Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (23 page)

The couple were rushed to hospital where surgeons performed an emergency Caesarean on a dying Carol, at that point seven months pregnant. The baby – whom she had planned to call Christopher – was alive but weighed only 3lbs and had been starved of oxygen for 30 minutes. A priest was called in to baptise him.

Carol died the next day. Meanwhile Charles remained in intensive care, with bladder, liver, stomach and intestinal damage necessitating a temporary colostomy. He talked briefly to police, describing his assailant as a black man who had forced them, at gunpoint, to drive to a rough area of Boston. He had asked for Charles’s wallet, which contained a police badge: apparently thinking that they were undercover officers, the stranger had shot them and fled. An armed robber called Willie Bennett – who had an IQ of 62, in the mentally defective
range – was arrested and police allegedly intimidated his cellmates into saying that he’d confessed.

Charles was too ill to attend his wife’s funeral on 28 October, but he scribbled a note that a friend read out at the ceremony, saying ‘God has called you to his hands… to bring you away from the cruelty and violence that fill this world.’

On 9 November, the Stuarts’ 17-day-old baby died. He was buried on the 20th, but Charles was still too ill to attend the private ceremony. Three weeks later he was released from hospital and collected $82,000 on an insurance policy which his wife’s employer had taken out on her. He also applied to collect on another policy worth $100,000. (Journalists would later suggest that Charles Stuart killed his wife for the insurance money but he was a high earner and the amount he was due to receive wasn’t even enough to pay off their mortgage. He killed to win his freedom, the opportunity to date like a single man, to start again.)

Only on 24 December, when Matthew Stuart’s girlfriend Janet went to the police and told them that Matthew and Charles were involved in Carol’s death, did police start to regard his story as unreliable. On 3 January, Matthew went to the District Attorney’s office and told them that Willie Bennett was innocent and that he, Matthew, was involved.

Charles Stuart knew that his arrest was imminent and that he’d be going to jail for a very long time. Aware that police were probably watching his house, he booked into a motel and asked for a 4.30am alarm call. When it arrived, he dressed casually in a parka and jeans, drove his car to the Tobin Bridge and jumped into the Mystic River. He left a note in his car saying that he couldn’t stand being a suspect any longer, though he did not admit to the murder. Conspiracy theorists immediately suggested that he’d been murdered, noting that he’d bought snacks in a store a few hours before his death and
had been chatty and cheerful. But this is consistent with suicide, as the person knows that their worries will soon be over for good.

The family tragedy continued as Matthew Stuart pled guilty to conspiracy and possession of a firearm and was imprisoned from 1992 to 1995. In September 2011 he was found dead in a homeless shelter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of a drug overdose.

This Scottish killer probably murdered his first wife and definitely killed his pregnant second wife. He may also have killed one or more prostitutes.

Andrew’s mother died three weeks after his birth and he was abandoned by his father. He was raised by an aunt in Paisley, Scotland in what was later described as an unremarkable childhood.

As a youth, he joined the Salvation Army and eventually became involved with another Salvationist, Christine, who was 11 years his senior. She mothered him and encouraged his ambition to become a social worker. They married in 1973.

But, by 1976, Hunter was looking for more excitement and had an affair with another man whom he picked up in a sauna. He would remain actively bisexual throughout his life.

In 1977, the Salvation Army sent the 26-year-old to do voluntary work at their citadel in Dundee. At first Christine remained in Glasgow, but, when her husband found employment as an unqualified social worker at a Dundee children’s home, she joined him. They later had a son.

Outwardly, their married life was highly respectable. Andrew continued to work in various orphanages during the
day and studied for a social work degree at night. The couple remained committed Salvationists. But Hunter was seducing vulnerable young women whom he met through his work and was also a heavy user of prostitutes.

On 20 March 1979, a man answering Andrew Hunter’s description – in his late twenties, slim, pale, with sideburns and a moustache – picked up 18-year-old prostitute Carol Lannen, drove her to the Templeton Woods, stripped her and strangled her. Her body was found the following day, and her clothes were later discovered 80 miles away on the banks of the River Don. Hunter would later drive many miles to dispose of his second wife’s car…

In October 1984, the 33-year-old met a respectable young woman called Lynda Cairns, who lived with a doctor in the house across the road. She, too, was a social worker and as her common law marriage to the doctor had faded to friendship, she and Andrew Hunter started an affair. When Christine found out, she insisted that he end the liaison, something which he reluctantly did.

But the couple soon resumed their affair and the following summer he left Christine and moved in with Lynda. He had ongoing access to his son, often taking the boy to the cinema. But Lynda wanted marriage and children and it would be five years before he could obtain a divorce…

On 14 December 1984, Andrew went to Christine’s neighbour, saying that he was attempting to return their son after an access visit but that his wife wouldn’t open the door. He added that her car was in the driveway with the lights on and that he could hear music playing in the house, that he was very concerned. He phoned Christine from the neighbour’s house but she didn’t answer and he went and borrowed a spare key from a friend.

Andrew Hunter and his 11-year-old son let themselves into the house and found Christine swinging from the rafters, a television cable tightly knotted around her neck. She had been dead for several hours.

At the time, everyone assumed that she must have committed suicide, though it was against her religion. They were also surprised that a caring mother would let her young son find her body, but they rationalised that she must have been suffering from depression and that this had affected her judgement. Everyone felt pity for the bereaved man and boy.

But Andrew Hunter was essentially a control freak – and now that he was getting close to marrying Lynda, he showed his true colours and began to treat her badly. He even hit her in front of witnesses when she suggested that he needn’t attend Christine’s funeral. On a later occasion, he struck her in the face with an umbrella, and, during yet another argument, twisted her arm so brutally that she had to go to hospital. In February 1985 the violence escalated and she went to the police.

Still, the couple continued their love-hate relationship, though, unknown to her, he had a brief affair with another young woman, also a social worker, as he had a voracious appetite for sex.

Yet he too was troubled during this time and sought psychiatric treatment for depression. It’s clear that Lynda was also distressed as she began to rely on sleeping tablets and accidentally overdosed one night, after which she was hospitalised for a week.

Sadly, she listened to her heart rather than her head and decided to marry Andrew Hunter. On 1 November 1986, she walked up the aisle with him and vowed ‘till death us do part.’

A man who loved to be the centre of attention, he carried his Bible and wore full Highland dress. They honeymooned in Israel before returning to their Carnoustie home (near Dundee) where, Andrew Hunter boasted to acquaintances, they had sex every single day.

But by early 1987, he needed further sexual adventures and resumed his gay affair with the man he’d met in the sauna 10 years earlier. He also resumed his frequent sex sessions with prostitutes.

In August 1987, Lynda found out that she was pregnant. She was delighted to be carrying her first child, but Andrew Hunter was secretly appalled at the news. He already had a son, who Lynda had become stepmother to, and definitely didn’t want another. To make matters worse, Lynda began to suffer from morning sickness and felt equally off-colour throughout the day so no longer wanted sex.

On 13 August, the couple argued yet again and Lynda said that she wanted to go to her parents’ house, some 30 miles away, until she felt better. Andrew offered to drive her – and her 14-year-old terrier Shep – there in her car.

As they drove, it’s likely that Andrew Hunter mulled over his options. Even if Lynda stayed with her parents permanently, he’d have to support their child until it was 18, maintenance money that he’d rather spend on other women and, indeed, men. He’d also have to spent time with the new baby, or face the disapproval of his fellow Salvationists, time he’d rather spend with prostitutes.

Parking in Melville Woods, he reached for Shep’s lead and looped it around his pregnant wife’s throat, tightening it until she strangled to death. After carrying her body deeper into the woods, he hurried back to the car.

Hunter knew that Lynda went everywhere with her dog, so he could hardly bring the terrier home with him. After driving a few miles he parked and removed Shep’s collar before letting the dog out of the car. Driving on to Carnoustie, he parked the Vauxhall Cavalier several miles from the house then took the bus to Dundee, where he handed in an essay which formed part of his social work course.

When Lynda’s sister arrived to visit her in the afternoon, he said that they’d had a minor argument and that she’d gone to visit her parents. He seemed entirely at ease with the situation, even taking the other woman for a round of crazy golf. That night, he went to a work-related party until 11pm, when a colleague dropped him off outside his home.

By midnight, Hunter had left his house again and walked to the part of Carnoustie where he’d hidden his wife’s car. Donning a blonde wig so that he resembled her, he drove across the Forth Bridge, though he had to stop briefly to change a tyre. After driving for 300 miles, he parked the car on a double yellow line in Manchester and made his way home by train. He figured that police would find the car and assume that Lynda had left him and perhaps been car jacked. To establish an alibi, he bought his son a pair of trainers in Dundee that lunchtime, knowing that the receipt would give the date and time.

That night, at 7pm, he reported his wife’s disappearance to the police. They soon discovered her vehicle and were baffled as to why a pregnant woman with a career would suddenly leave Scotland for England. They questioned the deserted husband several times, commenting on how disinterested he seemed in his wife’s – and unborn child’s – disappearance, but the social worker glibly replied that he had trained himself
never to show emotion. Detectives were sure that Lynda Hunter was dead, but, in the absence of a body, found it difficult to take their enquiries further, especially as Andrew apparently had an alibi, having been at his colleague’s party till 11pm and shopping in Dundee at 1.06pm the following day.

Convinced that he was in the clear, Hunter resumed having sex with his favourite call girls, even sleeping with one of his vulnerable clients, a heroin-addicted prostitute aged 22.

Fortunately the police were able to feature Lynda’s disappearance in a televised
Crimewatch
reconstruction and callers phoned in to say that they’d seen a distressed-looking Lynda in her car near Fernie Castle. The man driving the car matched Andrew Hunter’s description. Even more tellingly, a dog matching Shep’s description had been found wandering about in the St Michael’s area and had been put down as a stray.

Police now mounted a search of St Michael’s Woods and Andrew Hunter joined in, safe in the knowledge that he’d dumped Lynda’s corpse in Melville Woods, several miles away.

But time was running out for the social worker from hell. On 11 February 1988, a man walking his dog found Lynda’s badly-decomposed corpse, the lead which had been used to strangle her still knotted tightly around her neck.

Detectives went to tell Hunter the news, only to find him with his favourite 22-year-old prostitute. A day later, the girl was dead. A friend said that she’d probably taken a deliberate overdose of heroin as, months before, Andrew had been complaining about Lynda and the girl had said lightly ‘why don’t you just bump her off?’ then had felt guilty when the older woman went missing. But others wondered if Hunter had been afraid of what she’d tell detectives, and given her the fatal dose.

Aware that Hunter was looking increasingly good for Lynda’s murder, detectives were able to discredit his alibi, having found that it was possible to drive through the night to Manchester, return by train and still have 20 minutes to spare before going shopping for shoes.

On 1 April 1988, he was arrested and that summer went on trial at Dundee’s Bell Street court. The defence said that he was a caring social worker who had lost his first wife to suicide and his second to murder. The prosecution countered that he was a coldblooded killer who cared only for himself.

Witnesses testified that Andrew had been violent towards Lynda on several occasions and she’d told a friend that he refused to stay home with her now that she was pregnant and sometimes felt too ill to have sex.

Ironically, Shep’s collar played an important part in the trial as Lynda made sure that he never left home without it, yet it was found behind his basket, Andrew Hunter having thrown in there when he got home after abandoning the unfortunate dog. It meant that Hunter had been with his wife on her final car journey, a journey which had resulted in her death.

The jury took less than two hours to find the 37-year-old guilty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. A subsequent appeal by the glib sociopath failed. For the next five years, Andrew Hunter served out his sentence in Perth Prison before dying there of a heart attack on 19 July 1993, aged 42.