The Lawkillers Read online

  For Christine

  who gave me some of the words and all of the time.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Where to begin? So many people, knowingly or not, have assisted in the compilation of these pages that it is not practical to list them all. A large proportion of them were former police officers who generously shared their time and experiences with me and I am extremely grateful for their recollections. Among them was ex-Detective Inspector Bob Donaldson who helped me locate these invaluable people.

  I am also deeply indebted to D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd for their considerable cooperation, not least of which was the unrestricted access they allowed me to their extensive cuttings and photographic libraries. Many of the photographs used belong to them. In particular, I would like to thank Gwen Kissock and Anne Swadel for their encyclopaedic knowledge and willingness to help. Others who assisted were Gordon Robbie, Gus Proctor, Colin Stewart, Jackie Laing and Susan Dailly.

  Special thanks are due to respected sports journalist John Mann, who took a break from some of the violence of the football field to research a 19th century poisoning, the results of which he very kindly passed to me and which were central to the preparation of one of the chapters.

  My gratitude also to the staff of Dundee Central Library and the Scottish Prison Service.

  Thanks too – I think – to author Norman Watson, a journalistic colleague, who enthusiastically prodded me into this, but who neglected to inform me how much work would be involved.

  Most of all, I would like to record how grateful I am to the countless journalists who contributed indirectly to this book through their reports of the crimes and coverage of the trials of those responsible.

  Reporters are a much-maligned breed and they do not always receive the recognition they deserve. It is not generally appreciated that the words they write in today’s newspapers form the basis of tomorrow’s history books.

  Alexander McGregor

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Murder on a Monday Morning

  2 Betrayal

  3 Family Ties

  4 The Not So Ordinary John Smith

  5 Bill the Ripper

  6 Death in the Suburbs

  7 Eighteen Hours

  8 Collared

  9 Lessons

  10 Anything You Can Do …

  11 The Body in the Bags

  12 Babes in the House

  13 The Carry-out Killer

  14 To Love, Honour … and Kill

  15 Suffer the Little Children – Hazel

  16 Suffer the Little Children – Pauline

  17 Arsenic and Old Maize

  18 Forgive Me, Father

  19 The First Foot

  20 The Girl in Red

  21 Little Boy Blue

  22 The Mansion House Mystery

  23 Brief Encounter

  24 Repentance

  25 The Templeton Woods Murders

  Sources

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Murder is a funny old game. The end result is the same but the journey to that hellish destination is always different. The route can sometimes be straightforward enough, uncomplicated and not too difficult to understand why some people travelled in that direction. At other times, the trip can be as complex and unfathomable as the travellers themselves.

  Some of the leading players are, in truth, not so different from the rest of us. They have committed the ultimate crime in a moment of insanity, a solitary out-of-character act which changes lives forever. It is instantly regretted but as irreversible and final as the last breath of the person who perished. It is a route they are unlikely to take again. Their meandering journey through life has merely sent them down the wrong path on the wrong day, perhaps when they stopped off along the way for one drink too many.

  Sometimes it is just the chemistry between two people which is wrong, incompatibility being resolved by the most extreme of actions. If fate had not introduced the leading players, they would never have figured in the logbook of death. Others commit murder in the furtherance of another crime – an impulsive act during a robbery or to cold-bloodedly silence the victim/witness of a rape or the depraved assault of a child.

  Then there are the monsters, the ones who sit beside us on the bus or are behind us in the checkout queue and whose faces we only see when they stare out at us from newspapers, after some unspeakable act of slaughter. They kill for no other reason than the pleasure it gives them. These largely untreatable people are indiscriminate and unpredictable. They could do the same again next week or next year and are only likely to desist in their murderous activities if traced and detained, or if overtaken by death themselves.

  So those who assume the role of God come in many guises. The only thing they have in common is the corpse they leave behind. It is this diverse range of motives, unmatched in the criminal compendium, which makes murder the easiest or most difficult of offences to detect. When perpetrator and victim are closely connected, as they frequently are, the police are rarely troubled for long: there is usually evidence in abundance. It is the random slaying, when there is no prior link with the victim, which can launch the murder hunt that may have no conclusion.

  Just as homicide does not respect age or gender or predictability, it also takes no account of geography. The malevolence which lurks in one degree or another in nearly all of us arrives wherever we live. Those who kill need not be the inhabitants of the largest cities or the places with the most violent reputations. Stick a pin in a map and you are liable to stumble upon them anywhere. In this case, it landed on the city of Dundee in Scotland. It is an average-sized town with average-type people living there and it seemed a suitable place to peel back the civilised layers and reveal what festers in all communities making up our ‘orderly’ society. It is no better and no worse a place than any other when it comes to murder. What goes on there happens with just the same amount of wickedness and suffering – and regret – as it does elsewhere.

  Those you will read about fascinate and repel in equal measure, but there is no single reason why any of them found their way into this book. With no particular period or type of murder under consideration, there was a lot to choose from. In the end, the chapters were selected because they contained elements that were intriguing or unusual enough to make them stand out from the rest. Some of the killings were, and will remain, among the most notorious in the dark history of homicide. Others did not attract international headlines but are absorbing for the complexities of the people who carried them out, or for the reasons they were committed. It also seemed important to try to produce a representative selection of the types of killers and their crimes from the wide spectrum available. Most categories are covered, though others might have chosen differently.

  The following pages contain some material which is not for the faint-hearted. Murder is a messy business, however it happens, so there are passages you are unlikely to read in a romantic novel. Nothing has been included for gratuitous purposes and in some instances the content has been diluted to avoid offence – but not so severely that distortion occurs. To understand the act, it is necessary to acknowledge the detail. For the same reason, there has been no real painting on of false moustaches to disguise identities, except perhaps by omission and only then in the interests of fairness. The only chapter containing a significant deviation is ‘Babes in the House’, where the names of all those involved have been changed. They were made public at the time but, in the current spirit of protecting juvenile offenders, it seemed preferable to omit them from this account. Otherwise, the circumstances are just as they occurred.

&nb
sp; Few attempts were made to form judgements about the main players or to analyse the reasons for their extreme conduct, but in any volume of this kind it would be impossible to avoid the occasional passing comment of some sort. None of that should prevent readers from arriving at their own conclusions or from trying to have a better understanding of what takes place in the dark corners of the places where we live. Or – and perhaps a more difficult point – to endeavour to make sense of the some of the unfathomable people who dwell within in our midst.

  The true stories that lie ahead happen to be about a specific city. They could have occurred anywhere.

  1

  MURDER ON A MONDAY MORNING

  Cities come awake slowly. Like the people who inhabit them, they blink uncertainly in the light of the new day and move unhurriedly through a well-practised routine. It is a gentle and gradual process. Responses are automatic and no one pays too much attention to anyone else – especially when it is Monday.

  The morning brings not just a new day but a new week and the city, as it stirs, is at its most disinterested. It is the perfect time for those with murder in mind.

  So it was in Dundee on the morning of 8 May 1989.

  Like every other day, Gordon Johnston alighted from a bus in High Street at 8.45 a.m. and walked, limping slightly, past City Square and along Nethergate before turning into Union Street and opening up Gow’s Gunshop, where he worked, at the top of the street. It was a familiar scenario. He had done it for most of the thirty-seven years he had been employed in the shop, where he had started as a 16-year-old trainee gunsmith before becoming manager. That morning, after fifteen minutes in the premises, he closed up again and departed to pay a gas bill and make a purchase in a nearby store. Then he returned to Gow’s and at 9.20 a.m. passers-by noted that he had stopped at the shop entrance to speak to two men. Several customers called at the gunshop over the next twenty minutes, but all found the door locked and the lights on.

  That was how it stayed for the rest of the day. Late in the afternoon an anxious customer called the police and at 5 p.m. officers forced their way into the shop. They were ill prepared for what they found. Lying dead in a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs leading to the basement area was 53-year-old Mr Johnston. He was in a crouched foetal position and had been savagely attacked to the head, body and arms. His back pocket had been turned out, the till drawer had been opened and the safe ransacked. The badly damaged watch on the victim’s wrist was stopped, indicating that a struggle had taken place at 9.21 a.m. Bloody footprints led from the basement back up the stairs.

  Within minutes of the grisly discovery, Union Street was awash with police and teams of officers had started to interview nearby shopkeepers and commuters heading for home at the end of the day. It was a process that was to be repeated many times in the days ahead.

  A post-mortem revealed that Mr Johnston had been hacked to death under an onslaught of forty-eight blows, almost all of them delivered by an axe. The motive appeared to be robbery. It seemed that £100, a jacket, knives – and more ominously – firearms and ammunition had been taken by whoever had wielded the lethal blade.

  Because the raid had been carried out on a Monday morning, it was clear that cash had not been the main target since there was unlikely to have been much held in the shop. Nor was it probable that the objective was fishing tackle. There seemed to be little doubt that the sole aim of the robbery had been to acquire some of the guns held on the premises. But for what purpose? It was a question that would exercise – and deeply trouble – the minds of senior detectives again and again. Anyone who could carry out such a sustained and bloody assault in the pursuit of firearms almost certainly required them for violent reasons. It was even possible that the weapons had been taken for an attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or members of her cabinet, who were due to attend the Scottish Conservative Party conference in nearby Perth later in the month. However, that occasion came and went without incident and, as the weeks passed, police made little progress in apprehending the killer or killers. And still there was no hint as to why the guns had been taken.

  The investigation was one of the biggest ever undertaken in the city. Scores of extra officers were drafted in and new overtime rosters scheduled to run until Christmas were put in place. Everyone who had been in or near Union Street that day was interviewed and a £12,000 reward was offered by the owners of the gunshop. The strongest piece of evidence to emerge was the sighting of a young man with pointed features apparently leaving Gow’s at 9.50 a.m. On the way out of the shop he fumbled with the door handle before walking backwards out of the doorway into the path of pedestrians, pulling up his jacket hood over his head as he departed. Then he ran off down Union Street, carrying two gun cases.

  Police considered it possible that the person or persons they sought could have left the city by train, the station being only a few hundred yards from the scene of the crime. Hundreds of rail commuters were questioned and travellers who had used credit cards or cheques to purchase tickets that day were traced. Others who had operated automatic cash dispensers at nearby banks were also tracked down and interviewed. Every new initiative drew a blank. Video film from a security camera in a jeweller’s shop opposite Gow’s was minutely examined frame by frame, but that too seemed to be just another brick wall.

  Police turned to the BBC’s Crimewatch programme in the hope that national coverage would yield fresh clues. It brought almost a hundred calls offering information and possible identities. Every one of the tip-offs was followed up but none produced the slightest hint as to who had been responsible for the murderous attack on the man who was father to two young boys. After three months, over 7,000 people had been interviewed and 5,000 statements logged in the special major inquiry computer system developed by the Home Office. Still there were no significant results.

  Then, on 25 July, more than three months after the mild-mannered Gordon Johnston had been so viciously put to death, police received a brief phone call which brought the moribund inquiry dramatically back to life. A male caller who would not identify himself spoke softly and said haltingly that he knew who had been responsible for the murder. Before he could be questioned further, he added quickly that one of the killers was his relative. Then he rang off.

  Such calls are not unusual in major investigations, particularly when large rewards are on offer. Most come from cranks. This one had a ring of truth to it and senior officers were convinced it was genuine. Although the caller had declined to give his name, he had imparted enough information to enable a team of detectives to begin to piece the clues together. After a week they thought they knew the caller’s identity. Cautious approaches were made and finally they arranged to interview him.

  An extraordinary story unfolded. The man traced was 43-year-old Lucio Mario Ianetta. He confessed that he had placed the anonymous call because he could no longer endure the strain of reading daily press reports in The Courier and The Evening Telegraph detailing how the police hunt had reached stalemate, when he knew who had been responsible. Everywhere he went, he said, he seemed to be confronted by posters asking for information about the murder. Staring out at him, he said, was Mr Johnston – ‘God bless him’ – who seemed to be saying to him, ‘You know something about this. What are you going to do about it?’ He could stand it no longer, he explained, so he wanted to unburden himself. Then he recounted how his 21-year-old nephew Ryan Monks had arrived at his home, at 10.30 on the morning of the gunshop raid, in an agitated state and clutching a bag of clothing. Monks had thrown the bag on the floor and pleaded, ‘It went wrong – burn them.’ Uncle Lucio told senior members of the murder team that he had pressed his nephew for an explanation of what he was referring to and Monks had finally blurted out: ‘The boy in the gunshop. He was wasted.’

  Mr Ianetta described how, without asking many more questions, he had thrown a jacket, a pair of jeans and trainer shoes – which had been in the bag – onto his living-room fire. ‘I was in a total panic,�
�� he anxiously explained. ‘You try to help your own.’

  It was only later that evening, when he was in a Broughty Ferry pub and saw the evening news on TV, that he realised Monks had been involved in the gunshop killing. He was particularly shocked because, by coincidence, he had known the victim through his father, who had previously been a customer at the shop when he had bought cartridges and gunpowder to take to Italy. Finally, Mr Ianetta told the detectives, who were hanging on his every word, that his nephew’s accomplice on the raid on Gow’s was a young man named Paul who had hired a red Rover car as the getaway vehicle.

  At seven o’clock the following morning two teams of armed officers simultaneously raided the Dundee homes of Monks and his 21-year-old friend Paul Mill. What they found stunned even the most experienced of the detectives. The robbery at the gunshop had merely been a means to an end. A thorough search of both houses produced clear evidence of a complex plot to abduct the elderly mother of well-known Dundee bakery owner Robert Brown and hold her to ransom for £200,000. Monks had once worked for Mr Brown’s firm of Rough & Fraser in Kinghorne Road and had intimate knowledge of the Brown family and their habits. The surprised policemen found grubby pieces of paper detailing precisely how and when the kidnap plot would be enacted. Several ransom notes – some purporting to be from an IRA active service unit and typed in red ink – had been prepared, setting out death threats and demands to Mr Brown for cash. Failure to comply, Mr Brown was to be informed, meant he would be told ‘where to find your mother’s corpse’.

  The blackmail scheme had its roots in the popular Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry. Just as in the movie, the extortion victim would be instructed to wait at a particular payphone, where he would receive instructions for the handover of the ransom, leading to the eventual release of the hostage. That call box was to be the first in a chain of twelve stretching across Dundee on a route meticulously mapped out by Monks and Mill. The pair had noted the time it would take to travel between each box and the route had been designed to throw off any possible police tail. After arriving at the final destination, Mr Brown was to be handcuffed and hooded and locked in the boot of his own car.