Calls grow for inquiry into police failings in Iain Packer case
Demands are growing for a public inquiry into why it took almost 20 years to bring the serial rapist and killer Iain Packer to justice, after he was jailed for 36 years on Wednesday for the 2005 murder of Emma Caldwell.
The calls came as further details emerged raising serious questions about the investigation of the murder and police attitudes to reports of violence against sex workers.
Police Scotland have apologised for how the original inquiry was handled by Strathclyde police, which was amalgamated into the national force in 2013, and said Caldwell, her family and “many other victims” were “let down by policing in 2005”.
The Caldwell family said an inquiry was necessary to investigate the “toxic culture of misogyny and corruption [that] meant the police failed so many women and girls who came forward to speak up against Packer”.
Caldwell, 27, was living in a hostel in Glasgow when she disappeared in April 2005. Her mother, Margaret, told the trial that her daughter had started taking heroin to numb her grief after the death of her sister, and was funding her drug habit through sex work. Caldwell’s naked body was found five weeks later in Limefield Woods near Biggar, South Lanarkshire.
Information about the police investigation that came to light during the trial raised significant questions about why it took so long to bring Packer to justice. He gave six statements to police between 2005 and 2007 but was not interviewed under caution as a suspect.
By 2015, concerns about the unsolved case were such that the lord advocate ordered Police Scotland to reinvestigate not only who killed Caldwell but flaws in the original inquiry.
The original police investigation focused on four Turkish men, who were charged with Caldwell’s murder in August 2007, but that case collapsed and the men were released.
Speaking after Packer was also convicted of the sexual assaults of 21 women spanning a 26-year period, Aamer Anwar, the solicitor representing Caldwell’s mother, said: “We now know Packer carried out rapes, sexual offences and assaults some 19 times after Emma’s murder in 2005. Margaret believes that officers sabotaged an investigation into Packer for a decade and have blood on their hands. For far too long they have remained in the shadows but [they] must now answer for their betrayal.”
Anwar said the Caldwell family were calling on the Scottish government to order an independent, judgeled public inquiry into what went wrong. “The scale of the crimes and the failures are so catastrophic that nothing less than a judicial public inquiry will suffice. Neither the police nor Crown Office can be allowed or trusted to investigate themselves and their former bosses,” he said.
The Scottish government has said it will consider holding such an inquiry and that it was right that Police Scotland had apologised for the failures of the first investigation.
Since the verdict, many women have come forward to say they warned police about Packer’s violent behaviour when they began investigating Caldwell’s death in 2005 and that other victims needlessly were attacked because the force failed to act at the time.
BBC Scotland spoke to one woman, Nicky (not her real name), 41, who told the trial about her indecent assault by Packer. She claimed Packer’s name was flagged to police by other sex workers in the years after Emma’s death but “they didn’t listen”.
She said: “We were never believed. It was as if we didn’t matter, because we put ourselves in these situations and it was our own fault.”
Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, paid tribute to Packer’s victims who gave evidence at the trial. She said: “Many women had made reports of rape and sexual assault carried out by Ian Packer to the police. There can be many barriers to reporting sexual violence to the police. Police Scotland has acknowledged that a significant number of women who did report sexual violence did not get the response they should have and were badly let down by policing. This can never happen again.”
David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Scottish Police Federation, said he was “not convinced there would be benefit from a public inquiry” into the case.
“Society has moved on and so has the police service. I genuinely believe policing is much better, with policies to deal with vulnerable witnesses and domestic abuse,” he said. “The Caldwell case was a particularly bad instance where the decision was made about who the suspects were early on rather than looking at all the evidence.”