The escape had been six months in the planning and was masterminded by Mone with almost military precision. Between them the two cold psychopaths had spent weeks fashioning a deadly arsenal of weapons, somehow managing to conceal them within the west wing of the institution. This arsenal included two wire garrottes, an axe, several knives and a sword. In addition, they had constructed a rope-ladder and had stolen false beards and moustaches from the hospital drama group. They also possessed forged identity cards, nurse’s hats, £25 in cash and a torch.
The timing of the breakout had been worked out with the same meticulous detail as the rest of the plan. It would happen after the drama group finished reading extracts from John Steinbeck’s book
Of Mice and Men
. When the escape was launched McCulloch, a one-time painter and decorator, strapped on a home-made belt that carried three knives and the axe. Mone had knives concealed in his shirt and trousers and believed the sight of them would be enough to frighten anyone who got in his way. He was convinced the escape would succeed without the need for bloodshed. He clearly knew nothing of the evil which lurked within his 26-year-old companion.
Entering a safe-cupboard where Neil MacLellan, their supervising nursing officer, was speaking to another patient, Ian Simpson, the pair unleashed their attack. Mone threw paintstripper into the face of Simpson (a double-killer who had been sent to Carstairs fourteen years earlier after being found insane and unfit to plead to his crimes). Mone had intended that the liquid would be enough to overcome any resistance and that the victims would be locked in the cupboard, allowing the rest of the escape to proceed unhindered. But Simpson and MacLellan put up an unexpectedly powerful fight and the carefully prepared plan almost foundered in the first minutes. While Mone grappled with Simpson from the front, McCulloch attacked him from behind with the axe. Blood spurted over Mone.
Then McCulloch turned his attentions to the nursing officer who was desperately trying to overcome the effects of the paintstripper sprayed into his eyes. McCulloch pulled out one of his knives and slashed repeatedly at the nursing officer, finally sitting astride him and swinging the cleaver. As he continued his murderous attack, McCulloch shouted at Mone to find the keys to lock their victims in the cupboard. While he was doing so, he saw Simpson stir and reach out for one of the knives that lay discarded on the floor. Mone lifted up a pitchfork that had been left lying against the office wall and returned to the fray, thrusting the twin forks into the already seriously wounded Simpson, who collapsed, all resistance ebbing away.
Then the architect of the scrupulously prepared escape moved on to the next phase of his plan, cutting the wires of the internal and external phones. As the partners in murder prepared to don their makeshift nurse’s caps and false beards and moustaches to begin the journey to the perimeter fence, McCulloch called out that he was returning to the cupboard to seize the keys to the drama-room doors, which surprised Mone since the doors were already open.
The little Dundonian did not understand the man he had idolised for four years as well as he thought. McCulloch was by now less interested in locking doors than satisfying his bloodlust. Inside the cupboard, he flashed his axe again and again, reigning blows on the heads of the helpless Simpson and MacLellan, stopping only when it was clear he had at last ended their lives. Like a matador, he claimed his prize, slicing off both of Simpson’s ears.
By the time the escapees had scaled the barbed-wire fence using the rope-ladder they had so painstakingly fashioned, it was 6.30 p.m. Another half-hour was to elapse before the corpses would be found in the social club.
In the meantime, Mone was successfully executing another crucial chapter of his precisely planned escape programme. He lay down on one of the main roads within the greater hospital precincts, carefully positioning himself to look like an accident victim. McCulloch, by this time wearing his nurse’s hat and false beard and moustache, stood at the roadside and waved his torch to signal to the first car that come along to stop. After being informed that there had been an ‘accident’, the driver, Robert McCallum, left his vehicle to give assistance.
The steps he took through the darkness towards Mone, who was preparing to spring to life, might have been the last he would ever have taken but for a chance twist in the unfolding events. A passing police car on routine patrol unexpectedly arrived on the scene and pulled to a halt, its two constables alighting to offer aid.
Moments later the second bloodbath of the day was being enacted. The defenceless officers could do little to protect themselves as the escapees launched an attack. Mone by now had possession of a woodcutter’s axe and McCulloch swung his cleaver with practised ease. Both of them carried knives in their other hands.
Of the victims, PC John Gillies survived but PC George Taylor was not so lucky. Although he managed to stagger away from the bloody scene, he later died from his horrific injuries.
Robert McCallum, who had fled in his car while the first exchanges were taken place, alerted a gatekeeper to the horrific drama being played out in the shadows a short distance away. While the shocked gatekeeper urgently telephoned the police, the two crazed escapees raced from the scene in the stolen police panda car, McCulloch at the wheel and frantic to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the hospital. Mone tried to operate the police radio to find out how much the authorities knew of their whereabouts, but was unsuccessful. Ten miles along the road, they hit a patch of ice and skidded off the road, the car ploughing into an embankment and being rendered immobile. Mone’s head shattered the windscreen and he fell unconscious for a few moments. He came round to hear McCulloch shouting to two men travelling the same road in a van who had witnessed the crash and who had stopped to give assistance.
‘Help me with the prisoner,’ McCulloch called.
As they came over, both were set upon, one being struck on the head by McCulloch, the other being stabbed seven times by Mone. Then the two dazed and bleeding Samaritans were dragged into the back of their own van, which McCulloch had commandeered to continue the flight to freedom.
Once more the poor driving skills of the bloodthirsty killer let him down. After successfully getting clear of the area, McCulloch later drove into a field because he thought he saw the lights of a police roadblock ahead. The vehicle became bogged down and the pair ran off into the darkness, leaving their two captives in the rear of the van alive. Mone and McCulloch disappeared in the direction of lights they saw shining from a farmhouse. On the way, they were forced to wade into a stream. McCulloch crossed without difficulty, but Mone lost his footing and became stranded and called out to his fellow-killer to help. McCulloch looked back from the bank, pondering whether to leave the little Dundonian where he was, then stretched out the shaft of the axe for Mone to grasp and be pulled clear.
It was fortunate that the farmer who opened the door to their insistent knocking did not know the full history of the two desperate men who had come calling, for it is difficult to imagine a more terrifying scenario. Facing him were two mud and blood-spattered psychopathic killers on the run from the high-security state mental hospital for the criminally insane: they were armed with an axe and knives; in their young lives they had, between them, shot three people; and earlier that evening they had hacked to death three others. In the same bloody orgy that night, three others had been injured by the weapons the visitors now brandished.
As they forced their way into the isolated farmhouse, Mone and McCulloch pulled the phone from the wall. The farmer’s four children ran terrified down the hall into the arms of their mother. Fortunately, the escapees showed no inclination to linger. They wanted only the family car, parked outside, to continue their frantic journey, for they were still within twenty-five miles of the scene of horror that was just beginning to be fully pieced together at Carstairs. Inexplicably, it took the hospital managers forty minutes to set off the escape siren after the corpse of Nursing Officer Neil MacLellan had first been discovered.
It was to be almost another two hours before one of the most dramatic nights ever played out in Scotland came to an end. The breakout duo sped away from the farm and headed south for England. By now police all over Lanarkshire and the Borders had been alerted to the atrocities at Carstairs and the stolen Austin was sighted by officers on the A74. A high-speed chase reaching 90 m.p.h. followed and police vehicles pursued the car all the way to the border and beyond. Finally, just north of Carlisle, a police car packed with armed officers rammed the getaway vehicle, but the desperate duo were still not finished. They attempted to hijack another car and Mone, still holding on to his knife, was dragged, struggling from the passenger seat, by a police officer who grasped the blade in his hand and held it firmly. McCulloch was captured by other officers as he threatened the car driver with his axe. Their bloody flight to freedom had at last come to an end.
When the pair were searched, McCulloch was found to be carrying a faked identity card bearing his photograph and purporting to show him as an inspector of the Apprentice Scheme of the Building Industry of Scotland. Mone possessed an identity card in the name of ‘Thomas Hunt’. His photograph depicted him wearing a false moustache and dark glasses, with his hair combed back.
The three Cumbrian police officers who captured the killers were each awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal.
Three months later, when they appeared in the High Court, McCulloch admitted killing Nursing Officer Neil MacLellan, fellow patient Ian Simpson and PC George Taylor. Mone admitted murdering the policeman. Lord Dunpark, saying the pair had been involved in the ‘most deliberately brutal murders he had dealt with’, ordered that they spend the rest of their natural lives in prison.
It was not to be the last time the name Mone was to terrorise a community, however…
Almost two years later, at the very start of 1979, Detective Chief Inspector David Fotheringham sifted through the daily missing-persons reports which were routinely passed from the uniformed section of Dundee police to the CID. Usually they reported nothing more sinister than a runaway teenager or an assaulted wife who had walked out on her husband. More often than not they were returned to the beat officer for action, when time permitted.
That morning, something told the experienced detective that the report detailing the disappearance of 78-year-old Miss Agnes Waugh from her home in Kinghorne Road required closer examination, and with some urgency. The elderly woman had not been seen for a few days, since the afternoon of 29 December, and the circumstances following her departure from her usual routine raised suspicions. She lived in Gray Memorial House, a block of flats on the side of the Law, known locally as ‘No-man’s Land’ because the letting regulations stipulated that the houses could be rented only to females. Other occupants had become alarmed when they found the door of her flat open and the gas fire in the living-room on, with no sign of Miss Waugh. Checks at the hospitals were negative. There was also snow on the ground and she was unlikely to have wandered far.
Detective Chief Inspector Fotheringham launched a major hunt, sending uniformed and plain-clothes officers into the area and instructing that every other flat in the block should be entered, even if it meant breaking down the doors of any which were locked.
That proved unnecessary. There was only one house, on the ground floor, where no one appeared to be at home. On the afternoon of 4 January, a detective went to the rear of the house and forced open the living-room window and pulled aside the curtains. At the far end of the room, and barely visible in the fading light, a lifeless hand and arm dangled from a bed recess.
When the startled officer and a colleague burst their way in they found a scene more macabre than anything they would ever witness in the worst kind of horror film. On the bed was the body of a woman in her twenties with a stocking and an electric flex knotted round her neck. In armchairs at either side of the fireplace, facing each other, were the corpses of two women in their seventies, both with stockings tied tightly round their necks and knotted several times. Each of the women were bound to their chairs at their wrists and ankles by polythene bags. All three women had been severely beaten about the face.
The two elderly women were quickly identified as Mrs Jane Simpson (70), the occupant of the flat, and the missing Miss Waugh, whose flat was at the other end of the ground-floor corridor. Just as the initial efforts were being made to determine who the third victim was, an agitated man appeared on the scene, concerned about his bride of less than two weeks whom he had reported missing after she vanished on 29 December – exactly a week after the wedding and the first time she had gone out without him since their marriage. She had departed to visit the bank and to shop, though he suspected she may also have gone drinking. He had learned of the discovery of the corpses and, knowing his wife had frequented the Hilltown area on previous drinking binges, he feared the worse. His name was John Millar and a short time later he identified the third body as his 29-year-old wife Catherine.
Forensic experts confirmed that the women had been dead for several days, probably since 29 December, when both Miss Waugh and Mrs Millar had last been seen. The post-mortem revealed that the oldest woman had an unusual injury on her right cheek. Among the bruises, probably inflicted by punches, was a wound that was consistent with her attacker having worn a prominent ring. It was to prove a vital – and extremely ironic – piece of evidence.