The Lawkillers

by Alexander McGregor

  However, Lord Wheatley, then Scotland’s most senior judge, might have felt differently had he had known how John Cant Smith was to behave in the future. He was not to know, either, that 12 years was nowhere near to the time the murdering rapist would actually spend behind bars.

  A little over three years after descending the steps in the dock of the High Court to vanish out of public view and into the penal system, Smith once again burst into prominence. But this time it was not a helpless young woman who was to become his hostage but a prison officer.

  Along with two other lifers held with him at Peterhead Prison, Smith took part in a riot in an attempt to air alleged grievances. The trio petrol-bombed a section of the jail’s A Hall and seized one of their guards before embarking on an orgy of destruction. By the end of the five-day stand-off they had caused £260,000 of damage and made national headlines before surrendering.

  His fellow rioters were every bit as dangerous as himself. One was William Ballantyne, a 27-year-old jailed shortly before Smith for stabbing a man to death in a Glasgow street brawl. The other was one of Scotland’s most notorious criminals – 32-year-old Andrew Walker, a former Army corporal who had machine-gunned three soldiers to death in a £19,000 military payroll robbery 18 months earlier, for which he was given a 30-year sentence.

  To justify his actions, Smith made an eloquent plea during his trial at the High Court at Peterhead, claiming that he had ‘taken desperate measures because of his desperate situation.’

  His written plea in mitigation of his actions read:

  Can anyone ever understand the horrors of prison life, even by visiting prison? No one can understand this without being part of it, feeling the anxieties, knowing the helplessness, living in desolation.

  Prison life does not provide the creative correction and training needed for a man to be able to make a new beginning on the outside. Instead, it is geared to use the men as labour, punish them if necessary and disregard their inner spirits as of no consequence.

  Physical and mental brutality does exist in Peterhead. This matter can only be resolved with the introduction of rehabilitation. If the prison authorities insist on treating prisoners like animals, then prisoners will naturally continue to act like animals.

  Prisoners (including myself) have been described as incurable psychopaths, subversive and hell-bent on destruction. This can only be described as an excuse rather than a truth. I ask you, have prisoners been given the chance to express themselves in any other way? Certainly not in Peterhead.

  However well-expressed, the plea cut little ice with presiding judge Lord Murray. He made no distinction between the trio and sentenced each of them to 10 years, terms he wanted taken into account when their life sentences and eventual release were being considered.

  Smith had plenty of time to reflect on prison life and its care of inmates. He was to remain in Peterhead for another 16 years before eventually being freed on licence. Altogether he had served 19 years. Notwithstanding his words to Lord Murray, he claimed that during his incarceration he had ‘found God’ and reformed his ways. Some police officers and social workers who knew him doubted his conversion and considered his new-found faith to be little more than a ploy to obtain his freedom. Privately, they called him the ‘master manipulator’.

  It was a description that seemed particularly fitting considering Smith’s next brush with the law.

  Several months after his release in October 2002, the man with the violent past attended a Saturday night dance in Stonehaven where he befriended a 49-year-old Canadian-born woman. After a few dances, he talked her into allowing him to walk her home. He even persuaded the woman, a bank manager, to invite him into the cottage she shared with her daughter for a cup of coffee. Within a short time, however, and for whatever reason, Smith’s new acquaintance became uneasy. Regretting her offer of hospitality, she told him to leave. Reluctantly, he agreed and, after some hesitation, departed.

  But a few days later, in the early hours of one morning, he returned to the cottage, which was in darkness.

  He moved cautiously, sure he was unobserved. He did not know, however, that his stealthy approach had been detected. The woman’s daughter, who had risen from bed for a glass of water, had spotted him walking up the garden path and became instantly apprehensive. Ducking out of sight, she watched, terror-filled, as the handle of the door slowly turned from the outside. Her heart pounded so hard she was certain the uninvited visitor on the other side would hear it. Desperately, she tried to remember if the house had been locked up for the night or if the door would start to open. She closed her eyes and prayed. When she opened them again, the handle had ceased to turn and the sound of footsteps moving round the side of the house told her her God had been listening.

  The girl let out the breath she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding and after a few moments quietly alerted her mother. Together the pair remained silent but petrified as the man who had killed prowled around the exterior of the house, peering into various windows. Whatever his original intentions, and to the enormous relief of the terrified mother and daughter, Smith appeared to have a change of heart and a few minutes later departed. Once he was out of sight they called the police and a short time later the sinister, unwelcome visitor, was found close by and arrested.

  After being taken to the police station in Stonehaven, Smith requested permission to visit the toilet. It was then his earlier intentions became all too evident. Checking the WC immediately after he’d used it, police found a knife and a packet of condoms in the cistern. The discovery raised questions in the minds of the officers but, with nothing else to go on, they dismissed the find as just the actions of an anxious man brought in for a minor offence. Had they been aware of their prisoner’s history and the chilling echoes of the last time he had used a knife for a murderous sexual spree in a house where a mother and daughter were alone in the early hours, they might have viewed matters differently. That same knowledge would certainly have unnerved the two women in the cottage far beyond their most fearful imaginings.

  Surprisingly, Smith was again treated unexpectedly lightly at his subsequent court appearance. Although on licence from a life sentence, he was jailed for just three months, a term which seems inconceivably lenient considering the marked similarities to the circumstances of his crimes some 20 years previously. One explanation may be that the sheriff dealing with the case was unaware of the ghastly background to the crimes which had led to Smith’s long confinement in Peterhead.

  If that is the case, the judge’s ignorance was nothing to that of the next innocent victim who was to receive the attention of the killer rapist.

  Some three years later, on the evening of 3 February 2006, Smith surfaced once more to become the centre of a police hunt – and again it was for terrorising a woman.

  A slightly built lady doctor was loading shopping into the passenger side of her vehicle in a supermarket car park near Broughty Ferry when she was suddenly seized from behind by two powerful hands grabbing her round the waist. The attacker pinned her arms to her side and, in the darkness of the isolated area, dragged her round the vehicle. She screamed but the few late night shoppers who heard her, dismissed the incident as a domestic squabble and went about their own business.

  Seconds later, her panting assailant had opened the driver’s door and bundled her into the seat after placing one hand round her throat and the other over her mouth. He got into the car with her, at first sitting on his helpless victim then ordering her to move over into the passenger seat. Then he ripped the car keys from her hand. Despite her fear, the 41-year-old victim continued to struggle. She attempted to escape by opening her passenger door but was propelled back into her seat by an arm across her throat. When she tried to shout out, the broad-shouldered man with the pale eyes roughly stifled her call for help. ‘Don’t do that. Stop doing that,’ he instructed, the quietness of his words adding to the menace. But even after he had started the engine, the woman found unexpected courage to c
ontinue her fight. She managed to pull the keys from the ignition and, fighting off his attempts to pin her back in her seat, succeeded in switching on the car’s hazard warning lights and sounding the horn. Other shoppers paused in their haste to get out of the cold of the February evening and looked curiously towards the vehicle. But once more they discounted the disturbance as a minor family row where outside interference might not be appreciated.

  Perhaps because of the attention her actions were starting to attract in the car park, or maybe thanks to her surprising pluck, the situation suddenly changed. The aggression slipped away from the man in the driver’s seat and he slowly opened his door and began backing out of the vehicle. Then in an urgent, raised voice he pleaded, ‘I really need your help. I’m really desperate. I really need your help.’

  The woman who had been his prisoner until a moment before but who had somehow taken control of the situation, asked what help he required.

  ‘I really need to get to Lochee,’ he said, naming the suburb several miles away at the opposite end of town and where his notoriety had started two decades earlier.

  Calmly she replied, ‘I can’t take you there. You’ve really scared me. You know I can’t take you there.’

  Her firm response seemed to be all that was required to drain the last traces of aggression from her captor. Without another word he slid out of the vehicle, pushed the door shut and quietly moved off into the shadows of the car park. The trembling woman in the passenger seat quickly locked all the doors, anxiously watching his departure. It was only after he vanished towards a nearby housing estate that she found sufficient courage to leave the car and re-enter the supermarket to ask staff to call the police.

  Despite press appeals and the study of the supermarket company’s CCTV recordings, the identity of the man who had appeared from nowhere to transform a woman’s routine shopping expedition into the most frightening experience of her life, remained unknown. The tapes picked up his arrival at the store some 40 minutes before the incident began and he was tracked wandering round the store without attempting to buy anything. He was also pinpointed hanging around outside, apparently watching other shoppers, and then moving towards a cash machine as though to use it. But, however helpful the images were, they were insufficiently clear to establish who the man was.

  The breakthrough the police were searching for came when an observant detective reviewed the CCTV footage. Magnification of the images showed distinctive features on the jacket, sufficient to allow the manufacturer to be traced. They in turn advised that it had been part of a batch supplied to a charity second-hand furniture organisation in Dundee.

  Within hours of that information being received, the recycling firm were able to tell police that the owner of the jacket was John Cant Smith. They knew him as a released murderer but had been ‘motivated by humanity’ to give him a chance by taking him on as a volunteer. At first he had been employed part-time, then, latterly, full-time. They were able to tell police, too, that on the day of the abduction, Smith had not turned up for work.

  Three weeks after the incident, he was arrested. At first he denied having any part in it, but later, before he was due in court, he confessed to what he had done, saying the offence hadn’t been sexually motivated but had been carried out because he had a cocaine habit and owed a dealer £350.

  Even after his arrest, Smith’s latest female victim remained unaware of his appalling history. It was only after he had faced justice – again in the High Court in Edinburgh – for the ordeal he had subjected her to, that she learned the full extent of his violent past. Perhaps it was as well she was such an innocent or she might never have found the nerve to confront him in the valiant way she did.

  As in the previous incidents, when he forced himself upon unsuspecting women, Smith again sought in court to explain away his actions as having much less sinister motives. His defence counsel said that following his release from his 19 years in Peterhead, Smith had lived alone and had obtained employment. However, just as he had admitted to police, he was a drug addict and required extra money. An examination of blood samples taken from Smith and also of his bank account, confirmed these facts. On the day of the attack, the defence QC went on to explain, Smith had little recollection of events but his intention had been to rob someone at a cash machine. When he had been unable to do so, he turned towards his victim and when that plan went wrong, his next thought was to have her drive him to a less busy machine.

  Jailing him for five years, Lord Kinclaven remarked that the term would have been seven years except for the fact that he had owned up to his crime at an early stage and also because he had been returned to prison immediately under the terms of the licence releasing him from his original life sentence.

  His words were received unemotionally by the man with the ordinary name but extraordinary history of crime. John Smith, who in his relatively short life had murdered, raped, rioted and abducted, was led away silently to return once more to the place he had said left him feeling desolate and hopeless – the place where those behind the towering walls would be bound to act like animals if that was how they thought they were being treated.

  5

  BILL THE RIPPER

  A chill wind swept through Dundee Harbour that late January morning in 1889 when the couple from London hurried down the gangway of the steamer Cambria. Neither had been in the city before and they gazed for a few moments at the vast hill dominating the northern skyline – which they would later learn was called the Law – before pulling their collars up and quickly moving on to collect their luggage.

  Few of the others going about their business on the dockside that day paid them much attention, except to show a little surprise at how skilfully the diminutive 5-foot 3-inch male handled the large packing box that was discharged along with the rest of their baggage. William Henry Bury wasn’t just short of stature, but slightly built and sometimes a shade unsteady on his feet, though that had more to do with the amount of ale he normally consumed than any infirmity. For most of his twenty-nine years he had lived in his native Midlands and the woman who accompanied him was his wife Ellen, four years his senior, whom he had married only nine months before.

  Bizarrely, they had met in Kate Spooner’s brothel in London where Ellen worked as a skivvy and where Bury had become a frequent visitor after moving south to live in the capital’s East End, the previous November.

  Their courtship had been brief – a month – before their Easter Monday wedding and it was difficult to understand how Bury had managed to sweep Ellen, slim and delicately featured, so completely off her feet. He was said by those who knew him to be restless and quarrelsome, fond of drink and whores and without any kind of obvious future. His father, a fishmonger, had died when Bury was only six months old and a short time later his mother was admitted to a lunatic asylum. A prosperous woman in Wolverhampton took over the family of three orphans but, despite being educated above his class, Bury became a drifter soon after entering his teens. He had some training as a horse butcher and had worked in a locksmith’s, but these occupations required a discipline he didn’t have and after his move to the East End he eked out a scanty living as a sawdust- and sand-merchant. Most of his customers were publicans and he also tended to quickly become one of theirs.

  It was much easier to understand why Bury was attracted to Ellen. She had inherited £300 in shares from an aunt – the equivalent of three years’ pay for factory workers – and more than one customer at Kate Spooner’s had made overtures in her direction. Unaccountably, she had chosen the small, bearded man who had seemed incapable of offering her any kind of future. It was a decision she probably came quickly to regret. Less than a week after the wedding, their first landlady in Bow hurried to their bedroom because of the amount of noise. She walked in to find Bury straddling his wife with the knife he always kept under his pillow in his hand and Ellen shouting that he was in the act of killing her. Another acquaintance of the unlikely couple twice witnessed the petite new
ly-wed being assaulted by her husband. On the first occasion, Bury punched her full in the face in a pub in Whitechapel. During the next attack, in the street, Ellen was knocked to the ground after suffering a heavy blow to the mouth. The incident ended only when a man stepped in to hold the drunken Bury back.

  When he wasn’t ill-treating his new wife, the under-sized, under-achieving Bury was rapidly devouring the £300 legacy, first with the purchase of a pony and cart for his sawdust business and later on drink and prostitutes. By the time they arrived in Dundee, little remained. Certainly, there wasn’t enough left to fund the purchase of a house or even the rent of fully furnished apartments in the city and when they alighted from the Cambria that winter morning, they travelled only a few hundreds yards before finding lodgings at 43 Union Street. Jean Robertson, their landlady, charged them eight shillings per week for the rent of a room but Bury considered this too expensive and, a week later, after unsuccessfully attempting to gain two shillings’ reduction, they moved out. The same day, the couple took up occupancy of a two-roomed basement flat at 113 Princes Street, an area overlooking the harbour and on a busy route into the city centre.

  Significantly, the closely built tenements were also well served by public houses and, to the delight of their owners, Bury immediately established himself as a big-drinking customer. Ellen, however, appeared only once with him, on the day after they moved into the flat, when she had a glass of port wine in one of the pubs before going home. The little Englishman would sometimes visit the same bar more than once on the same day and was happy to chat to anyone who would listen. He seemed ‘a man of means’, spoke of selling shares, and said he and his wife had moved north for the sake of Ellen’s health – an ironic comment, given the events soon to unfold. He added that they would probably return to London that August.