The Law Killers (14 page)
They got their money’s worth. The revelations of the large number of witnesses opened a window on the extraordinary relationships that can exist in the lives of apparently ordinary people. Prostitutes shared the witness-box with Salvationists and the daily happenings in the Bell Street court-house played out like episodes from a TV soap opera. The defence presented a picture of a caring and ambitious social worker who had tried to put the unfortunate death of his first wife behind him to build a new life for himself and his son, only to be tragically caught up in the unexplained murder of his new bride. The Crown systematically dismantled that scenario and meticulously assembled a portrait of a cold-blooded and perverted man capable of playing a game of putting and going to tea with the sister of the woman he had callously killed just a short time earlier. Vitally, they demolished the alibi Hunter had so resourcefully created with his 300-mile overnight flight by car to England and cunning purchase of a birthday gift to secure a timed and dated receipt. That helped establish how it would have been possible for him to have committed the murder; but it did nothing to prove he had actually done so.
The prosecution case turned on the evidence of two separate witnesses who came forward to say that on the day Lynda had disappeared they had seen her in her white Vauxhall in Fife accompanied by a man. One said she appeared to be distressed. Both witnesses believed the man behind the wheel to have been Hunter.
In the end, however, the crucial factor was the discovery in the Carnoustie cottage of the dog collar belonging to the luckless Shep. Hunter, who believed he had cleverly covered his tracks, had slipped up. After removing the collar when he abandoned the terrier a few miles from the murder scene, he had taken it home and thrown it behind a basket where it was later found by police. The court heard that Shep was never taken out without it and Lynda was so devoted to her pet and anxious about him becoming lost that she had two address tags on the collar – one for her home in Carnoustie and the other bearing the address of her parents in Fife. Prosecutor Peter Fraser QC, the Solicitor-General, succinctly put it to Hunter in court: ‘If the collar was found in your house subsequently, there is only one remaining conclusion to be drawn and that is that you were present with your wife in the car. And if you were present in the car, you are exclusively responsible for your wife’s death.’
Hunter, who had seemed to have an answer for everything else put to him, and who spoke confidently all the time he was in the witness-box, for once could find no satisfactory response.
The jury took less than two hours to return a verdict of guilty by a 12–3 majority. When he stood before Lord Brand awaiting sentence, the 37-year-old was as cold-eyed and emotionless as he had been for the entire duration of the trial that had attracted record crowds. His Lordship looked straight back at him and told him, ‘You are an evil man of exceptional depravity. The sentence of the court is that you be imprisoned for life.’
Ten months later, Hunter returned to the dock when his appeal against the verdict was heard at the High Court in Edinburgh. The proceedings then were much more brief. The three judges dismissed the appeal without even bothering to call the prosecution to rebut the pleas of Hunter’s counsel, Lionel Daiches QC.
One of the judges, Lord Cowie, pointing to the critical evidence of the dog collar being found in the family home, remarked: ‘In all other cases we get a possible explanation, but here this dog always wore a collar and the collar was discovered in the house.’ The treacherous killer had been as impassive as usual, except for a quick wink he gave to a friend sitting in the public benches. Then he was led away to resume his life sentence.
That was not the finish of his story, however, for the man who came so close to evading justice finally succeeded. On 19 July 1993 – almost six years after ending the life of his pregnant wife – Andrew Hunter, the man of many faces, died of a heart attack in Perth Prison. Some believe he took just as many secrets with him…
9
News reporters spend their lives waiting for the phone to ring. They arrive at work most mornings utterly unaware of what the rest of the day will bring. Some of their time is spent on routine assignments from that day’s diary – court duty, interviewing visiting personalities, minor crime – but most of all they wait for the call that will alert them to the breaking news story, the big one that will lead the front page. They don’t exactly pray for disasters or major loss of life, but if it happens on their shift the most dedicated are first on their feet to start chasing ambulances and fire appliances. Their lives and professional peaks are vicariously shared with those experiencing extreme misfortune or overwhelming joy. It is a strange, parasitical – but intoxicating – existence.
In the newsroom of
The Evening Telegraph
on the morning of Wednesday, 9 June 1965 there was little to become excited about. The international news coming in over the wires announced that President Lyndon Johnson was again being criticised for America’s policy on Vietnam. Locally, Lord Provost Maurice McManus was to open an accident-prevention exhibition in the Caird Hall and the John O’Groats pub in Cowgate had been broken into. It wasn’t the liveliest of days.
Shortly after 11 a.m. and with the haze of cigarette smoke that always engulfed the room beginning to descend over the large communal desk and its bank of aged, but sturdy, row of Underwood typewriters, the phone rang for the umpteenth time that morning. There was no stampede among the half-dozen reporters on duty to answer it. The earlier calls had been the usual bunch of photo-requests, damp-house complaints and pleas to keep some of that day’s court appearances out of the papers. This time, though, the caller had an altogether more interesting tale to tell. In breathless bursts he gave John Marshall, the youngest person in the room and still a trainee, a graphic account of how he had just witnessed the body of a man somersaulting to earth from the top flat of a fifteen-storey block of flats in the Lochee area. The corpse, explained the caller, still lay sprawled on the concrete fore-court of Kilspindie Court, one of the proliferation of multi-blocks put up by the council as a quick but unsatisfactory solution to the city’s housing shortage problem. The featureless tower blocks also fulfilled another, unintended purpose – they provided a convenient and virtually foolproof jumping-off point for suicides, most of whom seemed to be young drug addicts.
Marshall began to mentally switch off. Suicides never made the lead story for the front page. But with any luck it might have been an accidental fall by a workman. Either way, it was still better than a road-safety exhibition; so he headed for the door and Lochee, unaware of the extraordinary events that were to follow.
Up at Kilspindie Court, knots of residents and passers-by gathered at the scene. They were watching, but saying little, for they knew no more than what was presented before them – the body of an apparently young man lying face down on a sunlit, tarmac courtyard. He wore a shirt and trousers and was barefoot. Directly above, on the fifteenth floor, was a shattered window which, fellow residents among the onlookers explained, was in the kitchen of the flat. A neighbour, who had been working in his garden, told everyone within earshot that he had heard the sound of breaking glass and looked up to see the man tumble from the window to the ground 140 feet below. John Marshall entered the multi-storey block and unexpectedly found no one barring his way to the lift doors. Seconds later, and accompanied by a police officer who evidently had more on his mind than the young reporter’s identity, he found himself walking into the living-room of the flat at 14C.
The scene resembled something he had only ever previously witnessed in the cinema. Lying, strangely serene, on the floor was a woman in her mid 20s wearing a nightdress. A black tie was knotted round her neck and her face and other parts of her body were stained with blood. More blood had formed in pools round about her and instinctively Marshall pulled up his trouser bottoms to avoid it as he pointlessly walked round the corpse of the attractive, but very dead, woman stretched in front of him. In the kitchen, breakfast dishes lay unwashed and on the floor was a basin. Beside it was a kettle, with one end of its electric lead dangling in the water that filled the basin and the other end plugged into a live wall socket. On his way out of the house that was otherwise so ordinary, Marshall noticed for the first time that the living-room walls were splattered with blood. Whatever had happened in the flat, he knew without doubt what was going to lead the front page of
The Evening Telegraph
that day – and probably the next.
By the time the reporter had returned to the forecourt of the multi-block, police had sealed off the entrance and were allowing access only to those who lived there. Groups of reporters from rival newspapers gathered behind the cordon, desperate for details of what had gone on, but Marshall had no intention of enlightening them until he had found a phone box to file his copy back to the newsroom. Only then did he share with the competition what he knew they would anyway read in his words in the early editions.
As the day progressed, the full events of the horror that had played out in flat 14C slowly began to unfold. The dead woman was 26-year-old Mrs Margaret Lundie, an attractive mother of two, estranged from her husband who had gone to live in London. For some time she had been involved in a passionate relationship with Owen ‘Chris’ McAuley – the man who had somersaulted to his death. They had lived together in McAuley’s flat in another part of town until two days earlier, when Mrs Lundie had moved out with her children and into her mother’s top-storey multi flat in Kilspindie Court. The dead woman had apparently become unhappy with her partner – who had also separated from his own wife – because he constantly worked nightshift. In addition, she was contemplating a reconciliation with her husband in London, whom she had spoken to by phone on the evening before her death.
On the morning of the day which would change lives forever, McAuley had finished his nightshift and waited patiently for Mrs Lundie’s mother to depart for work. Over and over he rehearsed what he was going to say. Then he went to the tower block in a bid to resolve the difficulties with his lover and convince the hairdresser’s receptionist to take him back. The discussion became heated and the couple began to argue loudly. Suddenly, in a moment of uncontrollable rage, McAuley took off his tie, wound it round the neck of his struggling mistress and kept pulling tightly until all resistance passed. Only after she slumped to the floor did reason start to return to him and by then it was much too late. The woman he so desperately wanted back in his life now lay lifeless at his feet.
What followed, and what Marshall the young reporter had seen evidence of but had initially been unable to piece together because of its surreal elements, demonstrated just how much McAuley had instantly regretted his actions. He went straight into the kitchen, placed a basin of water on the floor and, after removing his socks and shoes, stood in the basin. Then he placed the lead from an electric kettle in the water and switched the other end on at the wall socket. Unaccountably, the shock didn’t kill him. When it became clear he would remain alive, the demented 24-year-old took a large kitchen knife back into the living-room and began slashing at his wrists. He lost so much blood that it was extraordinary he did not succeed in his purpose. Finally, and having run out of options, he staggered back into the kitchen, climbed on top of the sink unit and hurled himself through the window high above the ground. Only then did he achieve the result he so desperately sought.
Owen McAuley was not alone in ending up prostrate on the pavement. When Mr John Orr, the city’s Chief Constable, arrived at the scene he surveyed the corpse and promptly passed out – an event which, unhappily for him, was photographed and recorded in the next day’s
Daily Express
.
The police chief probably learned something about himself that morning. John Marshall, the young reporter, also learned lessons. He learned the benefits of getting to the scene of an incident as quickly as humanly possible. And he learned that in newspaper offices the reporter who is first to answer the phone is usually the first to fill the front page. Most of all, though, John Marshall learned never to make assumptions.
10
Nobody paid him any attention. He was just a young soldier who seemed to know exactly where he was going as he walked purposefully through the gates of St John’s RC secondary school in Dundee one afternoon in 1967. He spoke to no one, for 19-year-old Robert Francis Mone had other things on his mind. He had been a pupil at the school until being expelled a few years earlier and had gone from there to an approved school. Now he was dressed in the uniform of a private in the Gordon Highlanders and carried a long, narrow object wrapped in brown paper. Still, no one gave him more than a second glance or asked what his business was.
It was 2.15 p.m. on 1 November – All Saints’ Day, a bizarre irony, given the terrible events that were about to unfold. On the top floor of the school, 26-year-old teacher Nanette Hanson was beginning a needlework lesson with eleven third-year girl pupils when the door burst open and the slightly built soldier ripped the paper away from his package to reveal a shotgun. The girls giggled. It was nothing more than a prank by a stupid show-off wanting attention. Mrs Hanson would soon sort him out.
Almost instantly they knew they could not be more wrong. The intruder, his eyes flashing wildly round the room, began to shout and swear, waving the gun at the girls and ordering the 14- and 15-year-olds, some of them now crying, to barricade the door with their sewing tables … and that was the start of an ordeal that was to last for two hours. It was also the opening sequence of a chain of events that was to reverberate for more than a decade, leaving eight people dead and making the name Mone one of the most feared in the whole of Scotland. Additionally, it bestowed on Dundee the unwanted distinction of being the birthplace of a father and son unrivalled for wickedness.