The Lawkillers

by Alexander McGregor

  Marshall began to mentally switch off. Suicides never made the lead story for the front page. But with any luck it might have been an accidental fall by a workman. Either way, it was still better than a road-safety exhibition; so he headed for the door and Lochee, unaware of the extraordinary events that were to follow.

  Up at Kilspindie Court, knots of residents and passers-by gathered at the scene. They were watching, but saying little, for they knew no more than what was presented before them – the body of an apparently young man lying face down on a sunlit, tarmac courtyard. He wore a shirt and trousers and was barefoot. Directly above, on the fifteenth floor, was a shattered window which, fellow residents among the onlookers explained, was in the kitchen of the flat. A neighbour, who had been working in his garden, told everyone within earshot that he had heard the sound of breaking glass and looked up to see the man tumble from the window to the ground 140 feet below. John Marshall entered the multi-storey block and unexpectedly found no one barring his way to the lift doors. Seconds later, and accompanied by a police officer who evidently had more on his mind than the young reporter’s identity, he found himself walking into the living-room of the flat at 14C.

  The scene resembled something he had only ever previously witnessed in the cinema. Lying, strangely serene, on the floor was a woman in her mid 20s wearing a nightdress. A black tie was knotted round her neck and her face and other parts of her body were stained with blood. More blood had formed in pools round about her and instinctively Marshall pulled up his trouser bottoms to avoid it as he pointlessly walked round the corpse of the attractive, but very dead, woman stretched in front of him. In the kitchen, breakfast dishes lay unwashed and on the floor was a basin. Beside it was a kettle, with one end of its electric lead dangling in the water that filled the basin and the other end plugged into a live wall socket. On his way out of the house that was otherwise so ordinary, Marshall noticed for the first time that the living-room walls were splattered with blood. Whatever had happened in the flat, he knew without doubt what was going to lead the front page of The Evening Telegraph that day – and probably the next.

  By the time the reporter had returned to the forecourt of the multi-block, police had sealed off the entrance and were allowing access only to those who lived there. Groups of reporters from rival newspapers gathered behind the cordon, desperate for details of what had gone on, but Marshall had no intention of enlightening them until he had found a phone box to file his copy back to the newsroom. Only then did he share with the competition what he knew they would anyway read in his words in the early editions.

  As the day progressed, the full events of the horror that had played out in flat 14C slowly began to unfold. The dead woman was 26-year-old Mrs Margaret Lundie, an attractive mother of two, estranged from her husband who had gone to live in London. For some time she had been involved in a passionate relationship with Owen ‘Chris’ McAuley – the man who had somersaulted to his death. They had lived together in McAuley’s flat in another part of town until two days earlier, when Mrs Lundie had moved out with her children and into her mother’s top-storey multi flat in Kilspindie Court. The dead woman had apparently become unhappy with her partner – who had also separated from his own wife – because he constantly worked nightshift. In addition, she was contemplating a reconciliation with her husband in London, whom she had spoken to by phone on the evening before her death.

  On the morning of the day which would change lives forever, McAuley had finished his nightshift and waited patiently for Mrs Lundie’s mother to depart for work. Over and over he rehearsed what he was going to say. Then he went to the tower block in a bid to resolve the difficulties with his lover and convince the hairdresser’s receptionist to take him back. The discussion became heated and the couple began to argue loudly. Suddenly, in a moment of uncontrollable rage, McAuley took off his tie, wound it round the neck of his struggling mistress and kept pulling tightly until all resistance passed. Only after she slumped to the floor did reason start to return to him and by then it was much too late. The woman he so desperately wanted back in his life now lay lifeless at his feet.

  What followed, and what Marshall the young reporter had seen evidence of but had initially been unable to piece together because of its surreal elements, demonstrated just how much McAuley had instantly regretted his actions. He went straight into the kitchen, placed a basin of water on the floor and, after removing his socks and shoes, stood in the basin. Then he placed the lead from an electric kettle in the water and switched the other end on at the wall socket. Unaccountably, the shock didn’t kill him. When it became clear he would remain alive, the demented 24-year-old took a large kitchen knife back into the living-room and began slashing at his wrists. He lost so much blood that it was extraordinary he did not succeed in his purpose. Finally, and having run out of options, he staggered back into the kitchen, climbed on top of the sink unit and hurled himself through the window high above the ground. Only then did he achieve the result he so desperately sought.

  Owen McAuley was not alone in ending up prostrate on the pavement. When Mr John Orr, the city’s Chief Constable, arrived at the scene he surveyed the corpse and promptly passed out – an event which, unhappily for him, was photographed and recorded in the next day’s Daily Express.

  The police chief probably learned something about himself that morning. John Marshall, the young reporter, also learned lessons. He learned the benefits of getting to the scene of an incident as quickly as humanly possible. And he learned that in newspaper offices the reporter who is first to answer the phone is usually the first to fill the front page. Most of all, though, John Marshall learned never to make assumptions.

  10

  ANYTHING YOU CAN DO …

  Nobody paid him any attention. He was just a young soldier who seemed to know exactly where he was going as he walked purposefully through the gates of St John’s RC secondary school in Dundee one afternoon in 1967. He spoke to no one, for 19-year-old Robert Francis Mone had other things on his mind. He had been a pupil at the school until being expelled a few years earlier and had gone from there to an approved school. Now he was dressed in the uniform of a private in the Gordon Highlanders and carried a long, narrow object wrapped in brown paper. Still, no one gave him more than a second glance or asked what his business was.

  It was 2.15 p.m. on 1 November – All Saints’ Day, a bizarre irony, given the terrible events that were about to unfold. On the top floor of the school, 26-year-old teacher Nanette Hanson was beginning a needlework lesson with eleven third-year girl pupils when the door burst open and the slightly built soldier ripped the paper away from his package to reveal a shotgun. The girls giggled. It was nothing more than a prank by a stupid show-off wanting attention. Mrs Hanson would soon sort him out.

  Almost instantly they knew they could not be more wrong. The intruder, his eyes flashing wildly round the room, began to shout and swear, waving the gun at the girls and ordering the 14- and 15-year-olds, some of them now crying, to barricade the door with their sewing tables … and that was the start of an ordeal that was to last for two hours. It was also the opening sequence of a chain of events that was to reverberate for more than a decade, leaving eight people dead and making the name Mone one of the most feared in the whole of Scotland. Additionally, it bestowed on Dundee the unwanted distinction of being the birthplace of a father and son unrivalled for wickedness.

  In the needlework room, a new order was being imposed. The sandy-haired youth who had thrust his way into the class was now sitting on the teacher’s desk and issuing instructions. He produced ammunition from his pockets and lined it up along the front of the desk. He told the pupils he would blow their heads off and one by one asked the girls their ages. Some were so afraid they could barely respond. Others whispered to each other and one even suggested to a classmate that they seize an iron from another part of the room and attack their captor with it. When Mrs Hanson – just seven months married – told Mone she was aged
26, he mocked – ‘You’re just a pensioner.’ Then he snatched her glasses from her face, threw them to the floor and trampled the glass into the wooden boards with his army boot. When some of the pupils sobbed too loudly, the gun was put to their head and they were advised to keep quiet or he would silence them.

  He ordered everyone into a small changing-room attached to the sewing section and began strutting back and forth, his eyes bulging in their sockets. He smirked as he told his hostages that he had come to the school to gain revenge for being expelled. In particular, he sought retribution against one of the Marist Brothers who helped oversee the Roman Catholic education in the school. Mrs Hanson was the calmest person present. She spoke softly to the young man with the gun and gently advised the girls to stop crying because they might use up the limited amount of air in the small ante-room that had now become a prison. She repeatedly tried to reason with their captor, pleading with him to release the girls and to detain just her.

  Outside, the sounds of disturbance had attracted the attention of Miss Margaret Christie, head of the domestic science department, who taught in an adjoining classroom. Puzzled by the unexpected noise emanating from what was normally the quietest class in the entire school, she went to investigate and found that the upper glass panel in the door had been screened with dressmaking material. As she stood outside the room with another needlework teacher, some of the cloth was moved away and she could see Mrs Hanson making her way in their direction.

  Then a blast of gunfire almost deafened them. Glass in the top half of the door showered over the pair, sending piercing shards into Miss Christie. Ignoring the pain and emerging blood, she fled with her teacher companion back along the corridor to alert the rest of the school to the frightening events taking place on the upper floor.

  If any of those being detained inside the room had any doubts about the seriousness of their position, they now knew better. Some of the pupils screamed. Most of them wept.

  Within minutes of the shot ringing out, police began converging on the school and the usually peaceful Harefield Road area found itself ringed by blue flashing lights and vehicles from all the emergency services. News of the siege quickly found its way on to radio news bulletins and media teams from across the country raced to the city. Among those hearing of the dramatic events unfolding in their home town were the members of the Dundee Police football team, taking part in a cup-final tie a hundred miles away.

  Meanwhile, a state of emergency had been declared at St John’s and the other thousand pupils were rapidly evacuated from the cordoned-off building. Three police officers, backed by a team carrying riot shields, made their way to the upper-floor corridor. Detective Superintendent Donald Robertson – the Clark Gable-lookalike head of CID – Detective Chief Inspector William Melville and Sergeant George McLaren hoped to negotiate with Mone, but the moment they approached the vicinity of the shattered door window, they were treated to blasts from the shotgun.

  An impasse appeared to have been reached. Officers shouted suggestions that they should enter the room to speak with him. Each offer was met with the warning that they should keep back or the gun would be turned on the girls. One of the 14-year-old hostages was led to the door and had the gun pointed at her head while Mone called out that she would be the first to die if anyone tried to force an entry.

  By now adrenalin was surging through his body and he was becoming increasingly aggressive towards the terrified pupils. Three of the girls were ordered at gun-point from the changing-room – where the heat was almost intolerable – into the main classroom. He kissed one of them and sexually interfered with the other two. He exuded power and, to demonstrate his absolute control, he released one 15-year-old, instructing her to inform the growing number of people gathering on the ground floor that he should be left alone. She hurried downstairs to carry out his order just as plans of the school were being scrutinised to determine if there was a possible route into the classroom.

  At the point when police were considering ending the deadlock with tear gas, Mone called out that the only person he would be prepared to speak to was a girl who had lived near him in the houses on the northern edge of the Law, the hill that had been his childhood playground. Her name was Marion Young and they had met four years earlier at a youth club. They had hit it off together and, he explained, she seemed to understand him.

  By good fortune, police were able to make quick contact with her and she was rushed under escort to the scene. Then aged 18 and a student nurse, she unhesitatingly volunteered to go into the classroom to negotiate with Mone. Police were reluctant to allow the gunman another hostage and indicated that the negotiations should take place from behind the door. Marion knew this was not what her long-forgotten acquaintance wanted and insisted she go into the room, as this would offer the best chance of the petrified pupils being released. After some hesitation, police agreed. Seventy-five minutes after the siege had begun, Marion found herself face to face with the baby-faced ex-pupil she now hardly recognised.

  Mone had eagerly anticipated the meeting. Awaiting her arrival, he filled one of the classroom sinks with water and washed his face and hair. Then he sat singing to himself while police sped Marion across the city. His first words to her weren’t exactly the customary greeting of old friends: ‘You thought you were being a brave little girl? How did you know I wouldn’t blow your head off?’ he asked with a small smile.

  The young trainee nurse hadn’t been taught anything about counselling or how to negotiate with someone so obviously disturbed, but instinctively she seemed to understand how to respond. Referring to him as ‘Bobby’, the name she had always known him by, she laughingly said she knew he would never do that to her. Then for ten minutes she and Mrs Hanson gradually convinced him that the pupils should be released, particularly since the changing-room had by then become unbearably warm and the children were beginning to suffer from the stifling heat.

  Mone, almost disinterestedly, agreed and Mrs Hanson, in a deliberately unhurried manner, went to the little room and led the ten petrified girls towards the door. But she was not to be allowed to leave with them. As the girls prepared to depart, Mone called out to the teacher, ‘Not you – you’re not going – I want you here.’

  At first the relieved pupils walked slowly from the room; then, out in the corridor, they began to run, faster than they had ever done in their lives, some of them slipping and cutting themselves on the shattered glass beneath the room door. Their ordeal was over. The same could not be said for the two women remaining in the room.

  Mone’s behaviour was becoming increasingly irrational. He produced some sandwiches and gave one to Marion. Then he asked for a cigarette from Mrs Hanson. When he laid the shotgun down for a few moments, the teenage nurse who had infatuated him four years earlier picked it up and casually started to inspect it. Almost immediately she found herself on the floor after Mone launched an attack on her, grabbing the weapon back.

  In the corridor, the posse of police officers, many of them now armed, were joined by Mone’s grandmother and Guy Hanson – Nanette’s husband, whose job in Dundee had brought both of them to the city from their native Yorkshire.

  Things were not going well in the needlework room. Mone acted even more bizarrely and he began aiming the shotgun at different parts of the room, at the same time demanding to know if his hostages thought he was capable of killing anyone.

  ‘Do you think I can do it?’ he taunted. To show he meant business, he pulled the trigger of the gun several times, but its faulty mechanism prevented it from discharging.

  He pointed the weapon at Mrs Hanson and asked, ‘Do you want to be a saint?’ Then he squeezed the trigger. Again it failed to go off. Next he aimed at Marion and tried to fire once more. Once more the gun did not respond.

  The unintentional game of Russian roulette finally paid off for him when he successfully directed a blast at the room door after he detected a movement outside. Mone was by now enraged at the weapon’s poor performance.
He had bought it in London on his way home on leave from the Gordon Highlanders’ base in Minden, Germany, and had not tested it before purchase. If he had done, he would have found that the firing mechanism was erratic, with no pattern to its successful operation.

  But Robert Mone had come to kill that All Saints’ Day and he would have gone on pulling on the trigger for as long as it took to achieve his purpose. In the event, it required just one more squeeze.

  Anxious that a police sniper might be waiting for a sight of him, he instructed Mrs Hanson to close the only curtain in the room that remained open. As she reached up to do so, he fired without warning at her back from a distance of just seven feet. For a moment the gentle, softly spoken teacher remained motionless. Then, as Mone prepared to send off a second round, she dropped slowly before him. Her exuberant assailant looked on, marvelling at the grace with which she sank to the floor.

  The gallant teacher was not dead. Horrified at what had taken place, Marion Young rushed to her aid and used her nursing training to establish that a faint pulse was present. Mone seemed indifferent to what was going on. He laughed dementedly and sang. He had fulfilled that afternoon’s purpose and now he didn’t care what came next. Dismissively, he told Marion she could do what she wanted when she pleaded with him to allow Mrs Hanson to be taken to hospital. When ambulance men arrived at the classroom a short time later, Mone allowed them to enter without any conditions. They were accompanied by two of the St John’s teachers, Brother Bede and Brother John, who came in, praying, behind a shotgun shield.