The Law Killers (24 page)
‘He put it round Pauline’s neck and pulled it tight,’ she said, adding that she also saw him punching Pauline on the head.
The girl’s evidence continued: ‘Daddy got a big case and put Pauline in it. He took her down to the backs and I stayed in the house. He came back and began to wash the blood from the suitcase. He had taken off her pants and socks. He put them in a bucket and put something in the bucket. He seemed to be cleaning it.’
Mr Milligan: ‘Did your father say anything more to you?’
‘Yes. If you tell anybody, I’ll do the same to you,’ was the response.
It is difficult to imagine any other words which could be more despicable coming from a father to his young daughter and some in the courtroom were visibly stunned at their utterance. Yet, for all its vileness, the threat appeared to have done little to alter the natural feelings of affection most children have for a parent.
Continuing to describe the circumstances of Pauline’s death, the schoolgirl told how Wilkinson had instructed her to go over the house with an air freshener and to tell anyone who asked that Pauline had gone home of her own accord. Occasionally, throughout her evidence, she looked towards her father in the dock and smiled.
Cross-examined by defence advocate Mr Edgar Prais, she was asked where her mother was.
‘Mummy has been in England since I was five,’ she replied. Questioned further, she explained that her father had been looking after her and that she still loved him.
Wilkinson displayed little emotion during the trial. It was only when the prosecution later referred to the threat to ‘do the same’ to his daughter that he became agitated to any extent, calling out several times: ‘Keep my daughter out of this.’
Dr Hector Fowlie, a psychiatrist, told the court that at first, on the balance of probabilities, he had believed that Wilkinson would have been insane at the time he had killed Pauline but he had altered his opinion after hearing the evidence of the accused’s daughter. If her account was true, Wilkinson would have been sane but suffering from a degree of diminished responsibility, he said. The doctor went on to explain that in an interview Wilkinson had said he could not recollect killing Pauline but had spoken of ‘coming out of a blackout and finding himself kneeling over her body in a bedroom.’ He had then admitted to pushing the body under a bed, then later, to washing her socks and pants and body after seeing blood on them. Wilkinson had also confessed to placing Pauline’s corpse in a bin recess before returning to the house to watch television. Afterwards, he’d gone to a bar and consumed three pints of beer.
During their interview, Wilkinson had further admitted to lying to Pauline’s parents and the police about her whereabouts, saying: ‘By that time I was frantic because I thought I had killed her, though I didn’t know how.’
Dr Fowlie also advised the court that he had treated Wilkinson in psychiatric units at various times some two years earlier because of a personality disorder associated with epilepsy. After his first marriage broke up, Wilkinson had married an 18-year-old girl but that had lasted only about a month because of frequent arguments about her going out with other men.
The jury unanimously rejected the accused’s plea of being insane at the time of the killing and convicted him of culpable homicide on the grounds of his diminished responsibility. Lord Leechman sent him to the state mental hospital at Carstairs, ordering that he be detained without limit of time. The jury also convicted Wilkinson of the indecency offences against the two 12-year-old girls but, on the instructions of the bench, he was found not guilty of the charges relating to the 13- and 14-year-old girls.
Wilkinson’s impassive state had returned by the time the verdicts were announced. After being sentenced he said nothing, simply turning away from the jury to stride quickly across the dock and down to the cells.
However, like others before him from Dundee whose monstrous crimes had taken them to the high security hospital in central Scotland, it was far from the last the public was to hear about the paedophile killer with the Jekyll and Hyde personality.
More than two decades after being removed from society to be held at Carstairs, he was back in court, not as a result of any other offence but to argue for his freedom. Some months earlier a fellow inmate at the hospital, Alexander Reid, had successfully won a ruling for his release after being detained for 30 years for stabbing a woman to death. Reid had argued that he should be discharged from the institution because he was not receiving treatment which could alleviate or prevent a deterioration in his condition, his personality disorder being untreatable. Although Reid continued to be held pending the result of an appeal by the then Scottish Secretary, Donald Dewar, it provided Wilkinson with the legal precedent to launch proceedings of his own.
The Dundee child killer, then aged 50, claimed there were no grounds to prolong his confinement because sexual deviancy, such as paedophilia, was not a mental disorder covered by the Mental Health Scotland Act, the law under which he was being held.
The case and its possible consequences for others held under similar court orders, prompted considerable interest in Scotland and beyond, once again gaining Wilkinson national headlines. The prospect of Wilkinson’s release was said to have alarmed staff at Carstairs, one declaring publicly that he was a ‘dangerous psychopath’ and ‘a typical child killer who was a model patient never causing problems but never discussing his crime or expressing remorse’.
Five psychiatrists were consulted by the courts, three of whom said Wilkinson was suffering from a mental disorder, and two that he was not. No one disputed that he was a paedophile, nor that there was a risk he could once again offend against children. Ultimately, it was ruled by a bench of Appeal Court judges that Wilkinson should not be freed, on the basis that he was not being held solely because of his paedophilia but because of his psychopathic condition. Reid’s earlier successful plea for discharge from Carstairs was eventually overturned by appeal judges in the House of Lords, the highest court in the land.
Wilkinson was present at all the hearings when his case was being argued and the high profile nature of his attempt to return to society meant few with an interest in his abhorrent attack on Pauline McIver were unaware of when he would be brought out of the mental institution to attend court. A close male relative of Pauline had followed the various proceedings with considerable interest and when Wilkinson was taken to the Court of Session in 1997 for his case to be heard by Lord Marnoch, the man was seated in the public benches. When the court rose for lunch, and as the child killer was being escorted out, the opportunity to relieve almost quarter of a century of pent-up anger proved too great to resist. The man sprang from his seat, attacking Wilkinson and knocking him to the floor. Legally, the action constituted an assault. Morally, there were few who disagreed with it.
17
The opening scenes are like sequences from a film – a bunch of boisterous students are taking advantage of an unusually warm spring evening to kick a ball about on a stretch of grass near their halls of residence. The ball bounces into the back garden of a house and rolls slowly down a flight of steps into an open basement area. One of the students shouts mockingly over his shoulder at his friend’s lack of kicking skill and takes the steps two at a time to recover the ball. He picks it up and is about to throw it back into play, when he notices a broken pane of glass in a conservatory attached to the house. He peers inquisitively through the window and, staring back at him but seeing nothing, are the bloodstained corpses of an elderly man and a woman …
It is 6.30 p.m. on Sunday, 17 May 1980. Within an hour the handsome, detached villa at 2 Roseangle is sealed off and teams of detectives and forensic scientists are swarming all over it. For the four young footballers, all students at Dundee University on the opposite side of the road from the house with a commanding view of the Tay estuary, a Sunday-evening kickabout would never be the same again. Their grim discovery launched a murder hunt that would soon stretch the length and breadth of Britain, leaving a bloody trail and other dead victims of a crazed psychopath.
It all began more than twenty-four hours earlier, on the Saturday evening, when the occupants of the imposing villa – retired doctor Alexander Wood and his wife Dorothy (both 78) – heard noises coming from their basement. They entered to find a man with his back to them who turned, startled, at their entrance. It is difficult to know who was most surprised, but Dorothy reacted instinctively and stepped towards the intruder, who was aged about thirty. She shouted for her husband – disabled and with an artificial leg and who had been released from hospital only the day before – to call for the police, all the while pointing her finger in the face of the stranger in her home. He too reacted without thought and grabbed her arm. At the sight of this apparent attack on his distraught wife, Dr Wood moved forward to protect Dorothy and began lashing at the excited man with his walking stick. Dorothy tugged desperately at the stranger’s hair and the man shouted that he didn’t want to hurt either of them, but as the doctor struck him once more with his cane, that is exactly what he did.
Reason left the man and he turned to pick up a slater’s hammer that lay in the basement. Screaming and shouting at the two old-age pensioners who had tried so gamely to protect themselves and their home, he lashed out, swinging the hammer-headed, hooked weapon and punching them at the same time.
Even the demented attacker did not know how long the frenzy lasted. The passage of time ceased for him as he rained blows on the helpless couple and his next recollection was standing gazing down at their dead bodies lying before him on the floor, covered in blood. He began to shake and simultaneously laugh and weep. Then he vomited and for the next two hours he sat on the floor beside the corpses.
But reason had not entirely left him. Remembering why he had entered the house through the basement window, the housebreaker-turned-double-killer made a quick search of other parts of the villa and loaded silverware and jewellery into one of the family’s suitcases. He took rings and watches, necklaces and earrings and even a tea-set, a haul valued at £2,000.
Then he put on Dr Wood’s raincoat to cover his own blood-soaked shirt and, glancing once more at his tragic victims, quickly left the house and hurried down Perth Road. He did not stop walking until he arrived at the railway station and seemed oblivious to the fact that he presented a noticeable figure, being dressed for rain on one of the warmest evenings of the year. A short time later, he boarded a train for London.
During the coming days, while the man sought refuge in various areas of the south coast of England and sold the stolen jewellery, police in Dundee tried to make sense of the savage attack which had stunned the city. Detective Chief Superintendent James Cameron, leading the murder hunt, had investigated his share of brutal killings in his time, but was clearly shaken at what he had seen in the basement of 2 Roseangle. Appealing for witnesses, he unusually broadened the call for assistance to include members of the Dundee underworld, stating publicly that the degree of violence was not normal for them and he was convinced that they would feel the same abhorrence as he did at what had taken place.
It was a plea that brought results and several housebreakers made contact to pass on points of information, at the same time expressing their distaste at the fate of the two helpless 78-year-olds. Yet there was nothing which gave the merest hint as to who might have been responsible. Door-to-door enquiries were stepped up and renewed appeals were launched through the media. A breakthrough seemed imminent when a local GP came forward to say she had been troubled by a fear that the dreadful slaughter might have been committed by one of her patients. She had racked her conscience and had decided it was her duty to pass on the name of the man she suspected. It was the kind of assistance the murder team was hoping for and the lead was immediately followed up – only for it to fall at the first hurdle when the suspect provided an impeccable alibi for the relevant times.
Among the other witnesses who came forward were several students who had lazed that sunny May afternoon on the lawns at Seabraes, the green oasis in Perth Road which almost forms part of the Dundee University campus. It was where the quartet of footballing students had played and where the always neatly trimmed grass adjoined the home of the Woods. The sunbathers told of seeing the old couple outside the house in late afternoon, waving off their dentist son Nicholas, who was travelling back to his home in Banchory. It was believed he was the last person – apart from the killer – to have seen the elderly couple alive, and that they had probably perished within an hour of his departure.
One of those who responded to the police appeals for help was a young woman who worked in the Labour Club, a short distance from the Woods’ villa. She recalled that on the Saturday afternoon an ‘odd-looking’ man had arrived at the door of the club to ask for directions to the home of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Dunkeld, whose official residence was in Roseangle. She gave a good description of the strange visitor, whom she thought was aged about thirty, and remarked that he stood out because of the dated style of shirt with its large floral patterns that he wore. At the bishop’s house, door-to-door enquiries revealed that a man fitting the same description had suddenly appeared in the garden there, but he had quickly departed after being confronted by the priest’s housekeeper.