The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Professor helped police catch ‘limbs in loch’ killer
EVENT: Author was speaking at Bloody Scotland international crime writing festival
A Scots forensic expert has told a book festival how she helped to snare “limbs in the loch” killer William Beggs – and how she imagined being the parent of his tragic victim.
Beggs was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in jail in 2001 for the murder of 18-year-old Barry Wallace in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, in December 1999.
Dismembered body parts disposed of by Beggs were found in Loch Lomond by police divers on a training exercise, before further remains were later found on the beach at Ayr.
The killer, originally from Northern Ireland, fled to the Netherlands but was extradited back to Scotland to face trial. He was sentenced to life in prison following a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh.
Professor Dame Sue Black, one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists, worked with police to identify Barry and catch Beggs.
Speaking at an online event for the Bloody Scotland international crime writing festival, which concluded yesterday, she described it as “a truly awful case”.
Prof Dame Sue said: “All police specialist teams do a huge amount of training and this diving team were doing their training one day off the sides of the shore of Loch Lomond.
“They... found some black bags, and they assumed that those black bags had been placed there for them to recover. What they found was in fact that there were dismembered human remains.”
She was brought in and was able to tell the victim was a male because of the hair patterning, as well as calculating a rough age, his shoe size and height.
Police were able to match the information with recent missing person reports and identify the victim.
“It was a truly awful case and you just put yourself as being the mother or the father of the young man,” said Prof Dame Sue.
The torso was later found further down the loch and the head on a beach near Ayr – Beggs had thrown it off the ferry as he was sailing to Ireland.
Inverness-born Prof Dame Sue has helped identify victims and perpetrators of crime in war zones like Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq, and helped crack numerous criminal cases across the UK.
She was Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at Dundee University for 15 years. She left Dundee in 2018 to become Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University.
She appeared at the festival to discuss her book, Written In Bone: The Stories Hidden In What We Leave Behind.
“It was a truly awful case. PROFESSOR DAME SUE BLACK