Frustrated by the apparent inaction of the police, who in fairness had nothing but a missing person report to go on, Mrs McCabe called the offices of
The Courier
newspaper to enlist their aid in running appeals for anyone with information to come forward. Seasoned journalists instinctively knew this wasn’t just the usual anxious mother whose wayward daughter had decided to stay away from home for a few days. None of the customary pieces fitted. Elizabeth, almost 21, had never gone absent before, always kept the family informed of her movements and had no obvious reason for disappearing. They ran the story of the troubled family and their growing fears that something terrible had happened. Despite several articles highlighting the mystery, no one came forward to offer the slightest clue about what might have occurred in the early hours of 11 February, or any time afterwards. It was as though the nursery assistant had never existed.
Around noon on Tuesday 26 February, the day before Elizabeth would have celebrated her special birthday, the situation dramatically changed – and a never-ending nightmare began for the McCabes.
Two rabbit hunters exercising their dogs in Templeton Woods pushed their way through a dense crop of small fir trees and emerged into a clearing where one of the dogs was sniffing at a pile of branches. When they investigated and pulled the tree cutting away, they were faced with something they had never expected to see. Before them lay the body of a young woman. She was naked and clearly very dead. In addition to the branches covering the lower part of her torso, a blue V-necked pullover had been placed across her shoulders,
It was a sight the pair would be unlikely ever to forget. It was also one which the first police officer on the scene, Sergeant David Gibson, knew would remain with him forever. As he took in the horror of what confronted him, the sergeant reflected that whoever had disposed of the body might, unusually, have experienced pangs of conscience at what he or she had just done. It seemed to him that the laying on of the jumper on the naked corpse might not have been so much an act of attempted concealment as one of concern, the jersey having been placed where it was to afford a degree of dignity, perhaps even warmth, to the violated woman underneath. On the other hand, perhaps it was the officer’s own compassion which prompted such thoughts. Seeing a murder victim at close quarters can stir unexpected emotions.
Within an hour of the grim find being announced, the same journalists in the newsroom of
The Courier,
who days before had intuitively suspected a distressing outcome, began writing the first of the hundreds of thousands of words that would ultimately follow. The files on the other Templeton Woods victim were hurriedly retrieved and the 11-month unsuccessful hunt for Carol Lannen’s murderer was back on the front pages, alongside the account of where and how Elizabeth had finally been found.
For the first time, the city was alerted to the chilling possibility that a serial killer might be loose in the city. The link has been made ever since.
On the evening leading to her disappearance, a Sunday, Elizabeth and her friend Sandra Niven, a nursery workmate, had visited a few pubs before ending up in Teazers discotheque. But, as the night wore on, the pair, who were considering sharing a flat together, had a minor disagreement. They seemed to have resolved it, but later, as closing time approached, Elizabeth was nowhere to be seen. Sandra went in search of her chum and found her with her jacket on and about to descend the exit stairs. The two exchanged a few friendly words then Elizabeth departed, apparently alone and presumably to find her own way home.
It was around 12.30 a.m. and it was the last time the two friends ever spoke to each other.
No one – except her killer – knows what happened to the reserved 20-year-old after that. Despite extensive inquiries and appeals, not a soul came forward to say they had seen the petite figure her making her way home along the two-and-a-half mile route to her home in Lyndhurst Avenue in Lochee. Some believe she may have travelled in a taxi, or what she took for one, or that she had accepted a lift from someone she knew. Family and friends said that Elizabeth, a quiet but intelligent girl, would never willingly have entered the car of a stranger, especially after an incident on a previous night out in town when she had allowed herself to be driven away from the city centre by someone she had mistakenly believed to be a taxi driver. Describing the incident to Sandra Niven afterwards, she said simply that she had been taken ‘to the back of beyond’ but gave no details of anything that may have occurred. She had, however, been upset by the experience. Whatever had taken place, it had been enough to make her wary and after that she would only travel in taxis with official roof lights. It was a practice that was to have considerable future significance.
Practically all of Dundee’s 700 taxi drivers were questioned, some at length, along with kerb crawlers and other late night drivers who operated in the city. By the end of the first week, statements had been taken from more than 1000 people, among them regulars from the nightclub and bar scene in the central area.
As the hunt intensified, the head of the CID in the city advised women not to make their way home alone at night. It was a natural but needless warning. With the bodies of two women who had vanished from the city centre having being found inside a year, and their killer or killers still on the loose, a climate of fear descended every time darkness fell. Overnight, the relatively common custom of unaccompanied women accepting lifts from strangers to save a taxi fare came to an end.
A female town councillor, worried about the safety of lone women, and concerned for the reputation of her city, launched a reward scheme. Others contributed and within days £5,000 was on offer to anyone who could help trace and convict the person who had ended Elizabeth’s life. It was never claimed.
Within days of the body being discovered, much of the victim’s clothing was found at three different locations in the city, all within a short distance of Camperdown Park, which is close to Templeton Woods, but it did little to assist the investigation.
Because of the condition of her body, there was a feeling among some experienced police officers that Elizabeth – unlike Carol – might not have met her end in the forest but that her corpse had been taken there some time after her death because it could be easily disposed of in the woods.
Like every police inquiry, those involved in the two murder hunts approached their investigations with open minds, though it was easy to recognise the similarities between the two killings. The most marked was the location of the bodies – 150 yards apart in the same woodland on the outskirts of town. The victims were practically the same age and both had last been seen in the city centre, also at spots only a few hundred yards apart. They had simply disappeared after apparently being willingly driven off. Each had been stripped and strangled and had their clothing removed from the scene. Even the time of year was similar.
But these parallels were not so striking as to present an absolutely compelling case, conclusively indicating a common killer. There were no trademark features pointing irresistibly in a single direction, no unmistakeable message that the same killer had come calling.
There were also marked differences. Carol had actively been seeking the company of unknown males, and not for conversation or romance. Elizabeth, keen to advance her career and looking forward to her 21st birthday, would have been unlikely to have allowed herself to be driven away by a stranger.
Police found themselves frustrated by the dilemma. The idea of a serial killer being responsible had a natural appeal for the media. It made a ‘better read’ and helped sell papers. But the press treatment of the cases also assisted the murder squads. It guaranteed headlines and kept the cases in the public eye long after any single slaying would have featured. Senior officers were in no doubt, however, that the understandable desire by the media to tie the two murders together might also be counter-productive. The more the killings seemed connected, the more potential witnesses might have been convinced the same person had to be responsible for both deaths. If a member of the public suspected a person’s link with one killing, but knew they could not have been involved in the other, would they simply have disregarded their suspicions and kept quiet?
Yet publicity was vital. If people continued to speak about the twin murders, the better the chances were of a conscience being stirred and the desperately awaited breakthrough occurring.
There was no lack of effort by the media. They stoked up interest with every morsel of fresh information, but as the days slipped into weeks, then months, without any kind of outcome, the story inevitably dropped off the front pages, then out of the papers entirely. It seemed to the public that the killer of Elizabeth McCabe, like that of Carol Lannen, might stalk the streets of Dundee indefinitely.
They were not to know, however, that for some on the murder team, the disappearance of Elizabeth did not seem the unfathomable mystery it might have appeared. They entertained their own suspicions about what could had happened to her after she walked away from the city centre nightspot and also who she might have been with. It would take the passage of many years, however, before the anxious and baffled citizens of Dundee would learn anything of that.
VINCENT SIMPSON
Shortly before breakfast time on the morning of 15 July 2005, a convoy of police vehicles drove slowly into leafy Longlands Way, in Camberley, Surrey, the upmarket commuter town 30 miles from London. Two of the cars drew to a gentle halt outside the front of one of the houses in the row of smart family residences, but the occupants did not alight. It was only when they were sure that the team of officers, in the three vans that had carried on to the rear of the house, was in position that they left their vehicles and walked up the garden path to ring the doorbell.
Inside, the 59-year-old owner of the £300,000 house wondered who could be calling at such an early hour. Vincent John Simpson answered the door – and his worst nightmare began. The callers informed him they were investigating the death of Elizabeth McCabe more than 25 years previously in a Scottish city some 400 miles away and they required his assistance.
Within a few hours the bespectacled, balding window cleaner was taken to Woking police station and formally charged with murdering the student nursery nurse by striking her on the head and strangling her some time between 10 and 26 February 1980. Later that same morning in Dundee, when news of the arrest broke in the
Evening Telegraph
, all those who recalled the quarter-of-a-century-old murder hunt were stunned at the unexpected announcement. The trail had apparently become so cold it seemed to have petered out for good.
Vincent Simpson, however, did not altogether share their surprise.
Unknown to the public, he had been identified as a prime suspect in the very first days by some to those hunting Elizabeth’s killer. Convinced that she was likely to have travelled in a taxi for her homeward journey after leaving the nightclub, the murder teams concentrated much of their efforts in tracking down all those who had been driving cabs in and around the city in the early hours of that February morning. Special questionnaire forms were compiled and a plea went out for members of the taxi community, who had been on duty, to come forward. Among those who willingly responded was Simpson, a taxi owner and part-time window cleaner from Newtyle, a small village a few miles beyond the north-west outskirts of Dundee. He and his Dundee-born wife Gillian, a nurse, and their three children had lived in Camberley until a year earlier but moved to Newtyle because her parents in Dundee wanted to see more of their grandchildren. To facilitate the move north, her folks purchased the taxi business for the couple, who had met when Simpson was treated by Gillian for a leg injury, sustained while playing football on a trip to Scotland.
Around the same time as the Newtyle cabbie was completing the police questionnaire, a couple from Carnoustie on the other side of Dundee were reflecting on whether or not to answer police appeals for assistance by informing them of an unusual encounter they’d had around 12.30 a.m. on 11 February, the date when Elizabeth had gone missing and whose ultimate fate was filling the papers. Driving home after a visit to friends, they were approaching Templeton Woods when a taxi emerged at speed from a side road leading into the forest and turned in front of them without stopping. The man was particularly interested in the model of the taxi as the vehicle was the latest Ford Cortina model, a Mark V, which he was a familiar with and dreamed of owning. But other things also drew the couple’s attention. The interior light of the taxi was on and the driver appeared to be controlling the vehicle by his wrists. Later, after deciding to report their experience to the police, the Carnoustie couple described how it had seemed the man behind the wheel was scanning his vehicle for something.
‘It was as if he had dirty hands and was afraid to touch the steering wheel. It was as if he was looking for something to wipe his hands with,’ they were to tell detectives.
When the murder squad cross-checked with data already held, they found that one of those who owned a Mark V Cortina was Simpson. He had also admitted to having been working that night. Furthermore, the sign on its roof was identical to the one described by the Carnoustie couple. He was immediately taken in for questioning.
In the days that followed, he was interrogated on repeated occasions, sometimes being roused at his home at 5 a.m. and held at police HQ until 11 p.m. the same day, the rules on limited questioning of suspects having still to be introduced at that time.