It wasn’t until Bill’s eyes fluttered and his struggles weakened and his body was hanging limp in his grasp that Robert realised he’d gone too far. He loosened his grip and saw that his fingers had dug into the flesh around the man’s throat, drawing blood. He let the body slip carefully to the floor and felt for a pulse and a heartbeat but nothing pounded at his wrist or throbbed in his chest. William Vincent was dead.
Then Robert did something strange. He took one of the man’s socks off and placed it at his neck to staunch the blood flow from the wounds. Exactly why he did this is unclear.
His thoughts then turned, as thoughts often do in desperate situations, to flight. He did not have murder in mind when he set out that night but plenty of men had been hanged who did not set out to kill. He needed to get rid of the body and he needed to get away. It is not known exactly at what point he decided to return to Cumberland, where he had been stationed – where he had been happy – but that’s where he ended up. He had dragged the corpse out of the flat and bundled it into the boot of William’s own 1956 yellow and red Sunbeam Talbot Alpine. He drove the ninety miles south in a daze, finally reaching Blackbank Wood near his old base in Longtown. He thought he could hide the body here, then return home. With any luck, the corpse would never be discovered and he would be able to live his life the way he wanted. He turned on to a woodland track to seek out a likely spot for a makeshift burial.
Maybe he knew the game was up when the car’s wheels became bogged down in thick mud. He possibly knew when he walked to the army base guardhouse and asked for help to free his car from the ditch. He certainly knew, after being told there was no help available, when he asked to use the phone and was connected to the police office at Gretna.
‘I have done a murder,’ he said. ‘If you come to the 16th Company guardroom I will show you a body.’
A policeman arrived from Longtown and Robert took him to where the brightly coloured car was stuck in the mud. He opened the boot and stepped back to let the police officer see inside. William Vincent was curled up inside, his knees to his chest, wearing only a shirt, trousers and one sock. The other sock was still wrapped round the wounds on his neck.
As the forensic teams arrived with their cameras and their tape measures and their evidence bags, Robert Scott was taken away by CID to Longtown. ‘I have saved some people a lot of misery,’ he told officers.
Back in Glasgow, police officers forced their way into the flat and found bloodstains in the hallway and the mark in the dust of garage floor where Robert had hauled the body by the legs towards the car. Neighbours were questioned about the bachelor who lived nearby and details of his private life also began to be unearthed. Meanwhile, Glasgow police picked the suspect up from Cumberland and brought him back to Scotland to face trial. He travelled in a police car surrounded by officers while another copper followed in Bill’s Sunbeam.
Robert Scott was formally charged in Partick Police Station – where Peter Queen had announced his wife’s death a quarter century before – at 1.18 p.m. on Monday 14 April 1958. ‘He tried to ruin my life and make me the same as him,’ he said.
His parents, who had been enjoying an anniversary dinner on the night their son was committing murder, were informed the following day. William Scott visited his son on Tuesday. But the young man was ashamed of himself and refused to talk. His father, desperate for some form of communication, asked him if he had enough cigarettes. ‘Yes, plenty,’ said his son, turning away. ‘Just leave me alone.’
There was little sympathy shown for the victim at the trial in July. Even the trial judge, Lord Russell, called him a ‘worthless man’ but did warn the jury that this was ‘not a court of morals but a court of law’ and they had to put their ‘personal revulsion’ aside when deciding Robert Scott’s fate. He also reminded them that no one had the right to set himself up as an executioner, no matter how ‘worthless’ the victim.
It took the ten men and five women only thirty-two minutes to decide that Robert Scott was guilty of murder. At the time, hanging was still the ultimate penalty for murder but Scottish courts had some distaste for the sentence and, anyway, there was sympathy for the young man in the light green jacket in the dock. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no minimum period set.
He began his new life as a convict in Perth Prison and seemed to be doing well – until that Thursday in November 1959 when he tied a noose and completed the job the courts would not. Plumber William Young returned after eight minutes to find him dangling from the roof beam. Why he felt the need to kill himself is a mystery. His letters home had been upbeat, hopeful that he could be freed soon pending a review of his case. He had been doing well in prison, had no complaints, no obvious problems. But something was obviously wrong – and his father, speaking after his son’s death, knew where to lay the blame. William Vincent had somehow reached out from beyond the grave and had hurt his son for the last time.
‘That loathsome creature and the other corrupters who surrounded him,’ he said, ‘they are the men responsible for his death.’
Robert Scott was only twenty-two years of age.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Adams, Norman, Scotland’s Chronicles of Blood (Robert Hale: London, 1996)
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Browne, Douglas G and Tullet, Tom, Bernard Spilsbury, His Life and Cases (Harrap: London, 1951)
Dowdall, Laurence and Marshall, Alisdair, Get Me Dowdall (Paul Harris Publishing: Edinburgh, 1979)
Forbes, George and Meehan, Paddy, Such Bad Company (Paul Harris Publishing: Edinburgh, 1982)
Gaute, J H H and Odell, Robin, Murderers’ Who’s Who (Harrap: London, 1979)
Gaute, J H H and Odell, Robin, Murder Whatdunit (Harrap: London, 1982)
Glaister, John, Final Diagnosis (Hutchinson: London, 1964)
Grant, Douglas, The Thin Blue Line (John Long: London, 1973)
Hodge, James H (ed.), Famous Trials (vol. 4) (Penguin: London, 1954)
Hodge, James H (ed.), Famous Trials (vol. 10) (Penguin: London, 1964)
Huson, Richard (ed.), Sixty Famous Trials (Daily Express: London)
Hyde, H Montgomery, Norman Birkett (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1964)
Knox, Bill, Court of Murder (John Long: London, 1968)
Lane, Brian, The Murder Guide (BCA: London, 1991)
Lane, Brian, The Encylopedia of Forensic Science (Headline: London, 1992)
Livingstone, Sheila, Confess and Be Hanged (Birlinn, Edinburgh 2000)
Newton, Norman, The Life and Times of Inverness (John Donald: Edinburgh, 1996)
Pierrepoint, Albert, Executioner: Pierrepoint (Harrap: London, 1974)
Prebble, John, The Lion in the North (Seeker & Warburg: London, 1971)
Roughead, William, Twelve Scots Trials (Mercat Press: Edinburgh, 1995)
Roughead, William, Malice Domestic (Greene and Son: Edinburgh, 1928)
Smith, Robin, The Making of Scotland (Canongate: Edinburgh 2001)
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Unknown author, A Complete Report of the Trial of Dr E W Pritchard (Wm Kay: Edinburgh, 1865)
Whittington-Egan, Molly, Scottish Murder Stories (Neil Wilson: Glasgow, 1998)
Wilson, Alan J, Brogan, Des and McGrail, Frank, Ghostly Tales and Sinister Stories of Old Edinburgh (Mainstream: Edinburgh, 1991)
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NEWSPAPERS
Caledonian Mercury
The Daily Record
Edinburgh Evening Courant
Edinburgh Evening News
Glasgow Courier
Glasgow Evening Times
The Glasgow Herald
Inverness Courier
Press and
Journal
Scotland on Sunday
The Scotsman
ARCHIVE MATERIAL FROM THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE OF SCOTLAND
JC1/13, AD14/35/19, JC11/83, AD14/78/341, JC27/171, AD14/57/123, JC13/98
BLOODY VALENTINE
Douglas Skelton is the author of six previous books, including Deadlier than the Male: Scotland’s Most Wicked Women, Blood on the Thistle: A Casebook of 20th Century Scottish Murder – which was later adapted for the stage by Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre – and (with Lisa Brownlie) Frightener: The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars. He has written extensively on crime for Scottish newspapers and has appeared in a number of television documentaries.
By the same author:
Blood on the Thistle: A Casebook of Twentieth-Century Scottish Murder
Frightener: The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars (with Lisa Brownlie)
No Final Solution: Unsolved Scottish Crimes of the Twentieth Century
A Time to Kill
Devil’s Gallop: Trips into Scotland’s Dark and Bloody Past
Deadlier than the Male: Scotland’s Most Wicked Women
COPYRIGHT
First published 2004
by Black & White Publishing Ltd
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This electronic edition published in 2014
ISBN: 978 1 84502 937 1 in EPub format
ISBN: 978 1 84502 004 0 in paperback format
Copyright © Douglas Skelton 2004
The right of Douglas Skelton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Ebook compilation by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay
Bloody Valentine Page 15