The New Year of 1976 was less than three hours old when 16-year-old schoolboy Barrie Michael Seabright contacted police to admit to a double murder in the family home. Unsurprisingly, given that it was New Year’s morning when drunken calls to police headquarters are not particularly unusual, PC Alexander MacDonald and Sergeant Peter Brown were not entirely sure what to expect when they went to the house in Balunie Crescent. They walked in on a scene of unimaginable horror. A badly injured man lay in a bedroom bleeding profusely from a number of wounds. In the hall, a woman, also with several severe lesions, was pinned to the floor with a three-foot sabre through her stomach. Both were barely alive and blood saturated many parts of the house. The male, defying expectations, survived his dreadful injuries but the female died a short time afterwards.
The story that unfolded seemed to come straight from the pages of a paperback on Satanism. The schoolboy killer-confessor explained that earlier that morning he had brought New Year in with his father, Frederick, and his father’s partner, Barbara Brown. He had then gone for a walk and, after returning home, had been compelled by voices urging him to kill. Watching, as though through someone else’s eyes, he said, he had taken an ornamental sabre to hack down his father and then Barbara Brown. Throughout it all, the voice in his ear repeated over and over, ‘Got to kill. Got to kill.’ and he swung the sabre again and again.
When he was done, he picked up the phone, and recounted to a startled operator what had taken place.
Although he was considered sane and fit to plead, Barrie Seabright was said to have been suffering from diminished responsibility at the time of his fearsome attacks and the original charges of murder and attempted murder were dropped to be replaced by culpable homicide and assault, to which he pled guilty. His defence counsel, Donald Macaulay QC, described the circumstances as unusual and disturbing, saying Seabright had not previously evinced any animosity to either of the victims.
‘It was completely irrational and out of character,’ he said. ‘He had apparently been taken possession of by some force which motivated him to kill for no apparent reason.’
The 16-year-old himself admitted that at the time he would have killed anyone, even the first person he saw. His father told the authorities that he and his son had been interested in black magic, though he did not know if this had any bearing on the New Year’s Day events.
Lord Dunpark listened intently to reports from psychiatrists before ordering that Seabright be detained in a young offenders’ institution for twelve years. He said the ‘bizarre accounts’ of the teenager’s mental condition meant he should be subject during that time to periodic mental assessment.
*****
Another youth to use a telephone kiosk as a confessional box was 18-year-old Walter Robert Donachy, who visited one immediately after killing the uncle he had been named after, in an axe attack. The baby-faced 5 foot, 2 inch teenager had gone to live with Walter Williamson, his mother’s brother, after being discharged from the army a few months earlier because of an ear complaint.
The relationship between the two had been reasonable enough, except when 47-year-old Walter senior had taken drink. Then he would turn on his diminutive nephew and arguments would rage. The one that erupted on a bright May evening in 1971 had its customary roots in drink. The pair consumed two bottles of sherry and some beer between them and the usual pattern ensued when Uncle Walter began to pick on the teenager – only this time he lifted a poker and moved towards the youth.
Fearing for his life, the 18-year-old reached out for an axe which had been left on a sideboard after his uncle had finished chopping firewood. He caught the advancing figure of the older man several times on the head, inflicting fatal wounds.
Moments after the dying man sank to the floor, reason abruptly returned for little Walter Donachy. He gazed unbelieving at the body at his feet and the blood spreading in a crimson pool across the floor. The axe seemed to be held in a hand which was not his. He opened his fingers and it dropped beside the body where all movement had ceased. Then, as though slowly awakening from a dream, he put on a jacket, locked up and walked from the tenement flat in Fintry Crescent.
He continued his unhurried journey for almost two miles until he found a phone box. When he spoke to a policeman the words were as explicit as they were extraordinary. The whole story was recounted in detail and after he had finished, the incredulous officer asked him to remain where he was.
The killer with the boyish looks and slender frame waited patiently outside the telephone box in the fine evening sunshine until a constable arrived a short time later to take him away.
When his time came to stand trial, the 18-year-old denied the murder, pleading self-defence. It was not a submission that convinced a sufficient number of jurors. After retiring for only thirty minutes, the jury foreman announced that they had found Walter Donachy guilty as libelled by a 10–5 majority. As he walked from the dock to start his life sentence wearing his favourite brown, fringed cowboy-style jacket, he paused and turned towards his mother, who sat sobbing in the public benches. Looking at her with tears in his eyes, he called out, ‘It’s OK, Mum. They canna shoot us.’
*****
When George Glennie’s turn came to confess, it was a more gradual, but in the end, equally urgent process. While detective teams scoured Dundee and beyond for the person who had strangled and stabbed to death a 45-year-old spinster in her own home, he lived with the knowledge of his actions for three days, outwardly appearing his usual relaxed, untroubled self. Inwardly, however, he was in turmoil.
His journey to repentance for the most wicked of all crimes began, if not innocently, certainly not especially unusually. In November 1985 he was aged twenty-eight, in a loving and happy marriage and in steady employment. During the six years of their union he had never displayed any violence towards his wife and their relationship was strong and apparently fulfilling. They had two young sons, on which their father doted. George Glennie considered his marriage to be the most important thing in his life.
At work – he was a packer in a city textile factory – he was described as popular and cheery, well liked by his colleagues, who found him easy-going and uncomplicated. Among those to develop a fondness for him was 45-year-old Rhoda Allan, a winder at the Tay Spinners plant in Arbroath Road. Other workmates knew her as a ‘quiet, religious woman’. She was also lonely.
When the young father told her his wife worked on permanent night shift, Miss Allan apparently invited him to visit her at her home in Bridgend Street any time he wanted company. He declined the invitation at first, but after it had been repeated on several occasions, he eventually paid her a call. They had sex. Other requests to make follow-up visits were declined, until one Sunday evening after Glennie had spent the day decorating at home. He phoned Miss Allan, then travelled the short distance from his own house to hers. Again they enjoyed intercourse.
It was while they lay together in bed that life began to unravel for George Glennie. Overcome by guilt at what had taken place and reflecting that he had left his loving wife and two sons at home, he told his companion that he would not be making any more visits. Angry words were exchanged and it seems the woman at his side became distraught, furiously threatening to inform his wife of his infidelity. It was not an entirely unexpected reaction, for Miss Allan was not always stable. In the previous six years, she had been a regular caller to the Dundee Samaritans and only the evening before had contacted them because she felt unhappy. She confessed that she had been so low she had taken six sleeping tablets.
Glennie was to say that he had little recollection of the immediate aftermath of their quarrel. His first clear memory of events after the shouted row was when he found himself standing beside the bed with a knife in his hand. His mind had apparently erased the fact that in the preceding minutes he had used his trouser belt to strangle the woman he had gone to visit, then stabbed her a total of twenty-seven times – eleven in the neck and sixteen in the chest.
The unlikely killer returned home and, for the rest of the day and all of the next, acted as though life was continuing to run its easy and uneventful course.
By the Tuesday morning, however, and after another night without sleep, he could no longer maintain any pretence of normality. When it came time to make his routine call home from work to his wife at 8.10 a.m., he blurted out the details of his actions that Sunday evening. In shock, his wife hung up. Four times more he called to repeat his story, saying he was about to give himself up. His parting words to the stunned woman he loved were, ‘Say cheerio to the bairns.’
A short time later, in the centre of town, George Glennie walked up to a police constable who was on traffic points duty in Cowgate to tell the startled officer, ‘You’d better take me to headquarters. The murder – it was me.’
With more than a little unreality surrounding his actions, the policeman asked the man who had just confessed to a brutal killing to wait on the pavement while he summoned a replacement to take over traffic-directing operations. When they finally started to make their way to headquarters in Bell Street, Glennie’s legs buckled beneath him and he had to be supported for the remainder of the journey.
The High Court proceedings that followed the bizarre confession were uncomplicated. The accused man denied murdering his mistress, but was prepared instead to admit to culpable homicide on the grounds that he had no memory of what had taken place and that he had been provoked by his victim’s threat to inform his wife of their relationship.
The jury did not agree with his proposition. An hour and a half after retiring, they decided by a majority that his uncharacteristic conduct in the bedroom that Sunday evening amounted to murder. He was given the mandatory life sentence. Ten years later, almost to the day, he was released on licence, one of the shortest periods anyone will serve after being convicted of murder.
*****
Edward Burns, a 43-year-old father of nine, wasted no time in confessing to his deadly deed. Indeed, he was so swift with his admission he had shot and killed his rival in love that police were not even aware murder had already come calling.
It was a simple and not unfamiliar scenario that figuratively and literally triggered the dramatic chain of events of 14 November 1967. Several months earlier, his wife had walked out of their home in Devon to go off with David Horsburgh, a family friend with whom she had been involved in a romantic liaison for some time. The pair found their way to Scotland, eventually settling in a rented semi-detached villa in Tullideph Road, Dundee.
Burns, desperate for a reconciliation and demented by jealousy, eventually tracked them to the city but had no knowledge of where they had set up home. Knowing that 40-year-old Horsburgh was a bus driver, the jilted husband waited outside the main coach depot in town until he spotted his rival coming off shift. Then he followed him back to Tullideph Road.
As Horsburgh was putting his key into the lock of the front door, he heard his name being called. Turning, he was confronted by Burns, who was waving a shotgun and demanding to know why his life had been so devastated. Seconds later, a blast of gunfire brought neighbours rushing to their windows. By the time they had pulled their curtains apart, the Englishman who had recently moved into the street lay prostrate in a pool of blood on his doorstep. Even as they observed the scene, a white car pulled away from the pavement, disappearing in the direction of the city centre.
Behind the wheel, Burns drove sedately but purposefully. Less than ten minutes later, he parked the hired Ford Anglia car in front of police headquarters then calmly walked up to the desk of the charge-room.
‘You’ll be looking for me shortly,’ he told PC Neil Alexander, who was coming to the end of his shift. ‘I have just shot someone.’ Then he related how he had followed his victim from the bus station before coming face to face with him outside the neat semi-detached villa.
‘He messed up my life. His name is Horsburgh,’ he said by way of explanation for what had taken place, adding that the weapon they would be looking for was under the dashboard of the Anglia sitting outside.
When charged, his admission was frank: ‘Yes, I did it. He broke up my family.’
By the time the man who had driven hundreds of miles with a gun in his car to seek revenge appeared in court, his story had a significant addition. He explained that he had presented the gun merely to frighten Horsburgh enough to make him terminate the relationship with Mrs Burns. The fatal shot had been fired accidentally only when the victim had attempted to push the barrel away.
It was an unconvincing tale and failed to convince a single member of the jury. Less than an hour after they had retired to consider their verdict, Edward Burns, the man who had confessed to a killing the police had no knowledge of, was on his way to start a life term.
24
In life, their paths never crossed. They were almost the same age and lived in the same city, but they could not have been more different. In death, they became inextricably linked, their names forever bound together. More than quarter of a century after they met their maker they are still spoken of in the same breath. And still no one knows if they had anything in common at all – except perhaps the last person ever to see each of them alive.