by David Leslie
‘The following week my boyfriend promised to write a letter, asking for the charge to be dropped, explaining that it was a domestic dispute that had got well and truly out of hand. He and I decided to meet up, but when we did he played the sympathy vote, patting his head and saying how painful it was and telling me how long it would take to heal up. It was pretty pathetic really. He was being so patronising it made me feel sick. He was telling me, as he pointed to his head, “At least these scars will heal but getting over you will take a hell of a lot longer, particularly because of everything that has happened.” I thought to myself “Yuk”.
‘As for his promised letter, he left it too late and, by the time it arrived, the formal report had been typed up and sent to the Procurator Fiscal. A fortnight later, I was summonsed to appear before a sheriff. I was frightened, as I expect anyone else would be who has not been in trouble with the law before. My solicitor asked me to write a letter to him that he could present to the sheriff, describing what had happened and how it was so out of character for me and that I was now left with nothing: no belongings, furniture or home.
‘At court, sitting among people who were so obviously career criminals because of the way they clearly knew how to play the legal system to their own benefit, waiting on tenterhooks for my name to be called, I was terrified as to what was going to happen. Finally, after what seemed like hours, I was told to go home and forget about it. The matter had been dropped.
‘Those were the worst weeks of my life and I told myself I would never again go near a sheriff or a court. I was not to know how wrong I would be.’
TWENTY-SIX
GO HOME
At the time Isobel was at her happiest, content and in love with a partner who in a few months would betray her trust and lead her to face a court, Graeme Mason and Hannah had good reason to be worried. Del Boy in particular was wondering if an avenging angel, the spirit perhaps of some victim of the drugs he had helped smuggle, had contrived the demise of the gang of which he had been a member.
Without warning, Paul Flynn had succumbed to a heart attack in an English jail. Then, in April 2002, Trevor Lawson, fleeing home to escape a fight at a local bar, was knocked down and killed as he ran across the M80 motorway. In September that same year, Gordon Ross, fit and handsome, legendary for attracting beautiful women, was lured outside a bar in Shettleston, Glasgow, and murdered by four men. Many of the remaining smugglers wondered who would be next. They would not have long to wait.
In March 2003, Billy McPhee was stabbed in the middle of a crowded restaurant as he watched teatime television, but before him the Grim Reaper would collect one more participant of the plot. Hannah would live to see neither Christmas 2002 nor enjoy her 53rd birthday.
As the death toll piled up of men she had not met but of whom she had known, their names having regularly cropped up in conversations at Thornliebank and occasionally in Spain, Hannah questioned why Mason had been released early. ‘He’s responsible for John being in prison and for everybody being caught,’ she would angrily tell her close friend. ‘Why have the others let him live? Why haven’t they arranged for somebody they know in prison to take care of him? Surely something will be done.’
But nothing would be. The drug-smuggling plot had been good while it lasted, but it was over and the chapter had been closed the day he, Healy and Flynn were jailed. There was nothing to be gained by seeking retribution now.
Her long confessions to her friends continued. It was as though she had heard a whisper that her time was running out and had to explain everything that had happened before it was too late. ‘She needed to explain herself, almost to justify herself,’ said her old friend. ‘She wanted to talk about the things that had hurt her most – being treated as the gopher during her youth, Bible John, Isobel’s birth, Mason – hoping perhaps that in talking she would find answers.’
Hannah’s confidante remembers her friend helping so many along the way but receiving little or nothing back in return. ‘Hannah was especially kind to one individual who had suffered his own share of personal tragedies; in fact, she had been more of a help to him than his own family. If he needed his grass cut, or shopping done, he would phone her. She didn’t resent doing his chores, only that others whose duty it was to care for the man did not help him.’
Perhaps it was down to her hard upbringing among families who, before the advent of the welfare state, objected to having to pay for a doctor, but when she was ill Hannah would shy away from surgeries, preferring to let nature work out a remedy. ‘She wouldn’t go to the doctor for help because apart from a dose of flu when she worked at the Hoover factory she had never known illness,’ said her friend. But there came a time when she had to.
‘We’d been shopping in a supermarket and Hannah had bought a pack of porridge and a pint of milk. As she laid them on the conveyor belt, she spotted a special offer – three little teddy bears for £3. She grabbed them and put them beside the other items. The checkout girl burst out laughing, and so did I. “All you need is Goldilocks,” I said to Hannah, and she broke into a giggle, but she had to hold her side. I had noticed she had been doing that quite a lot and knew it was a classic symptom of gallstones. When I said so, she asked, “What are they?” I had to try describing how things were growing on the side of her gall bladder and that simple keyhole surgery would remove them. Finally, she did go into hospital to have them sorted.’
In November 2002, her friend had arranged to holiday abroad with friends and promised to bring Hannah duty-free cigarettes. Before setting off, she had felt ill herself and Hannah had pleaded with her to stay at home, probably because she simply did not want someone on whom she relied so much to disappear, even for a short while. Nevertheless, the holiday went ahead. When she returned, she was horrified at her friend’s condition. At first, she thought the sickness had been caused by tablets prescribed for Hannah’s high cholesterol, but when Hannah called to collect the cigarettes it was obvious she was a sick woman. She stayed only 20 minutes; it would be the last time she visited her friend’s home.
Soon afterwards, she began complaining of leg pains and persuaded a friend to drive her to Monklands Hospital. After a brief examination, doctors ordered her to be admitted and she was put into a bed she would never leave. The following day her old friend visited her and was shocked by her gaunt look. Hannah toyed with the bedding, running her fingers along the blanket wrapped about her body. It was clear she had something to say but did not know how to form the words. After a silence, she decided that someone who had been such a close friend since childhood would understand and forgive the indelicacy in which the words were framed.
‘It’s cancer, you know,’ said Hannah, embarrassed at being the bringer of bad news.
‘Yes,’ replied her friend, struggling to retain the tears that wanted to cascade from her misting eyes.
‘It’s secondary. You know what that means?’
‘Yes. What are they going to do for you?’
‘They’re going to give me steroids, fucking things. They say they’re going to build me up and give me chemotherapy. I would like you to do something for me.’
‘Anything.’
‘Before I came in here I was ill in my house. I wouldn’t want anybody else to see it like that.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
Her confidante of many years took the key to her old friend’s home and did as she had asked. But she knew the clean-up was not for Hannah’s benefit; it was because the next time the front door would be opened it would be to admit mourners. Hannah wanted them to be entering a clean, neat house.
‘When I got back to the hospital, she was really bad, kicking her legs about. I could see one was black, dead, and she was very agitated. The doctors had put her on morphine to try easing her distress. I didn’t think she had long to live, but she did not want anyone knowing or worrying about her and when I suggested telling a particular relative, she insisted, “Just tell him I’ve got a sore leg.”
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sp; ‘The following morning, at a quarter to nine, the hospital telephoned and asked if I would like to sit with her. I called to inform the relative and then we sat in a vigil by her bed. We could tell Hannah’s death rattle because at first she was breathing from her stomach, but every hour the source of her breathing rose higher into her chest and then further up still. There was a lot of dark blood escaping from her nose, then her mouth, and then I noticed it coming from her ears.
‘It was absolutely horrifying at the end, yet I never saw her look so peaceful; her features had sharpened until she was her mother’s double. You could have sworn blind the person lying in the bed was her mother. At one time, she said, “I can’t stand this pain, I give up. I can’t take pain like this, I give up.”
‘And then she told me, “Go home, lass. I’m away to my bed.” She was, of course, already in bed in hospital. Those were the last words she spoke, then she went off to sleep. “That’s her going now,” I said and I told her once more, as I had so many times already that day, “Let yourself go, Hannah. You’re OK, hen.” And then came her last breath; it was like a sigh of relief and then, oh Jesus, the blood started pouring out of every orifice.
‘We were asked to leave the room where her body lay and it took the nurses an hour to clean up before we could come back in. It was horrible. But she was gone. It was over.’
Hannah died at teatime on 10 December, four days before her birthday. She had been suffering from cancer, the origin of which could not be found because by the time she entered hospital it had spread over too much of her body. Officially, the cause of death was liver disease brought on by cancer.
Hannah’s childhood friend arranged for her to be dressed in an expensive suit made by Frank Usher and bought specially for her last journey to join the others in her family. ‘We were determined she would go out in style and put her birthday card in the coffin with her. But when we came to see her for the last time, the peaceful look I remembered from the hospital had gone. Her face was distorted, swollen. I’d rather that was not my very last memory of Hannah, but it is.’
Hannah had made the journey to Daldowie crematorium three times already, with Isobel and her parents. Now it was her turn. There was no longer any need for the hearse to make a detour to avoid the spot where Isobel had died. During her final five years, she had lived a never-ending nightmare of financial shortage and terror that someone might seek her out for having spoken in court. Throughout that time, she had lived for the day when she would reach her 55th birthday and receive the Hoover pension.
Then there was the other windfall she was certain she would receive, one that meant more than the £10,000 at which it was valued. Every day, Hannah would rush to her front door after the postman called, looking for a brown envelope in which she was convinced John Healy’s friends would have sent the promised cash. That it did not arrive each morning did not mean it would not turn up the next. Her eternal optimism was based on her love for the man she tried to protect. Like so many aspects of her life, in this too she would be disappointed and she died poor, lonely and sad, with not even a picture to remind her of her daughter.
There were few to mourn Hannah, and Graeme Mason was not among them. As she could find no forgiveness for him, so he could not pardon what he saw as the malice she had shown him and Benji. Del Boy still makes no secret of the detestation he feels towards her.
‘After I was released, someone rang me one day and told me Hannah was dead. “You certain about that?” I asked. “Don’t crack jokes. Her dead? I’m not that lucky.” But it was true and I regret to say I’m glad she died because if she hadn’t died in the way she did, someone, sometime would surely have murdered her because of the damage she caused to so many families.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
SERIAL SEARCHING
Hannah Martin died never thinking she could possibly have been the trigger that shot down the shield protecting Bible John. A clue had perhaps been left, a fragment of evidence dropped, when she was attacked near Landressy Street. However, her violator had certainly left a pointer as to his identity: Isobel would forever carry traces of his DNA. Was her father the serial killer who quoted from the Good Book?
Scotland has had its fair share of serial killers and it has usually been a solitary slip that has opened the door to revealing a catalogue of death. For example, to boost their miserable wages as labourers helping dig the Union Canal, William Burke and William Hare were said to have dug up dead bodies in Edinburgh and sold them to medical schools in the city. Then they worked out it was easier just to strangle anyone who happened to be handy. However, the disappearance of their 16th victim, Mary Docherty, aroused too much suspicion and Hare was arrested. He was given immunity from prosecution and guaranteed freedom in exchange for spilling the beans on his old business partner and, as a result, Burke was hanged in Edinburgh in 1829.
In the case of civil servant Dennis Nilsen, originally from Fraserburgh in the north-east of the country but who moved to London, his homosexuality and loneliness led him to invite homeless men to his flat, where they were strangled and their bodies cut up and burned in his garden. When he shifted to an upstairs flat, he tried flushing their remains away, blocking drains. Workmen who were called to investigate discovered his gruesome secret. He was convicted of six murders in 1983 but is suspected of killing at least twelve others.
Robert Black from Grangemouth was known to school pals as ‘Smelly Bob’. He went to London where, working as a delivery driver, he travelled all over the UK and the European mainland. Between 1982 and 1986, police were horrified and baffled by the murders of three children, Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Susan Harper. In 1990, Black was arrested trying to abduct a child in the Borders. He was convicted of murdering the three children and has been questioned by police about the disappearance of many more.
Archibald Hall put behind him a Glasgow birth and his upbringing as a petty criminal to become a butler to the aristocracy, using his contacts with both to steal from them. When David Wright, one of Hall’s previous cell mates, tried blackmailing Hall about his past, he was murdered and buried on an estate in Dumfriesshire. Hall went on to kill his London employer, former MP and Labour government minister Walter Scott-Elliot, and his wife, Dorothy, before dispatching his lover Mary Coggle and his half-brother Donald, a child molester. Hall was arrested in 1978 because a North Berwick hotel owner thought he was going to leave without paying his bill. He died in prison in 2002.
It was largely luck that had brought about the downfall of these evil men. But good fortune appeared to have deserted the police hunting Bible John. If he had made a slip during the killings in 1968 and 1969, it had not been sufficiently obvious to lead to his capture. Any clues that might have been left from his earlier attack on Hannah near Landressy Street had been lost long ago due to the incident going unreported. And while his DNA might always remain within Isobel, it was many years before Hannah would tell of the circumstances of her conception and DNA sampling would become routine.
As far as the 1977 slayings of Anna Kenny, Hilda McAulay, Christine Eadie, Helen Scott and Agnes Cooney were concerned, other reasons would be cited for the failure to arrest whoever was responsible, including inter-force jealousy and an apparent refusal to see what, to a number of officers, appeared to be an obvious connection between their deaths. There would be another spate of killings of women in Glasgow between 1991 and 1998 and police again were adamant that there was no connection between the victims: Diane McInally, Karen McGregor, Leona McGovern, Marjorie Roberts, Jacqueline Gallagher, Tracey Wilde and Margo Lafferty. They would be proved correct. In a number of the cases, men would be charged and appear in court, although the prosecutions did not always end in convictions.
However, the feeling persisted that the 1977 slayings were linked, even though two of the deaths had obviously taken place far away from the others, while in the case of poor Anna the suspicion was that she had been killed where her body was discovered. It nagged at the men who had worked on
the cases but were now retired, and continued with others who came along to take their places.
There was another factor that may well have contributed to the lack of arrests. Scottish police are traditionally jealous of their territory and it is only in recent years that this attitude has softened. They do not like the thought of outsiders – especially from a neighbouring force, but even from another division – not only being brought in to give a fresh opinion on an unsolved case but also offering advice. Could it be, then, that this hard-line attitude had hindered solutions?
The National Crime and Operations Faculty functions within the National Police College are based on a campus housed around a superb Jacobean mansion in Bramshill, Hampshire. One of the many tasks the faculty performs is to study various crimes and look for similarities that suggest the same individual or gang may be involved. Because of its intense workload, the faculty tends to concentrate on major incidents – attacks on children, rapes and other sex offences, bank raids, art thefts and, of course, murder. At the time Hannah Martin was losing her hope and her health, officers at the faculty were examining a series of files sent by detectives in Scotland that they found increasingly interesting.
Police forces all over the UK, and sometimes from overseas, send details of major incidents to the faculty in case it discovers that a bank raid carried out in Yorkshire has a likeness to one in Devon and another in Warwickshire. Detectives of these three forces then meet up to see how they can help one another and alert yet more police forces to be on the lookout for a travelling gang of robbers whose methods can be described.
The faculty looked at the 1977 murders along with two further homicides for which the culprits had not been found. In March 1979, the body of Carol Lannen, aged 18, was found in Templeton Woods on the outskirts of Dundee; days later, her clothing turned up on the banks of the River Don in Aberdeenshire. She had last been seen alive on Exchange Street in Dundee. Almost a year later, Templeton Woods yielded the body of 20-year-old nursery nurse Elizabeth McCabe, the last sighting of whom had been a fortnight earlier, when she left a city discotheque and told friends she was about to get a taxi home.