Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (10 page)

Taylor pleaded guilty at Leeds Crown Court to kidnapping and murdering Leanne Tierney. Psychiatrists noted that he was a sexual psychopath and a danger to all women, and Mr Justice Astill described him as a ‘dangerous sexual sadist’ who had abducted the girl for depraved sexual purposes. The 46-year-old killer stared straight ahead as he was sentenced to two life terms.

Further sadistic crimes

Aware that a crime of this magnitude – abducting a girl on foot at teatime in a popular beauty spot – was unlikely to have been his first offence, police began to re-examine other unsolved sexual assaults in the area. As a result, they found that sperm samples taken from the rape victims at Houghley Gill and Bramley estate matched John Taylor’s DNA. He eventually pleaded guilty to both rapes and was sentenced to a further two life sentences on 4 February 2003.

Scottish police subsequently said they planned to question the killer about the unsolved murder of six young women aged from 21 to 31 as he regularly drove to Glasgow for sexual liaisons and allegedly visited a brothel there where one of the murdered girls worked.

Taylor is currently incarcerated at Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire and is unlikely to ever be released.

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WILLIAM FREDERICK IAN BEGGS

Born in Moira, County Down in Northern Ireland in 1964, William Beggs tortured several young men in England before committing his first sadistic murder in 1987. Freed on a technicality, he went on to commit a second even more horrific homicide in Scotland and was re-imprisoned in 2001.

Early shame

William was attracted to same sex partners from an early age

– but this put him into conflict with his strict Protestant upbringing. His deeply devout parents were politically active and he followed them into politics. By college, he had became the chairman of a right-wing group, even supporting Ian Paisley’s ‘Save Ulster From Sodomy’ campaign, but he was expelled from a loyalist paramilitary organisation for loitering outside schools and fled to Scotland to escape their wrath.

However, Beggs couldn’t turn his sexuality off, and by the time he attended Paisley University in Scotland, he was showing his predatory nature. He made advances toward straight male students after parties – and one was concerned to find that the razor in the bathroom had been broken and the blade removed. Beggs, who had a razor blade fetish, had doubtless planned to cut him with it but there were too many other revellers about.

Throughout his early twenties, the attractive dark-haired Irishman lured various gay men back to his flat where he plied them with drink and drugs before cutting them with razor blades, his preference being to slash a sleeping victim. In this he was unusual, as sadists normally relish an awake victim’s increasing terror and pain. But he liked to cut deeply and possibly feared the level of struggle that a conscious victim 81

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would make. As it was, his bleeding bedmates awoke in agony and fled the scene but chose not to go to the police for the 1980s were still homophobic times.

On other occasions, Beggs could be a charming companion and intelligent conversationalist. He often went walking in the countryside with one gay male friend called Richard who said that ‘Beggs was like many gay men with a strict religious upbringing who consequently can’t cope with their sexuality’.

He recognised that Beggs was deeply conflicted, but didn’t realise that he was dangerous.

The rst murder

In 1987, William Beggs (who often introduced himself as Ian Beggs) went out cruising and picked up 28-year-old Barry Oldham in a Newcastle gay nightclub. The mature student thought he had no reason to fear his well-spoken and articulate new friend.

The men went back to Beggs’ flat and had sex. No one knows the exact sequence of events, but at some stage Beggs slashed Barry’s throat from ear to ear. He attempted to decapitate the student and also tried to cut off his legs.

Eventually he disposed of the badly-cut corpse on the North Yorkshire Moors.

Beggs, who had been observed leaving the dump scene in his car, was soon arrested for the murder. He admitted it, was convicted and given life imprisonment but walked free two years later on a technicality. The judge had mentioned some of Beggs’ previous razor attacks on other youths, and this had prejudiced the accused’s case.

Attempted murder

The police were alarmed to hear that William Beggs was a free man, as they were convinced that, by getting him jailed 82

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for his first murder, they’d stopped a potential sadistic serial killer. And their concern was justified for, in 1991, just two years after being freed from jail for Barry Oldham’s murder, Beggs took another gay man called McQuillan back to his Kilmarnock flat. McQuillan fell asleep and awoke to find himself lying in agony on the bed, with his right leg badly cut and his left leg held over William Beggs’ shoulder. He felt a terrible pain as Beggs took a razor and cut his leg to the bone. The youth looked into his torturer’s eyes and knew that he was about to be murdered. He wrestled with the sadist and jumped through the glass window of Beggs’ first floor flat in a last-ditch effort to save his life.

Knocked unconscious, he lay on the grass then revived to hear a woman saying that she’d called an ambulance. He saw Beggs hovering behind her then he lost consciousness again.

Medics later noted that Beggs had cut the youth so viciously that his wounds were worse than those caused by shark bites and that McQuillan was fortunate to survive.

Beggs was sentenced to six years for this horrific assault, years in which he learned more about the legal system and helped other prisoners with their appeals. Released in 1994

for good behaviour having only served half his sentence, he took up a computer consultancy. He began to study for a PhD at Paisley University and also undertook some tutoring work which doubtless let him get close to attractive young men.

Throughout the rest of the 1990s, he lured various youths back to his flat, got them drunk and hurt them. He told friends that he particularly liked cruising the streets in the early hours of the morning, looking for drunk young men. But raping and cutting terrified victims wasn’t enough for Beggs. He wanted to kill again.

By now he was in his late thirties and had put on weight. His looks had also coarsened so it wasn’t so easy for him to attract 83

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beautiful youths to his Kilmarnock flat. Perhaps this is why he decided to ambush a straight young man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The second murder

On 5 December 1999, Beggs went to a party in Edinburgh where he stood out as he was one of the few revellers who wasn’t in fancy dress. He left the party before midnight and drove the 90-minute journey back to Kilmarnock where he encountered 18-year-old Barry Wallace who’d been dropped off by friends only a mile from his home. Barry, who worked for Tesco, had been on a Christmas work night out and had had several drinks.

The 38-year-old cajoled or forced the teenager (who wasn’t gay) back to his flat where he handcuffed his wrists and ankles and brutally raped him. Barry struggled so violently during the assault that the cuffs bit into his flesh, leaving deep cuts.

The rape itself was so savage that the police later said that Barry possibly died of shock. An alternative explanation is that he suffocated from having his face pushed into the bed or floor.

At some stage during the assault, Beggs got out his razors and knives and cut off Barry’s head and limbs. Driving to Loch Lomond to dispose of some of the body parts, he phoned a friend and told him that he’d enjoyed a sexual conquest with a young man last night. Beggs kept the head for another day then took a trip on a ferry and disposed of his grisly parcel in the sea off Troon.

Body parts discovered

Shortly afterwards, police divers on a training course at Loch Lomond found one of Barry’s hands and part of one of his arms wrapped in a bin bag. Nine days later a woman walking her 84

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dog on Barassie Beach, near Troon, found a package containing Barry’s severed head.

It was obvious that the body had been cut with a razor, so police looked at similar murders and found that William Beggs had attempted to decapitate and remove the legs of his first murder victim. They checked and found that, not only had Beggs been freed from that charge, but he now lived in Kilmarnock where the victim had lived.

The police’s luck now briefly ran out, for William Beggs was working in an Edinburgh call centre when he heard on the radio that the limbs in the loch had been found. Knowing he’d be the prime suspect, he immediately went on the run.

He fled to Amsterdam and lived as a fugitive for a fortnight

– but the police had published his photograph in numerous newspapers so he decided to give himself up and fight extradition to Scotland. As a result, he managed to remain in The Netherlands for a year. In the meantime, in January 2000, the police found more of Barry Wallace’s body parts in the loch.

Beggs’ flat also yielded several links between himself and the murdered teenager. The key to the handcuffs used on Barry were found in his house as was a kitchen knife with Barry’s blood on it. Other tiny spots of the 18-year-old’s blood were found in the kitchen and the spare room.

Even more tellingly, the house was filthy and overrun with rubbish – but the bedroom had been recently and extensively redecorated. The floor had been varnished and the wallpaper changed.

In January 2001, Beggs was returned to Scotland under police escort. On remand in Saughton Prison, he demanded to be given the gay porn which a friend had sent to him.

(Pornography is only allowed at the governor’s discretion in British prisons.)

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In September, Beggs went on trial at Edinburgh High Court.

The court heard from various acquaintances how he liked to pick up men in straight bars, get them drunk and offer them a bed for the night. Beggs claimed that Barry Wallace was gay and had attacked him. But there was nothing to support this and Barry had a girlfriend.

The court heard that at least 20 drops of blood – four of them Barry’s – had been found in Beggs redecorated flat and that the teenager’s blood had also been found in the grooves of a large kitchen knife.

In October 2001, William Beggs was sentenced to 20 years for Barry Wallace’s razor blade mutilation and murder. He showed no emotion as the verdict was read out – but he was upset when he later heard that he was going to be put on the sex offenders register.

Parents’ legal action

William Beggs’ parents and aunt now launched a legal action against Strathclyde police, claiming that they had been wrongfully arrested and interrogated on 4 January 2000. The police suspected that the Beggs had helped their youngest son redecorate his flat after the murder of Barry Wallace (he’d phoned them several times after the murder) so had questioned them for six hours and taken their fingerprints and mouth swabs. As a result, the couple were seeking ‘aggravated and exemplary damages’.

But later the compensation claim was dropped, with a Strathclyde Police spokeswoman confirming that ‘the civil action for damages raised against the Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police by the father, mother and aunt of William Beggs has been dismissed in favour of the chief constable.’

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Beggs’ legal action

Subsequently, William Beggs – now in Peterhead Prison –

launched a legal action against the prison claiming that their failure to provide him with secure computer facilities was a breach of his human rights. He argued that his correspondence should remain private: the prison had provided him with a portable computer but he had to save his work to a hard disk.

He lost his case, but the judicial review cost the British taxpayer at least £15,000, hardly the best use of resources. And, as an intelligent but bitter jailhouse lawyer, he is expected to make other expensive appeals.

Beggars belief

Recently a Scottish newspaper reported that William Beggs was to enter into a civil partnership with his prison lover, a 43-year-old man imprisoned for having sex with minors.

The authorities admitted that they were powerless to stop the ceremony, but said that they would not allow the two men to share a cell. But Beggs has allegedly told friends that he may take court action over this.

In April 2006, he asked Edinburgh High Court to free him, pending an appeal against his conviction, but his request for interim liberation was denied.

GRAHAM COUTTS

In 2003, Coutts was found guilty of murdering a female friend, an act he had committed out of a desire to assuage his asphyxiation fetish. But the Law Lords subsequently agreed that jurors should have been given the option of bringing in a verdict of manslaughter.

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Born in Leven, Scotland (though, by the time he murdered, he lived in England), Graham Coutts began to have sexual fantasies about strangling women when he was aged 15. As he matured sexually, he satisfied himself with consensual sex – but as he moved into his twenties he began to put his hands around girls’ necks during intercourse, asking them to feign unconsciousness. He also liked to bind their hands behind their back with tights. Later this wasn’t enough for him and he asked a girlfriend if he could strangle her until she passed out. He also liked to take the submissive role and asked one girlfriend to strangle him until he lost consciousness.