We saw human remains, claim 2 new witnesses in Moira probe
NEW witnesses have come forward in the hunt for schoolgirl Moira Anderson, more than 60 years after she disappeared.
Investigators say a fresh search for the 11-year-old’s remains could be launched after evidence emerged of a possible burial site.
It is three years since a police operation involving scientists and forensic officers unsuccessfully targeted five sites where the body of Moira, from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, might have been hidden.
Now two separate witnesses have been in touch with investigators claiming to have seen human remains in exactly the same area of the town some time after the youngster vanished in 1957.
One is a man in his 70s, who recalls playing with friends and seeing what may have been body parts of a child buried in rubble in a part of Coatbridge known as Witchwood Ponds.
Detective Chief Superintendent Patrick Campbell, who has led the investigation into Moira’s murder since 2012, said: ‘We have spoken to both of them and they have given us information about other people who may be aware of this. We are carrying out further inquiries around it to see if it gives us an opportunity to take it forward.’
It is now widely suspected that Moira, who vanished after leaving her grandmother’s house in Coatbridge, was murdered by bus driver Alexander Gartshore.
Gartshore, then 36, was behind the wheel of the bus on which she was last seen travelling, on the afternoon of February 23, 1957.
He died, aged 85, in a Leeds hospital in 2006. He was never charged in relation to Moira’s disappearance. In 1998, his daughter Sandra Brown linked Gartshore publicly to the schoolgirl in a book, Where There is Evil. Just before he died, she visited him in hospital.
Although he stopped short of confessing, he said Moira had been ‘too bonny for her own good’.
Mrs Brown, 71, who was a friend of Moira, has warned that any new police search might unearth the remains of more than one child.
She believes her father was part of a high-level paedophile ring responsible for abusing children ‘on an industrial scale’ – and that Moira was one of several killed by him and others before their bodies were dumped in a secret site. Mrs Brown, who founded the Moira Anderson Foundation to help victims of childhood sexual abuse, said: ‘There’s no two ways about it, my father had help when it came to disposing of Moira’s remains.
‘Moira’s not alone and my belief is that when they do find forensic remains of some kind, she won’t be on her own. There will be remains of other children, some of whom were not even reported missing.’ In 2014, the then Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland QC, who is from Coatbridge, upgraded the schoolgirl’s disappearance to murder and announced that, had he been alive, Gartshore would have been indicted for the crime. Regarding the new witnesses, Mrs Brown said: ‘There was a whole group of kids playing somewhere they shouldn’t have been... near the Witchwood Ponds. This person was hiding behind a pile of bricks and [remembers] seeing this skeletal hand. He moved some of the bricks to make sure it wasn’t a dummy and then he and his pals got into a panic and they ran back home.
‘He told his grandmother what he’d seen but was given a wallop for playing where he shouldn’t have been. The grandmother was concerned the family would be fined because the children were trespassing. She told him, “You’ll get everybody into trouble, you should never speak about this”.’
Mrs Brown added: ‘[Police] interviewed this guy and it does seem that a couple of the kids who were there with him are not deceased.
‘They are in the process of following up his childhood playmates to corroborate the story. Two detectives have gone with him to point out the exact location. It’s now the number one location where Moira’s remains may be discovered.’
‘She won’t be alone, there will be other kids’