KILLER'S DARKEST SECRET
‘Please let us give her the burial and send-off she deserves’
David Gilroy is serving a life sentence for the horrific murder of his former lover Suzanne Pilley. Yet he has always cruelly refused to reveal where he hid her battered body. Now, a decade on, police have launched a new bid to solve the riddle... with or without his help
IN the end, it was a tangle of tiny incongruities that tripped up Suzanne Pilley’s murderer. When the 38-year-old bookkeeper vanished without a trace after the May bank holiday a decade ago, police faced a baffling investigation.
With no body, no DNA or forensic clues, no weapon and no confession, how could they even be sure there had been a crime?
And yet, when officers looked at Miss Pilley’s colleagues, the odd behaviour of one man – David Gilroy – started to raise suspicions.
There was the strange damage to the underside of his car, the broken springs and snagged vegetation, suggesting it had been driven offroad; the long drive he took the day after she vanished, which took him hours longer to complete than it should have; the visit to the school campus he managed, where he asked for bin bags.
Why, detectives wondered, did Gilroy bombard Miss Pilley with endless text messages in the days leading up to her disappearance but stop when she vanished?
And why did he turn up to a police interview with what looked like women’s make-up covering scratches on his hands and face?
Small details, perhaps, but when woven together, these single strands created a powerful picture of inescapable guilt.
His trial would hear that married Gilroy murdered Miss Pilley in a jealous rage after she ended the turbulent on-off affair they had been conducting for months.
Gilroy’s case has become notorious not only for the details which led to his conviction, but also the fact he is one of only a handful of murderers to be successfully prosecuted without a body having been recovered.
MISS Pilley’s surviving family – her mother Sylvia and sister, Gail Fairgrieve – have been left dreading anniversaries, when they must expose their private grief to public scrutiny once more as they renew their appeal for help in finding Suzanne.
It does not help that the one person who can tell them where she is buried is the man they have come to revile most.
Police are certain Miss Pilley is lost somewhere in the vast Argyll Forest Park, but numerous searches by hundreds of volunteers of its pine-covered hinterland of craggy peaks and hidden gorges have yielded nothing.
And so, as another significant anniversary arrives in the search for Suzanne Pilley, her family must steel themselves once more to try to loosen the tongue of an unrepentant killer. Mrs Fairgrieve said: ‘For the past decade we have lived in a state of limbo, waiting for the news that Suzanne’s body had been found, but we’ve never been able to get that closure.
‘We accept that Suzanne was murdered and believe that the person responsible is in prison, but we feel we cannot say a proper goodbye until her body is found.’
Although police have assured the family any new information would be acted on, Mrs Fairgrieve said: ‘We understand that only one person can tell us where Suzanne is but has refused to do so.’
Urging all those who might know something to ‘search their conscience’, she added: ‘Not for our sake, but for Suzanne’s.
‘Please let us give her the burial and send-off she deserves.’
Only the stoniest heart can have failed to be moved by such a plea. But what about the man for whom the message is really intended? Is Gilroy ready to listen?
‘In my experience it is quite unusual for murderers to refuse to say where the body is,’ said forensic psychologist Dr Robert Forde, who assessed numerous violent criminals during a distinguished career.
‘But you have a problem if someone is maintaining his innocence, because he can’t reveal details of a murder which, as an innocent man, he’s not supposed to know.’
Dr Forde added: ‘There is certainly a group of murderers who like to maintain control over the family of their victim.
‘In this case, perhaps, he feels he no longer has any control over [Miss Pilley] because he’s killed her, but he can maintain control over other family members instead.
‘The vast majority of murderers don’t feel that, but he may get a psychopathic kick out of it.’
It was uncontrollable jealousy which led Gilroy to kill in the first place, after Miss Pilley had ended their affair and embarked upon a new relationship.
In his twisted mind, this obsessive control freak thought he was too clever to be caught. Yet considering the extraordinary lengths he went to cover his tracks, it was remarkable how quickly his plans unravelled.
The first problem was that police were on the case soon after Miss Pilley failed to show up at work on May 4, 2010. A creature of habit, she travelled to work by the same route every day – a bus to the stop by Jenners in Edinburgh city centre, then a short walk.
She would always phone if she was going to be late, even by a few minutes, but that morning, she had time to stop at Sainsbury’s before turning into Thistle Street and heading the final few yards to the offices of her employer, Infrastructure Managers.
Then, quite simply, she vanished. Her disappearance was so out of character that colleagues were immediately alarmed. Within hours, police had launched a murder inquiry and within days they had a suspect – David Gilroy.
Detectives soon knew what few company staff were aware of, that married Gilroy, a manager in her office, and Miss Pilley had been having an affair and that at one stage he had left his wife, Andrea, to move in with his lover.
A picture of a domineering and arrogant personality emerged, a man prepared to hack into her email and internet dating records to thwart her search for a new man, whose jealousy caused him once to hurl her belongings out of her kitchen window and hide her mobile phone for three weeks.
Miss Pilley was a very different
character. Bubbly and occasionally impulsive, she married young, to Peter Durrand, in a ceremony in Las Vegas. The marriage lasted only four years but they remained on good terms.
When she ended her relationship with Gilroy, things could not have turned out more disastrously.
She had just started seeing someone new, council worker Mark Brooks, but found herself still fighting off the unwanted attention of her controlling ex.
She and Mr Brooks had their first date on May 1, the day after she broke up with Gilroy, and they made a plan to meet again the next night. But she cancelled.
‘I can’t come out tonight,’ she texted. ‘It’s complicated. I’ve got a visitor. Take care.’
The next day she sent another text, explaining she had argued with Gilroy when he would not leave, adding: ‘At least if anything I managed to drum thru to David that it is over and leave me alone.’
As they learned details of his violent outbursts, police fixed their sights on this former Royal Navy engineer and relied on new technology – mobile phone masts and CCTV cameras – to pin down the final movements of both their suspect and his victim.
The final two texts she sent on the bus to work betrayed no hint of trouble. A message to her mother said: ‘I think Mark likes me. Take it slow.’ The second, to her father, concerned a moneysaving offer at the cinema. A FINAL grainy CCTV image shows Miss Pilley almost at her office door, where she was intercepted by a bitterly resentful Gilroy, who induced her to come to the offices’ basement garage.
A furious row ensued, during which he killed her.
In one of the most damning pieces of evidence presented at his trial, it emerged that the barrage of 400 text messages – including 64 in a single day – with which the regional office manager bombarded Miss Pilley in the weeks leading up to her death stopped the instant she vanished. He hid her body in an alcove and returned home to collect his car, buying air fresheners on the way.
While Miss Pilley’s friends fretted over what had befallen her, Gilroy spent the evening dining out with his family before returning to his unremarkable semi-detached home in Edinburgh’s Silverknowes district to plot his next move.
That night, the body of his dead lover was in the boot of his silver Vauxhall Vectra on the driveway.
The next day – the day before the 2010 general election – having arranged a spurious business trip to the far side of the country, he set off towards Lochgilphead via Callander and the spectacular scenery of the Trossachs, beyond Lochearnhead and Crianlarich.
It was a route Gilroy knew well, as his company managed five school campuses in the area for Argyll and Bute Council.
He would take Miss Pilley there, too, for days out.
On reflection, though, he might have wished he had skirted the Green Welly Stop shop and filling station at Tyndrum, where he was caught on CCTV at 1.23pm. He passed a second camera on Inveraray Main Street at 3.51pm, which meant a journey that should have taken him 35 minutes lasted almost two-and-a-half hours.
After stopping to collect a bundle of rubbish sacks from a cleaner at the school at Lochgilphead, he headed home, again taking almost two hours longer than necessary.
When police interviewed him, he remained cool but struggled to explain the scratches on his hands and neck, which he had attempted to mask with women’s make-up.
It was such tiny incongruities that sealed his fate as the Crown built up a compelling circumstantial case against the accused.
Prosecutors successfully argued at his trial that Gilroy used the missing hours to hide Miss Pilley’s body. furthermore, fuel consumption figures showed there had been 124 unexplained miles driven in his car, which was also badly damaged and snagged with vegetation.
Yet all the technology which helped to nail Gilroy could not locate Miss Pilley’s body.
Police are as certain as they can be that the dark interior of the
Argyll forest Park holds the final piece of the puzzle.
While sentencing Gilroy at the High Court in Edinburgh in April 2012, handing down a minimum term of 18 years in prison, judge Lord Bracadale told him: ‘It seems you are the only person who knows where her body is.
‘I hope a day will come when you will feel able to disclose that information and that might bring some comfort to her bereft family.’
EIGHT years on, Gilroy, now 57, shows little sign of bowing to this request. Indeed, the killer prefers to protest his innocence.
In December 2012, an appeal against his conviction was rejected by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh. A subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court in London, the highest court in the land, was later thrown out. Nearly everyone agrees on his guilt, yet he refuses to accept this.
His wife, who appeared initially to stand by her husband and refused to testify against him in court, has since distanced herself, reverting to her maiden name.
But his father, Benny, and stepmother Linda Gilroy, a former Labour MP, remain supportive, issuing a statement through a public relations agency demanding a fresh review of the case.
Their backing may harden Gilroy’s resolve, according to Dr forde, who said: ‘Being in prison, especially when you are going to be there for a long time, is a very lonely business.
‘If you’re frightened your family will disown you then that’s the last link you’ve actually got to your life outside prison.’
Miss Pilley’s father, Robert, died in february last year, at the age of 77, without seeing his daughter laid to rest.
If Gilroy maintains his silence, then his only route out of prison may be to convince a parole board he is fit for release. But he may never get that chance because of a parole review being driven forward in the name of his victim.
In february, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said he will press ahead with the introduction of ‘Suzanne’s Law’, which could mean killers who refuse to reveal the location of their victim’s body are never released.
Ten years on, Miss Pilley’s fate remains inextricably linked to David Gilroy, but the scales of justice are moving in her favour.
And as long as she remains entombed in a vast wilderness, her nemesis will wither away within the four walls of his concrete cell. It might just focus the mind.