A vulnerable missing teen. £182,000 in benefits. And a murder mystery without a body...
SHE was a vulnerable teenager imprisoned in a stinking, ramshackle home dominated by a brutish couple who – grotesquely – called themselves carers. In fact, Edward Cairney and Avril Jones were for several years Margaret Fleming’s tormenters. Then they became her killers.
And, most disturbingly of all, no one noticed. Not until almost 17 years had passed did anyone seriously wonder about the timid young woman sent to stay in Inverkip, Renfrewshire, with supposed friends of her late father.
And not until yesterday, when Cairney and Jones were convicted of murder, was any measure of justice afforded her.
To cover up for their crime, her killers invented ludicrous stories, forged letters in Miss Fleming’s name and even tried to convince the police who arrived at their door that they had missed her by seconds.
The truth was much bleaker. Almost two decades ago, by ‘means unknown’, they had taken her life. It was the final act in a vicious campaign of abuse conducted behind closed doors in conditions described by the policeman leading the investigation as ‘utterly disgusting and uninhabitable’.
Detective Superintendent Paul Livingstone added: ‘She was subjected to daily punishment, which included being tied up, having her hair cut short and deprived of food.’
Heartbreakingly, there was no one in the outside world to help. Few knew she had even been living with the couple and no one noticed when she was gone.
Miss Fleming died friendless and isolated as her killers pocketed her benefits money. A total of £182,000 was fraudulently claimed before the cynical scheme was finally uncovered.
Along the way, numerous opportunities to uncover the truth were missed. One came in 2012 when a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) team member, Morag Deegan, visited the house after Miss Fleming failed to turn up for a medical check for her incapacity benefit.
Mrs Deegan said was met at the door by Jones, who was appointed by the DWP to look after Miss Fleming’s benefits.
She told the jury: ‘Miss Jones said, “She’s here, but she won’t see you”. She told me it was because of her condition or mental health.’
Mrs Deegan referred the case to the social work department at Inverclyde Council, which failed to get the necessary client consent to pursue it.
It was only when Jones made an application for personal independence payments (PIP) on behalf of her long-dead murder victim that serious questions began to be asked. Her mistake, perhaps, was in over-egging the application.
She wrote that Miss Fleming needed ‘constant care’, had self-harmed and had been ‘caught eating out of a dog bowl’. That prompted a social worker to call Jones and offer help – whereupon more lies were spun.
ULTIMATELY, it emerged there was no record of Miss Fleming visiting a doctor in more than 16 years. In fact, there was no record of her doing anything anywhere in all that time. Finally the police were called – and the lies became more outrageous.
When Police Scotland arrived at the couple’s house in October 2016, covering the front and back exits, Cairney pretended that Miss Fleming had been there with him seconds earlier.
Indeed, he said he told them: ‘She’s here! What are you wanting her for?’ He added: ‘I turned round to get Margaret and she was gone.
‘She was out the door. There was police at the back, police at the front, she couldn’t get out that door without being seen. I don’t know which way she went… she must have just walked right through them, mustn’t she?’
Other claims were more far-fetched still. He claimed that the desperately shy teenager who had gone to live with them had, in adulthood, become a ‘gang master’, recruiting migrant agricultural workers from around Europe and directing them towards employment.
He also claimed Miss Fleming was a drugs kingpin, a friend to travelling people – even a ‘frustrated spy’ who was impossible to trace due to the many aliases she had taken to using.
Added to all this, he said, she was afraid of the police, which was why she had fled from her home just as they turned up. And yet, as fanciful as the claims sounded, there was no evidence beyond her absence that Miss Fleming had come
to any harm. So began an exhaustive search of the garden and house, two bedrooms of which were filled with little besides rubbish. The smell was appalling and, in order to get access to one room, police had to knock a wall down and take a window out.
They found no trace of Miss Fleming and almost nothing that had belonged to her.
Of thousands of photographs recovered, fewer than ten showed Miss Fleming who, according to her carers, had by then been living there for some 20 years.
Yet, with no evidence of criminality, the case remained no more than a missing person inquiry.
Not until the following October – when Cairney and Jones tried to make a run for it – did police strike. The couple were arrested trying to get onto a London-bound train in Glasgow’s Central Station. They were carrying £3,500 and the keys to a safe deposit box in London which contained £27,000.
In a police interview carried out shortly afterward, Cairney replied ‘no comment’ to every question he was asked – including ‘did you murder Margaret Fleming?’. Seeing his reaction, his interviewer told him: ‘I don’t know if it’s a nervous thing but, again, it’s a crucial question and you’re smirking.’
Cairney replied: ‘How is it a crucial question?’ He then told the officer: ‘Maybe I’m smirking at your manufactured sincerity?’
At another point he baited his interviewer with the question: ‘How much do you really know about me?’ What is known about Cairney is the 77-year-old is a former deep sea diver who, with his wife Margaret, had moved into the hotel business, running the Castle Levan in Gourock.
Avril Jones worked there, too, and the pair began a relationship. When the business failed in the 1990s, Cairney and Jones moved to the house in Inverkip which, over the next 20 years, they would turn into a fetid slum. It was in 1995 that Miss Fleming came into their orbit. Her father Frederick had died and, as she had almost no relationship with her mother Margaret Cruickshanks, he had stipulated in his will she should stay with his friends, Cairney and Jones.
He could never have known it, but he was sending his daughter to her death. She began living in Inverkip in 1996 and attended James Watt College in Greenock between 1996 and 1998. But, after that, sightings of her became fewer and further between. Some recalled seeing her with duct tape stuck to her face and limbs. They remembered a painfully shy teenager who would go to almost any lengths to avoid attracting attention.
Yet, according to Mr Livingstone, the man leading the investigation, Miss Fleming was ‘funny and caring’. Despite her mild learning difficulties, he said, she ‘just wanted to be liked and to have friends’.
One of her last chances to save herself came when her mother arrived at the Inverkip house and tried to persuade the teenager to come and live with her. The visit was a disaster. Miss Cruickshanks alleged Cairney shoved her and spat in her face. She said Margaret was brought downstairs and asked where she wanted to live.
She told the court: ‘I think she was a bit nervous… she said she wanted to stay there.’
QUITE what horrors were inflicted on the teenager inside this hellhole can now only be guessed at. What is known is that the last confirmed sighting of her by anyone other than Cairney or Jones was at Jones’s brother Richard’s house on December 17, 1999.
Shortly thereafter the couple began telling anyone who asked – and few did – that Miss Fleming had taken off with travelling people. Yet the pretence they maintained years later, when first questioned by the police, was that she returned home regularly to collect her benefits money.
If none of their neighbours had spotted her on any of those hundreds of occasions, well, they said, that was just coincidence. Practically everyone in Inverkip knew of Cairney and Jones, but almost no one had heard of Miss Fleming. ‘Nobody knows a thing about her, not a thing,’ said neighbour Rhona Wadley, ‘I’ve lived here for 26 years and I don’t recognise the pictures or anything.’
A friend of the couple, who had been on holidays with them, was similarly perplexed when asked about the young woman supposedly staying in their house.
‘I have never met or seen her,’ said Rosemary Connelly.’ Only once, years ago, said Mrs Connelly, had Jones ever talked about Miss Fleming.
She added: ‘I did hear Avril mention Margaret once because she hadn’t gone to college or something.’
Police efforts to find a shred of truth in her carers’ story – that Miss Fleming was alive and well and up to no good – could hardly have been more exhaustive. They contacted 244 NHS trusts, 51 police forces, 419 local authorities, 42 utility companies and banks and 386 women’s aid organisations.
They tried to contact everyone in the UK with the name Margaret Fleming, ultimately failing to reach only three. Nothing pointed to her being alive. Nor did the couple’s behaviour in a BBC interview weeks before their arrest suggest anything other than that they were liars – bad ones.
Cairney claimed at one point that he told police where Miss Fleming was but that they ‘weren’t interested’. When asked what they would say to her now if she were watching, Jones simply stared blankly ahead. There was no answer from Cairney either.
Both knew there was no way she could be watching. Behind their silence lay terrible secrets.