While others in Dundee made preparations to attend Watch-night services in churches across the city, the man who that Christmas Eve had murdered and robbed was on a mounting high that could not be further from the seasonal ethos of goodwill towards men. He returned with his victim’s groceries to Kirkton, still wearing the overcoat which he explained away to other hostel residents as being an early Christmas present from a woman friend, and waving the wad of crisp banknotes which he said were winnings from the horses.
Thompson washed, changed clothes, then headed back to Butterburn Court to view his handiwork. That night he brought Christmas in at Arthur’s Night Club in St Andrew’s Lane. No one who saw him there could have remotely imagined what he had been engaged in a few hours earlier. He danced and laughed, wished other revellers a Merry Christmas and bought drinks for two women he struck up a conversation with. At 2.30 a.m., he and another male left the club with the ladies, going to the home of one of them where Thompson remained, the life and soul of the party, until departing at 5 a.m. Few females could have unwittingly spent Christmas morning in such deadly company.
Whatever else may have been said about Alistair Thompson, he was not a stupid or unintelligent man. Although he had been detained in approved schools, borstal or prison for almost all of his life between the ages of twelve and thirty-five, he had benefited from a good education, gaining Higher passes in modern studies and geography and engaging in a detailed study of political development of the USSR. Reflecting many years later on his troubled childhood at home, he disclosed that the happiest period of his life had been when he was held in Loaningdale Approved School, remaining there longer than he need have done because he volunteered to do so. During his life sentence in Perth Prison he joined the Salvation Army for a brief period and then, after his release on licence and within a year of moving to Dundee, he landed a job at the large NCR factory in the city. Personable and persuasive, he could articulate his thoughts clearly on paper as well as vocally and he was elected by 97 per cent of the workforce as shop steward of his section.
His obvious intelligence made it all the more strange that he seemed to do nothing to conceal the tracks of his iniquitous activities on Christmas Eve. Indeed, he appeared to leave a trail that would inevitably lead to him. In addition to the damning pieces of evidence he left behind, he spoke freely to acquaintances about some of what had taken place. On Christmas Day he borrowed a hacksaw from a friend, explaining that he wanted to cut up some kitchen pipes. The next day he complained that the blade had broken and he was given the loan of a second one. This time, he bizarrely revealed that the true purpose of his request was to enable him to dispose of a body, which he had volunteered to do for two ‘hit men’ from Glasgow who had killed a man. Pressed, he explained that he had made a night-time journey to Dudhope Park, about a mile from the Butterburn Court multi, where he had left some of the body. The head had been placed in a refuse skip in Kirkton, he said, close to where he lived and at that point the remainder of the body was still in a bath of salt and detergent.
Recalling the conversation, the incredulous friend was later to say, ‘I took it all as a joke. He said he was going to have get rid of the rest of the body and said it would take three or four trips with it being heavy.
‘He said the Law hill would be a better place because he wouldn’t have so far to carry them.’
Thompson even put the name of Gordon Dunbar to the remains of the corpse he was so anxious to dispose of. Later, he asked the same man if he had an open coal-fire in his house so he might burn a bank card. These were hardly the words of a man taking every precaution to ensure that his dastardly deed would go undetected.
It isn’t known just how many people ultimately came to suspect Alistair Thompson for the murder which attracted headlines across Britain. Police certainly received a number of calls offering information. One anonymous tip-off said some of the missing body parts could, indeed, be found at Dudhope Park. After officers hurried to the scene, they came upon a number of bags among shrubbery on an access road leading to the car park. These bags contained a lower leg, feet – one in a woman’s stocking – and the remaining arm.
Thompson stood trial at the High Court in Edinburgh and the ghastly nature of the case guaranteed a rapt audience among those who packed the public benches and the thousands throughout the country who followed every word of the newspaper reports.
It was not, however, a case which contained many complications as far as the evidence was concerned. Although he exercised his right not to go into the witness-box, Thompson’s admission to some of his friends – who were called by the Crown – made it clear his position was that he had dismembered and disposed of the body, but that he had not been the person who had carried out the killing. The possessions he had of the victim – the long coat, bracelet and a key-fob – had been found by himself. In the circumstances, it was probably the best defence he could muster. There was an abundance of evidence linking him with the sad figure of Gordon Dunbar and even more which pointed to him having cut up the body in the bathroom of 9L Butterburn Court. His incredible story that he had simply been assisting two ‘heavies’ from Glasgow, in return for them being prepared to assault a brother he despised, did not exercise the minds of the jury overly long. Although the trial had lasted for nine days, they took only seventy minutes to return with their verdict. As they filed back into court, each juror was treated to a penetrating stare from the dark, deep-set eyes of the grey-haired, bearded man in the dock. None of them returned his gaze. Juries which unanimously convict seldom look at the man they are about to despatch to prison; this jury was no exception.
Lord Weir did not suffer the same inhibitions. He fixed the slightly built man who stood defiantly before him with an unwavering look and almost spat the words:
The jury have convicted you of nauseating and barbaric crimes. The sentence is imprisonment for life.
In view of the fact you have previously been convicted of murder and in view of the wicked nature of these crimes, it is my duty to recommend to the Secretary of State that you should not be released on licence until at least twenty years have elapsed.
After Thompson was removed from the dock, the judge turned to face the jury. With sympathy replacing the venom he had directed at the accused man, His Lordship told them softly, ‘I would not have wished your task on my worst enemy. You have had to listen to distasteful and horrendous evidence and have stuck to your task manfully. Your part in this sordid affair is now at an end.’
It was not the finish of the story, however, as far as the man who had been incarcerated for his second life sentence was concerned. Three months after ending up once more in Perth Prison, Thompson revealed to an acquaintance where he had taken some of the other body parts, even drawing on a biscuit wrapper a map pinpointing the location under a disused rail bridge in Strathmartine Road, near Kirkton. They were discovered precisely where he had indicated. But despite a massive citywide search, the head of his victim was never found, though it was suspected it may have been deposited in a rubbish skip near the killer’s home in Haldane Terrace.
Nearly two years later, Thompson was back in the dock in Edinburgh, this time to hear the Court of Criminal Appeal turn down his plea that he had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. He was well used to protesting his innocence. Four days after beginning his second life term, Thompson had penned an eloquent, perfectly punctuated, 3,000-word letter to the
Courier
newspaper – which went unpublished – the thrust of which was that he had not killed his grandmother. He also gave a detailed, and in places, moving account of his largely institutionalised life.
Turning to the murder of Gordon Dunbar, the butcher of Butterburn Court concluded:
The jury reached a verdict and though I could argue that it was the wrong one I cannot but accept it and in accepting it I accept that I am likely to die in prison. There is nothing else that can be done to me than that and it is a punishment I would not wish on my worst enemy.
12
When the curtain of rage that had descended over her at last lifted, the child-killer smoothed her dress and walked from the room, not even looking back as she gently closed the bedroom door behind her. The injuries she had inflicted were violent, sustained and quite deliberate. Pretty Helen Laird had been hit, repeatedly bitten and strangled. She was found in bed in her home in Blacklock Crescent, part of the Linlathen timber-house estate on Dundee’s north-eastern perimeter, at 1.20 in the morning and to this day no one knows why she had to die. She was only just three and the birthday presents she had received four days earlier still lay in the room beside her.
The person who caused the little child to suffer was also in the house, sleeping on a couch, and she couldn’t explain either what little Helen had done to bring on such a ferocious attack. Whatever it was, the unaccountable fury that detonated inside her that September night in 1972 thrust upon Annette McGowan the kind of infamy that usually exists only in the dark pages of horror stories. At thirteen years of age, Annette that day became the youngest killer her native city had ever known; indeed, she was, and remains, among the most tender-aged females to have taken a life anywhere in Britain. If this notoriety conjures up images of a juvenile monster, evil beyond words and capable of the worst kind of unspeakable atrocities, that would be a mistake.
For in reality Annette was the second victim in this wretched encounter when death came calling. By any definition, she deserved much of the sympathy that came her way. Some even thought she should not have been alone when she came to sit in the dock of the High Court to answer for her actions.
The events that took her there were straightforward enough. The mothers of the two girls were friends, living in neighbouring estates with unhappy marriages behind them. Between them they had ten children – Annette was one of seven to her 37-year-old mother, Mary McGowan, and Helen was the youngest of three daughters to 32-year-old Sheila Laird. The two women who bore these offspring were like many others of their generation – young mothers in post-war Dundee, a city struggling to come to terms with high unemployment and doing its best to house much of its population in new, but soulless, housing developments far from the city centre. Broken marriages abounded and the women left with the children sought an outlet from their boredom and enforced poverty with nights out at bingo parlours, or on drinking binges. The age had passed when women did not enter a public house without the company of a man and, like the bingo palaces, lounge bars with live music were flourishing in the city. That Saturday night the mothers of the two children went to visit one of them, The Blair, halfway down Princes Street and on the bus route from Linlathen into town. Thirteen-year-old Annette, not for the first time, was called upon to babysit for the Laird children – Helen (3), Susan (5) and Elizabeth (7).
The mothers departed in mid-evening and, in their terms, the night turned out to be a resounding success. They met two men and went off with them to a party in another part of town. At 1.20 the following morning, the pair finally returned to Blacklock Crescent. When they entered the house, Annette, who had been sleeping on a settee in the living-room of the flat, woke up. Mrs Laird went to check on her three daughters but could not find Helen in either of the two bedrooms. The two older children, who shared a bed, were roused and when Elizabeth was asked where her youngest sister was, she pointed to the bottom of the bed and answered, ‘There. She’s there.’ Anxiously pulling back the blankets, the mother saw the still, cold figure of Helen huddled in a corner at the base of the bed. She knew instantly that she was not sleeping.
‘Helen’s dead,’ she shouted over and over. By this time Mrs McGowan was in the room and she desperately lifted the little girl into her arms and tried as best as she knew how to administer the kiss of life. It brought no reaction from the child who had long stopped breathing.
Later that day, Annette was charged with her murder.
Eleven weeks on, and with Christmas just a week away, Annette McGowan sat nervously in the dock of the High Court in Dundee as the whole bewildering panoply of a trial in the most solemn court in the land was played out before her. She wore a dark coat and bright, multi-coloured dress and tightly clutched the hand of the policewoman seated beside her.
The question of who had killed little Helen was never really an issue. A dental expert told the jury that he ‘did not entertain the slightest doubt’ that the many bite marks had been inflicted by the 13-year-old babysitter. What required to be determined was the level of guilt that should attach to the child perpetrator of the manual strangulation that had brought on the death. Was it culpable homicide, as had ultimately been libelled, or should the charge be reduced to assault because of the special circumstances surrounding the case?
There were plenty of those. Psychiatrists explained to the court that Annette suffered from a mental disorder linked with epilepsy and also an unusual genetic eye condition which was known to be associated with other defects. She was of diminished responsibility. Mr R. D. MacKay, the prosecuting advocate depute, told the jurors they faced a task more difficult than the one usually confronting juries, because they could not allow the facts to be clouded by sympathy and emotion.