The Law Killers (36 page)

It was a view apparently shared by the jury. After an absence of only three hours, a relatively short time considering the volume of seven weeks of evidence, they returned a majority Not Guilty verdict.

The bespectacled 61-year-old in the dock, who throughout the trial had surprised many with his relaxed, friendly demeanour, sat with his head bowed as his fate was announced. When he finally looked up, his only reaction was to reply, ‘Thank you very much.’ He then departed quickly through a side door, his nightmare over at last.

Like every other unsolved murder, the files of Carol Lannen and Elizabeth McCabe will remain forever open. Taken together, the separate inquiries, the intermittent cold case reviews, the costly analysis of the low grade DNA samples and the long trial of Vincent Simpson, has meant the expenditure of millions of pounds. Although the sums of money involved are unprecedented in the history of Dundee policing, that would be no deterrent if fresh evidence emerged to point the way to likely conclusions leading to the final closure of the murder logs. Justice is beyond value in an orderly society and those who suffer at the hands of the wicked deserve to have the price of achieving it paid, whatever the cost.

Nevertheless, the prospects of ever winning convictions for the Templeton Woods murders diminished significantly with the presentation of the case against Vincent John Simpson. When Mark Stewart QC and the others in his all-Dundee defence team of advocate Ashley Edwards and solicitor George Donnelly demolished the Crown case so expertly, they effectively made it far more difficult for any future prosecutions to succeed. Forensic science will continue to advance, probably to levels even more unanticipated than the major breakthrough of DNA, but nothing will ever change the police procedures of 1979–80 and beyond, when officers, unaware of what lay ahead, innocently contaminated their own evidence.

Thanks to that and the continuing passage of time, no one, except the person or persons who took the last breath of life from two defenceless young women, is likely to ever know for sure if they were sisters in death or just strangers whose resting places simply happened to be 150 yards apart.

The tantalising, yet inconclusive, coincidences which attach to the murders will always ensure a continuing fascination with the cases, however, and legitimate theories pointing to possible scenarios will continue to be advanced.

There may be food for thought, for instance, in other pages of this volume. Some nine years after the discovery of Carol Lannen’s body in Templeton Woods, a walker in another forest on the opposite side of the River Tay also came upon the body of a woman who had been strangled. She was identified as Lynda Hunter, the wife of depraved social worker Andrew Hunter, who was subsequently jailed for life for her murder
(see
Collared).

During his trial, it emerged that he too trawled the city centre for prostitutes. At the time of Carol Lannen’s death, the slimly built Hunter was aged 28, pale-faced and with a moustache. The photo-fit of the Templeton Woods murder suspect, said to be slim, moustached and aged 25–30, also bore a striking resemblance to how he looked at that time. Hunter used the services of a number of call girls, among them a 22-year-old drug addict who apparently committed suicide the day after his wife’s corpse was found in the Fife forest. The pair enjoyed sex sessions in his home, before and after he murdered his wife, and it was later learned the two had become acquainted when Hunter met the young woman in his role as a social worker. Could he also have been a social work contact of the unfortunate Carol Lannen? Was there a possibility they may have formed an association and that she had perhaps threatened to expose him?

He may not have had any particular connection with Kintore where the handbag and clothing of the 18-year-old were found, but neither did he have business in Manchester where he took such elaborate steps to throw police off the scent by abandoning his wife’s car after taking her life. Anything the resourceful social worker might have known about the teenager who perished in Templeton Woods, however, went to his grave with him. He died in Perth Prison five years into his life sentence.

The contrasting lifestyles of the two unfortunate young women is the principal reason many of the police officers involved in both cases believed they met their deaths at the hands of different people. Yet, why should that necessarily eliminate the possibility of a single killer? Many men who keep the company of prostitutes lead perfectly normal lives and have ordinary relationships with decent women they are attracted to, some of whom may also be reserved and ambitious. Being interested in ladies of the night does not preclude a simultaneous interest in pretty nursery nurses, nor the ability to communicate with, and be attractive to, both of them, though for differing reasons.

Many questions thrown up during the trial of Vincent Simpson were left unanswered. An intriguing factor to emerge during the long hours of evidence, but which was not probed further, was that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Elizabeth might not even have been in a position to have hired a taxi to take her home in the first place. In a passing reference to how upset the victim had been in Teazers when she had felt like a ‘gooseberry’, her friend Sandra Niven had recounted how she had lent Elizabeth £1 for a drink. If she was without money for a cab, why had she declined the offer of a lift from Sandra and her male friend? Upset at feeling left out, and imagining she was disliked by male acquaintances, what had been in her mind when she stepped out into the night from the club? It did not seem she was in a particular hurry to go home. Is it possible she had made other arrangements about how she was to spend the next part of her night out?

Whatever her intentions, the one undisputed fact is that Elizabeth was last seen in the centre of her home town before she suddenly vanished into the night. The final, certain sighting of her was at a spot in town just a few hundred yards from where the other young murder victim, with whom she was to be forever linked, was also seen for the last time before she, too, simply disappeared.

The trial of Vincent Simpson produced another curious fact about their final movements.

When Carol Lannen was last glimpsed it had been when she stood on a street corner outside the Occidental Bar. On the evening before Elizabeth McCabe met her maker, she had gone to the Occidental for a drink but left in embarrassment after having been mistaken for a prostitute by a male drinker.

In all probability, it was just one more coincidence in their widely differing lives. Or perhaps not.

SOURCES

Books

Christie, J. B. W., ‘Crime’, in
Third Statistical Account of Scotland: City of Dundee
, Herald Press, 1979

Hamilton, Judy,
Scottish Murders
, Lomond Books; Geddes & Grosset, 2001

Millar, A. H.,
Haunted Dundee
, Malcolm MacLeod, 1923

Skelton, Douglas,
Blood on the Thistle
, HarperCollins, 1994

Magazines

Bonner, John, ‘The Dundee Strangler’,
True Crime Monthly
, February 1982

MacPherson, Euan, ‘Jack the Ripper in Dundee’,
The Scots Magazine
, January 1988

Melville, William, ‘Blood Group Determination’,
The Police Journal
, October–December 1971

Reid, Henry John, ‘Real Lives’,
The Guardian Weekend
, 26 March 1994

Newspapers

The Courier

The Daily Express

The Daily Mail

The Daily Record

The Evening Telegraph

The Glasgow Herald

The Scotsman

The Sunday Post

By the same author:
LAWLESS

COPYRIGHT

First published 2005

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This electronic edition published in 2012

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Copyright © Alexander McGregor 2005, 2009

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