David Wilson on the truth behind a 50-year-old murder

In 1973, a young woman was stabbed to death in a frenzied attack near her home in a sleepy Scottish town. One week later, a local teenager was charged with her murder. But 50 years on, Britain’s top criminologist, who grew up in the town, is convinced of his innocence and believes that it is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. Here, Professor David Wilson shares his two-year quest for the truth

It was the evening of Friday 6 July 1973 and the end of another working week in the small Scottish lowlands town of Carluke. Twenty-three-year-old Margaret Mclaughlin, who worked as a typist, was looking forward to the weekend. Her fiancé, Bob, a successful businessman, was working that summer in South Africa, and she was planning to spend the weekend in Glasgow, 23 miles away, with his sister, Muriel. She must have been excited, as they were going to make plans for the wedding.

Margaret’s younger sister, Rosemary, was going out that evening too and normally they would have travelled together. However, Rosemary had to catch an earlier train so she left Margaret at home talking to their parents, Hugh and Jean. Jean had helped Margaret get ready and had given her some spending money. Then Margaret picked up her tartan suitcase, said goodbye and left their house at 7.52pm to catch the 8.03pm train from Carluke to Glasgow.

It would have still been light. The walk to the station would only have taken her a few minutes as there was a well-used shortcut through an area of wooded ground, known locally as Colonel’s Glen.

The rain was heavy enough that evening to swell a small stream in the glen. The children who had been in the area had abandoned their play and sought shelter indoors, leaving the glen isolated and empty.

As well as her suitcase, Margaret carried a brown suede bag slung over her shoulder and a black umbrella. Margaret’s vision would have been slightly obscured by her umbrella. According to one neighbour, who saw Margaret at the very start of her journey to the station, the wind was strong enough to blow her umbrella inside out and she paused to sort it out. The wind would also muffle sound.

The undergrowth that July was quite high, so grass and nettles bordered the path. Turning west and climbing a rather steep slope was the railway embankment. If you followed the embankment you would quite quickly come to Carluke’s station. But Margaret never emerged from the glen.

A phone call from Muriel later that evening alerted everyone to Margaret’s non-arrival in Glasgow and an initial search by police officers took place on Saturday morning. Her body was found towards the foot of Colonel’s Glen, about 30 to 50 yards from the path up to the railway embankment and only about 400 yards from her home. Margaret had been subjected to a ferocious attack.

Her umbrella was found damaged and her ‘pinkie’ ring was discovered, although not her engagement ring. Her tartan suitcase, shoulder bag, wallet and toilet bag were recovered from the stream, some distance away from her body. A knife was also found on the left of the path. There was blood spatter at various points on the path and in the glen.

Margaret had been punched about the face and stabbed 19 times. These stab wounds were distributed across her upper arms, chest, abdomen, back and the back of her neck. This pattern suggests that she had attempted to fight back, and then flee from her assailant. The wounds to her upper body penetrated the chest wall and thereafter her lungs, and the wounds to her abdomen pierced her liver, stomach and kidneys.

There was no real attempt to hide her body and no evidence that her killer had attempted to move her body to another site where it could be disposed of later. However, she did seem to have been dragged from the path, through the undergrowth and down the slope towards the stream. Margaret was undoubtedly dead within a few minutes of the attack. Her killer would have been covered in her blood.

There was an overwhelming sense of disbelief that a murder could have happened in Carluke. At the time I was 16 years old, living in the town with my parents and three sisters. Two of them still live there, so my connection to Carluke remains strong.

It was a close-knit area; the sort of place where children played out in the street and where you could leave your front door unlocked. There was also a real sense of community. Everyone knew Colonel’s Glen and there was hardly a man, woman or child who hadn’t used the railway.

Soon after the disbelief came fear. I remember that my father started to drive my sisters around, rather than let them walk about the town. All that anyone seemed to talk about was the murder.

On the Saturday and Sunday after the murder, the police began to clear the area around the glen and start their house-tohouse enquiries; in the following days Lanarkshire police drafted in help from the Scottish Crime Squad.

To our modern eyes it doesn’t look promising. There was no national DNA database or offender profiling to help; no CCTV cameras or Facebook pages to consult; and no mobile phone records to reveal who had last spoken with Margaret. Yet it took only six days for the police to get their man – George Beattie, a 19-year-old brakesman who worked at the steel works and lived nearby.

There was speed at his trial too, as it took the jury 35 minutes to find him guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Over the years his appeals were rejected but he has always maintained his innocence.

For the last 40 years I have worked as a criminologist; I have written 15 books and worked with the police, media and HM Prison Service covering cases as diverse as the Ipswich Murders and the crimes of Dennis Nilsen, but a sense of duty continues to sustain my interest in the mystery surrounding this particular murder in my former hometown.

Not that the statutory bodies that make up the Scottish criminal justice system see things in this way. For them there is no mystery. As far as anyone ‘official’ is concerned, the murder has been solved. Indeed, given that I am writing about events that took place nearly half a century ago, George Beattie, now 66, has since been released from prison and is quietly living in Glasgow. And yet there have always been persistent, nagging doubts in the town that he was wrongly convicted.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that someone has stopped me on the High Street when I’m back in Carluke, or approached me after I’ve given a talk at the library. Pleasantries will be exchanged and we will ask after each other’s family; however, there will then come an almost imperceptible, hesitant pause indicating that something more needs to be said. I know what’s coming next. The person will often look over their shoulder, then lower their voice and whisper, ‘And can you not do something about the Carluke case?’

So almost 50 years after Margaret’s death, I returned to Carluke and tried to make sense

of what happened, although I decided not to speak with either George Beattie or the Mclaughlin family. They are aware of my research, but I did not want to be seen as prejudicing anything that I might later discover.

My two years of research, which have culminated in a new book, Signs of Murder ,led me to believe that this awful case is one of the most important miscarriages of justice in British history.

On the evening of 6 July, while Margaret was preparing to go to Glasgow, George Beattie was getting ready to start his night shift at Lanarkshire Steelworks in Craigneuk. He lived with his parents and three of his seven siblings, loved trains and had a model railway at home. I did not know him but I do remember him, standing on the platform as he noted down the numbers of the trains passing through Carluke.

Given the proximity of his home to Margaret’s, it wasn’t unexpected that George would know her, although there has never been any suggestion that they were particular friends, or romantically involved. George doesn’t seem to have been very interested in girls. There was also a religious divide. The Beatties were Protestant and the Mclaughlins Catholic, and this meant that they had attended different schools.

George had no criminal record and had in the past offered, on a confidential basis, information to the police about thefts that had taken place in the town. Even so, he was quickly arrested and then charged with Margaret’s murder.

His conviction appeared to mainly hinge on two things. First, some ‘special knowledge’ he had of the attack; he knew where Margaret’s body had been left, where a knife that was initially presumed to be the murder weapon had been found, what it looked like and how it had been cleaned, and described possessions that had been in her suitcase.

Second, in a ‘pseudo-confession’ he had to all intents and purposes admitted that he had been present at the murder – he had told police that he had been forced to watch as Margaret was killed by men wearing tall hats with mirrors or glass in them.

At the time, I remember thinking that the men with tall hats with mirrors sounded like an allusion to the pop group Slade, who wore hats similar to those he described. I wondered how George’s ‘special knowledge’ was different to my own, given the local gossip mill and the fact that the Daily Record had published photographs of the crime scene on its front page during the investigation. Plus my sisters and their friends were adamant about George’s innocence. However, we had been brought up to trust the police and were reassured by our father that the judicial process would get to the truth.

Fifty years on, as I began my research, this all niggled at me. I began by piecing together what George was like from those that knew him back then. He hadn’t had much schooling: he had been kept back a couple of years at primary school and it was generally accepted that he had a below average IQ. He was known about the town as someone who told ‘tall tales’; he lived in a fantasy world. He liked to try to impress people, and was eager to please as a way of being accepted socially.

He had often been the victim of bullying, as he was seen as ‘soft’ and immature; an easy target. Maureen Weston, who had been at Carluke Primary School with George, remembered him being surrounded by a circle of other children who would take it in turns to punch and kick him. George didn’t appear to object. Maureen recalled that he seemed to like being the centre of attention.

William Campbell, a fellow brakesman, suggested that as an adult George would often exaggerate about his drinking habits, but ‘we knew that they are all lies’. In fact, he hardly ever drank alcohol, which perhaps further served to mark him out as different to his contemporaries.

As I was not conducting an official cold case review, I couldn’t ask the police for their records and instead had to rely on newspaper archives in the British Library to get a sense of what the police had been thinking at the time. I was struck by a particularly revealing press statement made by detective chief superintendent William Muncie, the officer in charge of the case: ‘I feel some household must have noticed someone arriving home with signs of murder on his person. In kindness to that family, I appeal to them to come forward. It may well be that the killer needs attention and he could strike again.’ This seemed fair enough, based on the frenzied nature of the attack (something we call ‘overkill’, as the killer inflicted injuries that were far in excess of what was actually needed to cause death).

However, according to my research, it appears that there were no ‘signs of murder’ on George’s person – he was not covered in blood and no forensic evidence has ever been found to connect George to the murder, although there was some comment at the time about a spot of blood that had been found on his handkerchief. There were no fibres from her clothes on what he was wearing, no scrapings of his skin under Margaret’s fingernails. Nor did any witnesses I know of see George acting strangely or out of the ordinary; none commented that he had, for example, looked unduly troubled or emotionally high or disinhibited, as a killer might in the aftermath of such an attack.

One of my sisters’ friends, Laura Allan, told me that her father William gave George a lift on the morning after the murder, at the end of their shift. George had not mentioned anything unusual.

As for George’s alibi, his shift at the steelworks began at 10pm and there was evidence that placed him near the scene of the murder at around the time Margaret was attacked. However, he was spotted by various witnesses at 7.40pm and again at 8pm, heading towards Gorry’s Nursery, which he reached at around 8.30pm and where he had gone to buy tomatoes for his colleagues. The errand should have provided George with an alibi. None of the witnesses saw him acting

No forensic evidence has ever been found to connect George to the murder

Police search Colonel’s Glen; DCS William Muncie