Sir John Orr
Chief Constable of Strathclyde who led the initial investigation into the jumbo jet crash at Lockerbie
SIR JOHN ORR, who has died aged 72, was the workingclass son of a Kilmarnock wool blender who began his career as a village bobby and rose through the ranks to become chief constable of Strathclyde Police, Scotland’s largest force, in 1996. His biggest challenge had come in 1988 when he was appointed to head the investigation into the Lockerbie disaster. At the time the Pan Am jumbo jet, flight 103, fell out of the sky in December 1988, killing 270 people, he was joint head of CID in Strathclyde Police with the rank of detective chief superintendent.
Within a few hours his former colleague John Boyd, chief constable of the small neighbouring force of Dumfries and Galloway where the aircraft crashed, had called him in to lead the investigation. Orr was one of the most experienced CID men in Scotland, but even he was shocked by what he saw. “I’m not a crier,” he said later. “But that first night after the Lockerbie bomb? What I saw. The bodies and the severed limbs. The sheer futility and the waste of life. Yes, I cried. But only in private. I was 43 then and I will never forget.”
It soon became clear that the aircraft had been brought down by a bomb, turning the investigation into an international murder inquiry involving officers not only from different forces, but different continents. It was a huge operation. The wreckage was scattered over 2,000 square kilometres and investigators were confronted by a massive jigsaw puzzle in trying to piece the plane back together.
In total, four million pieces of wreckage were collected. Fragments of a Samsonite suitcase believed to have contained the bomb were recovered, together with pieces of circuit board identified as components of a radio cassette player.
Detectives found that the case had been loaded unaccompanied on to a flight in Frankfurt heading for Heathrow, having arrived in Frankfurt from Malta, tagged to go on to Heathrow. Intelligence-building by Orr’s team pointed to two Libyans working as security staff at Luqa airport in Malta. Eventually Orr was able to send a report to the Crown Office that led to the indictment of two Libyan agents, one of whom, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-megrahi, was convicted in 2001 on 270 counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Al-megrahi was released in 2009 on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government and died in 2012. His conviction continues to arouse controversy. Among several conspiracy theories, there were suggestions that the British government had been involved with the Americans in an elaborate cover-up to protect the Syrians and Iranians who were the real authors of the crime but who had to be kept onside during the Gulf War.
Those who knew Orr, however, found it impossible to conceive of his being involved in anything so fundamentally wrong.
The eldest of three children, John Orr was born in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, on September 3 1945 and brought up in a council house on the town’s Onthank Estate whose garden backed on to the premises of two police houses. “There was a sergeant and a constable and my family became quite friendly with theirs,” he recalled. “I used to admire both those officers; they were a good type. Probably old fashioned but good. They were decent people and that stimulated in me the thought that I might fancy being in the police.”
After leaving school with just one O-level aged 15, Orr joined the former Renfrew and Bute Constabulary as a police cadet, living in a Church of Scotland hostel in Paisley. He joined Kilmarnock Burgh Police in 1964, transferring to Cumbria Constabulary two years later.
Returning to Scotland in 1969, he joined the Ayrshire Constabulary, initially serving as a village copper at Monkton, before moving to CID at Ayr, Kilmarnock and the Irvine Valley.
He rose through the ranks via CID, the Scottish Crime Squad and Strathclyde Serious Crime Squad. In his early 30s, as a detective sergeant, he took a degree from the Open University in Social Sciences. Encouraged by this achievement, he went on to take a postgraduate diploma in Forensic Medicine from the University of Glasgow.
In 1990 he was appointed deputy chief constable at Dumfries and Galloway, and subsequently seconded as assistant inspector of constabulary for Scotland at the Scottish Office. He took the top job in Strathclyde at the beginning of 1996.
During his six years as chief constable he gained a reputation as a strong advocate of the kind of robust, interventionist, high-visibility policing that searches large numbers of people for weapons and targets drug dealers. This approach led to an unprecedented drop in crime rates.
There was, though, more to Orr, a large man with gingery eyebrows and rheumy, watchful eyes, than the “hard man” facade which he cultivated. Throughout his career, he listened to what he called “the little man” at the back of his head who told him what was right and wrong.
One of his first actions as chief constable was to apologise to a black officer who had been subjected to racism. The officer’s case had been overturned by an industrial tribunal on a technicality, but Orr felt that natural justice was on the man’s side. It was the first time that a chief constable had officially apologised.
In retirement he resumed his eldership at New Abbey Kirk in Dumfries and served as chairman of Kilmarnock football club, of which he had been a passionate supporter ever since his father and uncle Jimmy had carried him to his first Rugby Park encounter at the age of three.
Orr was appointed OBE in 1992, awarded the Queen’s Police Medal in 1996 and knighted in 2001.
In 1966 he married Joan Underwood, who survives him with a daughter and two sons, both of whom are in the police force.
Sir John Orr, born September 3 1945, died February 19 2018