The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (66 page)

The following day, work colleagues noticed the gouges on Donnelly’s face. He told one he had been involved in a tussle with a woman whose boyfriend had tried to jump a taxi queue before him. But he told another colleague he had been scratched by a cat. His workmates did not believe him and gave his name to detectives investigating Margo Lafferty’s murder.

During the trial, Donnelly alleged that the murder was committed by David Payne, who had been working in Glasgow at the time. However, Payne was seen with Margo on CCTV before she was seen with Donnelly. Despite his previous conviction for a violent sex crime, Payne denied being the murderer.

At his trial in 1998, the prosecutor Calum MacNeill told Donnelly: “We will never know why you killed her, whether it was a disagreement over payment, or your anger which lacks self control, or out of shame or disgust or contempt that you had for the heroin addict prostitute you had just used. You punched and kicked her and she fought back, scratching you. You were incensed, you 6 feet 3 inches and her only 5 feet tall. You were fuelled with anger and got out of control and banged her head off the wall before strangling her and finally dragging her body along the yard.”

He was found guilty on a majority verdict, but in 2001 the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh overturned the conviction on the grounds that the trial judge, Lord Dawson, had misdirected the jury over the CCTV footage.

Lord Dawson had told the jury that they were entitled to consider any evidence that Donnelly had any of the dead woman’s property on him or in his possession, saying specifically: “You’ll remember in that connection the video tape evidence where you saw a young man wearing a dark jacket.”

Gordon Jackson, QC for Donnelly, told the appeal judges there had been no suggestion during the trial that the man caught on camera wearing a dark jacket was either young or was Donnelly.

Lord Allanbridge, who heard the appeal with Lord Cameron and Lord Caplan, said: “We consider that the trial judge did misdirect the jury in inviting them to consider ‘the video tape evidence where they saw a young man wearing a dark jacket’. This was an open invitation to the jury to consider the 3.14 a.m. video recording and to recollect their viewing of it, so that they themselves might speculate about the disputed identity of a male person shown on the recording. Such a procedure is incompetent.

“If the jury concluded that the recording showed the appellant wearing the deceased’s jacket after her death, this could have been a very persuasive factor in their deliberations on the murder charge. We are accordingly satisfied that the misdirection of the trial judge in this case has led to a miscarriage of justice.”

They quashed the conviction, but granted the Crown leave for a retrial. At a second trial in 2001, it took the jury under an hour and a half to bring in a unanimous verdict of murder.

After the trial, Margo’s mother said: “I always knew Donnelly was the monster who murdered my daughter . . . He wasn’t any innocent young boy. I hoped someone would kill him when he went into prison after the first trial. I was wishing retribution would be served in another way. There’s no closure in this for me. Not as long as he breathes. I believe in the Old Testament, in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth . . . She might have been a prostitute but she was still a lovely lassie with a heart of gold.”

And Mrs Lafferty still has to live with the consequences.

“You’re sitting in work and people are talking, new staff maybe, not the ones that were there at the time. And they always bring Margo’s name up if anything happens. They’ll maybe come across a wee caption in the paper and they go, ‘Look at that. These lassies deserve it.’ I just get up and walk away. Or occasionally I’ll say, ‘Look at it this way. They’re out there, taking the chance of being jailed, and there’s others sitting next to you that are giving it away for nothing.’ Margo could have been out mugging old folk or breaking into houses. But she didn’t do that. She went out and did a job of work.”

Margo’s brothers did not know what she did for a living and had to read about it in the newspapers as well as living with the grief of losing their sister. Mrs Lafferty was afraid they would get themselves in trouble if they came to the court and the jury voted for acquittal, but the verdict was heard in total silence.

When Margo died it was three months before the family could bury her. And they were not allowed to cremate her, in case the body had to be exhumed later to look for further evidence, though Margo herself would have preferred to be cremated.

“She was afraid of creepy crawlies, couldn’t bear the thought of worms going through her body,” said her mother, but she now thinks the bureaucrats did her a favour. “Now I know I can go up to her grave and just stand there and talk to her. I know she’s never going to stand in front of me or cuddle me, which she always used to do. But at least I know where she is.”

Margo’s mother also has a grandchild to bring up who reminds her of her lost daughter.

“She’s so full of confidence. So was Margo, full of her own importance,” she says. “I hope she keeps that.”

Meanwhile, the murder of Margo Lafferty led to the girls in Glasgow’s red light district being given lessons in self-defence by specially trained police officers. They were issued with personal attack alarms and leaflets offering practical safety advice. The leaflets provide advice on what clothes to wear, where to sit in a client’s car, how to deal with a violent client and how to protect their money.

But that did not help 27-year-old Emma Caldwell, who went missing on 4 April 2005. Her badly decomposed remains were found on 8 May in thick undergrowth near Biggar, South Lanarkshire, over 30 miles away. It was found by a member of the public walking their dog in woods at Kilnpotlees, Roberton, at about 1 p.m., near two service stations on the M74 motorway link to the south at Happendon and Abington.

Emma Caldwell grew up in Erskine, Renfrewshire. Her mother said: “She was just a happy, happy child – we had a happy life. She was a lovely child, full of fun. A magical child who loved horses. There used to be a thing in the family – we’d say, ‘What would you like, Emma?’ She’d say, ‘A horsy, a horsy’. We’d say, ‘When would you like the horsy?’ She’d say, ‘Right now, right now I’d like the horsy’.”

Indeed she had worked as a horse-riding instructor before her sister, Karen, died from cancer in 1998. Then her whole world seemed to collapse. She left home, because she was a heroin addict and became a prostitute to support her habit. At the time she went missing she was living a women’s hostel in the Govanhill area. It was been reported that Emma may have been forced to walk to the woods before being murdered, but the police said she almost certainly died very soon after the last sighting of her in Govanhill.

Officers studied CCTV footage and warned men who did not come forward that they would be visited by detectives. In any effort to jog the public’s memory, the police projected a 60-foot image of Emma on to the side of a semi-derelict tower block in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.

The BBC’s
Crimewatch
programme aired CCTV footage showing the last recorded moments of Emma’s life. It showed her leaving Inglefield Street women’s hostel for the last time, then talking briefly to two people outside before heading for the city centre. The driver of a BMW passed her, stopped and did a three-point turn in Inglefield Street. She was last seen at around 11 p.m. on 4 April, walking down Butterbiggins Road towards Victoria Road.

Later the police came across footage of a woman getting into a silver Skoda Felecia car outside the Riverboat Casino on the Broomielaw, Glasgow’s historic quayside. Detectives have traced every owner of a silver Skoda Felecia car in Scotland, but have been unable to track down the driver. This line of enquiry might even be a blind alley.

Detective Superintendent Willie Johnston of the Strathclyde Police said: “I am unable to say with any authority that the person who entered the car was Emma. However, I do know that she could have been in Broomielaw at that time.”

The charity Crimestoppers offered a reward of £10,000 to anyone who could help track down her killer. But a year after she went missing 50 officers were still working on the case. The police then released recordings of 999 calls she made the weeks before she disappeared, expressing her concern about children playing on a railway line.

The officer leading the inquiry said the calls showed the kind nature of the “caring” young woman and he hoped they would help to jog people’s memories.

“I want to demonstrate to the public, who may still have reservations about coming forward, that despite her lifestyle, Emma was a loving, caring individual who was genuinely concerned for the children on the railway line,” he said. “It may also prompt people who recognize her voice and know something that could be relevant to this investigation to come forward. I make no apologies for constantly reminding members of the public of this crime and will continue to do so until the person or persons responsible have been brought to justice.”

The murdered Glasgow vice girls may not be the victims of a serial killer. It seems likely that a different killer is responsible for each murder. But that makes life no safer for Glasgow’s prostitutes, as long as the killers are at large.

On 8 September 2006, 29-year-old Gillian Gilchrist, from Ibrox, was thrown from a car by a man who had picked her up in the red light district of Glasgow. She lost part of an arm.

She had been picked up by a man in a dark coloured car in Holm Street at Wellington Street, in the heart of the red light district. He drove to Arkleston Road near to Arkleston Cemetery, on the outskirts of the suburb of Paisley, where he threw her from the car at around 1.50 a.m. From there she stumbled 100 yards across a field and onto the westbound M8 motorway, where she was found by a man in a taxi who did not want to be named.

“Suddenly the taxi brakes and there was this woman in the road,” he said. “She was covered in blood. I ran to help her and called 999 and tried to get her off the motorway, it was then I noticed she had no arm. It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen, I put my jacket around her and gave her first aid.”

Her arm was severed four inches above the wrist and doctors were unable to reconnect it.

Her sister Debbie, told the Scottish
Sun
: “I don’t understand why someone would want to do that to a lassie. In a way Gillian is lucky because she could well be dead.”

“We have tried so hard to get her off the streets,” said her stepmother Anne Gilchrist. “I just pray this is the wake-up call she needs – we will all be there to help her.”

The Glasgow edition of the
Daily Record
offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the attacker. The police are treating the attack as attempted murder and searching for a man in his forties with a full head of hair, driving a dark-coloured saloon.

South Africa’s Serial Killers

Since the end of apartheid there has been an explosion of serial killers in South Africa. Take the case of Lazarus Mazingane, who was given 17 life sentences for murder and rape, and over 700 years for other offences in Johannesburg High Court on 3 December 2002.

Dubbed the “Nasrec Strangler”, he preyed on women commuting between Soweto and Johannesburg. Many of the bodies were found near the Nasrec Exhibition Centre. His victims are black females, mostly between the ages of 20 and 35, who are lured from minibus taxis.

Judge Joop Labuschagne said Mazingane was a “cruel and inhuman person” who showed no remorse, and should be permanently removed from society to which he was a menace.

“He stalked defenceless women whom he robbed and raped before he killed them,” said the judge.

Mazingane was working as a taxi driver at the time and many of the victims were attacked along his route or when seeking transport. His first victims were throttled – not fatally – then raped. But as his vicious career progressed, he murdered by strangulation.

“All these women were young and in the prime of life,” said Judge Labuschagne. “I listened to the evidence of mothers . . . and loved ones who told me of their tragic losses. Nothing I do or say today can compensate them, but perhaps they can find some compensation in the conviction of the accused and these sentences I am imposing.”

The court also noted that some of the victims were men such as Gert Aspeling, who was shot dead when he refused to hand over his car keys after stopping to change a wheel. Mazingane then drove off with the dead man’s paralyzed wife in the car and dumped her in the veldt without her wheelchair.

The judge remarked that the chances of rehabilitation were “very poor if not non-existent”, noting that Mazingane had already been convicted of attacking his own wife.

In all, Mazingane was convicted of 74 charges, and was sentenced to life imprisonment on each of the 16 murder counts and life imprisonment for the most recent rape, which fell under the new legislation. He was sentenced to 18 years on each of the remaining 21 charges of rape. On the 20 counts of aggravated robbery he had been convicted of, he was sentenced to 25 years for the most recent one, and 15 years for each of the remaining 19. And he was sentenced to another 10 years on each of five counts of attempted murder. One victim had been shot three times but survived.

He received eight years for each of three counts of kidnapping, plus two years for assault, three years on each of the two charges of illegal possession of a firearm, and three years on each of the four charges of illegal possession of ammunition.

Twenty-eight-year-old Mazingane was already serving 35 years for a crime committed late in 1998 – the kidnapping, rape and robbery of an attorney’s wife and an attack on a motorist who stopped to help. He was in jail for that offence when he came to the attention of Superintendent Piet Byleveldt, who was investigating the unsolved Nasrec killings. However, the charges eventually laid against Mazingane were only the tip of the iceberg. At the time Police Director Henriette Bester detailed the extent of the Nasrec offences: “There are 53 cases, of which 51 of the victims were killed. Of the 51 murder victims, 32 were female, all of whom were raped. Seventeen of the victims were children between the ages of five and eight, of whom 11 were girls.”