The Wicked Mr Hall (17 page)

I remembered that rigor mortis had proved to be a problem with Dave Wright. I filled the bath with hot water, then we undressed him down to his underwear and lifted him into the bath. He was a dirty bastard, he should have bathed more often. Just to make sure he was clean, we held him under the water for about five minutes. When we let him float to the top, he was most definitely clean, and dead. We kept him warm until it was time for him to go into the boot of the car.

O
ut of the people we’d recently killed, Don was the only one with a criminal record. I knew that, if his body was found, his fingerprints would match those on police records. I didn’t count Dave Wright – he was under a watery garden and would never be found. His bones would rot first.

We would have to be careful burying Don. So far only one body had been discovered – Mary’s. As I had hoped, the police couldn’t identify her. As far as they were concerned, she was an itinerant Scottish lesbian. A shepherd had found her on Christmas morning – hardly the stuff of Nativity plays.

We drove north for about an hour and a half, heading for the Firth of Forth. We would find somewhere completely deserted and dig a grave. The snow was falling heavily that January of 1978. This would be helpful once we had buried him, as the natural elements would cover all traces of our
work. Having dead bodies in the boot of our car was no big deal. This was the third one in a matter of weeks. We stopped for drinks at Dunbar. After a few warming brandies, we carried on to North Berwick. As afternoon approached, the snowfall became heavier and driving conditions treacherous.

For obvious reasons, we couldn’t afford to be in an accident or get stranded. The wise choice seemed to be to leave the burial until the next day, and book into somewhere for the night. We stopped at the Blenheim Arms Hotel.

I was later to learn the name of the manager, Norman Wright. I wished I had never set eyes on him. Wright was one of those people who is suspicious by nature. If he saw children playing in the car-park, he thought they were potential car thieves. He was fussy, and he proved to be my downfall.

A couple of weeks previously, I had told Kitto to get us some false number plates for the car. The ones we’d had ended in 999. I am superstitious and I didn’t want to bring bad luck upon myself. I had told him to search for a red Granada, the same year as ours, and then to find out the name of the owner. If we were stopped by police, we would give them the right name to match the registration information supplied by the DVLC in Swansea. He was also to scratch out the old number on the tax disc and write in the new one. It wasn’t a big job and he was supposed to be a criminal. Change the plates! Alter the tax disc!

But Kitto was lazy and slovenly, and he didn’t have enough brains or drive to be a decent criminal. Telling me that he had done as I requested, he’d just had any old
numbers done, and then fitted the reg plate to our car. He never even bothered looking at the tax disc. His stupid actions would lose us both our liberty, forever.

Norman Wright didn’t like the look of us. He phoned the police to see whether they had anyone matching our descriptions on their books. Two uniformed policemen drove out to the hotel. While we ate our dinner in the hotel dining-room, they were in the car park. By the time we pushed our plates to one side, they had noticed Kitto’s error. The number on the tax disc didn’t match the number plates. We were just about to start on our first after-dinner brandy, when two policemen appeared at our elbows. They asked us to accompany them to the station. One of the officers drove our Granada. He was completely unaware of his passenger in the boot.

I gave my name as Roy Hall, antiques dealer from Lytham St Annes. Kitto gave his own name. The police station was almost empty, just three uniformed officers milling around. We were told we would have to wait until two detectives arrived. They were going to interview us about the car. My pockets were full of incriminating papers – phone numbers of criminal contacts, bank account numbers of the Scott-Elliots. I asked to go to the toilet and they let me go. On my own, I flushed everything down the pan. As the minutes ticked by, my fears of the car boot being opened grew. I asked again whether I could visit the toilet. Again, I was allowed to go without an escort. There was a small window in one of the cubicles. I didn’t know if it would open, or if I could squeeze through it. It did, and I did. I wriggled through like an overweight eel. The thick
blanket of snow that covered the ground cushioned my headlong fall. I closed the window. They’d just think I was constipated.

I ran from car to car in the police car park, searching for vehicles with ignition keys in. There were none. I walked away from the station and car park as quickly as possible. The snow was falling heavily, to my advantage. I stopped the first person I saw. I asked her whether she knew how I could get to Dunbar, my wife was in hospital there. She directed me to the home of a local taxi driver.

He believed my tale, and agreed to drive me. I settled into the back seat of his cab and hoped for the best. The drive was about ten miles. With each mile, my chances of escape grew. When he asked me which hospital, I said I’d only got the news second-hand through a phone message. He took me to Belhaven. While he waited in the carpark, I went inside, wasted a few minutes so he would think I was checking on my wife’s condition, and then walked back to the car. Leaning in his car window, I asked him whether he would mind taking me to Edinburgh. To my relief he agreed. If I could get to the anonymity of a city, I was home and dry. Obviously there would have to be a change of plan – they had Kitto and my dead brother. I’d pick up some funds, and leave the country immediately.

We’d been in the car for about half an hour. Driving conditions were very slow, Edinburgh was less than twenty miles away. In front of us was the town of Haddington, and a large roundabout. It was there that I saw the roadblock, three police cars and flashing blue lights. The car door was opened, and a helmeted face peered in at me. Taking me out
of the car, they radioed my description to headquarters. I fitted the picture. I felt their hands hold my arms. I sat between two policemen on the way to Mussleburgh.

At the station, detectives sat down and told me they had found the dead body of a young man in the boot of my car. I told them nothing. After some time, they gave up and put me in the cells. When they searched me, they never put their fingers up my arse. Alone in the cell, I requested a cup of water. They gave it to me. I went where the searching police hadn’t. I pulled out some barbiturate capsules, my suicide kit. Spend the rest of my life in prison? I’d rather die! I washed them down my throat with the water. I remember thinking that that water would be the last drink I would ever taste.

I don’t remember being moved, lifted, any of it. I have no recollection of the stomach pump. Why save the life of someone who wants to die? I had made one final bid to cheat justice, and I had failed. When I woke, my hospital bed was surrounded by doctors, nurses and policemen.

I was transferred to Edinburgh police head-quarters. All I heard was questions, mainly from a Detective Inspector Tom McLean and a Detective Chief Inspector McPherson. They quizzed me for hours. I was vaguer than a wisp of smoke. It was the pathologist from Edinburgh University, Bob Nagel, who discovered that Don hadn’t drowned, but had instead been chloroformed to death. It may have been a waste of time, but I’d still enjoyed holding him down!

Each time the detectives came back to me they had more information. In another room, Kitto was talking. They knew of the cottage at Newton Arlosh. A posse of detectives and
forensics moved in, and stayed for a week. By the time they left, they had lifted fingerprints from the house that matched those of the dead woman found in the stream at Middlebie and they had discovered a number of valuables from the Scott-Elliots, some with the family crest. Scotland Yard came into the picture. The Scott-Elliots had been reported missing. The pressure on us was growing and the questioning was endless.

Kitto talked. I learned that he said: ‘You won’t believe this, but there are two more bodies.’ He made a full statement.

I
was still recovering in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, when they next came to question me. They had all the information, they knew as much as me. Or almost! I gave them Dave Wright. Of him they knew nothing. Kitto’s memory, like everything else about him, was poor; he couldn’t remember the exact spots of the bodies. It was suggested to me that I should travel with the police to each location.

On the freezing, snowy afternoon of 18 January 1978 I guided the police to the shallow grave of Walter Scott-Elliot. We hadn’t done a very good job of burying him. Animals had got at his body and there were bits of him everywhere. His head was still in the bushes, where we had thrown him.

Three days later, I took them to the home of Lady Hudson and the Kirkleton Estate. The severe weather had destroyed the watery garden that I had so carefully cultivated over
Wright’s body. His decomposing foot was now sticking out of the water. Most of the flesh had been eaten, but the bones remained. I’d recycled him.

These field trips with the police were a welcome diversion to sitting in a cell. I was now being investigated by six police forces. They brought in a team of dogs that had been used in the Arab/Israeli war. They had been specially trained to sniff out bodies buried in sand. The ground was so frozen it took them two days to find Mrs Scott-Elliot. She, too, was badly decomposed. The only one who wouldn’t have looked too bad in an open casket was Don. Ironic! In life the others had some bearing while he was little more than a tramp.

Now they had the bodies, I would await the trial and the life sentences.

Friends’ houses were searched, Wooton’s was searched many times. They gathered more information, and more charges. I didn’t care. I knew that I would spend the rest of my life in jail, that I would never walk freely again. I wished that the bullet that David Wright had fired at me six months previously had killed me. Better death than an existence behind bars. Five months later at Edinburgh Crown Court, I was given two life sentences for the murders of David Wright and Walter Scott-Elliot. I pleaded not guilty to murdering Dorothy Scott-Elliot. The court ordered that the file on that one remain open. Kitto, who knew nothing of Wright, got two life sentences.

In October we were transferred south – a date had been set for our trial at the Old Bailey. This trial was for the murders of Mary and Don, both killed at Newton Arlosh, England. We were remanded to Wandsworth. Kitto was now
growing very concerned at how many life terms he was going to get. He started talking to the police, again. In an effort to get his sentence cut, he tried to implicate John Wooton. I wanted him dead. A friend, a fellow con, offered to help me out.

If you get a dark tobacco, pour a small amount of boiling water on it, then crush it, it will secrete a brown liquid. The brown liquid is ‘pure nicotine’, and it is fatally poisonous. The poison was made, and slipped into his dinner. The
ever-nervous
Kitto suspected something and gave the food to the warders who checked it. Of course nobody knew who did it! If you’re a prisoner and you grass, you should expect little else. I never touched him, but other cons poured scalding cocoa over his head.

Our trial started on 1 November. Kitto had two barristers acting for him, one of whom was the playwright and author John Mortimer. He was at the Bailey, and he had Rumpole! They tried to say that I led him by the nose, dominated him. This was rubbish – if he was frightened of me, he had plenty of opportunities to vanish. The truth was that he was weak. He was weak, and in a tight spot. First he’d tried to get his sentence reduced by giving the police Wooton, and now it was all my fault. It was his stupid killing of Dorothy Scott-Elliot that had started this whole sordid mess. If it was anyone’s fault, it was his. My plan was to leave the Scott-Elliots skint but alive. I was going to take their money and run. Showing that stupid bastard around the house ruined everything. I rue the day that Michael Kitto came into my life. I hope he dies in prison, the same as me.

I couldn’t see any point to a long, drawn-out trial. I
pleaded guilty to the murders of Mary and Don. When Judge Miskin QC sentenced me, he recommended that I remain in prison for the rest of my natural life: ‘Only to be released if in the late stages of a terminal illness.’ I smiled at him, bowed, and said: ‘Thank you.’

Kitto was described as ‘vile’, and a recommendation was given that he serve at least fifteen years. With the trial finished, I was transferred to Hull.

There is an old saying: ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life.’ It is one of those affirmations that are so popular nowadays. Whoever said that has never stood in the dock at the Bailey, and been told that their life would now consist of the banging of heavy metal doors, slop-outs, jangling of keys, food that is little better than recycled diarrhoea. Nor of the smell, that institutionalised smell that lets you know that you live in one of Her Majesty’s prisons. If I was to awake each morning and say: ‘Today is the first day of the rest of my life.’ I would start each day crying inside. Crying for the waste. I had wasted five people’s lives, and in return the Government had wasted mine.

I don’t suppose there are many people who look forward to death, but I am one. My death will be my release. Not until I am dead, can I escape these walls.

As a multiple murderer, Hull proved to be a different proposition from the last time I’d been there. The screws decided to ‘wind me up’. I was moved from cell to cell, each one filthy. I cannot live in squalor and filth, it makes me squirm. I would spend days cleaning them. As soon as I had got it to my satisfaction, they would move me again. In the end I’d had enough, I told them: ‘Move me once more,
and I’ll go on hunger strike.’ They called my bluff, and I called theirs.

The first thing they did was take away my radio and stop my
Daily Telegraph
. These were luxuries. If it was hunger they wanted, I would do it in silence. If they wanted a battle of wills, I would give them one. My only source of sustenance was one pint of water a day. My fast started. Jesus did forty days, IRA hunger-striker Frank Stagg did sixty. I would eventually beat them both.

The first days were the hardest. Three meals a day were brought to me, three meals a day were refused. The food would sit in front of me for one hour before they took it away. I told them I wanted to be transferred to a Scottish prison. I wanted to die in the country of my birth.

John Wooton and Ruth both continued to visit me. After fourteen days, I was taken from my cell and put into the hospital wing. My condition was now deteriorating. I started to hallucinate. The faces of the people I had killed – the Scott-Elliots, Mary Coggles still wearing that fur coat, Dave Wright, my brother Don – all their faces appeared in my cell. From their ethereal home they visited me regularly, and taunted me. I thought I was in hell. When clarity returned, I realised that I was.

I started to slip in and out of consciousness. For the most part it was the stomach pains that precipitated my return to some state of awareness. I had been in the hospital for twenty-one days when the doctors’ concern grew. They told me that, if I didn’t eat on the following day, I would have to be moved. They couldn’t guarantee that a doctor would reach me during the night hours. At times my speech was
incoherent. My body weight was falling rapidly, and I would go two or three days without passing urine.

I was taken by ambulance to Wakefield prison hospital, where they put me in the ‘Special Unit.’ This had housed the IRA hunger-strikers, and was separated from the rest of the ward by an iron gate and a wooden door. There was an office for the warders, a bathroom and toilet, a stripped cell, and the room where they put me. The brick walls were painted green, and there was a one-bar electric fire on the wall, which I was told, would reduce the chances of me getting pneumonia. The last occupant had been Frank Stagg.

Someone took a photograph of me lying in that bed. I must have been sleeping at the time. The next day it appeared on the front page of the
Sun
newspaper and I started to attract a lot of media interest. The Home Office declined all requests for interviews, which came from everyone, including the press, radio, TV, and even a film producer. An Oxford professor wrote to me telling me that there was always a reason to live. Gifts of food were brought to the prison gates by well-wishers. A top London barrister offered to represent me in my appeal for a move. All offers were blocked by the Governor’s office, acting under Home Office instruction.

At the start of my fast, I had weighed thirteen stone, eight pounds, and now I was five stone, four pounds. An oxygen machine had been placed outside the room. I signed a form stating that, in the throes of death, I wanted no resuscitation of any kind. The authorities were off the hook. I would just slip away.

Following my arrest, the police had always been asking me some bloody stupid questions. If they found a decomposed body somewhere, they automatically thought it was me, which I found very irritating. I did the same to them – I wasted their time. I made a statement that was smuggled out to Leonard Murray, my Glasgow solicitor. In it, I stated that I had murdered two other people – an American helicopter pilot who worked off the Aberdeen oil rigs, and a car mechanic in Preston, Lancashire. Murray did some bargaining for me. A Sunday newspaper offered £25,000 for the exclusive publication rights.

I thought of Caroline, the daughter of Margaret with whom I’d lived years before. I had always stayed in touch with Caroline. She was a beautiful child. If I could do one decent thing before I died, I would try. If Murray managed to get the money from the newspaper, I instructed him to set up a trust fund for Caroline. The money would go to her when she came of age. The statement was to be made public only in the event of my death.

My blood count was the lowest they had ever recorded, and I was allowed unlimited visits. Ruth came to see me three times a week. She put vases of flowers around the room. Lord Caithness of the Home Office came too, he sat on the edge of my bed and said he was very sorry but the Home Office would not submit to blackmail. If I wished to die, then so be it. I could die here, or live here. That was my choice. I fell back into unconsciousness.

Death would have to wait. I took a bowl of soup on Christmas Day, 1979. I had gone eighty-four days without food. For all my resolve, I couldn’t just let myself die. It was
too drawn out, too painfully slow and the instinct to survive is buried too deep inside of me. Maybe it was the haunting hallucinatory faces of my victims. Who knows what judgement I will receive, when I finally depart this world. I dread to think my torment will continue.

As for the statement it was all lies.