The Law Killers (23 page)

When Hazel failed to arrive at her home in Craigmount Avenue that late September afternoon in 1968, her parents scoured the immediate area without a single trace of their daughter being found. By 7 p.m., and still with no clue as to her whereabouts, the police were alerted and shortly afterwards a full-scale hunt was launched, headed by Chief Constable John Little, who only the day before had arrived from Glasgow to take command of his new force. The 70-strong team of police with tracker dogs first searched nearby parks and after darkness fell they concentrated on buildings and condemned properties. Loudspeaker appeals were broadcast and missing girl posters rushed out. But 24 hours after they had begun, they were still no nearer to tracing Hazel Phin, the little girl with the big eyes and wide smile.

Then a switchboard operator at police headquarters took a call from a man with an urgent message to pass on. He said he was an acquaintance of Karl Anderson Tonner, a 23-year-old, who a short time earlier had admitted casually to him that the girl half the city was looking for was in the cellar beside Tonner’s house in Lorne Street. Detectives hurried to the scene, just a short distance from where Hazel had alighted from the bus, immediately discovered her body and arrested Tonner. In his possession they found the schoolgirl’s watch and the remainder of the sweets she had purchased after setting out from St John’s to make her way home. Tonner told them dark-haired Hazel had been taking a short cut through the back area of his home, where he tinkered with motorcycles, when he spotted her and decided to seize her and force her into the cellar.

‘I was going to have intercourse,’ he calmly explained. ‘When I got there I did not feel like it, so I killed her with the rope and covered her up.’ He was so detached he might have been describing a late change of mind about what to have for tea.

When the time came for Tonner to appear in court to answer for his actions, two psychiatrists said he was sane and fit to plead but suffered from a personality disorder, which manifested itself in sexual abnormality. This mental disorder seriously diminished his responsibility for his behaviour and, because of his continuing dangerous and violent criminal predisposition, he required treatment under strict security. As a result of the medical advice, the Crown accepted his guilty plea of culpable homicide. The presiding judge, Lord Grant, ordered that the emotionless Tonner should be taken to Carstairs and detained without limit of time.

In most instances when this is the disposal of the court, little more is heard of the person who has been incarcerated under the Mental Health Act and accordingly afforded the privacy and rights of a hospital patient. Karl Anderson Tonner was not among them. Some 30 years after being confined behind the high-wire fences of the soulless compounds of the State Hospital, and long after Robert Mone, his home town compatriot, had burst his way out in his infamous murderous spree, he exploded back into the headlines. Barely credible though it seemed to ordinary members of the public, the psychopathic killer had devoted much of his hospital leisure time responding to women’s lonely hearts advertisements. He had built up an astonishing list of contacts, corresponding with females from as far afield as Japan, the USA and Norway, as well as scores in the United Kingdom. The paedophile had even persuaded more than 100 mothers to send him photographs of their children, some of them as young as 3, and their pictures covered the walls of his room in the institution. A former staff member at Carstairs revealed that Tonner had narrowed down the hundreds of letters he received in order to pinpoint the women he believed to be most vulnerable, provided they also had children. In his letters to the lonely ladies he did not at first reveal that he was detained in Carstairs, merely giving the name of the street of the hospital. Staff opened a parcel he sent out to one of his new acquaintances to discover he had despatched hundreds of business cards he’d run off in the hospital print shop offering a pen-pal service.

After corresponding with one woman for 6 years, she moved from her home in England to Dundee to be nearer to him and his mother in the city. Initially he had told her he was a printer at the hospital, later ‘confessing’ to being a patient who had been hospitalised because of ‘nervous problems’. They became engaged but the relationship quickly ended after the woman discovered the true nature of his detention and the background to his crime. She was particularly repelled because over the years of their contact she had sent Tonner numerous photographs of her children and grandchildren aged between 18 months and 6 years.

Others among his list of female penfriends were similarly shocked to learn of his activities decades earlier. One, the mother of a 15-year-old daughter, who had corresponded with him for 17 years and also sent snaps of her child, only found out about his murderous past from a newspaper investigating Tonner’s letter-writing pastime. Prior to that, he had even begun bombarding her with phone calls, pleading with her to pay him a visit.

As part of his deception, the killer dropped his surname, referring to himself only as Karl Anderson. A year after his horrified fiancée broke off their engagement, he had lined up another pen-pal to wed. A 58-year-old London mother, who was disabled, had been wooed by a constant stream of affectionate letters, followed by nightly phone calls when the killer expressed his love for her. She, too, was unaware of the precise reason he was in Carstairs and, charmed by his advances, agreed to marry him in hospital. It was only in the weeks leading up to the nuptials, and after the Carstairs authorities had persuaded Tonner to inform her of his crime, that she learned the full story of his sordid past and broke off the engagement. At the height of their romantic attachment, and still ignorant of what, exactly, had sent him to the State Hospital, she had even petitioned the Queen and Prime Minister Tony Blair, calling for his freedom.

Thirty-two years after being locked up, Tonner embarked on an audacious bid to secure his release. A fellow inmate at Carstairs, Noel Ruddle, known as the Kalashnikov Killer, had won his freedom after exploiting a loophole in the law, successfully arguing that since his personality disorder could not be cured, he should be released. Within weeks of Ruddle being paroled, Tonner and two other Carstairs patients – one also a paedophile killer, the other a man who had stabbed a young mother to death and who also attempted the abduction of an eight-year-old girl – lodged appeals of their own on the same grounds, demanding that they, too, be set free.

Aware that the ground-breaking case could open the floodgates for a rush of similar appeals, the Scottish Parliament hurried through legislation to plug the loophole. The case ultimately went as far as the judicial committee of the Privy Council in London, the highest appeal court in the United Kingdom, where the five judges rejected the freedom pleas of the three killers.

Six years later, on 31 January 2007, Karl Anderson Tonner, then aged 61 and whose weight had soared to 20 stones because of lack of exercise and his hospital drugs regime, failed to turn up for an appointment within Carstairs. Staff went to his room and found him dead from a heart attack.

His funeral was one of the briefest on record. In a 10-minute ceremony, he was buried in an unmarked grave near the hospital. Only three council gravediggers and four hospital staff were present to watch his outsize coffin being lowered into the ground. No one attended from Dundee, where almost 40 years earlier he had nonchalantly admitted to taking the life of a little girl making her way home from school.

16

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN – PAULINE

Sometimes the act that one person commits against another is so appalling it is almost beyond comprehension. When they learn of it, normal people are bewildered and repulsed in equal measure. They cannot take in what has occurred or understand the extent of another human being’s ability to remove themselves so far from civilised conduct.

Michael Wilkinson’s capacity for wickedness was all the more surprising because it followed soon after a display of self-sacrifice that was so heart-warming people praised him in the newspapers.

His story began in the autumn of 1971. Then aged 24, his marriage had broken up after he discovered his wife committing adultery with another man. He had assaulted both of them and they moved from Dundee to England, leaving him with three young children to care for. Soon after, the youngest, a boy, was taken to hospital to be operated on for a serious liver complaint. The two-year-old seemed to make a good recovery but one evening at home, without warning, he suffered a relapse. A short time later, he died in his father’s arms.

No one gets over that kind of experience, but six months later Michael Wilkinson thought he’d found a way that offered an unusual sort of solace. He read of a 12-year-old girl in Cambridge who was critically ill and required a kidney to stay alive. The appeal appeared to touch Wilkinson deeply and he immediately volunteered to donate one of his own.

‘I cannot sit by and do nothing while a little girl lies helpless. I know what the death of a child is all about …’ he told reporters. In the event, his organ was unsuitable for transplanting and the offer could not be taken up. His selfless gesture gained national headlines and his altruism was applauded in his home town and far beyond. Less than three years later, however, his words were to take on a chilling significance.

On the afternoon of 17 June 1974, six-year-old Pauline McIver failed to return home from school, prompting her worried parents to attempt to trace her movements. Their enquiries took them to a tenement flat in Gourdie Place, in Dundee’s Dryburgh estate, the home of one of her daughter’s young friends. Mrs McIver spoke to Michael Wilkinson, the child’s father, who at once said Pauline had accompanied his own daughter back from school and that the two little girls had played together in the flat. He helpfully explained that he’d sent Pauline home around 4.30 p.m. Mrs McIver, a 26-year-old nurse and the mother of two other young children, hurried back downstairs to pass the news on to her husband who had waited in the family car. The couple departed at once, anxious to continue their search. But by late evening, and having made no progress, Mr McIver, this time accompanied by his brother, returned to Gourdie Place to question Wilkinson once more. The man whose own son had died tragically a few months earlier, expressed concern at the lack of developments but repeated that Pauline had only played for a short time in the house before setting off for home.

At 10.45 p.m., with the late summer light finally fading, and chastising herself for not having done so sooner, Mrs McIver finally alerted the police. A full-scale search was quickly launched and brought almost immediate results. Shortly after midnight, a police sergeant searching in the back yard behind Wilkinson’s block of flats, came upon Pauline’s body. She lay beside two discarded sinks in a bin recess with practically no attempt having been made to conceal her body. Police were later to say her injuries indicated that she’d been assaulted ‘to an unnatural degree’.

Wilkinson was taken to police headquarters for questioning and over the course of the next 90 minutes made three statements. The first two denied any knowledge of Pauline’s death and amounted to little more than what he’d told her parents. Then, as he was about to end his explanation of events for the third time, his demeanour changed. He began to sweat profusely, his brow, upper lip and hands all becoming moist.

‘Now let me think,’ he told Detective Sergeant David McNicoll, wringing his hands nervously. ‘I will have to tell someone anyway. Wait a minute. I can’t remember it all but it was me that done it.’

When Wilkinson came to stand trial at the High Court in Dundee three months later, two other alleged offences had appeared on the indictment along with the murder charge, narrating how he had punched Pauline on the face and body with his fists and indecently assaulted her before strangling her to death. Allegedly, in the months prior to the killing of Pauline, he had used indecent practices towards two 12-year-old girls in his home and then, on another occasion, with girls aged 13 and 14.

Wilkinson never disputed in court that he had taken Pauline’s life but submitted a plea that he was insane at the time and therefore not responsible for his actions; a defence the Crown rejected.

A prime witness in the case was the accused man’s daughter, the playmate of Pauline, whose evidence was particularly harrowing. Describing the events of the fateful afternoon, she provided the jury of eight men and seven women with a traumatic account of what had taken place, her simple words illustrating the depths of her father’s depravity.

Questioned by Advocate Depute J.G. Milligan for the prosecution, she quietly explained what had occurred.

‘Pauline came home with me that day after school,’ she said. ‘We were playing in my room. My daddy was in the living-room and he gave me some money to buy sweets.

‘Pauline said she would stay with my daddy and I went to get some sweets for both of us.’

The young witness went on to tell how, when she returned home, she found her father and Pauline playing cards. He then took her friend into a bedroom and a short time later she heard screams. It sounded as though Pauline was calling out to go home, she recalled. When her father came out of the room he explained that he’d ‘put his hand across Pauline’s mouth.’

Asked to describe what she saw, the youngster said Pauline was lying on the bedroom floor.

Mr Milligan asked: ‘Was she awake or did she seem to be sleeping?’

‘She seemed to be dead,’ the little girl told the court.

The young witness recounted how her father then instructed her to fetch her skipping rope.