The Law Killers (11 page)
It was a verdict which met with the approval of Mrs Connelly’s family, who had believed from the start that the elderly woman who lived quietly in the pleasant suburb had been murdered by a chance intruder or intruders. Their supposition was that she had been assaulted and forced to hand over money and, after her attackers demanded more cash, she was hit again because they suspected she may have had additional funds secreted away.
Her son Kenneth, who had visited the house that afternoon, told a reporter that after the finding of his mother’s body, it was noted that the curtain on the toilet window had been closed, something Mrs Connelly never did because she was too small to reach. That may have been of considerable significance. The window was located next to the front door and visible to anyone passing. Did her killer or killers close the curtain so they could, undisturbed, remove any traces of blood from their person? Or was it because a mystery visitor, who may have been known to the occupant, had stayed long enough to require the use of the bathroom? The drawing of the curtain might even have been the act of a woman, through modesty or because of natural feminine instincts which demanded neatness, a word that in so many ways could have described much – such as the replacement of the blood-stained purse into the drawer – of what went on at 105 Aberdour Place that April evening.
It was one more awkward piece to the jigsaw that, even after an extensive murder inquiry, fatal-accident inquiry and the passage of almost quarter of a century, no one is any closer to piecing together.
7
Eighteen hours. Not even a day. In a lifetime, a blink of an eye. A fleeting, forgotten moment in time that blurs with a million other hours … unless you are one of those unaccountably selected by fate that makes it seem like an eternity. Then you may be left with memories so indelible and so painful they accompany you to the grave.
That was how it was for Charles Smith and his wife Sarah, when a Saturday in May 1971, that started so unexceptionally, turned into a lingering journey through the worst kind of hell. Even when the first fateful component that would change their lives forever entered into the day there was nothing to set it apart.
Late in the afternoon, while the couple were watching an England-Scotland football match on television, a knock on the door of their tenement flat in Broughty Ferry Road interrupted the couple’s viewing. The visitor was Charles Shepherd, a 24-year-old acquaintance who lived a mile away and who had called to apologise for an earlier argument. Generously, 33-year-old Mr Smith says to forget about the incident and invites him in. Shepherd is pleased at his reception and, as a gesture of goodwill, announces that he has £4 which he will use to buy drink for the trio. As a further token of his appreciation, he takes Sharon, Mrs Smith’s eight-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, and her friend of the same age, to the off-licence with him. They return 15 minutes later, Shepherd having purchased a bottle of wine, a few tins of beer and cigarettes.
After a few drinks, the mood has mellowed further and the visitor makes another friendly offer. If the young girls would like it, he would be happy to take them for runs round the block on the red and white Lambretta scooter he’d arrived on. The eight-year-olds are thrilled at the prospect and Mr and Mrs Smith willingly yield to their excited pleas for permission to make the trips.
Shortly afterwards, Shepherd and his young passengers return to the flat. The girls are animated about their experience and immediately request another spin on the magical scooter. They depart once more and at around 4.45 p.m. Shepherd and Sharon come back without the other youngster, who has gone home for tea. Sharon is even more elated. Shepherd has bought her a bag of butternut sweets. Politely, she offers them to her parents. The mood in the house is jovial, even though the football international has ended with a 3–1 defeat for Scotland.
Half an hour later, with the excitement of her previous journeys on the scooter still the main topic of the little redhead’s conversation, Shepherd volunteers to give her one more ride on the Lambretta. The pair set off from the flat once again and as Sharon disappears down the tenement stairs her bubbling laughter rings in her parents’ ears.
It is 5.15 p.m. It is also the last time they would hear the joyous sound and the last time they would ever see her alive.
At around 6 p.m. Shepherd returns to the house. He is alone and, in answer to the Smiths’ questions about their daughter’s whereabouts, he casually explains that he had dropped her off at nearby newsagent’s shop where she met up with a chum. He is relaxed and converses freely.
But 34-year-old Mrs Smith is alarmed after noting that his clothing is dishevelled and his shirt is stained with what appears to be blood. Anxiously, she suggests to her husband that the police should be called.
He, too, is apprehensive but in order not to alarm his wife further, conceals his fears and attempts to play down Sharon’s non-arrival. Mrs Smith is not appeased and her husband finally accedes to her plea. Eager to be of assistance, Shepherd offers to take Mr Smith round to the nearest police box on the Lambretta. They set off with Mr Smith on the pillion seat his stepdaughter had occupied less than an hour earlier. As events of the next 17 hours start to unfold, that seemingly natural occurrence takes on a surreal aspect.
After he has dropped his passenger off at the police box, Shepherd says he will tour the neighbourhood for Sharon and drives off. Meanwhile, Mr Smith and the officer he’s spoken to agree to delay an official search for half an hour to allow the missing girl more time to return home.
Back at the house, Mrs Smith is even more fearful but reluctantly accepts the proposal to defer the launch of the search. When Shepherd shows up at the flat again to say he can find no trace of Sharon, the air of despondency in the house deepens. At exactly 6.30 p.m. Mr Smith returns to the police box to ask for the search to commence.
Bizarrely, almost immediately it becomes a double hunt. As the last known person to have seen Sharon, police are anxious to speak to Shepherd. But he, too, has vanished. A general alert goes out to every officer on duty in the city to look out for him and his red and white Lambretta, registration number 69 BSR.
Two hours after the launch of the search, a constable radios in to headquarters to say he has located the scooter in Robertson Street, less than half a mile from Sharon’s home. Detectives hurry to the scene and examine the Lambretta. They lift the saddle and check the toolbox stored underneath. What they discover is as unexpected as it is grim. The first thing they see is an old-fashioned open razor – and it is blood-stained.
The inferences are obvious and efforts to locate Shepherd and little Sharon are intensified. While other officers scour the area, a special plain-clothes team lie in wait near the scooter which has been left in place. Some two hours later, their patience is rewarded when Shepherd arrives and prepares to drive off. He is immediately detained and when detectives note he smells strongly of alcohol the 24-year-old confesses to have been drinking most of the evening. It is the only admission he makes. Held at headquarters, he is questioned at length but says he has no knowledge of the whereabouts of the pretty child he’d taken for scooter rides that late afternoon.
At midnight, the head of CID, Superintendent William Melville, contacts the media to issue an appeal for the public to report any sightings they may have had of either Sharon or the scooter. One of those who takes his call is a late duty
Sunday Post
reporter who departs at once to interview Mrs Smith. She is distressed but anxious to plead for any assistance people can offer to help find her daughter. Then, through her tears, she makes a stunning admission. She says she fears she will never see her little girl alive again and names Shepherd as the person responsible. She even furnishes the astonished young reporter with his address.
Down at police HQ in Bell Street, the man she accuses continues to be unhelpful and protests his innocence, claiming that the last time he saw Sharon was when he dropped her off at the shop close to her home.
The search for the missing child continues through the night and when daylight breaks at 4 a.m. reinforcements arrive to bolster numbers. Police and special constables from Angus and Perth join volunteers from the Territorial Army, Royal Navy Reserve and youth organisations. As Dundee stirs into wakefulness, more and more people join in the hunt for Sharon. Soon, 400 people are checking outhouses and back gardens all over the city. With nothing to go on, the search area extends in every direction. It is the biggest hunt ever undertaken in the region. Police dogs are brought in and a helicopter is put on stand-by in the hope that the damp, misty weather lifts. Members of the WRVS and other groups arrive early to provide tea and hot soup for the searchers, many of whom have toiled all night. Their task is made worse when heavy rain starts to fall. Among those in the search parties is a jacketless Mr Smith who is advised by police to return home to await news.
At the same time as the city was being systematically scoured overnight, other police staff prepared special posters and pamphlets bearing Sharon’s photograph and details of the Lambretta and the time she was last seen. They are distributed at daybreak to those who have been asleep and unaware of the Saturday-night-Sunday-morning drama being played out. At the same time, loudspeaker vehicles tour Dundee broadcasting appeals for help. Radio news bulletins carry items about the missing girl and others learn of her disappearance when they read the heartbreaking plea of her mother in the
Sunday Post
.
Altogether, it is an unprecedented plea for public assistance – and it pays off. Shortly after 8 a.m., a woman living in Baxter Park Terrace, about quarter of a mile from the Smiths’ home, hears a radio appeal which jolts her memory. She recalls seeing a scooter pass her house as she sat at a window the evening before. The more she thinks about it, the more she is convinced that the ‘pretty girl with the bonnie red hair’ was Sharon. She visualises the scene as the scooter passed by, heading north, and recollects smiling because the little girl’s legs were too short for her feet to reach the footrests.
It is enough for the main thrust of the search to be concentrated on the north and east ends of town and the deputy head of CID, Chief Inspector John Bell, then decides to play a hunch. He remembers that as a youth Shepherd had lived close to Linlathen Estate, a large open area between Baldovie and Claypots, and he directs large detachments of the search teams there. It is a rewarding tactic.
While the drenching rain continues unabated, two police officers decide to check a small, disused War Department brick building standing in isolation on the estate. The sight which greets them is so ghastly that they are moved to tears. Sharon lies sprawled on the floor. She is partially clothed and her throat has been viciously slashed.
It is 11.15 a.m. and 18 hours since her excited laughter sounded on the stairs of her home where she said goodbye to her parents for the last time.
Charles Hampton Shepherd continued to deny any knowledge of how eight-year-old Sharon’s short life had ended so barbarously. But even as he appeared briefly in court the next morning charged with her murder, evidence was stacking up against him. The citizens of Dundee, who had responded so spontaneously and wholeheartedly in the search for the little girl, reacted just as unstintingly to police appeals about the movements of a Lambretta scooter, registration number 69 BSR.
Outraged at the details of her death, numerous people came forward to incriminate Shepherd by saying they had witnessed Sharon being taken on her final journey. All clearly remembered the slender figure in the green cardigan and with the bright red hair sitting on the pillion seat holding on to the young man driving. The pair had been seen all along the route, almost from the moment they had set off until turning at the crossroads in the direction of the scene of her death.
One male witness was particularly helpful. He had previously been a neighbour of the Smiths and had no difficulty in recognising Sharon. He went further and identified the scooter as belonging positively to Shepherd because it bore the name of the accused man’s favourite pop group, The Who, in bold black and gold letters.
Tests on the bloodstains found on the old-fashioned open razor discovered in the toolbag of the scooter establish later that the blood group is the same as Sharon’s – a different one from Shepherd’s.
Yet, despite the overwhelming case built against him, the 24-year-old continued to persist in claiming his innocence.
It was not until two months later, on 14 July 1971, when he appeared at the High Court in Dundee to stand trial, that he finally confessed to his fiendish behaviour. Dressed garishly in a bright yellow jerkin and brown slacks, and chewing gum throughout his short court appearance, he sullenly admitted raping and murdering the little girl who had excitedly asked to be taken for trips on his scooter.
The judge, Lord Emslie, could barely conceal his disgust for the long-haired killer. Telling him he had pleaded guilty to charges of ‘unparalleled savagery’, he jailed him for life, adding tersely, ‘I won’t waste words in heaping on you the condemnation that society feels for you.’
With that judgement ringing in his ears, Charles Hampton Shepherd was led from the dock and out of the public gaze, his long incarceration never to feel as endless as the eighteen hours endured by an anguished family.