A night on the town... and a serial killer who got away with murder
Fifty years after a woman vanished, a disturbing new theory about her fate
PAT McAdam was in high spirits as she headed off for a day out in Glasgow filled with shopping and partying. ‘We’re going to the dancing,’ she called to her mother, Mary, as she shut the door of the family home in Dumfries. ‘Don’t worry about me if I’m late. I’ll stay with friends.’
Despite the distances involved, Mrs McAdam was not given to fretting over the whereabouts of her confident and gregarious 17-year-old daughter, who would often come and go as she pleased.
That morning – Saturday, February 18, 1967 – the mother-of-four could not have known that she would never again hear from her youngest child, whose sudden disappearance would trigger one of Scotland’s most enduring and notorious murder mysteries.
Pat caught a bus to Gretna with a friend, Hazel Campbell, before the two teenagers hitched a lift to Glasgow, where they shopped for new clothes, handbags and shoes. They spent the evening at the Flamingo dance hall in Cardonald before being invited to an allnight house party.
The following morning, a wet and blustery Sunday, found the two friends thumbing a lift home in London Road, in the city’s East End. Traffic was thin on the ground and they were relieved when a dark-coloured articulated lorry pulled up smartly and the driver beckoned them into the cab.
Pat’s friend, Hazel, 19, was safely deposited back near her parent’s house in Annan, Dumfriesshire, around 2pm, but the younger girl never made it to her home 17 miles away in Lochside Road, Dumfries.
Pat McAdam, it seemed, had simply vanished into thin air. When the woollen factory worker’s increasingly anxious parents contacted the police, it triggered the largest search ever undertaken by Dumfries and Galloway Police until the 1988 Lockerbie atrocity.
Hundreds of officers were eventually drafted in to dig up moorland, search ditches and trawl riverbeds and lochs, while unprecedented media coverage carried the now-haunting image of her smiling face and Mia Farrow-style cropped hair.
In a bizarre twist, a celebrated Dutch clairvoyant was even invited to try to crack the case – to no avail.
Now, 50 years on, police remain convinced that Pat McAdam was probably dead before the weekend was out – almost certainly at the hands of a man who became the prime suspect almost from the word go.
Yet, Thomas Ross Young is himself now dead and with him died any prospect of a trial and the chance to bring justice to a family shattered by the loss of a young woman entering the prime of her life.
For as surely as the killer snuffed out Pat’s future, he shortened the lives of her despairing parents.
As days turned into weeks, the missing girl’s frantic mother, then 43, and her husband, Matthew, 51, criss-crossed the route of her last journey in search of any clue to her disappearance. A visibly exhausted Mr McAdam told one reporter: ‘We just have had very little sleep since she vanished.’
A keen follower of fashion, his daughter left a whole wardrobe of her favourite clothes behind. She had been saving for a summer holiday in Italy and her bankbook containing £47 and her insurance card were found untouched in her bedroom.
Her mother never stopped looking, once pounding the streets of Leeds after a report of a girl matching Pat’s description. ‘I just can’t give up hope,’ she said.
Tragically, both parents died without learning their daughter’s fate. Mr McAdam was only 53 when he died in 1969, while his wife passed away in 1981, at the age of 58 – both driven to an early grave by the strain, according to their other children, Wendy Dunlop and her siblings, Neil and Eleanor McAdam.
Mrs Dunlop, who turns 60 next week, has long feared the worst about her sister. She said: ‘Pat would never have gone away willingly. It was not in her nature to leave home like that. I have no doubt that she is dead.’
ALTHOUGH their sister’s final hours remain a mystery, a bulging police dossier is crammed with details of the articulated lorry’s fateful journey south from Glasgow.
The driver took the A74 towards Lockerbie before stopping briefly at a service station in Lesmahagow, near Lanark, where he bought Pat and Hazel a meal. Afterwards, Pat allowed the driver to kiss and cuddle her in the cab while her friend dozed in the back.
The lorry set off again, later cutting off towards Annan, where Hazel got out and waved her friend off. It continued towards Dumfries and witnesses would report their surprise at seeing it weave in and out of the maze of narrow roads near the village of Dalton. It was also seen parked up off a road near the Williamwath Bridge over the River Annan, north of Dalton.
Within three weeks of issuing a public appeal for help, detectives had the name of the lorry driver. Thomas Young, 33, from Glasgow, was, it soon emerged, a man with a violent past. Powerfully built with a hair-trigger temper, Young had displayed a volatile and vicious sex drive since his early teens.
At 13, this violent sexual inadequate was sent to borstal for indecent assault. By the mid-60s he was unhappily married and working as a lorry driver, a job which offered the perfect excuse to pick up women.
When questioned, Young was already facing a charge of raping a 19-year-old girl to whom he had given a lift near Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, exactly a month before he picked up Pat.
But he stuck to his story that the Scots teenager willingly agreed to have sex with him in his cab before he dropped her on the outskirts of Dumfries. With no evidence to the contrary, police had to let him go.
Kevin Cullinan, the detective who led the original investigation, once said: ‘The Pat McAdam case was the most frustrating in my career. We were convinced Pat had been murdered and we had a prime suspect who we were 99 per cent certain was responsible. But without a body we could not bring a charge.’
The police’s despair could perhaps be measured by their willingness in 1970 to allow a famous psychic, the late Gerard Croiset, to try to solve the mystery using his supposed powers of telepathy.
Having never visited Scotland, Croiset described where he said Pat had met her death, including uncannily accurate details of the area where Young’s lorry had been spotted.
He later travelled from his Utrecht home to view the scene. Handed Pat’s Bible, he immediately declared: ‘This girl is dead.’ He concluded she had been murdered and her body thrown into the river, which washed it out to sea. However plausible, Croiset’s claims suffered from a lack of solid proof.
In the meantime, a court jailed Young for 18 months for the Rosson-Wye rape before, in 1970, he was sent back to prison for eight years for raping a 15-year-old girl in Lanarkshire. Released after five years, he went on a spree of violent rape that ended in murder.
In July 1977, Frances Barker disappeared from outside her home in Glasgow’s Maryhill after getting a taxi home from the Parkhead area of the city. The 37-year-old bakery worker’s body was found dumped next to a farm track near Glenboig, Lanarkshire, 17 days later.
Police initially focused on Glasgow’s red light district in case the killer was a kerb-crawler. The hunch
paid off. Tales of a mystery lorry driver who would cruise around before picking up women led officers to one prostitute who had a habit of noting down the registration numbers of suspicious clients in a Mills and Boon paperback.
The suspicious lorry belonged to a haulage firm in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow. The driver was Thomas Young. Forensic analysis showed hairs found in his cab belonged to Miss Barker, while officers discovered her green make-up compact concealed under the floorboards at the house where Young was arrested.
Retired Detective Chief Inspector Alex Cowie, who worked on the case, said Young refused to cooperate with police interviews. He recalled: ‘We gave up after about ten minutes as he refused to answer any questions. He was physically intimidating. His lorry firm colleagues said he was so strong he could lift a trailer and put it on the lorry himself.’
Mr Cowie said Young boasted of having had sex with more than 200 women in the cab of his lorry, adding: ‘He was the most frightening, dangerous and evil man I’ve met. God knows how many other victims he had.’
Young always protested his innocence and claimed he was ‘fitted up’, but on October 25, 1977, a jury at the High Court in Glasgow took an hour to find him guilty of Miss Barker’s murder, the attempted murder of two more women and the rapes of another three. He was jailed for a minimum of 30 years – later reduced to 25 on appeal.
Yet Young’s link to Pat McAdam refused to go away. In 2004, Dumfries and Galloway Police’s then head of CID, Detective Superintendent Bill Gillies, launched a cold case review, which led to the killer finally being charged, in 2007, with the teenager’s murder.
Now retired, Mr Gillies said: ‘The case had a big impact on Dumfries – everybody remembered where they were when Pat McAdam disappeared – and we had an astonishing public response to the fresh appeal.
‘We managed to unearth new witnesses and eventually put the jigsaw together. All the evidence pointed to Thomas Young.’
Yet again, the breakthrough proved illusory. Shortly before he was charged, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission lodged an appeal doubting the safety of Young’s conviction for the murder of Frances Barker.
The appeal was based on reports by Glasgow University forensic pathologists and an FBI profiler which suggested that one man was responsible for killing six young women during the 1970s, including Miss Barker and the notorious murders of two Edinburgh women Helen Scott and Christine Eadie, after they left a pub in 1977.
The studies pointed the finger at Angus Sinclair, who was eventually convicted in 2014 of the so-called World’s End murders of Miss Scott and Miss Eadie. He lived with his mother Maimie a few hundred yards along the street from Miss Barker when she vanished, and fished near where her body was found. Crucially, the Commission stated, Young was in prison when the five murders – apart from Miss Barker’s – were carried out, and could not have been responsible.
IN the end, both the appeal and efforts to get Young to trial foundered as his health failed. He died in 2014 of a heart condition, after serving 37 years in prison for Miss Barker’s murder. But had he served all that time for the wrong crime?
Mr Cowie is adamant he got the right man. He said: ‘I’m certain in my own mind that it was Thomas Young.
‘We found a prostitute who had been raped by Young only a few yards from the spot where we found Frances Barker. She was able to take us to the spot afterwards and pick Young out at an identity parade. We also found Frances’s hair in his lorry cabin and blood traces on the hair.
‘We also found a compact belonging to Frances and other personal effects in Young’s former home. None of the evidence was planted or manufactured. Sinclair never featured.’
Mr Gillies is equally certain of Young’s culpability over Pat McAdam.
He said: ‘It’s just disappointing that it never went any further. The whole point was to bring some closure to Pat’s family. I feel sorry for them. They have been looking for somewhere to grieve, but have not been able to do it.’
Last week Mrs Dunlop, a motherof-six now living in Erskine, Renfrewshire, was again thinking of her sister on the anniversary of her disappearance.
A close family member, who asked not to be named, said: ‘We still talk about Pat all the time. It is very hard, but it is important to keep her memory alive.’