Where There is Evil (2 page)

It took time for the news of Moira’s disappearance to spread: communications in the fifties were a poor shadow of what we now take for granted. A local search took place, the next day, on
the traditional Scottish Sabbath but Monday’s
Daily Record
made no mention that the child had vanished. On Tuesday, though, it devoted the centre-spread to the story, and illustrated
the route she had followed. There is one sentence in which the reporter who wrote the story unwittingly touched on the key to the mystery: ‘Something made Moira change her mind about
shopping.’ But as the days slipped past the question ‘What?’ was left unanswered.

A few days later, on 2 March, the family’s sick grandfather, James Anderson, died, which doubled their pain. After the funeral, hopes for Moira’s safety faded fast, but Mrs Anderson
insisted on buying the Monopoly set Moira had said she’d love for her twelfth birthday on 31 March, saying, ‘I won’t give up hope yet.’ But the date, which was also
Mothering Sunday that year, came and went and Moira had not appeared for either her present or her birthday tea.

There had been no reconstruction of Moira’s journey to the Co-op and no door-to-door inquiry took place. Had the police spoken to the Andersons’ neighbours, they would have found
that one had been a vital witness. Mrs Twycross was the mother of my playmate Marilyn. She had been trying to clear her path of the heavy snow, and had seen Moira on her way to the Co-op. She had
called a greeting. She felt sure the child had shouted back, ‘Is the bus away yet?’ before she carried on, and Mrs Twycross had scurried back into the warmth of her home. Like others,
she expected the police to visit Moira’s neighbours but none came round and she dismissed what she had seen.

The
Daily Record
’s report ended with Maisie Anderson’s words: ‘I know Moira has been taken away against her will – she would never speak to strangers. Everybody
knew her. She was such a tomboy, so full of fun and life. She wouldn’t go willingly with her birthday so close.’

It had been just after midnight on that Saturday might that Andrew Anderson had contacted the local police station, which was almost opposite my home in Dunbeth Road. He told the officer on duty
of his daughter’s plans for that afternoon. The managers of half a dozen cinemas were called from their homes in case Moira had been locked in somewhere. Even the Carnegie Library was opened
and searched because she was an avid reader who spent lots of time there. The houses of all relatives and friends were checked and double-checked.

As the week progressed with no news, a huge search was mounted. The bin men abandoned their strike to join police on the hunt, scouring back yards, sheds, garages and derelict buildings. The big
event of Saturday, an Ayr United v. Airdrie football match at Broomfield, had attracted large crowds, then had been cancelled with the awful weather. Could a football supporter have stopped Moira
for directions and abducted her? Andrew was firm that his daughter would never have gone off with a stranger, but as the hunt dragged on he said, ‘I fear she has been picked up in a car and
taken away somewhere. But Moira never liked leaving the town, even to go into Glasgow. She spent almost all her spare time playing around the house.’ But Maisie Anderson insisted again that
Moira would not have gone anywhere with a strange man.

Terror built up in the local children. Our mothers promised dire punishments if we played out late without permission. My friends and I walked in pairs to school, and had to bear the ignominy of
being collected from the clubs we attended. I gave up Brownies on my mother’s insistence but was allowed to carry on with Red Cross classes, which were held much closer to home. We muttered
darkly about the injustice of this, but we looked over our shoulders constantly as we avoided former favourite play areas such as the old graveyard in Church Lane, by the school.

Overnight, the freedom of an entire generation of children had been wiped out by a single event.

As the days lengthened, townsfolk continued to surmise what might have happened. Some limelight-seeking individuals invented possibly useful information. One woman near Eglinton Street where the
Andersons lived insisted she had heard screeching brakes and had seen a car speed off that afternoon. Police dismissed her theory that Moira had been knocked down and that a panicking motorist had
bundled her body into his car when they checked the view from her window. She couldn’t have seen or heard what she had described. They explained to her that with the amount of snow that had
fallen on the roads it was highly unlikely that any vehicle could have been heard. All the side streets had been treacherous, and very few main roads had remained open on that Saturday.

Other leads took the police nowhere. A family described seeing the missing girl at a Queen’s Park funfair on Glasgow’s South Side, but the show folk could not corroborate this. A
navy blue raincoat belt was found by a railwayman in a marshy area of bog near Coatbridge known as the Moss, but proved not to be Moira’s. Most dramatic of all, a girl seen being dragged
forcibly into a van at Baillieston, by Coatbridge, that night, turned out to have been a willing hitchhiker.

Suspicion fell on the Anderson family themselves: as police understand it, the majority of victims know their killer. Moira’s sister Janet recalls that her uncle Jim was grilled endlessly
as he had been the last known person to have spoken to the child. Whispers followed him for many years and Janet feels that the episode blighted his life.

Even Moira’s parents found themselves the object of speculation. Fathers of missing children are automatic suspects, and Andrew was conscious of people looking at him askance. Maisie, it
was falsely said, had often had to punish Moira. She was lively, more trouble than the other two girls, a handful. Perhaps a family argument had gone too far.

Rumours of a family dispute persisted for several days, and on 5 March, eleven days after Moira had vanished, Coatbridge CID officers were reported by the
Glasgow Herald
to have
searched the Andersons’ holiday home, but found nothing.

The same officers travelled to Greenock, where an elderly woman insisted she had spotted a girl bearing a resemblance to Moira, and south to Doncaster to interview a lorry driver who thought he
had spotted her with two men. Both leads came to nothing.

New lines of inquiry gradually dried up, and what had been front-page news was relegated to inside columns, then odd paragraphs tucked in corners. ‘Moira – Still No News’,
‘Coatbridge Girl Still Untraced’, ‘Girl Still Missing’.

On 18 May the
Herald
reported that a photo of Moira would appear on television, some three months after she had vanished. The police had been urged to have it broadcast before, but had
felt that the BBC would not transmit it as ‘It would serve no useful purpose’.

Two days later, when the picture had been shown, it was reported that the television appeal had brought no response.

As time dragged by with no news, faith in Coatbridge Burgh Police plummeted. Just days after Moira’s disappearance, a dinner was held in honour of the retiring Chief
Constable Daniel McLauchlan OBE. The new Chief, Charles McIntosh, was left with a hot potato. In his statement to the
Scotsman
of 26 February, he said that he was in command of the
investigation and appealed for witnesses who might have seen Moira on the Saturday to come forward. From their statements, he said, perhaps a complete picture of her movements on the day of her
disappearance might emerge. To co-ordinate the inquiry, he promoted Detective Sergeant John F. MacDonald to Uniformed Inspector in charge of the Coatbridge CID.

The
Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser
carried a photograph of the new man, and I can remember my father discussing these promotions: we lived opposite the police station and he was on
nodding terms with all the officers, who in those days jumped on and off the buses and who had an arrangement with drivers where they expected to travel free. In return, they were prepared to look
the other way when problems arose regarding the staff of Baxter’s Bus Service.

Whether it was because of the turmoil of McLauchlan’s departure, McIntosh’s arrival, or MacDonald’s promotion, or whether the announcement in the middle of the search for Moira
that the Chief Constable for Lanarkshire was coming to visit the local force, there is no doubt that the search for the missing child became unco-ordinated. In 1993, a former police officer, now
living in Canada, telephoned the Scottish
Sunday Mail
to say he recalled how disillusioned he had been by his time spent with the Coatbridge Burgh Police. Contrary to what was being said
in the newspapers at the time about areas being searched two and three times, he had felt uneasy then and for years afterwards about the attitude of some of those in charge. Superiors, he said,
were more concerned about getting offices spick and span and ensuring filing cabinets were up to date because of the impending visit of the highest-ranking officer in the county. A distinct lack of
urgency had been shown about Moira, and he had overheard several men shrug off her disappearance with the words, ‘Och, the lassie’s likely had a row wi’ her mammy and went off.
She’ll turn up soon enough.’ The group of officers he had been with were told not to search anywhere beyond the town boundary.

Furthermore, egos were bruised, when because of lack of headway and the Andersons’ view that the local police were not experienced in dealing with missing persons, the Glasgow CID joined
the case. They were not overwhelmed by help. They briefly linked Peter Manuel, who went down in criminal history as Scotland’s most infamous serial killer, to Moira, and her name was
mentioned when he conducted his own defence at his trial in May 1958. Manuel indicated that two detectives had said to him after an identification parade that they were going to pin eight murders
on him, including ‘the little girl who disappeared in Coatbridge last year’. But they had to rule out Manuel: he had been in prison at the time of Moira’s disappearance,
completing a stretch for breaking into Hamilton colliery. He might have been in the clear about Moira, but he went on to gain further notoriety as the last person hanged in Scotland.

Other members of the public share the view that the search was fragmented and lacked foresight. A local man commented in 1993 that he never understood why the Monkland Canal, which went right
through the town, had not been dragged. At the time the official line was that it was too choked and overgrown with weeds, and because of Suez the petrol crisis was uppermost in the minds of the
authorities.

Also in 1993, William McDonald of Glenboig made a statement to those who reopened Moira’s file, saying how astounded he had been to see land infilled at Coltswood, only a mile from
Moira’s home, that spring. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes to see quarrying and infill work going on when a local child had just gone missing.’

Others have commented that they were amazed that no door-to-door interviewing took place, not even around Muiryhall Street, where Moira’s grandmother lived. A relative of mine, who has
stayed in neighbouring Albion Street all his life, said, ‘We always expected police to call because our household had three single men, all of them in different age groups, but it just never
happened.’

The local police had made the naïve assumption that people would come forward automatically with any relevant information, but they were mistaken. Members of the public thought progress was
being made when it was not. They felt sure that any local deviants would be undergoing thorough checking.

The only ‘local’ suspect whose movements were thoroughly checked was Ian Simpson, who was mentally handicapped, from Mitchell Street, near Kirkwood. His sister, by sheer coincidence,
lived almost next door to the Co-op to which Moira had been sent.

In the 1990s Inspector John F. MacDonald revealed that Simpson was always his number one suspect, but he had a cast-iron alibi. He had been away with the Territorial Army that weekend, and his
sister insisted he had been nowhere near her home in Laird Street. He was allowed to go free. However, he was eventually taken to Carstairs, the state psychiatric hospital, after hitching a lift
from a Leeds man whom he murdered and buried in a lay-by in the Scottish mountains. Taking the victim’s car, he picked up a foreign student and murdered him, too, dumping the body in a forest
near Dumfries. He was in Carstairs from 1962 till February 1976, when he was hacked to death with a staff member and a police officer during a break-out by fellow inmates.

The
Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser
, published weekly on Saturdays in 1957, summarized the events of the first week, stressing the concern being shown throughout the district:
‘Moira’s name is mentioned in shops, buses, public houses, in fact everywhere that people gather . . . all wish to help, yet all feel helpless in their ability to do so.’ Seldom,
they reported, in the history of the Monklands had there been such a poignant human drama, and Mrs Anderson had the sympathy of countless mothers. All of Scotland was in shock. The paper described
the ‘sightings’ in Greenock and Doncaster, but it went on to say:

The mention of the bus’s destination made the police concentrate on Ian Simpson’s alibi. The Anderson parents queried why Moira would ever wish to go there. They
explained that they knew no one who lived in that part of town.