The Lawkillers

by Alexander McGregor

  Monks and Mill had a video of Dirty Harry and had studied it at length. But this was not the only high-profile crime that the two former schoolmates at Lawside Academy had hatched. Police also found scraps of paper detailing the movement of Post Office cash delivery vans and, by piecing the jigsaw together, discovered that the pair intended to hijack a postal van one Friday morning when it stopped outside a sub-post office in St Giles Terrace – just a few yards from Monks’s home. The driver was to be seized and the van driven by the robbers to either Templeton Woods, on the outskirts of the city, or Monks’s lock-up garage, where the cash would be separated from the rest of the mail.

  The raid on the gunshop had been the means to an end for both of these elaborate plans, providing the would-be big-time criminals with the necessary fire power. Given the onslaught on Mr Johnston in Gow’s three months earlier, there seemed little doubt the pair had the inclination to go through with their plans. In addition to the painstaking notes they had prepared, Monks and Mill had assembled a range of other accessories to help them carry out their deadly plots. Police found two sawn-off shotguns, cartridges, camouflage and combat-style clothing, a gas mask, balaclavas, handcuffs, a forged Tayside Police warrant card and an aerosol can. Under the attic floorboards of Monks’s parents’ house, detectives discovered the barrels of shotguns encased in concrete and the butts cut into small pieces. Passport application forms, a map of Dundee (with various locations marked in ink) and numerous magazines about guns and survival were also seized by the murder squad. Several days before the gunshop killing, Monks and Mill had hired a car, a red Rover, and fitted it with false plates, which they duly returned after the ghastly events of that May Monday morning.

  It is difficult to know who was most surprised by the sudden conclusion to the murder hunt. After three months, with the inquiry leading nowhere, police had overnight rounded up two men for murder and robbery and had apparently foiled a kidnap attempt on an elderly woman, as well as an armed raid on a Post Office cash delivery van.

  Monks and Mill were just as taken aback. With each passing day, they had grown more confident they would never be linked with the frenzied attack on the gentle Mr Johnston. Without the phone call from the conscience-stricken Lucio Ianetta, that state of affairs might have gone on indefinitely. There was nothing to link them with the murder-robbery and, unlike the usual suspects in that type of crime, they had no police records. They were improbable criminals, far less killers. Both came from respectable families and both were in stable relationships with decent young women. Monks had two children – the youngest born just two weeks after the death of Mr Johnston – and Mill was a father-to-be. There wasn’t even that much to connect them to each other. Although they had been schoolmates, they had drifted together only in the lead-up to the Gow’s raid after each became jobless. Neither was known as drinkers and they spent most of their time together in each other’s homes. Bored, they watched videos of crime films such as Dirty Harry and discussed guns and survival techniques. Then, for thrills, they started to turn their fantasies into reality by plotting their own series of crimes.

  By the time the case came to trial, however, their friendship appeared to have evaporated. Each claimed they had simply been the driver of the getaway car, waiting outside the gunshop while the other had entered to carry out the relentless axe attack on the unfortunate Mr Johnston. They told how they had gone to the shop equipped with two-way radios and had devised a series of ‘bleep’ codes to let the other know when to bring the car to the scene and to indicate when the coast was clear for the one who had entered the shop to leave. Their stories were fundamentally the same, only each put himself in the car and the other at the murder scene. During the fifteen days they spent sitting together in the dock at the High Court in Perth, Monks and Mill never spoke and studiously ignored each other, consistent with their pleas that the other was the killer.

  Part of the Crown case against the men was a video film the police had acquired from the closed-circuit television security system of the jeweller’s shop opposite Gow’s. Forensic officers had used special computerised enhancement facilities at Dundee Institute of Technology and the Scottish Police College to improve the images which showed a Rover car, similar to the one the pair had hired, passing the gunshop during the crucial period. It revealed two men in the vehicle but did not distinguish which of them had been driving. In the end, it did not appear particularly to matter to the jury. They took the view Monks and Mill had acted in concert, each guilty in law for the actions of the other. After an absence of just over two hours, they returned to find both men guilty of all charges.

  Jailing each of them for life, Lord Mayfield told the two young killers that their crimes had amounted to ‘a cruel and sadistic atrocity’. Monks and Mill listened in silence, then, as they turned away to begin their terms, the eyes of the ashen-faced pair met for the first time since they had sought to incriminate each other. It was the closest they had come to communicating in public, but they would share many words in the long years that lay ahead.

  Although the jury did not distinguish between the young killers, the parole board did. Mill was released on licence after serving thirteen years. Monks was detained for a year longer before being allowed back into the community.

  Lucio Ianetta, the uncle who said he wilted under the unwavering gaze of a dead man pictured on a poster, never claimed the £12,000 reward.

  2

  BETRAYAL

  In downtown Dundee the clubs were coming out, drunks were quarrelling at the taxi ranks and the peace was being breached at the takeaways. In the housing estates, wives were falling out with abusive husbands and contemplating calling for help. In dark corners, the odd housebreaker was considering the opportunities. It was the usual mildly lawless weekend and Sergeant Fiona Cameron expected more disturbances before her Saturday-night-Sunday-morning mobile patrol shift would draw to a close. The paperwork would be irritating but keeping order was why she had joined Tayside Police. And it was good to be busy.

  When the message came in from headquarters, it sounded routine at first. She should attend a house fire at 39 Clepington Court, a block of modern flats not far from the centre of town and close to the football grounds of the city’s two senior football clubs. At least it would make a change from the drunks, she thought.

  But then she was told something that would make that day in November 1993 one she would remember for the rest of her life. Firefighters at the scene had discovered a body in the burning house. Even then she was unprepared for what she found when she entered the flat.

  The burned corpse was that of the female occupant, and she recognised her at once. She was 27-year-old Irene Martin, a police-woman colleague and her death was not a result of the blaze. She lay in a pool of blood and the smoke-covered walls and bed clothing were blood-splattered. Later, Sergeant Cameron was to learn from medical examiners that the attractive constable had suffered 30 stab and cut wounds, some of them on her hands and arms as she had attempted to fight off her attacker. Others were to her brain and vital neck arteries. The indiscriminate slashes had also severed her voice box.

  What had started as an early morning house fire had become a major murder hunt for an unknown, vicious killer – one who had taken his weapon away with him because there was no sign of anything in the house which could have caused the savage injuries.

  Despite the hour and the staffing complications of it being a weekend, the area quickly swarmed with detectives and scenes-of-crime experts. Forensic science specialists, who had known the tragic victim, fought to stifle their emotions during the minute examination of her body and the damaged flat. Out in the street, uniformed colleagues manned roadblocks erected in the immediate vicinity.

  Shortly after 5 a.m., several hours after the body of the police-woman had been discovered, a car was halted at one of the road-blocks as it attempted to turn into the street. PC Graeme Waghorn explained to the driver of the Ford Sierra that vehicles were being kept out of the
area because of a ‘major incident’. He asked the man behind the wheel what his intended destination was in the street. ‘I’m here to pick up my girlfriend to go on holiday,’ was the reply. Then he told the constable that he might even know her because she was a fellow officer, Irene Martin.

  After identifying himself as Angus Elliott, a 30-year-old council job-training supervisor, who had been romantically involved with Irene for almost three years, he was quietly invited by the constable to accompany him to police headquarters. For the next two hours, the victim’s boyfriend told a heartbreaking story of how they were supposed to be going on holiday to Cyprus that day, where they were to become engaged. On the Saturday afternoon, they had gone to a travel agent’s in the city centre to collect traveller’s cheques then returned to the Clepington Street flat. They had parted around 6 p.m., with Irene promising to pick him up at his home in Forfar in the early hours of the next day, in plenty of time to catch their flight to the sunshine island.

  He then explained that the woman he hoped to marry had been expecting a visitor that evening, a man she had never met and did not know, but who had responded to a newspaper advertisement placed by Irene, seeking a flatmate to help defray mortgage costs. Angus Elliott added that Irene had revealed that, a day earlier, she had received a call from the man, whom she had said was well-spoken, before she departed for a pre-holiday visit to her mother and stepfather in Fife. Elliott had thought it odd that the intended lodger had called when he did because it had been three weeks earlier that the advert had appeared in two newspapers. Helpfully, he added that police would find the stranger’s telephone number on a pad on a table in the lounge. He would be easy to trace. It seemed to offer a possible logical explanation for the unexplained slaying of the young policewoman and the availability of the mystery man’s telephone number would mean he could be quickly located for interrogation.

  There was only one problem. The table in the lounge had been one of the few pieces of furniture destroyed in the fire. There was no pad, no telephone number.

  Something else was missing. When interviewed at police headquarters by Detective Sergeant Andrew Allan, who informed him of Irene’s death, Angus Elliott displayed no feeling at what should have been devastating news. ‘There was no emotion, there was very little reaction, there was nothing,’ the detective sergeant was to recount later.

  There was, however, something present that was even more intriguing than what was absent. The hands of the man seated opposite Sergeant Allan were cut and bruised. Some of the wounds were still bleeding, a fact completely at odds with Angus Elliott’s explanation that they had been caused by an accident at work when a pane of glass had fallen on him.

  Sergeant Allan, who had examined the murder scene, had formed the impression that there had been a struggle in the room where Irene Martin’s body had been found. He was also aware that a neighbour had spoken of being awoken in the early hours by screams and ‘thuds’ – a time which was hardly consistent with a ‘mystery man’ calling in the evening to discuss the let of the flat’s spare room. It was curious, too, that Elliott had made a point of saying he did not have a key to the flat of the woman he had hoped to marry, especially since they’d enjoyed a long relationship and had previously lived together in Forfar. Was that a likely proposition? If he was not telling the truth, what was he trying to prove?

  Most improbable of all was the story he had told PC Waghorn at the barrier when he tried to drive into Clepington Court. Elliott had explained that he’d called to collect Irene so they could make the 5 a.m. check-in at Glasgow Airport for their 7 a.m. flight to Cyprus. Yet at the time he said it, it was already 5.15 a.m. Not only would they have missed the check-in, they would have missed the flight as well.

  Presented with such an accumulation of facts, his highly suspicious injuries, and in the absence of any evidence except Elliott’s word about an unknown man’s supposed visit to the house to discuss room-letting arrangements, police wasted no time in arresting the still-protesting 30-year-old. He continued to deny any knowledge of the killing during formal taped interviews, stating emphatically at one stage – after being asked if he was responsible for Irene’s death – ‘Definitely not’.

  Several hours later, when visited in his cell by Detective Sergeant Alexander McGregor who had gone to tell Elliott his solicitor had not yet arrived, the accused man had a dramatic change of heart. ‘I’m no denying it,’ he told the surprised officer, adding that he wanted independent legal advice.

  Four months later, at the High Court in Kirkcaldy, Angus Elliott denied the murder of Irene Martin, the woman he wanted as his wife, but was prepared to admit to the lesser offence of culpable homicide. It was not a plea the Crown found acceptable and for five days the jury heard a familiar tale of jealousy and passion, of tangled romantic relationships and the explosion of fury that culminated in the death of a young policewoman, who tragically became the victim of the most serious crime of all.

  Far from leaving the flat at Clepington Court at 6 p.m. the previous evening, as he had originally claimed, Elliott had spent the night there with Irene so they could depart in the early hours for the airport and the Mediterranean holiday they had both been looking forward to. But, as they dressed in preparation for the trip, an argument broke out about the relationship Elliott still had with a previous girlfriend, the woman he had been living with in Forfar when he and Irene had met. It was a topic the couple had squabbled over on previous occasions and with growing intensity.

  In the heat of the row, the distraught policewoman took an American Forces combat knife from a bedside table where she kept it for protection. It was a weapon that Elliott, a martial arts enthusiast, had given her after she’d said she was afraid Dundee ‘neds’ might sometime follow her home. She pointed it towards him, ordering him to leave the flat. More angry words flew between them. They grappled in a ferocious bed-top struggle. Despite her self-defence training, it was a contest the slender Irene could not win. The powerful ex-soldier – a part-time nightclub bouncer and a karate black belt – quickly seized possession of the commando dagger being thrust towards him. The control he’d been taught in the army abandoned Elliott and the knife began to flash. Reason only returned after he had swung it 30 times and Irene lay dead, her blood splattering the walls and forming pools beneath her.

  The unexpected killer thought quickly. He had to flee the scene but not in the blood-soaked clothes he stood up in because tell-tale stains would be left in his car. He removed his trousers, bagged them, then dressed in a pair of Irene’s uniform trousers and coat. But before departing there was something else he needed to do. To conceal the cause of Irene’s death, he would set fires throughout the flat so that the resulting blaze would leave no evidence for the forensic experts. Meticulously, he set about covering his tracks. Then he slipped out of the house, but not before ensuring all the internal doors were closed in the hope the flames could do their job.

  He drove quickly away from the city and back to his own flat in Forfar, where he washed and changed clothes once more. Finally, he loaded the lethal dagger, Irene’s coat and trousers and his own blood-stained clothes into a bag and sped off once again, this time travelling only a short distance to another house, one he knew would be empty because the occupant had told him she would be in Edinburgh. It was the home of his former girlfriend, the one the argument had been about, and he used his own key to enter and secrete the items he knew would send him to prison if they were discovered. All the bases seemed to have been covered. He would be in the clear, he reasoned. Moments later, he drove away, heading back towards Dundee for the Oscar-winning performance he knew he would be bound to give. As he set off on the 15-mile drive to Dundee, he quietly congratulated himself on his brilliance.

  Although Elliott seemed happy to ignore the fresh cuts and bruises on his arms, which proved just how courageously Irene had battled for her life, it was far from his only oversight. He had left himself so short of time that he did not reappear in Dundee until suc
h an hour that his story of checking-in for the Cyprus flight was clearly false. But his biggest mistake of all was the scrupulous care he took to close all the doors inside the flat in the belief the flames would erupt and spread more quickly. As any firefighter could have told him, the reverse would be the case; the shut doors significantly stalling and not accelerating the advance of the fire. When Elliott turned his Ford Sierra into the street, his heart must have dropped like a stone when he saw that the flat was still largely intact and the outbreak long since extinguished. Although Irene’s body had been affected by the fire, it was obvious the burn marks had been caused after death and that she had perished as a result of a frenzied knife attack.

  During the trial, it emerged that Elliott found himself on a murder charge as a result of circumstances that were far from unique. He had joined a long line of men who were driven to taking a life simply because he could not choose between two women. When the ladies’ man met Irene at the Brechin nightclub where he was a bouncer, he was already engaged and had lived in Forfar for seven years with his fiancée, a pretty waitress the same age as the police-woman. Although he broke off the engagement and moved out, the relationship never quite ended and the court learned how the former lovers still met. On one occasion, when Irene arrived at unexpectedly at Elliott’s home, the ex-fiancée, who had been sunbathing in the garden with Elliott, was forced to hide in a garden shed to avoid detection by the Tayside constable.

  Elliott had even been with his former girlfriend on the day before he and Irene were due to depart for Cyprus on holiday. On that occasion, the upset waitress, who was departing for a weekend in Edinburgh, gave him an ultimatum – finish with Irene or I will finish with you for good.