The Law Killers (13 page)
A sudden urgency overtook the wife-killer. If he was to avoid detection, he knew he had to dispose of the body which lay slumped in the seat beside him, and quickly, for anyone might pass without warning. He left the car, hurried to the passenger side, then lifted the body of his dead wife from the vehicle. With the kind of unexpected strength found only in moments of desperate need, Hunter surprised himself at the comparative ease with which he picked the corpse of poor Lynda up into his arms. He walked with her off the rough track where the car lay, then picked his way awkwardly through the forest for thirty metres. At a concealed thicket, he lowered Lynda to the ground at what he hoped would be her last resting place. Then he drove quickly back in the direction of Dundee. A few miles further along the road Hunter stopped the white Vauxhall, removed the collar from around Shep’s neck, then put the devoted pet out of the car. As the man who had just committed murder resumed his journey to Dundee, Shep gazed at the back of the disappearing vehicle, as bewildered as it is possible for a dog to be.
What took place the rest of that day demonstrated with absolute clarity that ‘cool, calculating killers’ do indeed exist. Hunter’s actions spoke eloquently of that species. Shortly after noon he walked calmly into Strathmore House residential home to drop off with his supervising social work officer an essay that was required as part of his studies to become qualified. He explained his warm and sweaty appearance as being a result of having walked up from the centre of Dundee after getting off a bus from Carnoustie. A short time later he briefly visited his own place of work at Ann Street children’s home, then left after after a few minutes, saying he would spend the rest of his day off in the garden but promising to meet up with his colleagues later that evening at the works night out. Back in the city centre, he withdrew £150 from his building society account before returning to the family home at Carnoustie.
Sometime around 3 p.m. Lynda’s sister Sandra arrived at the cottage for the get-together the two young women had arranged a week earlier. Hunter explained that he and Lynda had fallen out and she had departed mid-morning to travel to her parents’ home in Glenrothes, taking Shep with her. He thought she might return at any time and coolly suggested that while they wait they should sit in the garden, enjoying the warm August afternoon sunshine. Later, the pair visited the health centre in Carnoustie where Hunter asked if there was a prescription waiting for his wife. Told there wasn’t, he declined the offer of an appointment for her with a doctor later in the day, saying he believed she ‘had something planned’. Then Hunter took the woman whose sister he had so callously strangled a few hours earlier for a game of putting before they had tea in a nearby hotel. Sandra, a little anxious but confident her sister would ultimately arrive back home, departed at around 7 p.m. when Hunter explained he would be leaving for his night out in about an hour’s time.
As arranged previously, a neighbour gave him a lift into town shortly after 8 p.m., dropping him off at the Celtic Club in Hilltown where his social work colleagues had gathered for the farewell party for a workmate. Although his mind must have been in turmoil about the events of the day, Andrew Hunter was a picture of composure for the next two and a half hours, appearing relaxed and affable, even posing with a wide smile on his face while a photograph was taken of him with two female workmates. Few noticed that throughout the evening he drank very little. Shortly before 11 p.m. his obliging neighbour returned to take Hunter home. On the way, the man who had killed spoke easily about his enjoyment in the club but admitted that he felt a little troubled about the row he had with Lynda that morning and her non-arrival home. Back at Carnoustie, Hunter bade his neighbour good night and disappeared into the High Street cottage.
He did not go to bed. Less than an hour later, he furtively slipped out of the house and made his way through the darkness to the spot in town where he had parked the Vauxhall some twelve hours earlier. Then he drove through the night, headed south. No one who glanced at the driver would have known him, then or again, for Hunter by now was wearing a woman’s blonde wig. It was not the type of disguise completely unknown to him. Once, at a Hallowe’en fancy dress party at the children’s home where he worked, he had turned up dressed as a woman, complete with wig, fish-net stockings and suspender belt. He had been asked to leave.
After an hour the car lumbered to a noisy halt. Moments after crossing the Forth Road Bridge, and while heading for the route to England, a wheel of the Vauxhall punctured on a roundabout. Cursing his ill-fortune, Hunter threw off the wig and hurried to change the wheel. After being given assistance by the driver of a passing van, the anxious killer resumed his flight at ever-greater speed.
His bizarre journey ended some 300 miles away in Manchester, where he abandoned the car in Dale Street. At 7.35 a.m., the female wig long since discarded, he boarded a train to take him back to Scotland. After a change in Glasgow he arrived back in Dundee at midday and went to a city-centre shop, where he bought a pair of trainers as a birthday present for his son, then had a haircut. It wasn’t until seven o’clock that night that he finally reported his wife missing. By then he was confident the trail would lead away from him. Besides, he had the perfect alibi. Hadn’t he been at a farewell party the night before, not arriving home in a neighbour’s car until almost midnight, and the next morning gone shopping in town? The electronically timed and dated receipt for the trainers he’d bought could prove conclusively that he had been in Timpson’s shoeshop in Murraygate at precisely 1.06 p.m. Hunter had also been cunning enough to abandon the car on double yellow lines in Manchester so that it would attract a parking ticket. That happened within hours of him hurrying away from it, at 9.10 a.m., and when police went to the vehicle the following day they found it had also been broken into. It all helped to establish the methodical killer’s apparent alibi.
It didn’t take police long to begin suspecting that there might be reasons for not simply treating the disappearance of the relatively recently married social worker as a missing-person case. There appeared to be no logical reason why she should suddenly vanish off the face of the earth. Even if she had been unhappy in her marriage, there seemed no cause for her not to have maintained contact with her parents, to whom she was devoted; and, being pregnant, she also had much to look forward to. It was beyond explanation why she would apparently drive hundreds of miles from her home to Manchester, then mysteriously go to ground. Hunter was questioned on several occasions and expressed suitable concern, but police noted that he appeared curiously unemotional for a man whose wife had supposedly walked out on him in mysterious circumstances. When they remarked on his seeming coldness, he brushed their questions off, saying it was simply how he was made, that he preferred never to show his emotions.
He was much more hot-blooded in private, however. Within weeks of his murderous act in the Fife countryside he resorted once more to satisfying his insatiable sexual appetite in the company of prostitutes, even taking them back to the cottage in Carnoustie and the marital bed. One of his favourites was a 22-year-old drug addict he had met in his capacity as her social worker. His compassion appeared to extend no further than using her services to fulfil his deviant fantasies.
As Lynda’s family and friends became increasingly anxious about her disappearance, Hunter figured ever more prominently in the minds of detectives as the person who could solve the riddle. But in the absence of a body, there was little headway that could be made. Furthermore, it seemed he could satisfactorily account for his movements during the crucial period of his wife’s disappearance.
It was to take almost another four months for the breakthrough the frustrated detectives were looking for to arrive. On 9 December the circumstances of the mystery were featured on BBC TV’s
Crimewatch
programme, the first time a Scottish case had been included in the broadcasts. It brought a flood of information. Callers told the waiting teams of police officers that on the day Lynda vanished they had seen a car similar to hers near Fernie Castle being driven by a man and with a woman ‘in a distressed state’ in the passenger seat. An Edinburgh taxi driver told how at 1.20 a.m. the next day he had seen the white Vauxhall Cavalier at a roundabout near the Forth Road Bridge having a wheel changed by two men. The taxi man had been inexplicably suspicious, to the extent that he had written down the number of the broken-down vehicle. It matched, apart from one digit, the registration number of Lynda’s car.
The day after the programme was broadcast, police announced that a dog matching Shep’s description had been seen in the St Michael’s area shortly after Hunter had released it. It was also disclosed that the dog had been collected as a stray and put down a week after being found. Convinced that the body of the missing woman could be in the woods at St Michael’s, police mounted a full-scale search with a team of more than sixty officers. Special ‘body dogs’ used in the hunt for the notorious Moors Murders victims were brought north to help in the probe. The search continued for three days before being called off. Hunter, secure in the knowledge that the corpse being sought was in a different forest a few miles away, had even joined the search teams. Lynda’s broken-hearted parents, devastated at the continuing uncertainty over the whereabouts of their devoted daughter, announced that they would offer a £1,000 reward to anyone who could find her.
Two months later, on 11 February 1988, a man walking his dog in Melville Woods, near the main Dundee–Kirkcaldy road, came upon Lynda’s badly decomposed body. The dog lead, which her husband had so efficiently used six months earlier to bring about her death, was still knotted round her neck.
When police called to break the news of the grim find to Hunter, he was in the company of the drug-addict prostitute he had evidently become attached to. Twenty-four hours later, she too was dead – apparently as a result of having taken a drugs overdose in her multi-storey home in Dundee. A fellow prostitute said it had been a deliberate act: she felt responsible for Lynda’s death, having apparently told Hunter many months earlier that if he had been as tired of his wife as he had said during a conversation, he should ‘bump her off’.
But this sad and premature demise may not have been brought on by an attack of conscience. Perhaps it had been a simple miscalculation of the potency of the drugs she had consumed. Perhaps it was neither. Perhaps she had secrets that could have assisted the murder inquiry which had been launched the previous day. Whatever the actual circumstances surrounding the disturbing death of the tragic young prostitute, it beyond doubt marked the untimely demise of a third woman intimately involved with Andrew Hunter. All within a twenty-six-month period and all by unnatural causes.
The unexpected finding of Lynda’s remains gave police the final missing piece of the jigsaw they had started to put together. The evidence of the argument in the car and the sighting of the Vauxhall near the Forth Road Bridge started to point even more firmly in the direction of her supposedly distraught husband. His alibi was examined and re-examined. Police retraced the route from the cottage in Carnoustie to the spot where the body had been found and meticulously noted how long the journey took. They matched that with the time Hunter first put in an appearance at work on the day Lynda vanished. Then they drove through the night from Carnoustie to Manchester, taking different routes, and detailing the precise times. Next, they closely questioned British Rail officials about the movement and exact timings of trains between Manchester and Scotland on the vital day. They walked, stopwatches in hand, from Dale Street – where the car had been left – to the railway station and did the same along the route between the different stations in Glasgow where someone travelling to Dundee would have had to change trains. They found it would have been perfectly possible for someone to have made the overnight journey by car then return by early-morning train and be back in Dundee at 12.49 p.m., giving a more than adequate twenty-one minutes to be in Timpson’s shoeshop by 1.06 p.m. the same day.
Hunter became aware that the spotlight of suspicion was being pointed even more in his direction. Four days after the discovery of Lynda’s body, he spoke exclusively to
The Evening Telegraph
, saying emphatically that he had nothing to hide.
‘I am aware of local speculation and since I am her husband and the last person known to see her alive, it is no more than I would expect,’ he said coldly. ‘I have nothing to hide, from the police or anyone else.’ He then discussed at length the couple’s movements on the day of Lynda’s disappearance and added, ‘I cannot feel anger yet about who murdered Lynda. It has not really sunk in.’ He even spoke about the circumstances of the apparent suicide of his first wife Christine, describing her death as a ‘terrible shock’. Before the interview concluded, he agreed to be photographed – but only after insisting the picture be taken showing the right side of his face, his ‘better side’.
Meantime, police continued to gather evidence and issued a second appeal on the
Crimewatch
programme.
On 1 April, seven weeks after the discovery of the body of the missing social worker had been found, and after more than 5,000 people had been interviewed and 1,200 statements taken from witnesses, Hunter was finally arrested.
His trial that summer attracted enormous interest and drew the biggest crowds to the court-house in Dundee for more than thirty-five years. For each of the eleven days the evidence was heard, queues began to form outside from 7 a.m. onwards, three hours before proceedings began. Those too far down the queue to be admitted remained outside on the court-house steps to be first in line for the afternoon session, taking refreshments from flasks and sandwiches they had brought with them. Many of those who had been in court during the forenoon forsook lunch to join immediately the queue to get back in after the court re-opened. Every day more than twenty reporters packed the press benches.