scotland.

  Back in Dumfries, Frank Ryan together with Jack Johnstone, a local photographer, went on an excursion out to Dalton. Thomas Ross Young’s lorry had been seen parked off the road at Williamwath Bridge and Ryan thought this was the location that Croiset had viewed remotely, but when they arrived they immediately saw that the setting was wrong although the bridge was similar to the way the Dutchman had described it. Unlike Ryan, Jack Johnstone knew the area well and said that around three miles away at Middleshaw was another bridge crossing over a river known as the Water of Milk. Getting back into the car, the two men drove on. A short time later, Frank Ryan got out of the car and realised they had entered into the scene of Gerard Croiset’s vision. Everything was as the clairvoyant had described hundreds of miles away in his consulting room in Utrecht: the wooded hillside, the eroded river bank, the bridge with the tubular railings, the cottage with the advertisements, while a chain-link fence attached to the bridge sagged in just the way that Croiset had sketched. Ryan was stunned and realised that he had to contact Pat’s parents in order to obtain the personal item that the clairvoyant had requested.

  Ryan went to Lochside Road in Dumfries and introduced himself to Matthew and Mary McAdam. After he had shown them the results of Croiset’s psychometry, the couple allowed him to take away Pat’s Bible and Frank Ryan returned with it to Utrecht, together with Jack Johnstone’s photographs and a larger-scale map of the area he had visited. Croiset was pleased that Ryan had confirmed what he had ‘seen’ but when he picked up the Bible his expression changed. Like Jacob Klerk and Edith Kiecorius before, Croiset had the overwhelming impression that the young Scottish woman was dead. He then turned to the map and described his impressions: at a place called Broom Cottage (unvisited by Ryan and Johnstone) there was a wrecked car; it was being used for something but Croiset couldn’t tell what, but he described a wheelbarrow leaning against the side; Pat had been killed and her body hidden on the river bank among the exposed tree roots; there they would find items of clothing that belonged to her.

  With high expectations Ryan returned home and, together with his wife and another Record journalist, drove out to Middleshaw. Broom Cottage was three quarters of a mile downstream from the bridge over the Water of Milk that Croiset had described during his first visit, and as the party got out of their car they realised that again the Dutchman had been unbelievably accurate. In the garden of the cottage was an old car, a green Ford Poplar that the farmer was using as a hen house and leaning against the back was a rusty wheelbarrow. Ryan knew Detective Inspector Cullinan, who had headed the enquiry to locate Pat three years before, and, realising it was possible a breakthrough on the case was imminent, contacted the policeman. That evening Cullinan sent two officers with Ryan back to Broom Cottage and the three men searched the river bank looking for the clothing that Croiset had said would be there. Finally, after a long search, Ryan recovered a woman’s long-sleeved black dress, a stocking, and the remains of a handbag caught up in the mud and undergrowth, which were taken back to Dumfries.

  Ryan’s reporting of the discoveries for the Daily Record made front page news across Scotland and it seemed only a matter of time before Pat McAdam’s body would be recovered. It was not to be. Further searching of the river bank revealed nothing and the clothing could not be matched to the missing girl: the dress was unlike anything Pat had been wearing when she disappeared and Hazel Campbell was adamant that her friend had only bought a handbag in Glasgow, not the dress that Ryan and the police had found.

  Disappointed but convinced of the reality of the Dutchman’s psychic powers, Frank Ryan returned to Utrecht and, four days after the discovery of the discarded clothing, asked Croiset to put on record his impressions of the events that led up to Pat McAdam’s death. Croiset said she had walked with a man along the river bank near to Broom Cottage and a place where trees had been recently cut down and it was there that she had been beaten to death with a large metal spanner and her body thrown into the river, where it had become entangled in the tree roots exposed by the action of the water. The killer was in his early thirties, five feet four inches tall, with one ear noticeably larger than the other. Ryan made careful notes and contacted his editor in Glasgow, who agreed to the newspaper paying to fly Croiset to Scotland to see the area in person. The Dutchman, who had never visited Scotland before, spent a day around Middleshaw accompanied by Ryan and a local policeman. He confirmed his previous impressions of the disappearance and claimed that after a time, Pat’s body had become dislodged and had been washed out to sea. It was known that the Water of Milk was subject to periodic flash flooding during episodes of heavy rain and anything picked up by such fast-moving water would soon be swept away out into the Solway Firth. Despite the great efforts made by Frank Ryan and Gerard Croiset, the McAdam case remained unsolved.

  In 1975, Colin Wilson and producer Colin Godman interviewed Croiset for an episode of the BBC’s paranormal-themed television programme A Leap in the Dark. During the course of filming, Croiset told Wilson that the case was a personal triumph for him as through his involvement the police had recovered the missing teenager’s body. The broadcaster knew this was not the case and the two men argued until Wilson, sensing that nothing would convince the Dutchman otherwise, decided to let the matter drop. Later it became clear that Croiset had been misled by a fri
end, who had told him that the Scottish police had found a woman’s body in the same area – they had, but it was that of a married woman in her forties who had change in her pocket which had been minted after Pat McAdam had disappeared. Gerard Croiset died in 1980 at the age of seventy-one. Many people, including the clairvoyant himself, have considered his collaboration with Frank Ryan, despite the fact that ultimately Pat McAdam’s body was never traced, to be his finest hour as a psychic detective.

  Who did kill Pat McAdam and why? The prime suspect, Thomas Ross Young, was released from prison in 1975 after serving two-thirds of his sentence for assaulting a teenager. In June 1977, police investigating the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl at an address in Ashley Street, Glasgow, were given his name by the victim, who claimed he had held her by force inside the house for ten hours and subjected her to a repeated and violent assault. Ross was traced to the house of his estranged wife, where he was arrested. Police found a secret hideout under the floorboards where the lorry driver had been concealing himself, which contained a number of items including a make-up compact. This was found to belong to thirty-seven-year-old bakery worker, Frances Barker, who had gone missing from her home in Maryhill Road, Glasgow earlier the same month. Her decomposing body, naked from the waist down and with her hands tied behind her back, was subsequently discovered in undergrowth near a service road leading to Inchneuk Farm at Glenboig on 27 June. Forensic analysis of hairs collected from the cab of Young’s lorry revealed they were the same as those from Frances Barker’s body and on 25 October 1977 at the High Court in Glasgow, a jury took an hour to find him guilty of murder and Young, the ‘Monster of the highway’, was sentenced to life imprisonment. At the time of her disappearance, Hazel Campbell had told police that Pat had refused to sleep with someone at the party they went to on the Saturday night in Glasgow as she was on her period and most commentators have concluded that she would have dissuaded her killer from having sex for the same reason. It probably cost her her life.

  On 23 September 2007, over forty years after the disappearance of Pat McAdam, Young was officially charged with her murder by Sheriff Kenneth Ross via a video link with the Dumfries Sheriff Court. The petition alleged that Ross had carried out the killing, by means unknown, at or near Charlesfield Farm on the B7020 road between Annan and Dalton on 19 February 1967. However, despite the indictment, closure in the McAdam case was not made possible as it was subsequently found that Ross, then aged seventy-two, was too ill to stand trial due to a suspected heart condition, and the hearing was dropped. Two months later, in November 2007, the case of Thomas Young took a new twist when it was announced that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had referred his conviction for the murder of Frances Barker to the High Court of Justiciary as being unsafe. In the Commission’s view, a study by two forensic pathologists at Glasgow University together with a report submitted by FBI profilers at the Behavioural Analysis Unit at Quantico, Virginia, on the killings of six young Scottish women during the 1970s made it highly likely that either one or more men had carried out all six murders. The reports had been prepared as part of the prosecution case against another Scotsman, serial sex killer Angus Sinclair, who was accused of killing two Edinburgh women, Helen Scott and Christine Eadie, in 1977 in what became known as the World’s End pub murders. Scott and Eadie, along with Frances Barker, were three of the six ‘cold cases’ which were reviewed at the time by the FBI, all of which, according to profiler Mark Safarik, were carried out by the same killer or killers. Sinclair’s trial collapsed in August 2007 due to lack of evidence but it paved the way for a review of Young’s conviction, who was in prison during the times that the other five women were killed, although the Commission acknowledged that there remained a strong body of evidence that continued to implicate Young in the murder of Frances Barker. To date the High Court has not pursued the Review Commission’s case and Thomas Ross Young remains behind bars in Peterhead Prison, now one of Scotland’s longest-serving prisoners.

  The story of Pat McAdam continues to arouse periodic interest. In January 2011, the discovery of a woman’s skeletal remains in a disused quarry near Longtown in Cumbria brought the case again briefly into the spotlight, but forensic examination soon discounted any connection with the forty-four-year-old mystery. Writing about Croiset’s role in the investigation in the early 1980s, Colin Godman concluded that if Pat McAdam’s body had been discovered in 1970, the case would have become ‘the classic work of psychic detection’. Even Croiset’s most ardent critic, Piet Hein Hoebens (who died in 1984), admitted that it was one of the clairvoyant’s greatest triumphs. However, Hoebens preferred to believe that the wealthy Croiset had in fact paid his secretary to travel to Scotland to collect the information on his behalf, a somewhat desperate attempt at debunking given the wealth of independent evidence that supports the genuineness of the case. ‘A few hundred pounds is a bargain for a classic ESP hit’ was his rather short-sighted comment, a response that goes a long way to proving that on occasion, a belief in paranormality is far more credible than the ‘rational’ explanations of the sceptics.

  For parapsychologists intent on obtaining the smoking gun evidence that would give psychic detection the satisfaction of a convincing ‘case closed’ scenario, the Croiset-McAdam story was a frustrating one. Colin Godman’s ‘classic work’ seemed to be forever tantalisingly out of reach, but as we shall see, it was coming. It would just be a matter of time …

  CHAPTER 10

  GHOST OF THE FROZEN GIRL

  ANNE NOBLETT, 1974

  We have already seen how the alleged ghost of a murder victim was the catalyst that brought about the revelation of Modern Spiritualism in the middle years of the nineteenth century. What is often cited as the first ever instance of the investigation of a haunted house, a hundred years before the birth of Christ, may also have involved the apparition of a murdered man. This is the well-known account, attributed to Pliny the Younger, who described the discovery of the skeleton of a man, bound hand and foot in rusted chains, from under the floor of a courtyard in a villa in Athens. The appearance over several years of the fettered figure of a grey-haired old man, so Pliny recorded in a series of letters to a friend, had so frightened several occupants that the house had a sinister reputation in the immediate neighbourhood and the owner had considerable difficulty in finding tenants who would stay for any length of time. A philosopher, attracted by the local tales and the disarmingly low rent, moved in and observed the appearance of the ghost, which disappeared at a particular spot in a corner of the courtyard. When this was excavated, by workmen in the presence of the philosopher and a magistrate, a shallow grave was found which must have lain undisturbed for many years. After the skeleton was given a proper burial, the sinister apparition of the mysterious man in chains was never seen again.

  Unlike the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who revealed to his son how he was murdered in his sleep (with poison poured into his ear) by his brother Claudius, Pliny’s spectral Athenian, if he was the victim of an ancient murder, did not reveal the identity of his killer or give any indication of how he came to be bound and buried in such a way. The world of literature abounds with vengeful spectres who materialise to denounce killers and reveal secrets from beyond the grave. Much nearer to our own time than Shakespeare’s tale of the tragic Danish king, writers Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, in their book Ghost Stories Round the World (1965), a collection of accounts based on allegedly true happenings, tell the story of one such purposeful shade, that of the doomed Henry Edwards, ‘The Ghost of Anngrove Hall’. Edwards, an under-coachman in the service of Charles Stanford, is dismissed and later murdered by the Master of Angrove for revealing his love for the Squire’s daughter, Catherine. Henry’s ghost later appears to his sister Polly and denounces his former master as a killer. Polly, in the tradition of the tale of the Red Barn with which it is contemporary, dreams of her brother’s body buried in a grave under a haystack on the Anngrove estate. Labourers from a neighbouring country hous
e dig at the site and unearth a heavily decomposed body dressed in a coachman’s uniform, but by this time Charles Stanford himself has disappeared, presumably at the ghostly hands of his former servant, and Anngrove Hall, located near Stokesley, a small market town in North Yorkshire, has become a derelict ruin.

  Palmer and Lloyd’s book contains a number of stories previously collected by Charles Lindley Wood (1839-1934), 2nd Viscount Halifax, and published in 1936, with a foreword and annotations on the contents, by his son as Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book. The book, which contains a broad cross-section of reported cases of supernormal phenomena including crisis ghosts, phantasms of the living, phantom guardians and haunting apparitions, is one of the first major collections of allegedly true ghost stories and should be read by any serious investigator interested in the history of the paranormal. Lord Halifax was an avid collector of supernatural encounters and gives the provenance for the vast majority of the accounts he preserved, these often being the experiences of personal acquaintances. Sadly, the authority is missing for one such tale, ‘The Passenger with the Bag’, which interestingly features the ghost of a murdered man whose appearance results in the eventual apprehension of the killer: an unnamed gentleman is travelling on a train out of Euston and falls into conversation with a fellow passenger, who reveals himself to be the director of the particular railway company on whose line they are travelling. The director, a Mr Dwerringhouse, discloses he is carrying a substantial amount of money to a local bank which will be used to finance the construction of a new branch line. When Lord Halifax’s correspondent mentions he is attending a dinner party at a particular house in the district, the traveller declares the owner to be his niece and asks to be remembered to her, mentioning a previous visit during which he stayed in the Blue Room and complained of the over-large fire which had been lit in the grate. When the train pulls up at a station and the director gets off carrying his bag, the passenger realises he has dropped his cigar case and, following him out onto the platform, observes Mr Dwerringhouse talking under a lamp-post with a man with sandy-coloured hair whose face he clearly sees. However, the two men have unaccountably disappeared when the narrator reaches the spot and a nearby porter declares that no persons matching their description were standing on that part of the platform at the time. Arriving at his destination, the traveller dresses for dinner and during the meal passes on the message to his hostess, who is clearly distressed at hearing the news. After the ladies have retired, leaving the men to their brandy and cigars, her husband takes the narrator to one side and reveals that his wife’s uncle is missing and under investigation by the police, having apparently absconded with £70,000 of the railway company’s money. Their conversation is overheard by two fellow guests, also directors of the same company, who request the narrator give a statement about his encounter to the Railway Board. At the meeting a few days later, the narrator recognises the man with the sandy hair, who turns out to be the company’s Chief Cashier. When questioned he eventually admits to robbing and murdering Mr Dwerringhouse in a quarry on the way to the company’s bank, although the killing itself was not planned: in the struggle to gain possession of the bag, the railway director fell and died instantly after striking his head on a rock.