Police draft in ‘water drones’ in f inal bid to find girl’s body after 65 years
POLICE are to deploy pioneering technology in a final bid to find the body of a Scots schoolgirl who went missing in 1957.
Later this month is the 65th anniversary of the disappearance of 11-year-old Moira Anderson. Despite repeated searches, her remains have never been found.
She is believed to have fallen victim to a notorious paedophile who murdered her and dumped her body.
Police Scotland has now teamed up with an expert who has developed techniques to find deeply buried bone fragments or tiny items such as buttons, jewellery, belts or shoe buckles.
A drone fitted with ground and water-penetrating radar will be used to search a burn and pond near Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, where it is believed Moira’s body was concealed.
Last night Moira’s sister, Janet Hart, welcomed the development and said that after a lifetime of waiting, she still holds out hope that her sibling will one day have a proper funeral and burial.
Speaking from her home in Sydney, Australia, the 77-year-old said: ‘Yet another anniversary approaches of Moira’s disappearance without resolution, but I will continue to have hope while I have breath in my body.
‘It’s been such a long journey but while most say it’s too long now, I feel I have the support of the Cold Case Unit and many others, including the Scottish media, that are keeping Moira’s story alive and seeking closure.
‘I know we have the goodwill of some of the best forensic experts in the world, so I will not lose hope until they have found her or told us that they’ve exhausted every possibility trying.’
Moira was the last passenger on a bus being driven by Alexander Gartshore, who was then aged 36, on a freezing day in blizzard conditions.
Gartshore was never questioned by police even though, just a few weeks earlier, he had been charged with raping his family’s 13-year-old babysitter, a crime for which he was later jailed.
Years later his daughter, Sandra Brown, linked Gartshore publicly to Moira in a book, Where There Is Evil.
Just before her father died – aged 85 in a Leeds hospital in April 2006 – she visited him and showed him a photo of Moira.
Although he stopped short of confessing to killing her, he said that Moira had haunted him his whole life, and she had been ‘too bonny for her own good’.
The Crown Office later acknowledged that Gartshore should have been prosecuted for Moira’s murder. Police have made repeated attempts to find the schoolgirl’s body and are now working with Dr Alastair Ruffell, a forensic geoscientist at Queen’s University Belfast.
He has helped to locate long-concealed bodies from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where victims of terrorist paramilitaries had vanished without trace, and in war zones, including Kosovo, where the victims of mass killings were hidden in secret graves.
Dr Ruffell is a world-leading expert in water-based body recovery, deploying the most advanced ground-penetrating radar and sonar systems to analyse the beds of rivers and lakes.
Drones will carry the equipment over areas of the Gartsherrie Burn in Coatbridge, known locally as the Tarry Burn, and the nearby Witchwood Ponds – where a number of witness statements suggest Moira’s body may have been dumped.
Detective Superintendent Suzie Chow, in charge of homicide governance and review for Police Scotland, said: ‘This case remains a live investigation and I would appeal to the public for any information which will assist with recovering Moira’s remains.’