How police searching f lat missed body under bed... twice
POLICE officers searched a flat three times before finding the body of a missing woman hidden under a bed – ten days after her death.
Lorraine Cameron was at the centre of a missing person inquiry after she failed to return home, and police visited the flat of her drug addict boyfriend Christopher Kemp.
Yet officers failed to find Miss Cameron – and it took them a further two visits before they located her body at the flat in Glasgow’s Parkhead, by which time the smell was so horrific that they struggled to breathe.
‘She’s under the bed,’ Kemp eventually told them, admitting that after she collapsed and died he had made only a bungled attempt at reviving her, without calling 999.
He then hid her body before stealing her valuables from her flat in Shettleston and pawning them for £500.
Glasgow Sheriff Court heard Miss Cameron, 40, had been seeing Kemp for several months before her death in May last year. When she did not return home, her son Taylor Ross, 20, tried calling her before alerting police, who launched a missing person inquiry. Kemp agreed to his flat being checked – until police went into his bedroom, when he angrily tried to prevent them and was arrested for breach of the peace. Police returned to Kemp’s flat five days after their first visit but still did not find Miss Cameron. It was only on their third visit that he told them where she was.
Sentencing Kemp to three years and five months in jail for house breaking and attempting to defeat the ends of justice, Sheriff Ian Miller told him he had deprived Miss Cameron of the ‘proper respect’ owed to the dead.
The case comes at a critical time for Police Scotland amid ongoing controversy over its failure to investigate reports of a car crash on the M9, leaving 25-year-old Lamara Bell dying by the roadside for three days beside the body of her partner John Yuill, 28.
Police call handling is now under scrutiny after Justice Secretary Michael Matheson ordered a review by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland.
Last night, Scottish Tory chief whip John Lamont said: ‘ This is a truly shocking incident. The fact a body lay undiscovered despite officers searching the property is unbelievable – sadly, this case very much echoes the recent M9 crash.’