The Lawkillers

by Alexander McGregor

  On the morning of 29 May, a week after he had battered Father Hull and Maud Lelean to death, the hunted man – somehow inevitably – turned up on the doorstep of the vicarage of St Chad’s in York, just after breakfast. The vicar, Derek Hall, had just departed to give communion to sick parishioners and the door was answered by his wife, Dorothy. Gallagher, looking dishevelled and anxious after spending the night in a doss-house, asked if he could wash the family car. Instinctively, but almost immediately regretting it, Mrs Hall said her husband always washed his own car and, by way of further explanation, added that he was presently away from the house with it. As she spoke, she slowly started to realise that the uninvited caller was somehow familiar.

  By the time she had closed the door and watched from a window while Gallagher walked away in the direction of York racecourse, Mrs Hall felt with growing certainty that she had just come face to face with the most wanted man in the United Kingdom, the deranged Scotsman who had brutally ended the lives of four people – and who preyed on clergymen. Ironically, the biggest clue to his identity had been the shaven head with its still unhealed razor cuts, the ‘disguise’ he had adopted in order to be less noticeable among the skinheads of Brighton. Mrs Hall at once phoned the police and began a systematic series of calls to the homes of every minister and priest she could think of.

  One of those receiving a call was Father Hugh Curristan, priest of a church three-quarters of a mile away from the vicarage occupied by the Halls. Gallagher had arrived at the priest’s house a few minutes earlier but Father Curristan, who had watched his arrival from an upstairs window, did not open the door because he did not recognise him as one of the regular tramps who came begging for aid. As Gallagher sat on the front doorstep, smoking, and while the priest continued to watch him from the window, the phone rang with the alert from Mrs Hall. Simultaneously, a police car passed the front of the house and Gallagher, panicking, hurried quickly away, but not without first attracting the attention of the officers in the car. They stopped him. However, as they started to question the multiple-killer, he took flight and jumped on to the back of a moving lorry. After a few hundred yards he leaped off, then fled over a railway line.

  Police cars converged on the area and, in a scene reminiscent of a silent movie, the runaway killer was pursued through the streets and over fences by an ever-growing posse of policemen, at least one of whom was blowing his whistle as he ran. He was finally cornered in a back garden by Sergeant Arthur Snowden. When the end came, it could not have been more peaceful. The man who had terrorised two countries said simply, ‘OK, you’ve got me,’ before submitting quietly to his arrest by the sergeant.

  News of the capture was passed to the murder team in Dundee and Detective Chief Superintendent Cameron immediately travelled south. In an interview Gallagher admitted to the murders of Dr and Mrs Woods.

  The killer who could not stop confessing never stood trial for the Dundee killings, however. After pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Father Hull and Miss Lelean on the grounds of diminished responsibility, he was ordered to be detained in Broadmoor, the top-security English hospital, without limit of time. Several days later, the Lord Advocate in Scotland announced that in view of that disposal, no further action would be taken against him north of the border.

  19

  THE FIRST FOOT

  Sandy Borland was one of life’s nice guys. You never heard a bad word about him because nobody ever uttered one. He wasn’t a saint, just the kind who would rather do a good turn than cause any harm. He didn’t have much money because he was a jute worker who didn’t earn a lot. What was left over he usually gave away. The man with the seemingly permanent smile was known as Little Sandy because he stood only a little over five feet in height. If they’d measured him by the size of his heart, they would have called him Big Man. He was born in Lochee and seldom strayed far from there and on the first day of 1957 that was where he died.

  It made no sense then and, more than a half a century later, it still has no explanation. There didn’t seem to be a single reason why Sandy Borland should die and every reason why that New Year’s Day should have ended as happily as it had begun for the man who was one of his community’s most loved figures. Instead, his life came to a savage conclusion only 200 yards from where he lived and the circumstances have haunted his home town ever since. Most disturbing of all is the probability that the two men who almost certainly held the answer to the riddle continued to live side by side with their baffled fellow citizens, quietly rejoicing that for 50 years they had got away with murder.

  When they found 54-year-old Sandy, no one recognised him, not even his closest neighbours. He lay in a heap in the middle of Lorne Street, just down the road from where he lived with his 75-year-old mother Mary, and was so badly beaten his face had lost its features. Some thought he’d been hit by a truck. After his bloody corpse had been examined by experts down at the mortuary the consensus was as unexpected as it was incomprehensible. Little Sandy had been kicked to death, his body, like his face, bearing the evidence of a rain of vicious assaults by a booted foot, or, more likely, feet. In addition to the near obliteration of his features, several ribs had been fractured. He would have cried out when the first kicks were delivered but by the time they’d ended he would have been long silent, overtaken by the kind of death no one should have to suffer. Yet, right up to the moments before he met his maker, the ebullient little jute worker had been even cheerier than usual.

  When he died he had been wending his way home just after 10 p.m., happily intoxicated after a period of drinking that had begun more than 24 hours earlier, on Hogmanay, and had resumed again early the next evening after a day’s sleep. His traditional First Footing excursions round friends in Lochee had started immediately after New Year had been rung in. For a companion he had his 19-year-old niece Mamie, his brother Willie’s daughter from London, who was experiencing her first Hogmanay in Scotland. He also had the company of two half bottles of whisky, bought in advance from the Corner Bar, one of his drinking haunts.

  After celebrating for a few hours into the New Year, Sandy thought it wise to return Mamie to his mother’s house, for he had more drinking to do and he considered an all-night session to be beyond a teenage girl, even one eager to enjoy the peculiar New Year customs north of the border. He then partied in a pal’s house in Kerr’s Lane until 6.30 a.m. before returning home once more, this time to fall into bed and sleep off the hangover that threatened to develop.

  Later that afternoon, Sandy awoke, refreshed and ready to embark on a second round of First Footing. He decided he would visit the same friends he did most New Year Day evenings and take Mamie with him. It was then that fate intervened, seemingly insignificantly as such intrusions invariably are at first, but with devastating consequences for Sandy. Mamie declined the offer to recommence celebrations, believing a cold to be developing, but more probably still recovering from her participation in the unaccustomed festivities. Her uncle, being familiar with the feeling, did not press her. He set off alone – and almost certainly died as a result.

  After visiting and sharing a few drinks with a long-standing pal who’d been under the weather the night before and not in the mood for First Footing, Sandy moved on. It was around 8 p.m. and the popular little reveller was in fine fettle. He had other friends he wanted to call on. At this stage, as one of his hosts was later to explain, Sandy was jovial – as usual – but still sober. However, two hours later and following more socialising, drink had overtaken him. Sometime around 10 p.m., after attending a party in a top-floor flat at the end of Lorne Street, Mrs Agnes Mack left her ground-floor flat in the tenement when she heard someone calling ‘Aggie’. She found an under-the-weather Sandy seated on her doorstep and asked her husband to help her assist him on his way. The pair took the weary merrymaker a little way down the street, heading him in the right direction and advised him to go straight to his home at 123 Lorne Street. It was only after he’d departed that they noticed Sandy had d
ropped his whisky bottle. But rather than run after him with it, believing its owner might be tempted to consume more of its contents, they deposited the bottle in their home, knowing Sandy would better appreciate being reunited with it the following day. It was a drink he was never to take.

  Within half an hour, the harmless bachelor who was everyone’s friend lay dead on a freezing stretch of road just 100 yards away. From a short distance his huddled form seemed, to those who found him, more like a bundle of discarded rags than the body of someone who’d been at his happiest less than 60 minutes earlier. It was only when they came closer and the street lights revealed a pool of blood seeping away from the indistinguishable mass that they realised the clothing contained the crouched figure of a small man. His hands were up around his head, the way someone would hold them for protection. The defensive action had done their owner no good at all. Like the face they had tried to shield, both hands had poured blood from the flesh that had been opened up by the ferocious kicking.

  The stunned locals could barely take in what had happened. Had it been anyone else, they accepted there might have been a drunken New Year’s Day brawl, an event not entirely unknown in the city, particularly at that time of year. But there would never be physical conflict involving Little Sandy, of that they were absolutely certain. His lack of physique apart, it just wasn’t in his nature to fight, no matter how many drinks he’d taken.

  The police teams which swamped the area made little headway. They took statements from 70 people and carried out door-to-door enquiries at more than 100 addresses. But after widespread appeals, the nearest they came to making progress was when one or two witnesses came forward to say they had seen Sandy in conversation with two young men in the street a short time before he died. Despite the strong probability that they were his killers, the investigation progressed little further. The pair were never traced and those who lived in Lochee were convinced of one thing, they had to be outsiders because no who knew Sandy could have ended his life so savagely or pointlessly.

  That they continued to walk the streets of Dundee without ever having to account for their despicable actions left a wound that never healed for the many friends of the little man with the enormous heart. But no one was more affected than his elderly mother, who never got over the cruel way one of her ten children had had his life taken away.

  ‘He was such a cheery boy,’ she used to say. ‘He never harmed anyone. Why would they want to kill him?’

  Why, indeed.

  20

  THE GIRL IN RED

  The attractive teenager in the red mini-dress and knee-length black shiny boots hadn’t a care in the world when she alighted from the late-night bus to walk the short distance home. The weekend was well under way and that evening, like most Fridays, she’d danced the night away in the J. M. Ballroom in the city centre. Now it was 1.30 on the Saturday morning and the dark-haired 16-year-old looked forward to a long lie-in before meeting up with her friends again later in the day. She smiled at the thought. Long-lies had become an enjoyable part of life since the start of the strike of General Post Office telephonists, of which she was one, even if she did have to take her turn on the picket line down at the exchange in Willison Street. It was anyone’s guess how long the dispute would last, she thought, as she turned into the tree-lined drive that would take her to the multi-storey home in Pitalpin Court she shared with her parents.

  At 5.30 a.m. the body of Diane Graham was found in the launderette area of the multi-block. Her red dress lay beside her and her black boots had been removed and taken away. She had been strangled with a ligature and her naked body bore the marks of match burns. The discovery had been made by the dead girl’s next-door neighbour, who had gone to use the laundry before departing for work as a cleaner at Dundee University. Diane’s parents, assuming their daughter had come home after they had gone to bed, then retired herself, knew nothing of her disappearance until being informed of the grim find in the launderette.

  By the time the other residents of Pitalpin Court had come to their senses on the morning of 6 March 1971, the area was swarming with uniformed and plain-clothes police and the special incident room caravan of the City of Dundee Police was prominently in place in front of the tower block. Reporters were also on the scene and the first press conference of the day had taken place in time for the details to make the early editions of the evening papers. The attending journalists experienced the same feelings of revulsion and sorrow as the others who formed the wider cast of the murder hunt. But like the rest, they never forgot why they were there. Instinctively they knew there would be a big readership for the words they would write that day.

  Murders almost always make the front page. On this occasion the ingredients made that certain, at least in Dundee. The victim was a pretty and carefree young girl. Her killer had apparently appeared from nowhere and had disappeared just as quickly. He could, on the face of it, have been almost anyone. It was good news for the reporters but bad for the murder squad detectives – random killings were the hardest to solve. As usual in these cases, the police would lean heavily on the services of the news reporters they would sometimes choose to shun.

  Later that day The Evening Telegraph carried a full front-page ‘splash’ giving extensive details of the horrific discovery of the body and the events leading up to it. The story was accompanied by photographs of the victim, the murder scene and teams of detectives conferring at the mobile incident room. Prominent in the text was an appeal from the head of Dundee CID, who described how Diane had been dancing in the centre of town and might have been accompanied home at some point by a youth.

  By four o’clock in the afternoon, the investigation was going nowhere. A picture of the movements of the dead 16-year-old on the evening before was being slowly built up, but it wasn’t leading anywhere in particular. No one in Pitalpin Court had apparently heard or seen anything suspicious, though a girl in another multi-storey 100 yards away said she had detected screams at about 1.45 a.m. It was interesting but not particularly helpful. Nor was there any sign of the victim’s boots, handbag and gloves, which had vanished. Although the local residents couldn’t offer much information, they rallied round to provide soup, tea, coffee and food for the teams of police scouring that part of the Lochee area. It was appreciated – but not much consolation.

  Things were considerably brighter for the publishers of The Evening Telegraph. Thanks to the timing of the tragedy, which allowed a complete account of the appalling circumstances to be recounted from the first edition onwards, the papers sold in high numbers throughout the city. Dundonians, like members of the public everywhere, are always intrigued by murders. Downtown sales rose by 25 per cent.

  Among the readers that afternoon was a 17-year-old youth who devoured every word. He studied the photographs and read the account of the police hunt over and over again. Then he went to Pitalpin Court and made his way to the incident room.

  ‘I’m the guy you are looking for,’ he told Detective Chief Inspector David Fotheringham. ‘I was on the bus with her.’

  The chief inspector’s first impressions were that the slightly built young man standing before him seemed remarkably young and inoffensive – and friendly. There was a complete absence of hostility and the dialogue between them continued amicably. His instincts told him to keep it that way, for he was certain there was much more to hear.

  ‘We’d better have a chat away from here,’ the policeman said softly. ‘We’ll go down to headquarters in Bell Street.’

  The interview that followed came straight from the good cop–bad cop textbook. DCI Fotheringham, naturally easy-going and conversational, but one of the most productive interrogators in the force, probed gently and the story the youth had to tell slowly started to unfold. He identified himself as James Mullady, who lived in Kings Cross Place, on the other side of the wall which separated Pitalpin Court from the Beechwood estate. That night, he explained, he had been on the same bus as Diane and they had alighted at th
e same stop. He caught up with her and they had walked together and struck up a conversation. Then they had gone into the basement area of the multi-storey block and briefly ‘kissed and cuddled’ before he climbed the boundary wall to make his way home to Beechwood.

  It was evident that his version of events had been only part of the story and the other detective sitting in on the interview slipped effortlessly into bad-cop mode, demanding loudly to be told the full story and showing none of the chief inspector’s sympathy. He shouted and raged and in an apparent temper, stormed from the room. DCI Fotheringham leaned conspiratorially towards the 17-year-old sitting anxiously in front of him.

  ‘Look, before he comes back, what really happened? ‘he urged. ‘I’m sure you didn’t really mean to kill her.’

  It was the key that unlocked a confession. In a tumble of words James Mullady explained that when he had approached Diane in the basement of the multi-block she had pushed him away, mockingly saying he smelled.

  ‘Do you mean you had been drinking?’ asked the chief inspector.

  ‘No. It was my feet. I have awfy smelly feet and she said I was stinking,’ said Mullady by way of explanation.

  He quickly went on to disclose that after being pushed away by the 16-year-old in the red mini-dress, he had responded by shoving her in return, when she fell down. He wasn’t sure what had followed but he slowly came to the realisation that she lay dead at his feet, the result of a terrible accident. Further coaxing by DCI Fotheringham brought the admission that he had stolen the boots, handbag and gloves – ‘everything shiny’ – because he imagined they might have had his fingerprints on them. The burns on the body had been caused, he explained, by matches he lit to locate the items he had removed. Shortly afterwards, he accompanied police back to Pitalpin Court and pointed out a drain near the tower block where he had concealed the stolen property. When his home in nearby Beechwood was searched, Diane’s metal comb with her name scratched on it, was found under the mattress of his bed.