The Law Killers (3 page)
What had started as an early morning house fire had become a major murder hunt for an unknown, vicious killer – one who had taken his weapon away with him because there was no sign of anything in the house which could have caused the savage injuries.
Despite the hour and the staffing complications of it being a weekend, the area quickly swarmed with detectives and scenes-of-crime experts. Forensic science specialists, who had known the tragic victim, fought to stifle their emotions during the minute examination of her body and the damaged flat. Out in the street, uniformed colleagues manned roadblocks erected in the immediate vicinity.
Shortly after 5 a.m., several hours after the body of the policewoman had been discovered, a car was halted at one of the roadblocks as it attempted to turn into the street. PC Graeme Waghorn explained to the driver of the Ford Sierra that vehicles were being kept out of the area because of a ‘major incident’. He asked the man behind the wheel what his intended destination was in the street. ‘I’m here to pick up my girlfriend to go on holiday,’ was the reply. Then he told the constable that he might even know her because she was a fellow officer, Irene Martin.
After identifying himself as Angus Elliott, a 30-year-old council job-training supervisor, who had been romantically involved with Irene for almost three years, he was quietly invited by the constable to accompany him to police headquarters. For the next two hours, the victim’s boyfriend told a heartbreaking story of how they were supposed to be going on holiday to Cyprus that day, where they were to become engaged. On the Saturday afternoon, they had gone to a travel agent’s in the city centre to collect traveller’s cheques then returned to the Clepington Street flat. They had parted around 6 p.m., with Irene promising to pick him up at his home in Forfar in the early hours of the next day, in plenty of time to catch their flight to the sunshine island.
He then explained that the woman he hoped to marry had been expecting a visitor that evening, a man she had never met and did not know, but who had responded to a newspaper advertisement placed by Irene, seeking a flatmate to help defray mortgage costs. Angus Elliott added that Irene had revealed that, a day earlier, she had received a call from the man, whom she had said was well-spoken, before she departed for a pre-holiday visit to her mother and stepfather in Fife. Elliott had thought it odd that the intended lodger had called when he did because it had been three weeks earlier that the advert had appeared in two newspapers. Helpfully, he added that police would find the stranger’s telephone number on a pad on a table in the lounge. He would be easy to trace. It seemed to offer a possible logical explanation for the unexplained slaying of the young policewoman and the availability of the mystery man’s telephone number would mean he could be quickly located for interrogation.
There was only one problem. The table in the lounge had been one of the few pieces of furniture destroyed in the fire. There was no pad, no telephone number.
Something else was missing. When interviewed at police headquarters by Detective Sergeant Andrew Allan, who informed him of Irene’s death, Angus Elliott displayed no feeling at what should have been devastating news. ‘There was no emotion, there was very little reaction, there was nothing,’ the detective sergeant was to recount later.
There was, however, something present that was even more intriguing than what was absent. The hands of the man seated opposite Sergeant Allan were cut and bruised. Some of the wounds were still bleeding, a fact completely at odds with Angus Elliott’s explanation that they had been caused by an accident at work when a pane of glass had fallen on him.
Sergeant Allan, who had examined the murder scene, had formed the impression that there had been a struggle in the room where Irene Martin’s body had been found. He was also aware that a neighbour had spoken of being awoken in the early hours by screams and ‘thuds’ – a time which was hardly consistent with a ‘mystery man’ calling in the evening to discuss the let of the flat’s spare room. It was curious, too, that Elliott had made a point of saying he did not have a key to the flat of the woman he had hoped to marry, especially since they’d enjoyed a long relationship and had previously lived together in Forfar. Was that a likely proposition? If he was not telling the truth, what was he trying to prove?
Most improbable of all was the story he had told PC Waghorn at the barrier when he tried to drive into Clepington Court. Elliott had explained that he’d called to collect Irene so they could make the 5 a.m. check-in at Glasgow Airport for their 7 a.m. flight to Cyprus. Yet at the time he said it, it was already 5.15 a.m. Not only would they have missed the check-in, they would have missed the flight as well.
Presented with such an accumulation of facts, his highly suspicious injuries, and in the absence of any evidence except Elliott’s word about an unknown man’s supposed visit to the house to discuss room-letting arrangements, police wasted no time in arresting the still-protesting 30-year-old. He continued to deny any knowledge of the killing during formal taped interviews, stating emphatically at one stage – after being asked if he was responsible for Irene’s death – ‘Definitely not’.
Several hours later, when visited in his cell by Detective Sergeant Alexander McGregor who had gone to tell Elliott his solicitor had not yet arrived, the accused man had a dramatic change of heart. ‘I’m no denying it,’ he told the surprised officer, adding that he wanted independent legal advice.
Four months later, at the High Court in Kirkcaldy, Angus Elliott denied the murder of Irene Martin, the woman he wanted as his wife, but was prepared to admit to the lesser offence of culpable homicide. It was not a plea the Crown found acceptable and for five days the jury heard a familiar tale of jealousy and passion, of tangled romantic relationships and the explosion of fury that culminated in the death of a young policewoman, who tragically became the victim of the most serious crime of all.
Far from leaving the flat at Clepington Court at 6 p.m. the previous evening, as he had originally claimed, Elliott had spent the night there with Irene so they could depart in the early hours for the airport and the Mediterranean holiday they had both been looking forward to. But, as they dressed in preparation for the trip, an argument broke out about the relationship Elliott still had with a previous girlfriend, the woman he had been living with in Forfar when he and Irene had met. It was a topic the couple had squabbled over on previous occasions and with growing intensity.
In the heat of the row, the distraught policewoman took an American Forces combat knife from a bedside table where she kept it for protection. It was a weapon that Elliott, a martial arts enthusiast, had given her after she’d said she was afraid Dundee ‘neds’ might sometime follow her home. She pointed it towards him, ordering him to leave the flat. More angry words flew between them. They grappled in a ferocious bed-top struggle. Despite her self-defence training, it was a contest the slender Irene could not win. The powerful ex-soldier – a part-time nightclub bouncer and a karate black belt – quickly seized possession of the commando dagger being thrust towards him. The control he’d been taught in the army abandoned Elliott and the knife began to flash. Reason only returned after he had swung it 30 times and Irene lay dead, her blood splattering the walls and forming pools beneath her.
The unexpected killer thought quickly. He had to flee the scene but not in the blood-soaked clothes he stood up in because tell-tale stains would be left in his car. He removed his trousers, bagged them, then dressed in a pair of Irene’s uniform trousers and coat. But before departing there was something else he needed to do. To conceal the cause of Irene’s death, he would set fires throughout the flat so that the resulting blaze would leave no evidence for the forensic experts. Meticulously, he set about covering his tracks. Then he slipped out of the house, but not before ensuring all the internal doors were closed in the hope the flames could do their job.
He drove quickly away from the city and back to his own flat in Forfar, where he washed and changed clothes once more. Finally, he loaded the lethal dagger, Irene’s coat and trousers and his own blood-stained clothes into a bag and sped off once again, this time travelling only a short distance to another house, one he knew would be empty because the occupant had told him she would be in Edinburgh. It was the home of his former girlfriend, the one the argument had been about, and he used his own key to enter and secrete the items he knew would send him to prison if they were discovered. All the bases seemed to have been covered. He would be in the clear, he reasoned. Moments later, he drove away, heading back towards Dundee for the Oscar-winning performance he knew he would be bound to give. As he set off on the 15-mile drive to Dundee, he quietly congratulated himself on his brilliance.
Although Elliott seemed happy to ignore the fresh cuts and bruises on his arms, which proved just how courageously Irene had battled for her life, it was far from his only oversight. He had left himself so short of time that he did not reappear in Dundee until such an hour that his story of checking-in for the Cyprus flight was clearly false. But his biggest mistake of all was the scrupulous care he took to close all the doors inside the flat in the belief the flames would erupt and spread more quickly. As any firefighter could have told him, the reverse would be the case; the shut doors significantly stalling and not accelerating the advance of the fire. When Elliott turned his Ford Sierra into the street, his heart must have dropped like a stone when he saw that the flat was still largely intact and the outbreak long since extinguished. Although Irene’s body had been affected by the fire, it was obvious the burn marks had been caused after death and that she had perished as a result of a frenzied knife attack.
During the trial, it emerged that Elliott found himself on a murder charge as a result of circumstances that were far from unique. He had joined a long line of men who were driven to taking a life simply because he could not choose between two women. When the ladies’ man met Irene at the Brechin nightclub where he was a bouncer, he was already engaged and had lived in Forfar for seven years with his fiancée, a pretty waitress the same age as the policewoman. Although he broke off the engagement and moved out, the relationship never quite ended and the court learned how the former lovers still met. On one occasion, when Irene arrived unexpectedly at Elliott’s home, the ex-fiancée, who had been sunbathing in the garden with Elliott, was forced to hide in a garden shed to avoid detection by the Tayside constable.
Elliott had even been with his former girlfriend on the day before he and Irene were due to depart for Cyprus on holiday. On that occasion, the upset waitress, who was departing for a weekend in Edinburgh, gave him an ultimatum – finish with Irene or I will finish with you for good.
Irene was aware of the ex-fiancée’s continued contact with Elliott, if not the full extent of it, and reacted accordingly by challenging him regularly about the relationship. The final confrontation began as the two would-be holidaymakers dressed to go to the airport and Irene openly accused the man she hoped to marry of still sleeping with his one-time partner.
Elliott claimed in court the row had broken out because he had ‘jokingly’ said he was calling off the Cyprus holiday and that, during her ‘tantrum’, Irene produced the combat dagger and started to lash out at him, ordering him out of the house. In the ensuing struggle, he fell from the bed to the floor and knocked his head. After that, he had little recollection of events and could not recall stabbing Irene or setting the fires in the flat afterwards. His only memory was of ‘arms moving about in the air, striking one another.’
Weeping, he told the jury, ‘I could hear her voice saying, “Gus, I love you. I want to marry you.” I saw her lying on the floor. There was blood everywhere.’ He accepted having possession of the knife and that he must have inflicted the wounds, but claimed he had no intention of killing the agitated Irene. He also claimed that there had been nothing between himself and his ex-fiancée, beyond friendship, after he and Irene had met. The suspicious policewoman would not believe that, he said, and the trouble between them was because she was possessive.
Curiously, that was the same word some witnesses used to describe Elliott himself in his relationship with Irene. A senior police officer later used another term. Describing how calm the martial arts expert had been under questioning, he said, ‘He is the most controlling person I have ever met in life.’
The jury seemed to share that view. After an absence of only 35 minutes they filed back into court to return a unanimous verdict of guilty to murder and not culpable homicide as Elliott had hoped.
The man who found himself at the heart of one of mankind’s oldest and most deadly triangles was emotionless when Lord Sutherland told him the only sentence he could pass was one of life imprisonment. But as he disappeared from the dock to begin his bleak term behind bars, a single gasp of anguish sounded in the courtroom. In the public benches Angus Elliott’s former fiancée, the woman who formed the other side of the fatal triangle and who had sat through the trial, slumped forward in her seat and wept.
3
When the newly wed teenagers walked arm-in-arm down the aisle of the picturesque village church in Longforgan that April day in 1973, it seemed to the women gathered outside with their confetti that Cupid had struck again. He was only 17 and she a year older, no more than bairns really – but they were in love and that would see them through, as it always did, thought the well-wishers.