The Law Killers (30 page)
Not everyone was convinced of his guilt. The only evidence against him seemed to be that he was handsome and vaguely fitted the description of a man seen around Elmgrove at the material times. The witnesses had made their first identifications from a poor photograph and it was not unnatural that they would want to seem helpful, especially since they had become something of celebrities in their own right. Witnesses in London who were acquainted with Miss Milne had never seen him in her company. More importantly, Warner protested that he had been on the continent at the time she was supposed to have been murdered. As supporting evidence, the Canadian recalled that he had pawned a waistcoat in Antwerp on 16 October and even managed to produce the ticket.
Chief Constable Semphill departed at once for Belgium, taking the pawn ticket with him. Following the instructions given to him by Warner, the policeman located the shop and found that the pawnbroker’s records confirmed the accused man’s account. Next, Semphill travelled to Amsterdam to check another part of Warner’s story – that the British Consul there had issued a passport to the Canadian on 17 October. That, too, was established beyond doubt. The case against the protesting man being held in jail in Dundee dissolved. A short time later he was released.
That was as close as the police came to solving the mystery of the mansion house murder in Broughty Ferry. After Warner had been set free the investigation floundered, all impetus gone, and one of the most celebrated mysteries of its time stuttered to an inglorious end. Although much of the evidence suggests that the spinster with the widely contrasting lifestyles died on 15 or 16 October at the hands of some stranger she met on her romantic expeditions away from home, that is by no means certain. The lightness of the blows which hastened her end could have been inflicted by a female, and the church-officer witness was emphatic he had seen a woman standing at an upper window five days after that. Is it even possible that the diminutive Miss Milne was bound then bludgeoned to death by two assailants, a man and a woman?
Detective Lieutenant John Trench returned, disappointed, to Glasgow with these and other questions uppermost in his mind. He also reflected at length about how a perfectly innocent man had been arrested for a murder which had taken place when he was hundreds of miles away in a foreign land.
It may have been these thoughts which prompted him to consider again the case of Oscar Slater, the man he had helped convict of the murder of the Glasgow spinster, in 1908. Trench had long felt uneasy about the quality of the evidence which had put Slater in the dock and after returning from Dundee he was even more convinced that an injustice had been done. He played a prominent part in demanding a review of the case and his agitation ultimately cost him his career. Trench died without knowing that the information he had passed to a journalist friend led to a book on the case which was responsible for Slater finally being released from prison after eighteen and a half years, his convictions quashed.
Miss Jean Milne’s unsavoury and untimely demise is likely forever to remain a mystery; but, as far as Oscar Slater at least was concerned, it was not entirely in vain.
22
They had never set eyes on each other before their paths crossed in the centre of the city that fine summer evening. Window-shoppers still strolled Murraygate in the fading August sunshine of 1977 and, in Dundee’s downtown pubs, the Thursday-night regulars had been joined by a stranger from Montrose.
At 8.45 p.m., in a flat tucked behind some of the shops, Linda Batchelor volunteered to fetch carry-out meals for herself and her boyfriend, whom she’d gone to visit an hour earlier. The pretty 19-year-old clerk departed with a cheery ‘Bye for now!’ and set off for a Chinese restaurant 200 yards away in St Andrews Street.
At exactly the same moment, 18-year-old Brian John Mearns walked out of a bar in that street and turned into Murraygate.
They met at the doorway of Richards, a fashion store with a short arcade of off-street window displays that provided shelter when it rained and privacy from those passing along the street. No one knows for sure if the two teenagers even spoke to each other, but within moments of them first coming face to face, Linda was fighting for her life in the concealed corner of the arcade.
She did not win. A few minutes later a passer-by saw Mearns emerge from the entrance, wiping his face. His demeanour aroused the suspicions of the man, who just before had heard noises coming from the precinct. He ran into the arcade and found Linda dying from injuries which were later described as ‘utterly horrifying’. She was naked from the waist down, apart from socks, and had suffered serious head injuries. A broken pick shaft had been driven so far into her body through her private parts that it had all but disappeared.
The observant pedestrian who made the dreadful find rushed back into the street to summon aid, then followed in the direction her attacker had taken, hoping to apprehend him. He never saw him again. The 18-year-old who, minutes earlier, had committed such a savage and random murder had quickly disappeared into a restaurant in St Andrews Street, where he asked to use the toilet. As he desperately sought to remove his victim’s blood and straighten his appearance, his description was being broadcast over the police radio network.
Among others, it was heard by PC David Martin, who was on patrol duty in the city centre.
At 9.15 p.m. he was in Commercial Street when he spotted Mearns approaching and noted that he matched the description of the subject of the all-points bulletin. As the young fugitive came closer, PC Martin also detected what appeared to be bloodstains on his shoes and damp patches on his trousers. The constable’s heart beat faster, but he remained composed. Making no reference to the vicious attack that had been carried out a short distance away, he merely asked Mearns where he was going. The untidy teenager replied that he was about to make his way back to his home in Baltic Street in Montrose. Then, out of the blue, he asked, ‘How is the lass?’ As incriminating remarks went, it was about as damning as they come. Taken to police headquarters, the 18-year-old made other statements which clearly involved him in the crime.
Experienced detectives, well used to lengthy murder inquiries and the frustrating brick walls that can be encountered in the hunt for the perpetrator, were taken by surprise at the suddenness of the events of the evening, for the circumstances were unique. In the space of just thirty minutes, two young people – total strangers, as far as anyone knew – come face to face utterly by accident; on the spur of the moment, one is viciously killed by the other, who takes flight; then, just as much by chance, the suspect walks into the arms of the police and immediately implicates himself.
The murder stunned the city but, even after the completion of the court formalities, no one was any closer to understanding what had brought on such a frenzied, sadistic and random assault. When Mearns appeared at the High Court in Dundee eight weeks later, the two men at the heart of the proceedings were advocates who in later years would become judges in the supreme court. That day, however, they could shed little light on the nauseating drama that had played out in the heart of a city on that peaceful summer evening.
After Mearns pled guilty to the murder, Advocate Depute John Wheatley, prosecuting, recounted the bizarre circumstances of the killing and said the accused man had previously appeared to have had normal relationships with girlfriends, although he also seemed to have something of a drink problem. On the day of the murder, ‘for reasons that were obscure’, Mearns had decided to travel from Montrose to Dundee, where he had visited two bars. Mr Wheatley explained that although there were sexual injuries inflicted in the assault, there were no signs of intercourse.
Andrew Hardie, the defending advocate, said that because of the nature of the assault, psychiatric reports had been obtained about Mearns, but they gave no indication that his responsibilities were substantially diminished, Nor did they indicate that he required any psychiatric treatment.
Pressed by the judge, Lord Wylie, to provide an explanation for the killing, Mr Hardie said he had tried to determine one, but Mearns had either been unwilling or unable to provide a reason. Jailing Mearns for life, with a recommendation that he be detained for at least fifteen years, His Lordship told the unemotional teenager standing quietly before him, ‘This is about the most horrible murder I have come across in all my years on the bench and at the Bar.’
It was not the last the public was to hear of Brian John Mearns, however. Exactly twenty-two years later, while serving out the last months of his life sentence, he failed to return to Saughton Prison in Edinburgh from an outside work placement while training for his eventual release. He had gone on the run to London with a 25-year-old woman he had become involved with while carrying out service with a charitable group as part of his freedom preparations programme. A week after absconding, he was found unconscious in a street in Shrewsbury after taking a drugs overdose. It seemed he and his female companion had argued the day after arriving in London and she had immediately returned to Scotland. Mearns was admitted to hospital in a critical condition and spent some time in an intensive care unit before being taken back under guard to Saughton to resume his sentence. He was still detained at the time of writing (2005).
His decision to flee baffled members of the Scottish Prison Service, who could not understand why he should choose to escape when his official release had been so imminent. It made no sense at all – just like the appalling crime which sent him to prison in the first place.
23
Saturday afternoon in Hilltown. A distant cheer carrying on the icy February wind sweeping over the tenement blocks told of a goal at nearby Dens Park. Few who bent into the breeze as they went about their business cared very much. Those who supported Dundee FC were already at the game and the rest were more interested in the betting shops or purchasing something for that evening’s tea.
The agitated figure who thrust his way into a side-street phone box was least interested of all. His head was near to bursting with what consumed him and all he could think of was shouting it out and finding some peace. He dialled 999 and asked for the police. Then he told his extraordinary tale to the female operator, ‘I’ve killed my father. You’d best come and get me.’
He was still unburdening himself when the policeman who had been alerted by the switchboard staff at headquarters in Bell Street a mile away arrived outside the telephone box. The caller hung up and, turning to the officer, exclaimed, ‘Aye. It was me. I killed him. I put a pillow over his face.’
The next few hours that afternoon in 1974 were among the most bizarre of the detective’s entire career. The man identified himself as 42-year-old Joseph Gibson, who lived in Rosebank Street with his 81-year-old father, and he invited the officer to go home with him to see for himself what he had done. When they went to the ground-floor flat together the old man was dead, sure enough. He lay serenely on a bed, dressed in his best suit and with cotton wool filling his nostrils. He had clearly been visited by an undertaker and the funeral was just as obviously imminent. Death, it appeared, had been as a result of perfectly natural causes.
What began as routine checks, however, produced some startling facts. The man who had been so anxious to confess his guilt knew all about killing. Fourteen years earlier he had been sent to Carstairs State Institution without limit of time after strangling his mistress, with whom he lived, with a scarf. He had been detained for twelve years before being released on licence. A telephone call to the dead man’s family doctor revealed that the GP had not examined the corpse of Mr Gibson senior and a death certificate had been issued purely on the basis of the man’s medical history, which indicated that he had suffered from several potentially fatal diseases. A hasty post-mortem by the police surgeon told a different story. Mr Gibson’s life had ended after suffocation, most likely by a pillow or something similar.
Three months later, when Joseph Gibson sat in the dock of the High Court in Dundee and admitted a charge of culpable homicide, Lord Stott was informed that had it not been for the phone call the accused man had made to the police, the killing would never have been discovered and the arranged funeral would have gone ahead as planned. He also heard that, although Gibson had done his best to care for his elderly father, some ill-feeling had developed between the two and the suffocation had occurred on a night after the old man had locked himself out. The amount of force used to kill him had been minimal and frail Mr Gibson was already ‘at death’s door’.
His Lordship, after expressing some surprise that the authorities had not decided to treat Gibson as a medical case, took a lenient view. He sent the son who had confessed to prison for three years, commenting, ‘This was perhaps the minimal culpable homicide that one could perceive.’
*****
By calling the police to desperately admit to a killing, Joseph Gibson’s actions are far from unique. He is just one of a long line who have been so overwhelmed with the magnitude of their crime that they can think of nothing else until the outpouring of their guilt has been completed – as though admission gives them exoneration.
Two years after Gibson’s 999 call, another son in another part of the city dialled the same number with similar matters to get off his chest.
