Templeton Woods murders, the most frozen of cold cases
The horrific slaying of two young women appalled the nation. Yet, 40 years on, police are no nearer solving the mystery... or finding a killer
IT was a young girl who saw the handbag, cast onto the river bank by floods. The family scrambled up to examine it and discovered a woman’s polo-neck jumper, tights and belt, along with a purse containing money and a child allowance book.
They belonged to Carol Lannen, a name that meant nothing to them, as they prepared to take part in a charity raft race on the River Don in Aberdeenshire in April 1979.
The off-duty police officer present at the race who handed the effects in to Inverurie police station on his way home was also none the wiser. Yet anyone living 80 miles south in Dundee would have been only too aware of the handbag’s significance.
Its owner was an 18-year-old mother who had been found stripped, tied up and strangled beside a picnic table in the city’s Templeton Woods park less than two weeks earlier. Her murder, both repellent and brazen in its execution, had struck such a note of public disquiet that detectives on Tayside were desperate to make a reassuringly quick arrest.
For 11 days, they had hunted in vain for the vital clue that would unlock the case. Then Miss Lannen’s missing handbag and clothes turned up a two-hour drive away on a lonely riverbank. Surely this was the stroke of good fortune they had been waiting for? Sadly, nothing in this case has ever been straightforward.
Less than a year after her death, the increasingly fraught investigation was further contorted by the murder of a second young woman in worryingly similar circumstances. The body of 20-year-old Elizabeth McCabe was found less than 100 yards from where Miss Lannen was discovered in the same park on the northern outskirts of Dundee following a night out with friends in February 1980. The trainee nursery nurse had also been stripped, bound and throttled.
From the moment the second death became public, the link was imprinted indelibly in the collective consciousness and the killings would for ever be known as the Templeton Woods Murders. Such notoriety sparked a frenzy of speculation that the murders were the work of a serial killer. Down the years, the names of Angus Sinclair, Peter Sutcliffe and, most improbably, California’s infamous Zodiac killer would all pass across detectives’ desks.
YET, four decades after police first embarked upon this most baffling of cases, Miss Lannen’s family still live in agonising limbo, no closer to seeing her killer unmasked. As the 40th anniversary of her murder approaches, the police evidence vault remains stuffed with the 1,485 items of interest seized by officers and the 3,715 witness statements gathered during their inquiries.
No one has ever appeared in court charged with her murder, let alone been convicted and sentenced. The passage of time and improvements in forensic science which have provided succour to victims’ families in other long-running cases have yielded nothing here. Suspects have presented themselves, including a sex-addicted wife killer who may well have known the victim. Despite all the attention the case has garnered since 1979, the central question remains unchanged. Who killed Carol Lannen? And why?
The youngest of five, she was, by all accounts, an unhappy child whose unstable home life led to her being put in care before her untimely end. She was not yet ten when her father Norman, a former RAF man, was jailed for 18 months for theft. While he was locked up, her mother met someone else and the marriage crumbled. Following his release in 1970, he moved back to his native Bradford and never spoke to his daughter again. He only learned of her murder when police reopened the case in 2005 and visited him to obtain a statement.
Young Carol attended St John’s in Dundee, a well-regarded Roman Catholic secondary school, but struggled to fit in and left at 16. One classmate said this week: ‘We used to feel sorry for her. She didn’t have a circle of friends. Not even one close friend.
‘People would try to get her involved but it wouldn’t work. It was difficult to talk to her one-to-one. I don’t think she had a happy home life; she never looked a happy teenager. She always looked haunted. All through school I never saw her smile once.’
With few prospects, she was drawn to prostitution. Three days before Christmas 1978, just three months before her death, Miss Lannen gave birth to a son, Derek. No father’s name was entered on the birth certificate and she juggled childcare with working in Dundee’s red light district. She was last seen getting into a red estate car in Exchange Street on March 20, 1979. The following day, a couple walking in Templeton Woods found her naked body, partially covered by snow.
A description was issued of a man – late twenties, slim, pale, with sideburns and a moustache – seen picking her up in a red car. Dozens of statements were taken; but one by one the leads dried up. When Miss Lannen’s handbag was found, police initially believed the killer must have had local knowledge of the area where it was deposited. But as time passed, suspicion grew it had been used as a decoy to draw police away from the killer’s true location.
When Miss McCabe’s body was found almost a year later, close by and in near-identical circumstances, it gave the Lannen investigation fresh impetus – although police were reluctant to connect them.
Both women were picked up by a vehicle at night in Dundee city centre, both were stripped and strangled, their clothes and handbags found miles from the woods. There, however, the similarities ended.
The two young women could hardly have been more different. Miss
McCabe was shy and from a closeknit family who worked as a nurse in a city centre nursery school. The former Menzieshill High pupil vanished after a night out with friends on February 11, 1980, and her body was not found until the eve of her 21st birthday two weeks later.
Detectives believed a taxi driver was responsible for Miss McCabe’s death, but that a client may have killed Miss Lannen. Officers set about tracing more than 700 licensed and unlicensed taxi drivers. One, Vincent Simpson, whose car had been spotted near the woods the night Miss McCabe vanished, became a suspect.
He was eventually brought to trial for her murder in 2007, but found not guilty. He claimed he had an alibi and produced a list of 13 names which he said were more likely suspects.
That trial emerged out of Operation Trinity, a cold case review by three Scottish police forces – Lothian and Borders, Strathclyde and Tayside – into seven unsolved cases, including the World’s End pub murders of teenagers Christine Eadie and Helen Scott in Edinburgh in 1977.
The officer in charge was Tom Wood, then Deputy Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders.
ONE name that cropped up was Angus Sinclair, who had been jailed for life for the 1978 murder of teenage prostitute Mary Gallacher in Glasgow. He would later be found guilty of the rape and murder of Miss Eadie and Miss Scott.
The murders of Agnes Cooney in Lanarkshire and Anna Kenny and Hilda McAuley in Glasgow were also reviewed. Sinclair, who died in prison earlier this month aged 73, remains the prime suspect in their killings.
Mr Wood said there were ‘strong reasons’ to suspect Sinclair of the Dundee killings due to similarities to his other crimes around the same time. He said: ‘The way the two Dundee girls were killed was also similar to the methods used by Sinclair in other murders.
‘However, although it took a bit of digging we realised that Sinclair could not have committed the murders because he had definitely been in prison at the time of both deaths. Tayside would have loved Sinclair to have been in the frame – it was a huge let-down for them.’
It would also emerge the Templeton Woods murders were included in a secret investigation into possible attacks in Scotland by Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, carried out by West Yorkshire Police chief Keith Hellawell in 1996.
But the most far-fetched theory came in a dossier passed to Tayside police in 2005 which alleged the man responsible for the infamous Zodiac slayings which terrorised Northern California from 1968 to 1974 – and were turned into a 2007 Hollywood movie starring Robert Downey Jr, Jake Gyllenhaal and Dundee-born actor Brian Cox – was linked to the murder of Miss Lannen.
It said the killer, who was never identified, had fled to Scotland and the Dundee teenager’s killing was ‘Zodiac’s last act’.
But the theory was eventually quashed by investigators in California.
Far more compelling was the conclusion of veteran local reporter Sandy McGregor, who believes he knows the identity of Miss Lannen’s killer – Andrew Hunter, who was convicted of the murder of his pregnant wife Lynda in 1988 after the case was among the first Scottish cases featured on the BBC’s Crimewatch.
Hunter’s trial heard he moved to Dundee in 1977 to work in a Salvation Army citadel and as an unqualified social worker attached to children’s homes. But behind the façade of respectability was a sex killer who frequented prostitutes. He is likely to have met Miss Lannen in a children’s home in the city.
Described in court as ‘an evil man of exceptional depravity’, his trial heard he strangled his wife with her dog Shep’s lead and buried her body in woods near Ladybank, Fife – before going to extraordinary lengths to cover his tracks. He drove his car 300 miles to Manchester, abandoning it near a train station to make it look like she had run away – then made his way back to Scotland.
But his story unravelled after her body was found in a shallow grave.
MR McGregor said in a television interview that the mother of a prostitute who associated with Hunter told him they met while he was a social worker at a children’s home.
‘Carol Lannen was a young prostitute and I think it’s perfectly possible he met her in the course of his duties,’ he added, pointing out that a police photofit of the Lannen murder suspect bears ‘an uncanny resemblance’ to Hunter. ‘Would it be such a stretch that a violent bully with an apparently voracious sexual appetite may have struck before?’
Hunter died of a heart attack in Perth Prison six years after he killed his wife.
Miss Lannen’s mother Christine McCluskey died before her daughter’s killer was brought to justice. Derek Lannen, now 40, who was brought up by Mrs McCluskey, said in an interview: ‘As I’ve got older and learned more about the murder, I wanted closure for my gran. She was devastated and over the years her hopes had been raised the killer would be found, then crushed again. She passed away in 2011 and it devastated me. I’m still struggling with it. I feel as if I’ve lost two mums.
‘The person who killed her destroyed her family too. I just hope someone comes forward and gives the police something they can work with now. It’s time to let Carol and Christine rest in peace. They both deserve that.’
A Crown Office spokesman recently declined to say whether Andrew Hunter had ever been investigated in connection with the murder of Miss Lannen, but said its cold case unit keeps all unsolved homicides under review.
A Police Scotland spokesman said: ‘We never consider cases closed and the passage of time is no barrier to the investigation of unresolved homicide cases.’
Forty years on, the clock is still ticking.