MY FIGHT FOR EMMA
Margaret Caldwell: Police let me down and must nail killer The day I knew I’d lost my caring little girl forever
MUM REVEALS UNTOLD STORY OF A 12-YEAR BATTLE FOR JUSTICE
The mother of Emma Caldwell will never forget her murdered daughter but has told of how she hopes one day to forgive how justice failed her.
Margaret Caldwell spoke of her loss and anger yesterday as she urged Police Scotland to catch her daughter’s killer almost 12 years after Emma’s death.
In her first interview since the force were ordered to reopen the murder inquiry, she told how her disappointment at the failure of the initial investigation became dismay when a forgotten suspect was revealed in April 2015.
She said: “I didn’t know what to think or what to feel. It felt like 100 emotions all at once.
“It was so unexpected, such a shock. Everything the police had told us about Emma’s death, everything we thought we knew, was suddenly turned inside out and upside down.”
Margaret’s grief remains raw. So too is her upset at the failure of the first police inquiry and, worse, the conspiracy of silence that followed as the off icers who led it were promoted to some of the most senior positions on their force.
She said: “Is betrayal too strong a word? It feels like a betrayal sometimes.
“We felt very let down after the first investigation when there was no outcome and no justice for Emma.
“But there was at least something to hold on to because the police were still insisting they knew who had killed her but just couldn’t get the evidence.
“To discover there had been another suspect they had known about for all those years cast doubt on everything we had been told.
“It felt like we had been told a lot of rubbish, anything to keep us quiet and not ask awkward questions.
“The officers in charge of the first inquiry must have known the truth but we didn’t.
“They hoped it would all go away and, if it hadn’t been for the Sunday Mail, it would have.
“Those officers were getting on with their lives and careers and we were just going to be left here, left with nothing, forgotten.
“It’s been almost 12 years since Emma died. The years pass but they don’t pass for me. My world stands still.
“People talk about moving on and getting closure but they’re just words to me. I still feel the way I felt the day Emma disappeared.
“She could never mean as much to anyone else as she did to me but she should still have mattered more to the police.
“She doesn’t seem to have mattered at al l to them. That makes me sad.”
Emma, f rom Ersk ine , Renfrewshire, disappeared on April 4, 2005. Her body was found five weeks later in woods in rural south Lanarkshire, 45 minutes from Glasgow, where she had last been seen.
After a two- year, £4million inquiry, the case against four Turkish suspects accused of the crime collapsed.
But in 2015, on the 10th anniversary of her death, we ran a series of stories revealing a forgotten suspect, Iain Packer, 43, had been interviewed six times by murder squad detectives.
After initially denying knowing her, Packer, from Airdrie, had admitted he was a client of Emma, who had been working as a prostitute after becoming addicted to drugs.
He was never arrested – despite repeatedly changing his story during police interviews and finally directing off icers to the remote forest track, 30 miles from Glasgow, where Emma had been found dead.
Despite telling officers he had taken Emma and other women to the isolated spot several times before, he was released and never inter v iewed again as senior detectives insisted the inquiry should remain focused on the Turks.
Instead of immediately reopening the inquiry after the Sunday Mail’s stories, Police Scotland launched a hunt for our journalists’ sources, unlawfully accessing phone and email records.
They did not reopen the murder investigation for seven weeks and only then after being ordered to by the Lord Advocate. Margaret says