Final bid to f ind Moira, 60 years on
A FINAL effort to find the remains of 11-year-old schoolgirl Moira Anderson, who vanished 60 years ago, will begin next month.
A police operation involving scientists and forensic experts will target six possible sites where the body of Moira, from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, might have been hidden.
The Monklands Canal will be the starting point, as it has the strongest evidential link to Moira and a man who matches the description of her likely killer, the late Alexander Gartshore.
Maps of the areas of interest, which centre around Carnbroe, on the edge of Coatbridge, have been overlaid with aerial photographs taken of the terrain from 1945 onwards.
The search will begin on or around March 13, focusing at first on a 100-
‘We know we’re playing out the last act’
yard stretch of the canal. If it yields nothing, the operation will move to the first of five potential nearby sites.
Police searching for Moira in 1957 failed to follow up a witness from Carnbroe who saw a tall man of about 35 emerging from waste-ground opposite his home, carrying a large, heavy sack towards the canal the morning after Moira disappeared.
He reported the sighting to police, and his description was a good match for Gartshore, named in 2014 as Moira’s likely killer by then Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, QC.
Gartshore, then 36, was driving the bus on which Moira was last seen on the afternoon of February 23, 1957.
He died, aged 85, in a Leeds hospital in 2006, never having been charged in relation to Moira’s disappearance.
Years later his daughter, Sandra Brown, linked Gartshore publicly to Moira in a book, Where There is Evil.
Just before he died, she visited him in hospital. Although he stopped short of confessing, he said Moira had been ‘too bonny for her own good’.
Mrs Brown set up the Moira Anderson Foundation, based in Airdrie, to support victims of child sexual abuse.
She has become a close friend of Moira’s sister, Janet Hart, who lives in Australia and is the charity’s patron.
Mrs Hart is coming to Scotland for the 60th anniversary. She said: ‘I am trying not to get my hopes up, but I can’t help feeling the time has come.’
Investigation leader Detective Superintendent Pat Campbell said: ‘There has never been any doubt this was the right thing to do.
‘We’ll do all we can. We know we’re playing out the last act.’