The Law Killers (28 page)
Some of the young witnesses related how the swaggering McIntosh had arrived in the vicinity of the Law at around the time the body had been found with a ‘red and puffy’ face and had explained that away by saying he had just showered. Staff in a chip shop recounted how he had appeared in the shop that evening to tell them that a woman had been stabbed to death on the nearby Law, a seemingly inconsequential remark – except that it had been made before any member of the public could possibly have known. Police had meticulously checked the timings, even down to the running time of the TV programme
EastEnders
, which a witness in the shop had been watching, and examined the movements of emergency vehicles in the area, to conclude that McIntosh had jumped the gun with his news. The case against him was slowly building.
Then came a bombshell. In his plea of not guilty at the outset of the trial, McIntosh had lodged a special defence of incrimination, naming as the killer one of his friends, a 16-year-old former classmate who looked not unlike him and who also had a pierced eyebrow. The incriminated youth was called to give evidence and described himself to the jurors as a meat technician, which most assumed meant a butcher.
He described how he had been at his grandmother’s home between six o’clock and nine o’clock on the night of the murder, but admitted he had gone to the Law later to watch the police activity. He also revealed that on the day after the murder he had been drunk and had boasted that he had been the killer. On top of that, he confessed to having had a homemade knife in his possession, before and after the attack, and that his mother had disposed of the knife down a drain following the launch of the murder hunt.
Cross-examining the 16-year-old, Peter Gray QC, McIntosh’s counsel, suggested to him that he and McIntosh had met that night and had gone to part of the Law known as Dead Man’s Cliff where they had smoked cannabis together. While they were in the midst of preparing a joint, Anne Nicoll had passed by and, seeing what they were doing, threatened to tell their mothers.
‘You were not happy and as she walked past you, you took your knife out of your back pocket, you came up behind her and drew it across her face, and then you butchered her, didn’t you?’ posed the QC.
The teenager denied every part of the suggested scenario and explained that it would be of no consequence to him if someone told his mother they had seen him smoking cannabis, since she already knew he did so.
Later, an 11-year-old boy, shielded by special screens round the witness-box, revealed that he had met the trainee butcher on the night of the attack and noted that he had a bruise on his cheek and a cut lip. He also had a ‘shiny thing’ in his back pocket. It was almost possible to feel the current of excitement which ran along the packed public benches in the courtroom. Folk leaned forward to catch every word. They gasped inwardly when the 11-year-old went on to say that he met the 16-year-old the following day. Then he told the court: ‘He pulled out the knife and said, “It was me that killed Anne Nicoll.” ’
It was all startling evidence and completely changed the complexion of the trial. Now the jury were aware that two teenagers, friends who were remarkably similar in appearance, had one way or another admitted to being near the murder scene that night. One of them – and not the one in the dock – had apparently even announced to young acquaintances that he was the murderer. But which, if either, was actually the killer?
A strong indication that it was McIntosh came, as it so often does, with the presentation of the forensic data. A meticulous search of his house had not unearthed any blue top and matching bottoms – but it had produced a baseball cap and rolled-up sock, both bearing minute specks of blood. DNA tests revealed that the blood on the sock was, with a billion-to-one certainty, Anne Nicoll’s. The trace of faint bloodstaining on the baseball cap was less conclusive because the sample was incomplete and showed a mixed profile – but it was still a thousand-to-one probability to have been a mix of McIntosh’s and Ms Nicoll’s.
Before the jury retired to examine the enormous amount of evidence they had heard over the eleven days of the trial, they were invited to consider a possible explanation for the presence of Ms Nicoll’s blood on the accused youth’s belongings. Defence counsel suggested that he might have been at the scene, and close enough to have picked up specks of the dead woman’s blood, but only as a spectator while the friend he had accused carried out the murderous onslaught. It was an intriguing proposition.
McIntosh himself was unprepared to shed any light on what had taken place on the Law that summer evening, exercising his right not to give evidence and declining to go into the witness-box.
The jury retired with a lot to think about.
What they did not know was that before going out onto the hill that evening, McIntosh had spent twenty minutes on his home computer accessing a number of pornographic sites depicting torture and violent sexual acts of rape, where the victims included children. McIntosh had tried to remove the images, but specialist forensic computer unit police officers were able to retrieve the sickening pictures. Significantly, they were also able to extract data showing that in the months leading up to the slaughter on the hill he had visited sites referring to stalking and rape. The prosecution had hoped to lead evidence during the trial about what had been found on McIntosh’s computer, but it had been ruled inadmissible on the basis that there was a material difference between viewing violent sexual conduct and being a perpetrator of it. Furthermore, there was no indication that the attack on the unfortunate Anne Nicoll had been sexually related.
Others who knew McIntosh could have told the jurors it wasn’t surprising he found himself in the dock of a High Court – especially a neighbour who five months before the slaying of Anne Nicoll had warned that he was on a course to commit an ‘unpleasant’ act against someone. The fearful resident had even penned a letter intended for McIntosh’s mother, but it had been placed through the wrong letterbox, arriving instead at a neighbour’s. The recipient passed it to a local councillor, who forwarded it to the police. The text of the anonymous letter read:
I think it’s about time something was done about your son. He has brought nothing but trouble to this street.
Him and his friends make people’s life a misery, running through people’s gardens, closes, etc, vandalising the park and people’s cars. The language is terrible. I have heard they take ecstasy tablets on Friday afternoon. Check out the condoms in the park along with the drink cans.
Someone is going to end up getting something done to them and it won’t be pleasant.
People are wondering how you managed to get a house in this street. Other people wait years. Your son is an unsociable tenent (
sic
). We need to petition to get you out.
Other residents in quiet Kenmore Terrace, where McIntosh lived with his mother, shared the letter-writer’s unease about the youngster in their midst. One householder described him thus: ‘He is evil. I said that laddie was evil before anything happened.’
His schoolteachers could speak of him as a ‘walking nightmare’, a swaggering thug who insulted staff and bullied smaller and younger pupils. He had had no interest in learning and was unreceptive to any kind of discipline. At Harris Academy, which he attended for a few years, he was frequently sent to a special windowless room for misbehaving where there were only two desks and two chairs – one for the errant pupil and the other for a supervising teacher. The regime removed contact with other children, except during the lunch-break, and the time was spent in solitary study. Most pupils sent there seldom returned after a single day in the ‘cooler.’ McIntosh was a regular occupant, put there repeatedly for offending and apparently unperturbed by the harsh routine. Eventually, he was expelled from the school and moved to the city’s special unit for disaffected secondary pupils.
He had also become a growing menace in his neighbourhood in Kenmore Terrace, where he had gone to live with his single-parent mother four years earlier. He led the local gang and they terrorised much of the community, rampaging through gardens and breaking fences. On the local bus service he would lead other teenagers in loud chants about sex. Those courageous enough to challenge him were met with a sneering torrent of abuse.
None of that information was available to the jury, however, when they retired to consider their verdict. No one save the jurors themselves ever knows the precise directions a jury’s deliberations take, but anyone who sat through the eleven days of evidence of the high-profile trial would have been bound to ponder long and hard over the claims by McIntosh that the frenzied attack had been carried out by the youth he named. Uppermost in most minds was that the two youths looked remarkably similar, with the same hairstyles and even pierced eyebrows. Then there was the apparent boast by the incriminated youth – a meat technician – that he had been responsible for the fearsome knife attack.
As the minutes ticked by while the packed courtroom waited for a verdict, a few seasoned veterans of previous trials began to contemplate the possibility of the fence-sitting ‘not proven’ decision. After more than four hours the jurors returned. None of them looked for more than a moment in the direction of the 16-year-old who sat glowering at them.
When the foreman stood to announce the jury’s findings, the only sound to penetrate the silence that had descended was the shuffling of feet of some of the teenagers who sat in the public benches. Finally, after the formal pronouncements of the clerk to the court, the foreman delivered a verdict of guilty – by a majority decision.
Passing sentence, Lord Bonomy looked with barely concealed disgust at the powerfully built teenager standing before him. Recalling the appalling attack on Anne Nicoll, he told him:
One witness described her as being butchered and no better description can be applied to the way in which she met her death.
It was a dreadful way for anyone to lose their life and for that conduct there is no explanation and I think I can say nothing in the surrounding circumstances that might be considered in mitigation.
Telling the expressionless McIntosh that he took into account the extremely violent nature of the attack, the judge ordered that he be detained without limit of time but with a recommendation that he serve at least fifteen years.
Although the trial had lasted eleven days, no one connected with the case was any wiser about the motive for the senseless slaughter. The circumstances of the crime horrified the city but, equally, it baffled a community who could not comprehend what would drive a 15-year-old boy to attack so mercilessly an inoffensive and decent woman who had done him no harm.
No one was more bewildered or outraged than Gordon McKenzie, the victim’s partner, who had gone to accompany her home from the hill she loved to stroll but instead found her mutilated body. As the callous young killer was led sullen-faced from the dock to begin his sentence, Mr McKenzie called out to him from the public benches, ‘See you when you get out, you bastard!’
21
Whatever way it was viewed, the lady who lived alone in the mansion house could never be described as an ordinary Dundee spinster. Miss Jean Milne was eccentric but friendly, well read, fluent in foreign languages and something of a traveller. She was extremely comfortably off and the fourteen-room house she had quietly occupied for much of her life was set in its own grounds in an exclusive area of upmarket Broughty Ferry. Although she was sixty-five years of age, she preferred to dress colourfully and youthfully and there was an occasional glint in her eye that hinted at more adventurous living on the frequent holidays she spent in London and on the continent. Those who believed she led a double life were not mistaken. When she came to die, it somehow wasn’t all that surprising that her passing was surrounded by mystery and intrigue, as baffling today as it was in the genteel period of her killing in 1912.
In the October of that year she suddenly went missing. She had last been seen around the middle of the month, but then she just vanished. No one was particularly surprised, or worried, for she had spoken of returning to London once more before the year was out. Most of her friends and contacts assumed she had just departed a little earlier than intended. On 2 November the postman was unable to insert mail into the letterbox of her mansion, Elmgrove, which stood in tree-filled splendour on a two-acre corner site where Strathern Road met Grove Road, because of an accumulation of letters already there. That puzzled him, because on her travels away Miss Milne always made arrangements to have her mail redirected, even sending a card to post office headquarters when she was due to return. He informed the police.
An officer called at the mansion late that evening but received no reply. Reluctant to force an entry in case Miss Milne was indeed at home but sleeping, and because a fellow officer had been reprimanded for doing precisely that on a previous occasion, he left. The next morning at 9 a.m. he returned with Mr Coullie, the local joiner, and they broke in through a window. The silence that enveloped the freezing house was broken by the gasps of both men at what confronted them.
Miss Milne lay dead in the hall two feet from the bottom of the carpeted staircase leading to the upper rooms. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse and her feet were bound together with curtain cord. The stairs, floor and walls were splattered with blood and, beside her body, which had been partially covered with a white sheet, lay a bloodstained poker with hair attached. Garden shears, which had been used to cut the telephone wires, had been discarded nearby. Despite her age and fragile frame, it seemed Miss Milne had made a determined effort to fight off her attacker, which was consistent with the reputation she had among her acquaintances for being ‘plucky’. Furniture was upset and a glass vase had shattered. Further along the hall lay her straw hat with its lining soaked in blood. More blood stained a gas lamp high up on a wall. Her false teeth were also broken.