Detectives would later explain how, during one interview session, Simpson admitted that he would occasionally visit Templeton Woods, which was on his route between Newtyle and Dundee, to spy on couples having sex in the open or in their cars. On these Peeping Tom expeditions he would often take his dog with him as an excuse for being near the vehicles.
Questioned about his movements on the night of Elizabeth’s disappearance, the officers recounted how the cabbie had willingly confessed to having gone twice to the woods that evening. On the first occasion, he told them he had seen a dark coloured car moving up and down as though the occupants were engaged in intercourse. When his dog jumped up on the car he called it off and went home. Later that night, he returned to the forest. The car he had watched earlier had gone but another one was present, though he could see no sign of activity. He decided to leave the woods but after driving a short distance he pulled over in the side road leading to the main highway and had begun to masturbate. When he drove off a few minutes later he continued in the act and ended with semen on one of his hands. He could not find a tissue and used his cash bag to wipe the fluid off. In the process, he switched the interior light on to see what he was doing and to check if his trousers had been stained. The officers claimed that Simpson related how he had then driven into Dundee and, after picking up several fares, had returned home at around 2.45 a.m. and gone to bed.
By any definition, police were entitled to think they had made a breakthrough in the case. Persuaded by the statements of those who knew Elizabeth McCabe best, it was reasonable for them to assume she had taken a taxi home, but only one bearing an official sign. Witnesses had seen such a car leaving Templeton Woods around the crucial time and a person who owned the precise model of vehicle they had observed had admitted that he had been twice in the forest that evening when he engaged in sordid sexual activity. As murder inquiries went, they appeared to have a more than reasonable case for identifying Vincent John Simpson as a suspect.
Regrettably, from their perspective, suspicions were all they had. No other useful evidence was available which might have incriminated him further or, indeed, which might have eliminated him entirely, for at that time forensic science had not reached the sophisticated levels that were to follow.
Yet he was not the only individual to occupy the minds of detectives. The movements of others with links to Elizabeth were also being examined in some detail and at least three other people were classified as ‘people of interest’. But it was to be another 25 years, and only after Vincent Simpson had been taken from his home in England to stand trial in Scotland, before such information would come to public light.
His elevation from suspect to accused happened only after fresh advances in the analysis of DNA samples allowed matches from hitherto unimaginably minute quantities of the cellular material. A spot of sweat, or a piece of biological matter as small as a millionth of the size of a grain of salt, for instance, were now sufficient to establish ownership.
It was this scientific advance which opened up a major cold case review of the 2004 Templeton Woods murders. Ironically, Simpson’s arrest came about as a result of a special crime squad’s attempts to prove that someone else – later found to be completely unconnected with the case – had killed the nursery nurse.
At that time the murders of six other young women in Scotland in the late 1970s and early 1980s also remained unsolved. Because of loose similarities in the eight deaths, a nationwide detective team was assembled to review the cases under the code name Operation Trinity. Much of the inquiry was to focus on determining if DNA matches could be made from low copy number – smaller, poor grade – samples taken from the possessions of the victims. Similarities and differences were put under the microscope, figuratively as well as literally, to determine if all the homicides had been the work of the same person, specifically Angus Sinclair, a serial rapist who had been convicted of causing the deaths of two females and jailed for life.
As it turned out, Sinclair was swiftly eliminated from the Dundee murder inquiries, for the very good reason that he had been in prison at the material times. However, the forensic reexamination of clothing and other items belonging to Elizabeth McCabe and Carol Lannen was already underway. That study produced what police believed to be a major development in the case of the young student nursery nurse. The new techniques had discovered DNA traces on the new blue jumper she had worn that night and which had been used to partially cover her naked body. Since Sinclair could be discounted as the source of the genetic material, police set about trying to trace its owner. It was decided to obtain a sample covertly from Vincent Simpson by then living in England. The result produced a strong match. In addition, tests on a hair found on a black plastic sheet used in the mortuary examination of Elizabeth also indicated that it belonged to the Newtyle taxi driver. That, and the information about Simpson already held in the McCabe murder file from 1980, was enough to convince prosecutors they had a strong case. They ordered his immediate arrest.
But even after his dramatic apprehension hundreds of miles away, there was still to be no speedy conclusion of the case. Extraordinarily, almost another two-and-a-half years would pass from the time of Simpson’s arrest to his eventual trial in the High Court in Edinburgh; a period he spent free on bail after being released from custody, permitting him to once more return to Camberley.
Although such a lengthy gap between arrest and trial was highly unusual, so were the circumstances that brought it about. The comparatively recent introduction of low copy number DNA profiles into court cases meant that, in many respects, it was evidentially untested. Nor was it without controversy. Many believed the technique to be flawed because it was appreciably less exact than the established profiling procedures and carried a significant risk that samples could be easily contaminated. These were factors Vincent Simpson’s defence team would spend many pre-trial months exploring. They also devoted countless hours considering if others might have had more of a case to answer than their client.
The length of time taken to finally start proceedings was not the only remarkable aspect of the trial. On the opening day in October 2007, Mr Mark Stewart QC, who headed Simpson’s legal team, lodged two special defences – firstly, that the accused man had an alibi because he was elsewhere at the material time, and secondly, on the grounds of incrimination. To support the latter, the young QC claimed that if the crime had been committed it had been carried out by one or more of 13 other individuals, all of whom he named to the court.
Unsurprisingly, the trial extended far beyond the normal duration of capital cases. It lasted for seven weeks and from start to finish fascinated the Dundee public who had waited 27 long years to learn what had happened to the pretty young nursery nurse about to celebrate her 21st birthday.
From the outset, the daunting challenge facing the defence was to disprove the apparent evidence of their client’s DNA being found on Elizabeth’s clothing and what seemed to be his hair having been located on the mortuary sheet covering her body.
Until the start of the trial, juries across the country and further afield had come to believe that DNA proved an infallible link to its owner. Thanks to numerous high-profile cases that spawned an endless series of films, TV thrillers and books, the public were extremely familiar with how successful the identification of the genetic material had been in tracing and convicting everyone from serial killers and rapists to small-time housebreakers. It was more available than fingerprints and a thousand times more damning. But such success was the result of the examination of large, high grade and comparatively fresh samples, producing matches that were mathematically impossible to reasonably contradict.
The advent of the new lower grade specimens was a different matter entirely and not something the public was particularly familiar with. The problem for the first defence teams facing this new evidence in court was to persuade juries that this poorer quality material was much less likely to produce conclusive proof than the prime quality DNA, which had brought dramatic convictions in the celebrated cases.
Another major plank in the bid to have Vincent John Simpson acquitted was the task of presenting an acceptable hypothesis that someone else, who would be named, might be responsible for the killing of Elizabeth McCabe. While it is no part of the defence’s job to prove another’s guilt, claiming incrimination by suggesting it might be a particular other person is a recognised strategy that can be sufficient to sway an undecided jury. Simpson’s plea was highly unusual because 13 other individuals had been listed as possible perpetrators of the act which had brought about Elizabeth’s death.
In order to present this aspect of the defence, it was necessary for Mark Stewart QC to introduce evidence about the victim’s sexual history, which didn’t exactly fit with the public perception that Elizabeth had been a timid and fairly straight-laced young woman with little interest in the opposite sex. Within the space of a few days, and after hearing from a number of witnesses, a picture emerged in court of someone who had experienced her first sexual encounters in relatively casual circumstances. Most specifically, she had lost her virginity to one of the 13 named on the indictment, a man around her own age who had been a boyfriend of her friend Sandra Niven, the companion she had been with at Teazers discotheque on the night she went missing. The court heard that a few months before that fateful evening, the two friends had been in town but had had a disagreement. Elizabeth had then ‘stormed off’ to go home alone and on the way had stopped off at the flat of Sandra’s boyfriend, which was on her route. Elizabeth later told Sandra she had slept with him. Further evidence was given that the nursery nurse had gone to the flat on other occasions, by Sandra recounting how, on one of these visits, she had followed her chum to find out where she was going.
Sandra described in court how, on their last night out together, the two had been joined at their table in Teazers by two male friends, but one of them, who was in a relationship, left to go home alone. Elizabeth felt she was left playing ‘gooseberry’ and had started to cry in the toilet, saying she was upset because ‘no one liked’ her. After placating her, Sandra told how she had loaned her friend £1 so she might buy another drink. Sandra agreed that in an interview with police after the discovery of her friend’s body in the woods, she had recounted how Elizabeth had explained during their toilet conversation that one of those who ‘hated her’ was Sandra’s former boyfriend, adding that the reason for that was because she had been ‘annoying him’.
The court also heard from Sandra that she had seen Elizabeth and the male in question in conversation in one of the bars they had visited before going to Teazers and, although the pair seemed to be on friendly terms, the man appeared at one point to be ‘shooing her away’. Sandra said that after it was learned Elizabeth had gone missing, she had suggested to her anxious parents that her chum might have gone once again to the man’s flat on her way home.
Before giving evidence himself, the man was advised by Lord Kinclaven, the trial judge, that he need not answer any questions which might suggest he had committed a criminal offence, nor need he say anything else which might incriminate him. During his long spell in the witness box, the man vehemently denied being responsible for Elizabeth’s death, saying he had been interviewed by police 19 times when attempts had been made to ‘fit him up with it.’ He agreed he had a history of violence and had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment after being convicted of serious assault and that a local sheriff had once described him as a ‘fighting machine’. He also admitted that on the night of Elizabeth’s disappearance, he had been looking for sex and some time after midnight had left his house to phone a female acquaintance in the hope of finding it. He acknowledged, too, that Elizabeth’s handbag and some other possessions had been found near his flat and that her clothing had been disposed of a mile and a half away. Admitting that on the day she had vanished he had not gone into work until the afternoon, he said this was a ‘common occurrence’ after being out at the weekend. However, he strenuously denied the suggestions of Mr Stewart that he had met up with Elizabeth late at night, shared a fish supper with her and had then taken her back to his flat.
During heated exchanges from the witness box, the man repeatedly protested his innocence, exclaiming: ‘There’s no way I murdered that lassie. Twenty-five years ago there was no way the police could prove I murdered her. Twenty-five years later they still haven’t found my forensics on that lassie’s body.’
He was not the only person called to give evidence about his sexual connections with Elizabeth. One of the man’s friends also went into the witness box to explain how his semen had been found on the crotch of the jeans Elizabeth had been wearing on the night she was killed.
He told the court that he and the 20-year-old had formed a relationship after meeting some six to nine months before she disappeared. They eventually had sex together but the last time had been a number of weeks before she went missing. He explained to the jury that their association had not been ‘like boyfriend-girlfriend going to the pictures’ and that they’d had only two ‘romantic encounters’. He had been surprised when police told him his DNA had been found on Elizabeth’s jeans because he knew her to be ‘a clean girl who would have washed her clothes’. He described in court how the first time they’d been intimate it had been at the flat of his friend – the boyfriend of Sandra Niven – and she had worn her jeans.