Renowned criminologist David Wilson re-investigates a 47-year-old murder that still feels personal to him

IHAVE worked as a criminologist for some 40 years, specialising in violent crime, so I am used to discussing, researching and trying to understand murder in all its various guises. I’ve talked with hundreds of murderers, many hundreds more who are suspected of having committed murder and, saddest of all, the families of the victims left behind.

Over the years I have come to understand the public’s fascination with murder, especially serial murder, and developed stock answers to questions I regularly get asked. Are people who commit murder born evil? Do you enter the mind of a serial killer? And, perhaps most commonly of all, how do you cope?

My various coping strategies have been honed over the years but they were tested to the limit by the murder that is the subject of my new book. The case has engrossed me for the past two years, not least because for the very first time the murder felt personal. I was returning to my home town in Lanarkshire at the request of my sisters and their friends to look again at a case which had nagged away at them for decades. What I was to discover made me profoundly uncomfortable as a brother, man, Scot and criminologist.

In July 1973, a 23-year-old woman called Margaret McLaughlin was murdered as she took a shortcut from her home in Glenburn Terrace, Carluke, through an area known locally as Colonel’s Glen to catch the 8.03pm train into Glasgow. Margaret had recently got engaged to Bob Alexander, although he was working that summer in South Africa. Margaret was going into the city to meet her soon to be sister-in-law to make plans for the wedding. She was about to start the rest of her life.

The journey from her home to the station should only have taken her a few minutes, but Margaret never emerged from the glen. Her body was found the following morning and it was obvious she had been subjected to a ferocious attack; she had been stabbed 19 times.

In an era before CCTV, mobile phones, a national DNA database or “offender profiling”, and when forensic science was still in its infancy, it didn’t seem that the Lanarkshire police and their lead detective William Muncie – “Scotland’s top detective” – would have much to go on. But within the week they had arrested and charged a 19 yearold local man called George Beattie with Margaret’s murder. Yet there was no forensic evidence to connect Beattie to Margaret’s death. He appears to have been charged as a result of his “special knowledge” of the crime scene and a pseudo-confession that he had been forced to watch Margaret being repeatedly stabbed by men who wore top hats with mirrors on them.

The jury took just 35 minutes to find Beattie guilty. All of his subsequent appeals were unsuccessful and, as far as anyone official is concerned, the case is now closed. Beattie has served his sentence and been released from prison. In 1973 I was a teenager still living at home with my parents and two of my three sisters, Alison and Margaret; Annie, my third sister, had recently married and was living in another part of the town. Alison and Margaret still live in Carluke.

By 1975 I had gone off to university and would make my career in England. I was aware even then that my gender gave me opportunities that were denied to my sisters: their horizons were fixed at school teaching, nursing or clerical work. Those horizons were also geographically bound by Lanarkshire, while just a few years after leaving university I was living in New York, then Cambridge. This had nothing to do with talent but was merely a taken-for-granted, seemingly “natural” process that separated girls from boys and women from men. We would now call all of this prejudice.

MY sisters and their friends, who all still meet regularly in a cafe in the town, wanted me to look again at Margaret’s murder and Beattie’s conviction. They are as convinced now as they were in 1973 that Muncie had arrested the wrong man. I was reluctant. What if I come to the same conclusion as Muncie? “That would be fine – we trust you,” they replied, the implication being they didn’t trust the original investigation.

Many other women in the town shared their skepticism, while most of the men – including my own father – simply accepted that Muncie and the criminal justice system had convicted the right