The Lawkillers

by Alexander McGregor

  ‘Helen kept saying she wanted a drink and I kept saying she’d had enough. We stopped at the toilets at the top of Riverside Drive. When I came back Helen wasn’t in the car.’ Wilkie went on to recount how he had searched the ladies’ lavatory and had then driven around searching for her. After finally going to his mother’s to collect the baby, he drove back to his own home, fully expecting her to be there. When she wasn’t, he fed the baby then went to bed.

  Asked whether there had been any occasion when he thought he had seen Helen since her disappearance, he replied that he believed he had done so once, adding that he had asked around many times if anyone knew her whereabouts. When he was questioned about showing ill will towards her, he replied, ‘I may have slapped her and grabbed her on the arms, but never with a clenched fist or anything like that.’

  He disputed the interpretation that had been put on his comments about his missing wife being ‘well buried’, explaining that what he had probably said was something to the effect that if police had not found her by then they were unlikely to do so after such a passage of time. At the time of the conversation he and Mr Milne, whom he had made the comment to, ‘had a drink on them’ and he was getting fed up with people asking him if he had done anything to Helen.

  When the jury retired after three days of evidence, experienced court journalists and even some of the police involved in the murder inquiry agreed that the case against the accused man was slender. There was plenty of room for suspicion and sufficient evidence that the teenage couple had had a fiery relationship, which more than once had provoked violence, but there was no overwhelming proof linking Wilkie to the actual act of murder. Without the existence of the tie used to strangle the unfortunate young mother and, more importantly, its admitted ownership by her husband, it is even possible that the case might never have arrived in court.

  No one was more surprised than the speculators gathered in the corridors of the court-house when the jury of nine men and six women returned after an absence of only seventy minutes.

  Jimmy Wilkie was brought back and sat in the dock, pale-faced and impassive between his police escorts, as he waited for the verdict. Without looking at him, the jury foreman rose to say they had found him guilty of the murder – by a majority.

  Lord Robertson told the accused man, ‘You have been found guilty by a jury of what can only be described as a horrible crime and there is only one sentence I can impose.’ When the life term was ordered, Wilkie slowly bowed his head and he was then led back down the cells. In the public gallery, his girlfriend Donna was visibly upset. His mother wept.

  In the following months, life once more returned to as near normal as possible for the principal players in the murder melodrama – apart from the convicted man himself, who was struggling to come to terms with the bleak regime of prison life and facing a sentence of indeterminate length. And that is how it all might have continued … except that a short time later Chief Inspector Fotheringham, whose skilful investigation had secured the slim conviction, received an extraordinary phone call from the Procurator Fiscal in Dundee. He heard in disbelief that a new witness had suddenly come forward to say she had been visited at her home by Helen Wilkie on 18 May 1974 – more than three months after she had disappeared after supposedly being murdered by her husband.

  The woman, Mrs Valerie McCabe, who had lived at the time in the same tenement block as the Wilkies at 43 Hill Street, had related how she had been at home that evening when the doorbell rang and Mrs Wilkie was on the doorstep to say Mrs McCabe’s husband Norman had just phoned the Wilkies’ flat. The McCabes had no telephone themselves and the call had been to inform Valerie, a woman in her early 20s, that her husband’s bus had broken down on the way home from the Scotland–England football match at Hampden that afternoon and that he would be late in returning home.

  The stunned chief inspector went at once to see the belated new witness, whose first-floor home was above the ground floor flat of the Wilkies. During a lengthy interview, Mrs McCabe disclosed that she had read reports of the trial in the newspapers and had become very anxious about the verdict because she ‘knew for certain’ that Helen Wilkie had been in her house on the day of the football international in May. They had spent a long time chatting, she said.

  The chief inspector questioned and probed, suggesting that a few years had passed and that people’s memories could play tricks. But Mrs McCabe was emphatic about her identification and stressed that because of the football match she had absolutely no doubt of the date of the visit. She became indignant that her word was being doubted and asked angrily if the policeman was calling her a liar or thought she was stupid. Chief Inspector Fotheringham responded that neither was the case, but he believed it might have been a case of mistaken identity: maybe the visitor was not Mrs Wilkie, but someone else who might have been co-habiting with Jimmy Wilkie.

  Later, back at headquarters, the detective learned that by coincidence a young police constable and his wife, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the missing Helen, had separated and that she had taken up with Wilkie. The chief inspector collected a colour photograph of the young woman from her estranged husband and it was subsequently shown to Mrs McCabe, who agreed it looked like Mrs Wilkie – but it had not been her who had visited that evening in May.

  In January 1979, seven months after the original trial, Scottish criminal history was made when the appeal court in Edinburgh allowed new evidence to be heard in a concluded case – the first time there had been such an occurrence since the controversial case in 1927 of Oscar Slater, who was ultimately freed after being cleared of a murder for which he had served eighteen years.

  Jimmy Wilkie was less fortunate. Lord Emslie, the Lord Justice General, one of three judges to consider the appeal, dismissed the plea that there had been a miscarriage of justice, saying that they were far from convinced that if Mrs McCabe’s evidence had been heard at the original trial there would have been a different verdict. His Lordship said there was no reason to doubt that a woman had called at Mrs McCabe’s home on the day of the football match, but the critical question was what weight and reliability should be attached to that evidence.

  ‘In my opinion, indeed, it is the highest degree likely that an intelligent jury would have reached the conclusion without much difficulty that Mrs McCabe, although an honest witness, was quite mistaken in saying that she saw Helen Wilkie alive on the evening of 18 May 1974,’ said Lord Emslie.

  Then, in a devastating dismissal of the defence case, and with surgical precision, the country’s leading judge demolished the supposed new evidence point by point. He said her supposed visit simply could not fit with the statements of the accused man himself two days after she vanished – and in further interviews with police, and in his own evidence – that she had never been seen again and had never returned to the flat. Nor was it consistent with the evidence of Mrs Wilkie’s friends that they had not seen or heard from her, or that she failed to contact her parents or go to visit her son to whom she was devoted, after 3 February. All this evidence and the inability of the police to trace Mrs Wilkie presented a clear picture of a young woman who, if she had been alive after 3 February, had deliberately and successfully abandoned her husband, child, family and friends and had dropped completely from sight – someone who was quite determined she should not be traced.

  ‘In such circumstances it is almost impossible to believe that this young woman could have taken the risk of making a single visit to the flat on 18 May,’ said His Lordship. He suggested that if she had made this single visit it was ‘astonishing’ that she took nothing with her before completely disappearing again, since her clothes were still in the flat. Nor had she left any trace whatever of her visit, for which there appeared to be no rational explanation.

  He pointed out that if it had been Mrs Wilkie at the flat, that meant she had been murdered after 18 May, and there were ‘grave difficulties’ in the way of accepting this hypothesis.

  ‘The most important
is that she was strangled by her husband’s tie,’ he pointed out. In the face of that, it was difficult – if not impossible – to believe that Helen Wilkie, having deliberately abandoned and cut herself off from her husband, would have continued to carry the tie in her handbag for months. If she had disposed of the tie, how had it come to be used by her murderer?

  In addition to all this, the jury would have been required to accept two remarkable coincidences. The first was that if Mrs Wilkie had been murdered after 18 May, her body was buried just off the route she and her husband had taken on 3 February. The other coincidence being that when she was murdered she was, in all probability, wearing the wine-coloured dress she had changed into on 3 February.

  Lord Emslie thought there were other ‘more direct’ indications that Mrs McCabe was probably mistaken in her identification of the woman who had called at her home on 18 May. He said she had not known Helen Wilkie that well and her encounters with her must have been infrequent and fleeting. Other evidence suggested Mrs McCabe may not have been all that observant. She had said a photograph she had been shown of a woman friend of the Wilkies, who had stayed at the flat after Mrs Wilkie had disappeared, could have been Mrs Wilkie. Both Mrs Wilkie and the woman in the photo were hairdressers and had blonde tips and streaks in their hair, which they wore in the same style.

  As Lord Emslie coolly dismissed one by one the main planks of the appeal, the parents of the accused man sat with growing anxiety at the rear of the court. Mrs Wilkie, realising that her son’s prospects of freedom were slowly ebbing away, brought out a white handkerchief and pressed it to her face to stem a flow of tears.

  Jimmy Wilkie himself had remained surprisingly composed throughout. Dressed in a black leather jacket and checked shirt, he sat in the dock chatting amiably with his prison-officer escorts while he waited the appearance of the trio of appeal judges who would decide his fate.

  When they finally rejected his plea that he was innocent of the murder of his young wife, he turned to his parents and gently shook his head. Mrs Wilkie broke down, sobbing emotionally. Later, after the two had chatted in an ante-room for ten minutes, they hugged each other in a corridor before he was taken back to prison.

  While he served out his sentence, Wilkie and his family continued to protest his innocence. His parents and legal advisers took the case to Justice, the London-based campaigning group led by broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy which had successfully won the release and pardon of Paddy Meehan in a high-profile appeal hearing. However, after considering the Dundee case, the group decided it lacked strength and turned down the plea for assistance.

  Jimmy Wilkie completed his life sentence. Soon after his eventual release, he died in a road accident.

  4

  THE NOT SO ORDINARY

  JOHN SMITH

  When she first heard it, the sound was almost gentle – a soft sigh that could have been a restless turn in the night or a fleeting gasp for breath. It wasn’t loud but its presence in the still house had been just enough to make the young woman stir in her sleep.

  It was 5 a.m. and as she lay in the darkness the 21-year-old occupant of the upper floor bedroom drifted uncertainly between slumber and wakefulness. The half-heard noise that had roused her seemed to have come from the bedroom of her mother a short distance away, but silence had once more descended. Drowsily, she dismissed what she thought she had heard as her mother’s restlessness or her own dreams. Either way, it was unimportant. As she started to turn on to her side in an attempt to return to sleep, she heard another sound. It was just as soft, but this time it was unmistakable and much closer. Someone was in the room. She knew that beyond doubt. Whoever it was, was breathing quickly, the way they would if they had exerted themselves – or were excited. Then a hand reached out and pulled back the bedclothes.

  What confronted her was no longer any kind of dream but the beginning of the worst nightmare a woman could have. Silhouetted in the gloom of the half light was the figure of a powerful man holding a knife. He stepped forward and when he brought the blade up to point threateningly at her she saw that both his hands were covered in blood.

  Then he lay down on the bed and told her he had just killed her mother and unless she did what he asked, she would be next. There was no reason to disbelieve him. The knife, like his hands, was blood-soaked and his chilling words explained the unusual sound which had come from the next room, which was now completely silent.

  Practically paralysed by fear, the young woman shuddered at what she knew was about to happen. Then through her half closed eyes, she made an astonishing discovery. The agitated man lying beside her was a neighbour of the same age who lived only two doors away in the row of neat terraced houses.

  Almost as soon as she realised who he was, her terror intensified. Her recognition meant she would be able to identify him to police – and he would be just as aware of that. He could not simply vanish anonymously into the night. It meant that what was about to occur was likely to have only one ending.

  Her torment seemed endless. In the anguish that followed, she was raped repeatedly. Attempted protest was met with the knife again being held menacingly into her face. Resistance brought the repeated threat that she, too, would die as horrifyingly as her mother.

  Her ordeal lasted two hours. As daylight filtered into the room, the devastated victim knew the scenario would soon be about to change. She began to plead for her life, begging her captor to spare her. At first her words were desperate, then, as it seemed he was hesitating in his intentions, she somehow found the resolve to be gently persuasive. Everything would be all right if only he would leave quietly and without any further trouble, she assured him. He could depart before the neighbourhood was fully awake and no one would be any the wiser.

  The performance of the 21-year-old that April morning in 1983 was remarkable for its courage and, almost unbelievably, it was also successful. The man who had terrified and violated her, nodded slowly, gradually convincing himself of the seeming logic of her plea.

  With a final threat that the trembling woman before him should keep his identity secret, he backed slowly out of the room, departing as silently as he had come.

  She lay in the bedroom for long minutes after that. She needed to be sure he had gone and she needed to stop shaking from the horror that was enveloping her. But she knew, too, that she had to go the bedroom next door to find out about her mother, even though she was certain of what awaited her.

  The sight that greeted her was something no daughter should have of her mother. Only then did she flee the house and leave the scene of unspeakable horror behind to make her way to the home of a friend to haltingly describe what had taken place.

  Things happened rapidly after that. At the arrival of the police she told them her attacker was John Smith and supplied his address. But when they went for him he was not there. Detectives quickly traced him to the home of his sister and found him on a sofa fast asleep after his monstrous night’s work.

  He did not lie about what he had done. In the car on the way to police headquarters the 21-year-old whose full name was John Cant Smith calmly described how he had broken into the house and had ‘stabbed someone.’ But he did not explain that he had swung his kitchen knife so often that his helpless 61-year-old victim had had no chance to defend herself. Casually, he admitted that he had gone to his sister’s house to wash the blood from his clothes, and, if they wanted it, they’d find the knife in a rubbish bin near her home. Under caution at headquarters, he explained further that on the evening leading up to the atrocities he had had a lot to drink and on the way home had decided to break into his neighbour’s house to steal. There had been no intention to kill, no plan to rape, he volunteered.

  Although his story was not disputed, there is every reason to believe that he might have been fully aware that there were no men in the house when he forced his way in. The murdered woman, who was described as a ‘credit to the community’ and faithful church worker who had been in much demand as a sin
ger at local functions, spent most nights alone because her husband was a bakery worker on overnight shifts. Her daughter’s boyfriend visited frequently, as he had done that night, but had departed before midnight. Since Smith lived so close to the semidetached house in the Lochee housing estate, he was in a position to be aware of movements at his neighbour’s home.

  In light of his early admissions, there was no need for a trial. Two months after his crimes, Smith appeared in the dock at the High Court in Edinburgh and again confessed to what he had done.

  Sentencing him, Lord Wheatley looked at Smith with unconcealed distaste and told him:

  In view of what has been said, there is nothing I can say to you, save this: These two atrocious crimes were carried out within a home and people, particularly women, are entitled to expect that in their home they are safe from attacks such as you perpetrated. If women cannot be safe in their own home, then society has reached a sorry state. Therefore, in order to mark the court’s great displeasure and anxiety at such offences and to deter others, I propose to fashion my sentences accordingly.

  His Lordship said the law prescribed but one penalty for murder – life imprisonment. As far as the rape was concerned, he would impose a separate sentence of seven years’ imprisonment, explaining that this would place it on Smith’s record, to be taken into account when his possible release was being considered.

  Referring again to the life sentence, Lord Wheatley added that he would make a recommendation – something he seldom did – that Smith should serve a period of at least 12 years. He ordered that the two sentences should run concurrently, meaning that the seven years for the rape would be served at the same time as the sentence for murder.

  Compared with present-day sentencing protocols, when judges are obliged to suggest a minimum tariff, 12 years might seem a relatively lenient disposal, particularly in the circumstances of a brutal and unprovoked murder followed by the repeated rape of a second victim. But it was not particularly exceptional at the time and brought no public outcry.