The Law Killers (15 page)

In the needlework room, a new order was being imposed. The sandy-haired youth who had thrust his way into the class was now sitting on the teacher’s desk and issuing instructions. He produced ammunition from his pockets and lined it up along the front of the desk. He told the pupils he would blow their heads off and one by one asked the girls their ages. Some were so afraid they could barely respond. Others whispered to each other and one even suggested to a classmate that they seize an iron from another part of the room and attack their captor with it. When Mrs Hanson – just seven months married – told Mone she was aged 26, he mocked – ‘You’re just a pensioner.’ Then he snatched her glasses from her face, threw them to the floor and trampled the glass into the wooden boards with his army boot. When some of the pupils sobbed too loudly, the gun was put to their head and they were advised to keep quiet or he would silence them.

He ordered everyone into a small changing-room attached to the sewing section and began strutting back and forth, his eyes bulging in their sockets. He smirked as he told his hostages that he had come to the school to gain revenge for being expelled. In particular, he sought retribution against one of the Marist Brothers who helped oversee the Roman Catholic education in the school. Mrs Hanson was the calmest person present. She spoke softly to the young man with the gun and gently advised the girls to stop crying because they might use up the limited amount of air in the small ante-room that had now become a prison. She repeatedly tried to reason with their captor, pleading with him to release the girls and to detain just her.

Outside, the sounds of disturbance had attracted the attention of Miss Margaret Christie, head of the domestic science department, who taught in an adjoining classroom. Puzzled by the unexpected noise emanating from what was normally the quietest class in the entire school, she went to investigate and found that the upper glass panel in the door had been screened with dressmaking material. As she stood outside the room with another needlework teacher, some of the cloth was moved away and she could see Mrs Hanson making her way in their direction.

Then a blast of gunfire almost deafened them. Glass in the top half of the door showered over the pair, sending piercing shards into Miss Christie. Ignoring the pain and emerging blood, she fled with her teacher companion back along the corridor to alert the rest of the school to the frightening events taking place on the upper floor.

If any of those being detained inside the room had any doubts about the seriousness of their position, they now knew better. Some of the pupils screamed. Most of them wept.

Within minutes of the shot ringing out, police began converging on the school and the usually peaceful Harefield Road area found itself ringed by blue flashing lights and vehicles from all the emergency services. News of the siege quickly found its way on to radio news bulletins and media teams from across the country raced to the city. Among those hearing of the dramatic events unfolding in their home town were the members of the Dundee Police football team, taking part in a cup-final tie a hundred miles away.

Meanwhile, a state of emergency had been declared at St John’s and the other thousand pupils were rapidly evacuated from the cordoned-off building. Three police officers, backed by a team carrying riot shields, made their way to the upper-floor corridor. Detective Superintendent Donald Robertson – the Clark Gablelookalike head of CID – Detective Chief Inspector William Melville and Sergeant George McLaren hoped to negotiate with Mone, but the moment they approached the vicinity of the shattered door window, they were treated to blasts from the shotgun.

An impasse appeared to have been reached. Officers shouted suggestions that they should enter the room to speak with him. Each offer was met with the warning that they should keep back or the gun would be turned on the girls. One of the 14-year-old hostages was led to the door and had the gun pointed at her head while Mone called out that she would be the first to die if anyone tried to force an entry.

By now adrenalin was surging through his body and he was becoming increasingly aggressive towards the terrified pupils. Three of the girls were ordered at gun-point from the changing-room – where the heat was almost intolerable – into the main classroom. He kissed one of them and sexually interfered with the other two. He exuded power and, to demonstrate his absolute control, he released one 15-year-old, instructing her to inform the growing number of people gathering on the ground floor that he should be left alone. She hurried downstairs to carry out his order just as plans of the school were being scrutinised to determine if there was a possible route into the classroom.

At the point when police were considering ending the deadlock with tear gas, Mone called out that the only person he would be prepared to speak to was a girl who had lived near him in the houses on the northern edge of the Law, the hill that had been his childhood playground. Her name was Marion Young and they had met four years earlier at a youth club. They had hit it off together and, he explained, she seemed to understand him.

By good fortune, police were able to make quick contact with her and she was rushed under escort to the scene. Then aged 18 and a student nurse, she unhesitatingly volunteered to go into the classroom to negotiate with Mone. Police were reluctant to allow the gunman another hostage and indicated that the negotiations should take place from behind the door. Marion knew this was not what her long-forgotten acquaintance wanted and insisted she go into the room, as this would offer the best chance of the petrified pupils being released. After some hesitation, police agreed. Seventy-five minutes after the siege had begun, Marion found herself face to face with the baby-faced ex-pupil she now hardly recognised.

Mone had eagerly anticipated the meeting. Awaiting her arrival, he filled one of the classroom sinks with water and washed his face and hair. Then he sat singing to himself while police sped Marion across the city. His first words to her weren’t exactly the customary greeting of old friends: ‘You thought you were being a brave little girl? How did you know I wouldn’t blow your head off?’ he asked with a small smile.

The young trainee nurse hadn’t been taught anything about counselling or how to negotiate with someone so obviously disturbed, but instinctively she seemed to understand how to respond. Referring to him as ‘Bobby’, the name she had always known him by, she laughingly said she knew he would never do that to her. Then for ten minutes she and Mrs Hanson gradually convinced him that the pupils should be released, particularly since the changing-room had by then become unbearably warm and the children were beginning to suffer from the stifling heat.

Mone, almost disinterestedly, agreed and Mrs Hanson, in a deliberately unhurried manner, went to the little room and led the ten petrified girls towards the door. But she was not to be allowed to leave with them. As the girls prepared to depart, Mone called out to the teacher, ‘Not you – you’re not going – I want you here.’

At first the relieved pupils walked slowly from the room; then, out in the corridor, they began to run, faster than they had ever done in their lives, some of them slipping and cutting themselves on the shattered glass beneath the room door. Their ordeal was over. The same could not be said for the two women remaining in the room.

Mone’s behaviour was becoming increasingly irrational. He produced some sandwiches and gave one to Marion. Then he asked for a cigarette from Mrs Hanson. When he laid the shotgun down for a few moments, the teenage nurse who had infatuated him four years earlier picked it up and casually started to inspect it. Almost immediately she found herself on the floor after Mone launched an attack on her, grabbing the weapon back.

In the corridor, the posse of police officers, many of them now armed, were joined by Mone’s grandmother and Guy Hanson – Nanette’s husband, whose job in Dundee had brought both of them to the city from their native Yorkshire.

Things were not going well in the needlework room. Mone acted even more bizarrely and he began aiming the shotgun at different parts of the room, at the same time demanding to know if his hostages thought he was capable of killing anyone.

‘Do you think I can do it?’ he taunted. To show he meant business, he pulled the trigger of the gun several times, but its faulty mechanism prevented it from discharging.

He pointed the weapon at Mrs Hanson and asked, ‘Do you want to be a saint?’ Then he squeezed the trigger. Again it failed to go off. Next he aimed at Marion and tried to fire once more. Once more the gun did not respond.

The unintentional game of Russian roulette finally paid off for him when he successfully directed a blast at the room door after he detected a movement outside. Mone was by now enraged at the weapon’s poor performance. He had bought it in London on his way home on leave from the Gordon Highlanders’ base in Minden, Germany, and had not tested it before purchase. If he had done, he would have found that the firing mechanism was erratic, with no pattern to its successful operation.

But Robert Mone had come to kill that All Saints’ Day and he would have gone on pulling on the trigger for as long as it took to achieve his purpose. In the event, it required just one more squeeze.

Anxious that a police sniper might be waiting for a sight of him, he instructed Mrs Hanson to close the only curtain in the room that remained open. As she reached up to do so, he fired without warning at her back from a distance of just seven feet. For a moment the gentle, softly spoken teacher remained motionless. Then, as Mone prepared to send off a second round, she dropped slowly before him. Her exuberant assailant looked on, marvelling at the grace with which she sank to the floor.

The gallant teacher was not dead. Horrified at what had taken place, Marion Young rushed to her aid and used her nursing training to establish that a faint pulse was present. Mone seemed indifferent to what was going on. He laughed dementedly and sang. He had fulfilled that afternoon’s purpose and now he didn’t care what came next. Dismissively, he told Marion she could do what she wanted when she pleaded with him to allow Mrs Hanson to be taken to hospital. When ambulance men arrived at the classroom a short time later, Mone allowed them to enter without any conditions. They were accompanied by two of the St John’s teachers, Brother Bede and Brother John, who came in, praying, behind a shotgun shield.

By this time the soldier hostage-taker had apparently lost all interest in his situation. He continued to laugh without reason and appeared not to notice as Mrs Hanson was taken from the room on a stretcher, accompanied by Marion.

Minutes afterwards, when police burst into the room, he was still sitting quietly, alternately singing and laughing, the shotgun at his feet. He offered no resistance when he was handcuffed and led away.

Two hours after it had started, the siege of St John’s was over. In total, eight shots had been fired that afternoon when the innocence of youth vanished for so many.

All eleven of the schoolgirl pupils who had formed the needlework class were taken to Dundee Royal Infirmary for examination, a few of them being treated for cuts sustained after falling into the broken glass as they ran to freedom. Most of them were still there when they learned that Mrs Hanson had died from her injuries in another part of the same hospital without having regained consciousness. It was many months later before they found out that their brave teacher had been in the early stages of pregnancy with her first child.

On 23 January 1968, Robert Francis Mone, the laughing teenage killer, appeared at the High Court in Dundee. The hearing lasted only eighteen minutes. Medical evidence was led that the 19-year-old was insane and suffered from schizophrenia ‘which had developed insidiously over approximately two years’.

When Lord Thomson ordered him to be detained without limit of time in the State Mental Hospital at Carstairs, Mone looked up at him, smiled once more and muttered, ‘Good for you.’

The extraordinary bravery of the two young women who secured the release of the pupils was justly marked when they were honoured by the Queen. Marion Young was awarded the George Medal, and Nanette Hanson, posthumously, the Albert Medal. Two months after going to Buckingham Palace to receive her medal, Marion was married in the city. Her groom was also a soldier and, like Mone, he too had served in Germany.

Every 1 November in St John’s High School, a special Mass is said for Nanette, a police superintendent’s daughter who was described at her funeral by Brother Bede as ‘a heroine, a martyr, who died for these children.’ He did not remind anyone that the day she met God also happened to be All Saints’ Day …

The lives of everyone involved in the siege of the sewing class changed forever that November afternoon which had started so innocently. For some, it left wounds that will never heal, but others succeeded in locking away the memories securely enough to allow them to go on gradually to resume a near-normal existence. They put the name Mone into the recesses of their minds and started to go for weeks, even months, without ever thinking about him.

Just over nine years later, everything changed. On the evening of 30 November 1976, a siren belatedly sounded in the darkness at the State Mental Hospital, Carstairs, to announce an escape that was unprecedented in its savagery. Three people had been axed and stabbed to death in a bloody killing spree that began in the hospital’s social club and ended seventy miles away after a police car chase.

At the centre of the débâcle was Robert Mone and his friend and fellow inmate whom he idolised, Thomas McCulloch – a bisexual who had been sent to the institution after the attempted murder of two people in a double-shooting in 1970. McCulloch, armed with two guns, had shot a hotel chef in the face after complaining he hadn’t been given enough butter on a roll. He then shot the hotel manageress in the shoulder.