The Law Killers (10 page)

Mrs Eliza Connelly was aged 74 and had been married three times. After the death of her third husband she had lived by herself in the neat single-person council house at 105 Aberdour Place, a desirable and secluded area in an out-of-the-way corner of Barnhill where the folk were friendly but reserved. There was never any trouble. It was considered a good place to have been allocated a house and hers was one in a row of identical modern cottages, all with small, manageable gardens at the rear. Mrs Connelly had recently been in hospital with a chest complaint, but had recovered well. Sometimes she grew lonely, although she had three sons, a daughter and grandchildren and was regularly visited. She never stopped being house-proud and her apartments were seldom anything but immaculate.

The last time the grey-haired widow was seen alive was at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Sunday, 12 April 1981. Earlier that day, her eldest son Kenneth had visited. Following his departure, his mother called at the nearby home of a spinster neighbour to use her telephone. There was no reply from the friend she had wanted to speak to and the two women shared a cup of tea and a chat. Then she left. The following day her obliging neighbour knocked on Mrs Connelly’s door to inform her she had tried several times to phone the friend but had been unable to make contact. When Mrs Connelly failed to come to the door, the woman placed a note through the letter-box. She noted that the house appeared to be locked up.

The next day, the Tuesday, at around 12.45 p.m., Mrs Connelly’s middle son, James, arrived at the house with his wife and daughter to take his mother on one of their regular drives together. This was something he usually did on a Sunday, but had been unable to manage that weekend. When he entered the house, he instinctively knew things were not as they should be. In the living-room a chair, unusually, was hard up against the kitchenette door and the bedroom door was closed, something his mother would not normally have done. He entered the bedroom with growing trepidation but was still unprepared for what he found. The first thing he saw was the blood-soaked carpet and bedclothes, then, just behind the door, the corpse of the woman he had planned to take on a family car outing.

Detectives were at the scene within an hour – and that was the end, for some time, of the usual uneventful existence of Aberdour Place’s silver-haired residents. In the days ahead, police sniffer-dogs scoured the area with their handlers, seeking anything that might have resembled a murder weapon. More than 1,500 people were interviewed but every line of inquiry drew a blank. A post-mortem indicated that the time of death had probably been between seven o’clock on the Sunday evening and ten the following morning. Two youths, carrying bags, had been seen on a pathway close to the home of the 74-year-old widow on the Monday morning and a major appeal was launched to trace them. When they were found they were closely questioned – and eliminated from the inquiry. Other appeals for information met with an unusually poor response, specifically from taxi drivers who had been asked to come forward with details of any fares they may have had in the area over the crucial two-day period.

A few days after the launch of the murder hunt, Mrs Connelly’s son James told police he believed up to £100 could have been taken from two of his mother’s purses. It reinforced the view of some that the pensioner may have disturbed a sneak thief, who had reacted in panic and battered the life out of her with some kind of object. A plea for assistance was made to members of the underworld in the hope they might have been sufficiently sickened by the fate of the old woman to incriminate one of their own (as had happened following previous attacks on elderly victims). No one responded.

Senior detectives began to feel increasingly uneasy about many aspects of the inquiry. From the start it had seemed a motiveless killing. Nothing, apart from the apparent disappearance of some money, appeared to have been taken or disturbed. There was no evidence of a struggle, no trace of a weapon. Nor had there been any indication of a forced entry or exit. Every surface in the flat was painstakingly examined by forensic teams but there wasn’t a single fingerprint which should not have been there. A purse with the dead woman’s blood on it was found in a closed bedroom drawer. There were no unexplained prints on that either. Neighbours in the quiet suburb had neither seen nor heard anything to have caused them concern and there was an untypical dearth of witnesses of any kind.

The repeated pleas for information met with virtually no success, the poorest response many experienced murder detectives could recall. If an opportunist thief had, indeed, been responsible, why was there no evidence that drawers or cupboards had been ransacked? Why had nothing but the money been taken and why had some other money and cashable electricity stamps been left? Most crucially, would a casual thief have come armed with a weapon? If he had seized the nearest thing to hand, why was it not still in the room? Nothing that could have caused the kind of injuries inflicted on Mrs Connelly had apparently been removed from the flat. Having committed a spur-of-the-moment murder, would a sneak thief not have been in such a panic that his flight from the scene would have been witnessed, or at least some evidence of his hasty departure from the house left behind? It was also reasonable to ponder whether any house-breaker sufficiently experienced enough to leave not a single fingerprint would have bothered to enter the home of an elderly woman living alone in a council house, since the pickings were unlikely to have been particularly good. Perhaps she knew her killer, for the family thought it unlikely she would open her door to a stranger if she was dressed for bed. But if her attacker were an acquaintance, what possible motive could there have been? Too many questions remained unanswered. Too many pieces of the jigsaw did not fit. Apart from the corpse of the unfortunate Eliza Connelly, it was as though nothing had occurred to disturb the ordered, safe routine of the respectable neighbourhood. Gradually, police began to wonder whether they were investigating an unlikely, but just feasible, tragic accident instead of a murder.

A month after the grim discovery in the house at 105 Aberdour Place, police took the unusual step of submitting a report to the Procurator Fiscal containing every detail of what the exhaustive police enquiries had revealed, including the possibility that the death might have been accidental. Five weeks later, equally unexpectedly, the Fiscal, who acknowledged the intensity of the police investigation, made the surprise announcement that a fatal-accident inquiry into the circumstances would be held. Although such a hearing closely resembled the common English coroner’s courts, it was an extremely rare procedure in Scotland.

Even after the fatal-accident inquiry was held, the initial findings were inconclusive. Although not ruling out the original belief that a murder had been committed, police suggested there might also be another explanation for what had occurred. A senior detective, giving evidence at the hearing, described how he had gone to the house shortly after the discovery of the body and had at first believed there had been an accident but had initiated a murder inquiry on the advice of a police surgeon and a forensic expert. He went on to recount how Mrs Connelly’s home was in an extremely quiet residential area with a fairly low crime level and how there had not been a sneak-in theft there for ten years. Asked about the discovery of the purse with the victim’s blood on it, he replied that he would not have expected a thief who had just committed a serious assault to take money from a purse, then close it and replace it in a drawer, which he also shut. Sneak-thieves went in and out as quickly as possible and would not waste time to see if they were lucky, he told Sheriff Graham Cox: ‘They would not close any purse, then replace it in a drawer. They would examine the contents outside and then throw the purse away,’ he pointed out.

Much of the hearing took place in Dundee Royal Infirmary, where the dead woman’s bedroom had been reconstructed in the Department of Forensic Science. The furniture from the room was positioned to match as closely as possible the layout at Aberdour Place. Even the bloodstained bedding and a blood-soaked hairnet were in the exact spots where they had been found.

The senior detective who had gone to the house within an hour of the discovery of the body proposed that the death could have been the result of an extraordinary set of accidental circumstances. He advanced a theory supporting that view, as follows. Mrs Connelly had been ready to go to bed when she fell – as she had done in the past – between her bed and a wardrobe, striking her forehead on a chair in between. She either lay there for some time before pulling herself on to the bed, or fell back immediately and then lay on the bed, as indicated by the heavy blood-staining on the bedding. From there, the pensioner had attempted to rise but twice struck her head on the wardrobe – accounting for the curious shaped wounds on her head, caused by the doorknobs and a key.

The detective’s suggested scenario continued with Mrs Connelly crawling round the floor at the edge of the bed towards the door and, in an attempt to rise, toppling back and striking the back of her head on the open drawer of a chest. Her bloody handprints indicated that she had crawled hand-over-hand round the bed, then held on to a chair. The unusual spread of blood on the walls and ceiling would have arrived there after the first fall, when the injured widow pulled off her hairnet, which had been blood-soaked. The fact that the hairnet was elasticised had caused the blood to spatter the way it had. Supporting his hypothesis in part was evidence from the dead woman’s GP that she had suffered from angina for twelve years and had experienced two heart attacks in that time. It was also known that Mrs Connelly had previously been found in the house after falls.

Sheriff Cox suggested that, as an alternative to the detective’s conjectures, Mrs Connelly may have sustained her assorted injuries by being thrown about.

‘I could not equate the scene in the bedroom with an assault,’ responded the officer. ‘In these circumstances the woman could not have moved herself from one side of the bedroom to the other. Everything would have been happening in one corner.’

Asked to account for the presence of the blood on the purse in the drawer, he explained that it could have come about after Mrs Connelly had attempted to seek help after her falls. Since she had no telephone in the house, she had gone to the purse to collect her house key before departing to alert a neighbour to her plight – but had been unable to do so.

The police speculation about the events in the house that April day did not meet with any kind of agreement from the forensic scientist who had examined the body of Mrs Connelly. Dr Donald Rushton, bow-tied and peering over the top of glasses positioned on the point of his nose, was customarily categorical in his dismissal of the accident theory, saying it did not equate with the nature and severity of the wounds suffered by the victim.

‘On my first visit to the scene I formed the opinion that the deceased had first been assaulted on her bed or at the wardrobe,’ he said emphatically. ‘Had it been accidental, none of her injuries would have spurted blood to that degree. For them to have been caused by her hairnet it would have had to have been a forcible or frantic removal.’ He thought the dead woman could have been assaulted on the bed, then she might have recovered sufficiently to have crawled round it to the place where her body was eventually found. His conclusion was that the majority of her wounds indicated that she had been severely assaulted about the head with a hard object – the sort of which he could not identify – and, in attempting to defend herself, had sustained two injuries to the backs of her hands. Dr Rushton expressed his unhappiness with the idea of the circumstances being explained away as an accident, dismissing the assumptions as implausible and insufficient on medical grounds.

‘The injuries were too severe and there were too many of them,’ he said. ‘There were fifteen separate impacts on the body.’ He admitted that a fitter, younger person might have survived the attack.

Nothing was said at the inquiry, however, to provide any kind of explanation for the lack of signs of a disturbance or forced entry or exit. Nor could anyone account for the absence of unidentified fingerprints. One spot of blood had been found outside the bedroom, on the door inside the living-room leading to the hallway, but that did not produce a foreign print either.

The conclusion of the evidence at the inquiry presented the Sheriff with a dilemma. He had two widely differing opinions of what might have happened in the pensioner’s flat, each coming from men eminent in their fields but each leaving many questions unanswered. He adjourned the hearing to seek the views of a second medical expert, saying this was the only safe way to deliver a judgement which would be fair to the police, Dr Rushton and Mrs Connelly’s family. It was acknowledged, however, that any new evidence would be based on the available written reports, photographs and interviews and not on first-hand experience of the death scene or the body.

Two months later, Professor Arthur Harland of Glasgow University told the resumed fatal-accident inquiry that he supported the opinion of Dr Rushton, saying he believed the twelve injuries to the pensioner’s head could only have been sustained by repeated blows ‘of quite unusual violence’. He dismissed the idea of the blood trails on the ceiling having been caused by Mrs Connelly removing her hairnet, but admitted they were likely to have arrived there by someone swinging the hairnet – or a weapon.

Sheriff Cox proceeded to find that Mrs Connelly’s sad death had been no accident, the ‘balance of probabilities’ showing that it had resulted from a sustained and violent assault upon her and that she had died around 7.15 p.m. on the evening of Sunday, 12 April.