The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Double killer who broke out of Peterhead Prison
The sinister warning “this man is considered dangerous” was relayed across the north-east when double-killer Donald Forbes escaped from Peterhead Prison.
Once dubbed “Scotland’s most dangerous man”, police were on high alert as a manhunt was launched 50 years ago.
Forbes was serving life behind bars for two murders and an attempted murder, after being reprieved from a death sentence.
As most Peterhead residents were tucking into their breakfast, the violent killer was quietly slipping over the prison wall.
Police patrols and sniffer dogs were deployed around the Blue Toon when a length of rope was found dangling from the prison wall near the governor’s house.
But by the time the alarm was raised at about 8.30am, Forbes had already been on the run for two hours.
Trawlerman Donald Ferguson Forbes was said to have had a troubled upbringing and had been no stranger to violence in childhood.
Of no fixed address, Forbes – also known as Ginger – was only 23 when he was sentenced to death by hanging for a brutal murder in Edinburgh in June 1958.
Forbes killed night watchman Allan Fisher in a botched robbery at a fish factory in the city’s Granton area.
The watchman had seen Forbes skulking about the factory and confronted him armed with a bottle.
But Forbes overpowered the 67-year-old and savagely beat him over the head with the bottle, leaving him for dead before nonchalantly heading to the pub.
Charged with murder, he was later described in court as a psychopath by a psychiatrist.
And in September 1958, Forbes was convicted of murder at the High Court in Edinburgh, where judge Lord Wheatley sentenced him to death.
The execution was set for October 16 at Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison.
Cold-blooded killer Forbes made headlines up and down the country.
But by the late 50s, capital punishment was falling out of public favour.
Forbes played to the crowd, making an impassioned, 11th hour plea to the Scottish Home Department for permission to marry his sweetheart who was expecting his second child.
With days to go, this was granted and the condemned man married 22-year-old Rita McLean, of Inverness, in the prison chapel.
He was the first and only person on death row to marry in a Scottish prison.
Portrayed as a troubled man who would be dead before meeting his unborn child and reuniting with his devoted young wife, there was public pressure for mercy.
Scottish Secretary John Maclay relented and Forbes’s death sentence was replaced with life imprisonment.
Forbes would never meet his child, who only lived for three days, while his marriage lasted just months, but the sob story saved him from the noose.
Forbes was freed on parole in May 1970 having not even served 12 years.
Within seven weeks he killed again.
He was at the Duke’s Head pub in Leith when there was a fight outside.
The brawl didn’t involve Forbes, but he went out, coolly drew a blade, knifed 21-year-old Robert Gilroy and fatally stabbed his brother Charles Gilroy, 25.
The pair had been celebrating the birth of a new baby in the family that morning.
Within hours their mother Jane had gained a grandchild and lost a son.
Witnesses described how red-haired Forbes calmly went back inside to finish his pint.
Two months later he was back in the same dock in Edinburgh and it took just three hours for the jury to convict him of murder and attempted murder.
This time Forbes gained no sympathy from the public who wanted him to hang, but the death penalty had been banished, and he was again sentenced to life in prison.
Less than a year into his stint as a maximumsecurity inmate at Peterhead Prison, he made his bid for freedom on August 30 1971.
Guards reported seeing the 36-year-old when the cells were opened at 6.15am, but his absence was not known until 8am.
A search of the grounds found the rope dangling over the wall near the governor’s house.
Forbes’s escape coincided with the retirement of the prison’s governor Alex Angus and, knowing his house was empty, it’s thought Forbes escaped through the garden.
Within minutes a search and recapture plan was
“Four years is an unheard of prison sentence for escaping
implemented. Police and tracker dogs swarmed the jail and road blocks were set up from Aberdeen to Inverness.
With a dangerous and unpredictable murderer in their midst, hundreds of commuters in the Peterhead area were stopped as police searched cars, vans and buses.
A description of the killer and a photograph of him in his denim prison uniform was circulated across Scotland, and train stations and harbours were searched.
Meanwhile, Forbes was having a wash and shave in an empty cottage nearby, cool as you like.
With a killer on the loose, tensions were heightened in the north-east.
One man took matters into his own hands and headed to Aberdeen armed with an air pistol in pursuit, terrifying a cafe worker who called the police.
But by now, Forbes had evaded capture and was back home in Edinburgh.
He was on the run for days before police traced him in the area of the city where he had first killed.
During an appearance at Aberdeen Sheriff Court in September 1971, it was revealed Forbes had scaled the prison wall before breaking into a lock-up at the staff quarters in an attempt to steal a car.
When this failed he broke into Church Cottages, in Clola, and stole clothing.
By September 3 he was in Auchnagatt near Ellon, where he stole a car from a farm at Mains of Elrick.
Forbes was spotted the next day in Edinburgh, his sixth day on the run, when a routine description of a blue Triumph Herald stolen from a village in Aberdeenshire was relayed to local officers.
Police were still scouring the fields around Peterhead when the net began to close in on Forbes in Edinburgh.
On September 5, within 25 minutes of the message going out, and a “hairraising” police chase in cars then on foot, Forbes was caught.
He was given an extra four years for absconding from jail, which he immediately tried to appeal.
Unfortunately for the criminal, the judge who imposed the punishment was Lord Wheatley, who had sentenced him to hang 13 years earlier.
Forbes claimed at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh that press attention had sensationalised his escape, leading to harsher treatment.
He told the court: “Four years is an unheard of prison sentence for escaping.”
Rejecting his appeal, the judge pointed out that Forbes had been convicted of three additional charges including dragging a police officer along the road during the pursuit.
Forbes’s notoriety as Scotland’s most dangerous man meant he drew the morbid fascination of women who wrote to him when he was back in Peterhead Prison.
One such woman was Alison Grierson, with whom Forbes struck up a romance via letter.
His cell was packed with letters and cards, and he was briefly granted leave to marry her at Peterhead Registrar’s office on March 6 1980.
Speaking on her wedding day, Alison said: “Nothing can ever hurt me while I am with him.
“I certainly don’t think of Donny as a double murderer.
“I have been told in prison he keeps himself very much to himself. But I don’t know him as a prisoner.
“I only know him as he is with me and he is very warm, very loving.”
But the baying crowds in Peterhead weren’t in the mood for romance, and dozens protested outside during the nuptials, calling for the death penalty to be reinstated.
Within weeks Alison was pregnant with their son James – and treated as an outcast in Peterhead. She would move near whichever prison Forbes was sent to.
When he was eventually freed on December 8 1998, he was Britain’s longestserving prisoner having been caged for 40 years.
Now 63, he and Alison got together again and he tried to establish himself as a taxi driver in Greenock, but his licence application was turned down.
Forbes was again ensnared by the lure of crime, and after a move to Glasgow became involved in the drug world.
In 2003, police raided his flat in Royston, Glasgow, on a tip-off and found a drugs factory in operation and £340,000 of class A drugs.
Aged 68 Forbes was dubbed Scotland’s oldest drugs baron and he was sentenced to 12 years.
This time there was no escape and the man who once terrorised Peterhead didn’t live long enough to be released again.
Forbes died aged 73 on April 12 2008, handcuffed to his hospital bed, 50 years after he stared death in the face as a condemned man.