Peterhead (7 page)

Oscar Slater was not the only innocent who lodged for years in Peterhead. The case of Paddy Meehan, the man wrongly convicted in 1969 of the murder of pensioner Rachel Ross in, coincidentally, Slater’s adopted hometown of Ayr, has many similarities to that of the German, including a celebrity supporter. In Meehan’s case, instead of Conan Doyle, TV personality and author Ludovic Kennedy led the fight to free him, supported by a group of newspaper men and lawyers. Meehan, like Slater, was involved in a possibly rigged identity parade and there were accusations of evidence being planted on him to help ensure a conviction. Even the furore in the press was similar to that which followed the death of old Marion Gilchrist. History does indeed seem to repeat itself.

The victim in the Meehan case, Rachel Ross, was a seventy-two-year-old who lived with her ex-bookmaker husband in a bungalow in the Clyde coast resort of Ayr. They were involved in bingo halls and kept large sums of money in the house, something that seemed to be known in the murky Glasgow underworld. Their home was a tempting target for any rascal bent on getting his hands on large sums of readies and the brutal murder horrified the entire country. Intruders had broken into the home of the wealthy couple and tied them up. Mrs Ross was bludgeoned heavily around the head and later died in hospital. The couple were not found in the house until twenty-four hours after the thieves had left. The detail of their ordeal made horrific reading in the press and, once again, the police found themselves under enormous public pressure to find the cruel villains involved.

Again not for the first time, in an investigation without any obvious leads, they pulled in one of the usual suspects in break-ins, Paddy Meehan. This despite the fact they were dealing with a violent incident and that Meehan, although a well-known safebreaker and burglar, was not considered a man of violence.

Meehan had been suspected of being in the area on the night of the crime. He was, but he was returning to Glasgow with a co-villain Jim Griffiths after some nefarious late-night business south of Ayr. Griffiths did have a record of violence and a pathological fear of imprisonment. Approached by the police about his movements on the night of the murder he went berserk and went on a daylight rampage through the streets of Glasgow. By the time he was cornered and killed by a shot from armed police who had chased him into a tenement flat in the west end, nine men had been shot by him, one fatally, plus two women, a child and a police officer. The officer who killed him had, as per police practice, aimed at his shoulder but the bullet ricocheted into his heart.

Griffiths, aged thirty-four, was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Linn Park cemetery in Glasgow’s south-side. His life had run its course, but for Meehan the nightmare was only beginning. The saga of his wrongful conviction and eventual pardon made headlines for years and is told in detail in my book
Glasgow’s Hard
Men
(Black & White Publishing, Edinburgh, 2002). One major difference in the Slater and Meehan cases is that in the Ayr murder the killer was found. It was established many years later that the real murderer was an infamous Glasgow low-lifer called Tank McGuiness, who eventually died in a bloody street brawl. No matter, in the late 1960s, after a dramatic and controversial trial, Paddy Meehan took that road so familiar to Glasgow’s criminals up north to Peterhead. In jail he was soon a headache to staff and governor alike. As Slater had done before him, he took every opportunity to declaim his innocence and show the size of the gigantic chip on his shoulder. Again, like in the Slater case, the outsider thinking of a man wrongly banged up in a tough jail and enduring a tough regime could sympathise. There can be no harder torture to endure than years of imprisonment for a crime you did not commit. Especially as no one inside the prison would listen to you.

Meehan refused to take any part in prison chores or cooperate with the prison authorities – in a reversal of the old prison cliché, he was doing the time but had not done the crime, and it showed in his behaviour. You suspect such a demonstration of his feelings consistently over the years must have aroused some sympathy from some of his jailors but there is not much sign of it. It was those on the outside who listened to his pleas of innocence and decided to do something about it. Those in the prison service can be good judges of character and you wonder how many believed that this small-time Glasgow crook was capable of such a wickedly cruel murder as that of Mrs Ross. But even if some had a sneaking sympathy for him and an unexpressed belief in his claims to be innocent, it made little difference to Paddy’s life in jail. His constant hassle with the prison rulebook and the harder of his tormentors meant there was only one solution to get everyone a little peace – sling him into solitary. The astonishing fact is that this punishment was not for a weekend or two to teach a difficult prisoner a lesson. In his time in Peterhead Paddy Meehan spent seven years in solitary confinement. In the annals of crime this must be among the most draconian punishment handed out to an innocent man. Other than to be left dangling at the end of rope in the Barlinnie hanging shed.

Meehan was eventually pardoned in 1976, but unlike Slater who lived life after Peterhead out of the limelight, Paddy sought out the late-night company of Glasgow’s often drouthy newsmen and was a familiar figure in the city’s pubs. He even used his old skills in burglary as a security advisor. But after he left jail Paddy was most prominent for the years he spent in conflict with the authorities over his compensation and in a feud with legendary lawyer Joe Beltrami. This was a bit unsettling for Joe, who had played a major role in the campaign to free him. Meehan postulated all sorts of wild theories on how he had come to end up in prison, including accusations that the British Secret Service was to blame. He even wrote a book which included this fantasy, and many a Glaswegian remembers seeing him as a tragic figure trying to hawk this slim volume on the streets of the city for ready cash. The city booksellers had refused to handle it, wary of the legal implications of the content. He died of throat cancer in 1994 aged sixty-seven.

Slater and Meehan were only two of the better-known difficult prisoners of Peterhead. Down the years a succession of toerags made life difficult for the men in the north who had joined the prison service, often for job security in an area where that could be hard to find. From day one there were troublemakers, there always are. In any hard prison fighting the regime is fruitless 99.9 per cent of the time, but you will always get those who try. Even those whose chance of getting anyone to listen to their protestations of innocence, never mind getting a celebrity campaign to back their claims, is as likely as a big win on the lottery. But someone like TC Campbell is rather different. No one with the slightest interest in matters criminal in this country is unaware of perhaps the most modern injustice linked with Peterhead – Glasgow’s infamous Ice Cream War murders.

Campbell and another Glasgow hard man, Joe Steele, were wrongly convicted of these dreadful killings. Campbell in particular was aware that his constant wars with the Peterhead rulers made headlines in the Glasgow papers for years and kept the injustice he had suffered in the mind of the general public. He and Steele were as driven as Slater and Meehan when they languished behind the very same bars.

Steele had an interesting history coming from a notorious Glasgow crime family (a genuine family, not in the mafia way!). His brother John, known in his frequent visits to Scotland’s prisons as “Johnnyboy,” was a headache when in Peterhead, being involved in the infamous dirty protests, the stories of which made regular headlines and outraged the readers of the tabloids. These protests were a feature of life in the jail for many years around the 1970s and ’80s. Cons with a chip on their shoulder about beatings and horrific treatment from the bad apples among the prison officers took to smearing the walls of their cells with excrement and urinated everywhere and anywhere. Dirty was something of an understatement. It is difficult to properly state the effect this nastiest form of protest had on the majority of arrow-straight warders who were only trying to do a job. What shocking memories these men took home with them at the end of a shift. Johnnyboy and Jimmy Boyle were two of the well-known criminals involved.

The Steele clan were just one of many criminal families in Glasgow. Evil thickened the blood of many a law-breaking dynasty – the Ferris, Thompson and Steele families prominent among them. One prison governor told me of having a grandfather, father and grandson of one bunch all in his nick at one time or another. John Steele was also a bit of a jail breaker, though not in the class of Johnny Ramensky when it came to the Houdini stuff.

Johnnyboy was also something of an amateur psychologist, with himself as the subject. In a book he wrote about his life of crime he dwelt heavily on a childhood of beatings from his father and the horrors of deprivation in a tough Glasgow scheme. One of the deprivations was psychological – the absence of a law-abiding role model. Like many another Glaswegian he had relatives galore who feared the cops and knew the jails of the country like the backs of their hands. When he finally ended up in Peterhead prison, life came as no surprise to him; he had listened to jail tales galore at the family fireside.

No crime in recent years has so horrified the Scottish public as that of the deaths of the Doyle family in their Bankend Street, Glasgow, home as result of a deliberate act of arson. James Doyle Snr, fifty-three; James Doyle Jnr, twenty-three; Tony Doyle, fourteen; Andrew Doyle, eighteen; their sister Christine Halleron, twenty-five; and baby Mark Halleron, aged one, all died when their flat was set alight. The deaths of the Doyles was a result of various gang feuds over the control of the many profitable ice cream vans that patrolled the mean streets of the Glasgow schemes. The honest traders were being attacked and driven out by ruthless gang lords who realised there was more money to be made by such vans than that generated by flogging mere confectionary. The sales of ice cream, lollipops and cigarettes was becoming a front for the distribution of hard drugs much in demand in these deprived areas. In the weeks and months before the fiery death of the Doyles, who had a son in the ice cream van trade, the city police were kept busy investigating attacks, and the threat of attacks, on the honest traders. The Bankend Street massacre was the final push to convince decent folk in the ice cream business to hand over vans to the neds who would promptly turn them into mobile illegal drug dispensaries. No prescription needed, just hard cash. And the best of “gear.”

When news of the deadly blaze first broke in 1984, the newspapers treated it as a not unusual Friday night fire. It made the splash in the Saturday morning front page of the
Evening Times
but there was no early hint of the real story behind the tragedy – that it was arson. Glasgow had the nickname “tinder box city” and to the veterans on the Saturday morning news desks the fire at first seemed pretty run-of-the-mill. But this was no drunken chip pan incident, nor was it caused by that other Glasgow serial failing, careless use of candles in a dangerous effort to cut the electricity bill. As the death toll mounted as the victims slowly succumbed to their horrific burns it became clear that this tragedy was gang driven and the story grew to dominate the front pages for weeks. Yet again the police were under the cosh of public opinion and yet again the usual suspects were looked at.

Campbell and Steele were no Sunday school teachers, they were major players in the Glasgow crime scene feared by the folk who had them living in their midst and constantly at odds with the forces of law and order. They were pulled in. Their pleas of innocence were ignored and they were convicted after a long and complex trial involving other Glasgow low-lifers and false testimony, as in the Slater and Meehan cases. Once again Peterhead and the road north beckoned. It took almost twenty years for Campbell and Steele to be freed and cleared. When their conviction was eventually overruled after years of hunger strikes, escapes, publicity stunts and almost countless appeals and appeals on appeals, it emerged that they had been caged, as the tabloids like to say, on concocted police evidence.

Long sentences had been handed down and Campbell, in particular, when in Peterhead embarked on a one-man war against authority. It was always going to end in violence. In June 1986 he was accused of punching a chief officer in the high security prison. The allegation was that he had lashed out with his fist when he heard that a visit from his family had been cancelled because of investigations into a riot the previous night. Such was life in Peterhead at the time. At his trial the judge said he entertained a doubt about the prosecution case and found Campbell not guilty of assault. But at the same time he threw out Campbell’s claim that he had been beaten up and kicked by a squad of eight officers in retribution for the riot, resulting in a stomach injury. This was significant as the press at the time was full of stories about so-called “batter squads”. In this important case the authorities cleared the prison staff of that particular allegation.

Despite the courts clearing the prison officers in this case it seems undeniable that there were, at the time, what the cons – and their villainous friends outside – called “batter squads” at work in the prison. Many ex-cons have talked to me about this. How much of it was going on will never be fully quantified. Nor will any degree of justification of the behaviour of some prison officers. In a riot there is no referee and no predilection to fight by the Queensberry rules. And back then, inside many parts of prisons, there were no cameras. Conflict is hard on each side and you have to have some sympathy for officers who daily faced the prospect of sudden desperate attacks from men who felt they had nothing to lose, men who were there anyway mostly because of violence when out on the streets.

TC Campbell’s health gave concern of a different kind a year or so later. Hunger strikes punctuated his long years behind bars. On this occasion it was a protest against the authorities’ plan to move him back to Peterhead after a transfer to Barlinnie. His feuding and fighting up in the North-East fortress had planted a desire in his mind never to see the place again. He had few friends there among prisoners or staff. There was always a lot going on around TC, whatever prison he happened to be in. In this case he went on a “liquids only” diet. He was taken to the prison hospital and given twenty-four-hour care, though the authorities had no plans to force-feed him.