The Law Killers (22 page)
It wasn’t the only money that was to come his way during the strange absence of the home-loving woman he had wed so soon after release from his life sentence in prison. On 18 July – sixteen days after Margaret had apparently departed for her unannounced holiday in England, Robertson arrived at the offices of Leeds Permanent Building Society in Reform Street, Dundee. He was accompanied by an unidentified woman whom he introduced to staff as his wife Margaret, explaining that they had come to close her account and withdraw the £2,913 it contained. In fact, the nervous female by his side who barely spoke was the girlfriend of an acquaintance whose assistance Robertson had sought. Robertson had told him that Margaret was in England and they had urgent need of her life-savings, but to save her from returning north, and because he knew the building society rules would prevent them from paying the cash to anyone but the pass-book holder, it would be of great assistance if the man’s woman friend would briefly pose as Margaret to enable him to collect the cash. As an inducement, Robertson promised each of them 10 per cent of what he received, adding that Margaret herself knew of the arrangement and agreed to the payment.
Inside the offices of the Leeds Permanent, things did not go quite as well as Robertson had hoped they would. A member of staff explained that company policy prohibited them from giving out more than £300 in cash and that the remainder would be paid by cheque. The anxious couple reluctantly agreed to accept the payment on that basis, then immediately encountered another unexpected problem. The clerk dealing with the transaction looked closely at the signature of the ‘Margaret Robertson’ before him and left without explanation to consult the office manager. He had spotted that the writing differed slightly from the specimen kept in the office and his uneasy instincts about the couple deepened his suspicions. The manager noted the discrepancies between the signatures but also pointed out similarities – which was hardly surprising, since the impostor had spent much of the previous night copying it – and authorised the payment.
After quickly leaving the office with the £300 in cash and cheque, the extremely relieved Robertson hurriedly handed over the promised payment to the woman and her boyfriend who had waited down the street, then vanished into the throngs of people who packed the pavements round the nearby bus stops.
Shortly before midnight the following day, and only forty minutes into his Sunday-evening shift, PC David Murdoch answered the phone in police headquarters in the city’s Bell Street to take the most unforgettable call of his entire career. A male, who refused to give his name, spoke crisply but urgently and refused to be interrupted by the attempts of PC Murdoch to ask routine questions. The caller cut him short, telling him he had something important to say and would not repeat it: ‘If you go to the house at 3 Moncur Crescent, occupied by Robertson, you will find the body of Margaret Robertson under the kitchen floorboards.’ Then the man on the other end of the line told how police would be able to gain access to the flat by using keys which were concealed under the first rose bush in the front garden. The call ended shortly afterwards with the request that police should notify the dead woman’s sister about what had happened.
Two uniformed officers hurried to the scene. One of them, PC Angus Low, retrieved the keys from the precise location described in the phone call, then used them to make his way into the darkened house. With some trepidation, he put on the lights and, after noting the house’s spotless condition, looked quickly into the bedrooms before proceeding into the kitchen. At the far end of the room he detected the outline of a hatch under linoleum, partly covered by a table and chairs. Taking a screwdriver from a nearby cupboard, the constable prised open the hatch, switched on his torch and, with quickening heartbeat, lowered himself slowly into the opening before him.
Doing his best to ignore the cold air and strange smell that rushed to greet him, he squeezed his way into the five-foot-deep foundations which contained an assortment of boxes and tins of paint. The probing beam of his torch flashed round the 10-foot-by-6-foot compartment, but revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Then, in a second sweep, the light exposed a rough hole in the brick wall at the far end of the basement pit and, protruding from it but barely visible, was what at first appeared to be a heap of clothing. When he moved nearer, he saw the bundle was covered by a sheet of transparent polythene and held together with a rough rope. It was only when he was inches away that the constable realised he had found the body he had searched for but hadn’t really expected to find. In his haste to report this gruesome discovery, he kicked over a tin of paint and unknowingly left a trail of white footprints through the house as he hurried from the makeshift crypt to report back to headquarters.
Detectives and forensic scientists were roused from their beds and within the hour the once-anonymous council flat was the focus of intense activity. Other occupants of the block, awakened by the arrival of the procession of vehicles and the excited chatter, knew, without asking, that their missing neighbour had been traced.
Detective Inspector Ernie Brown, who was to lead the hunt for her killer, started the inquiry with a fairly full hand. Although the body had lain in the cellar for some three weeks, the ventilation in the dingy foundations had preserved the corpse in an unusually fine condition and positive identification was quickly established with the aid of a photograph album found in another part of the house. An early post-mortem also revealed that the cause of death was strangulation. In addition, it seemed a reasonable inference that the man who had placed the call alerting PC Murdoch to the existence of the body, was also the killer. His identity didn’t present many problems either. The call he had made had been routinely recorded and extracts were played to folk who knew the sound of Peter Robertson’s voice. They all said without hesitation that the mystery caller was indeed the husband of Margaret Robertson. Another police check revealed that the man they were now desperately hunting had killed before, almost fifteen years earlier to the day, when wife number one had perished at his hands.
It didn’t take long for his likely whereabouts to be determined. Later in the day, as news of the gruesome find was made public and detectives began visiting Robertson’s known haunts, another call came into police HQ, this time from a fellow officer in Skegness who was making enquiries into a probable suicide in the English seaside resort. The constable explained that at 9.20 that morning, a female lifeguard had found a pile of men’s clothing on the beach at Skegness, arranged neatly at the side of the lifeguard’s hut. In the pocket of a jacket was a membership card for Dundee Football Club, a union card and a bill from the nearby Godiva Hotel – all of them bearing the name Peter Robertson. When police had gone to the hotel they searched the single room Robertson had occupied and discovered a letter propped on a bedside table. It read: ‘I have told the Dundee police what has been haunting me these past day (
sic
). Between nagging women and these daft horses, life’s just a wank anyway.’ It was signed ‘Peter Robertson’.
On the face of it, it seemed a reasonably logical, if tragic, conclusion to the macabre events that had unfolded nearly three weeks earlier in the neat council flat hundreds of miles away in Dundee. Facing a second life sentence for the slaying of another woman who had married him, and unable to contemplate that prospect, Robertson had unburdened himself in an anonymous phone call to the police, telling where he had disposed of the body. Then, having spent all of the money he had withdrawn from Margaret’s building society account and facing almost certain arrest, he had taken the route of numerous other killers: the ending of his own life. The tidily arranged clothing – everything from his suit down to his pants and socks – left on the beach along with the identification documents in the jacket pockets, and the brief note of explanation in the guest house room, neatly fitted the pattern of many suicide victims.
But for Detective Inspector Ernie Brown in Dundee, it was just too convenient. All the instincts and cynicism that police officers possess, acquired from years of dealing with manipulative criminals, told him that the real victims might be the police themselves if they believed what was so tidily being presented to them. His counterparts in Skegness felt the same, but for different reasons. Coastguard officers, familiar with every trick of the tide on that stretch of coast, knew with reasonable certainty that a body which had gone into the water there would inevitably resurface in the same area twenty-four hours later. A continuous search showed that that had never happened.
Teams of officers in Scotland and England embarked on a round of visits to all of Peter Robertson’s known haunts in Dundee, Skegness and Lincoln. Scores of pubs, betting shops and lodging houses were scoured for the double-wife-killer. All enquiries drew a blank. It began to look as though the imagined fugitive may indeed have ended his days under the waves.
Then, nearly three weeks later, matters took an incredible and almost unbelievable turn. Police in Dundee received a visit from the woman who the previous month had gone with Robertson to the Leeds Permanent Building Society to masquerade as his wife. She had a remarkable story to relate. A short time earlier, she said, she had gone to the lounge of the Ellenbank Bar in Alexander Street with a female friend and, after just a few minutes, she had become startlingly aware of two men seated at a nearby table. One of them, she became convinced, was Peter Robertson, although he no longer had a moustache and his hair was styled differently. The longer she looked, the more certain she was that she was facing the man being hunted in two countries. Any lingering doubts that she may have had then evaporated when he approached her table and started to make advances. Certain now of his identity, and conscious that his easy conversation was probably an attempt to determine whether he had been recognised, the woman fought her instincts to flee from the bar. Instead, she waited ten minutes, left quietly – and headed at once for the nearest police station to tell her extraordinary story.
Four officers rushed to the Ellenbank Bar and found Robertson standing casually at the bar. His demeanour changed instantly on seeing the policemen and, after a few moments spent regaining his composure, he admitted who he was and said he knew why they were there.
He told the officers, ‘She was nagging, nagging, nagging. It was me that done it. I ken what it was all aboot.’
It many ways it was an unexpected admission, given the cunning he had shown in his elaborate attempt to convince police that he had committed suicide. Yet it was no more surprising than the fact that he had inexplicably returned to Dundee to resume visiting the pubs in his old neighbourhood only three weeks after so cleverly placing his clothing on the shore at Skegness. Police may not have believed he had taken his own life, but if he had quietly moved to a distant part of the country and maintained a low profile, they might never have known for sure.
Later, when formally interviewed by detectives at police headquarters, Robertson again readily confessed to the murder. He also spoke at length about the circumstances leading up to the moment when he throttled the woman who for five years had lived with the uncomfortable knowledge that he had killed his previous wife. He blamed Margaret for the increasing arguments they had about that brutal act and how it had caused the slow disintegration of their own relationship. It did not seem to occur to him that her distress was probably due more to his excessive drinking and gambling.
He remained just as unremorseful on the day of his trial on 8 September 1981, saying he wished to plead guilty and telling the presiding judge, Lord Allanbridge, that he did not want a defence counsel. When His Lordship asked him if he wanted to say anything before sentence was passed, he replied, ‘I knew Margaret since we were teenagers. She knew my first wife. It was just like holding a gun to my head all the time.
‘I tried to get away from her, but I could not. That is why I came back to Dundee. Taking the money was a stupid way of trying to get away from it.’
His Lordship told him there was only one sentence that could be imposed. For the second time, Peter Robertson – who had killed the two women he had promised to love, honour and cherish – was given a life sentence.
15
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN – HAZEL
As the bus pulled up at her stop, 12-year-old Hazel Phin moved to the exit, turned, and raised a small hand to wave farewell to a schoolmate. A moment later, she was on the pavement and setting out to walk the remaining few hundreds yards to her home. When the bus passed, she smiled and waved again to the boy pulling faces at her from the window. And that was the last time Hazel was spotted alive by anyone who knew her.
It was another 28 hours before she was seen again and by that time she was long dead. Her school blazer and neat navy blue skirt had been removed, along with the rest of her clothes, and her slight body had been buried under a heap of soot, ash and other debris in a cellar below some houses. There was little doubt as to how she had died. An old rope was pulled tight round her throat and her hands and feet were also trussed up.
Hazel had been a pupil at St John’s RC School in Dundee where ten months earlier, on All Saints Day 1967, a class of girls had been held at gunpoint before their teacher was shot and killed
(see
Anything You Can Do).
By an odd twist of fate, the man who pulled the trigger that day would go on to become a confidant of the perverted paedophile who had cruelly robbed Hazel of her life. During the long years they spent together in the State Hospital at Carstairs, the secure institution in central Scotland for the criminally unbalanced, the two warped killers from the same town had plenty of time to discuss their depraved acts.