I'm weary of it now - we are the victims too

Published on Monday 29 May 2006 12:06

THE road leading to Hector McInnes' front door is lined with neat, well-tended detached homes.

The gardens are cared for - plants sprout from beside garage doors, there are new cars sitting in the driveway and the lawns are neatly trimmed.

Everything in Harmony Street, Bonnyrigg, seems perfectly normal.

There's certainly nothing unusual about Hector and his wife Cathie's garden path, nothing to suggest the lives of the quiet couple living inside have been in turmoil for the past eight years by a murder.

Hector, a dignified and softly spoken pensioner is murdered mother-of-two Arlene Fraser's father.

It is almost three weeks since Nat Fraser, Hector's son-in-law, sat in the dock at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh, just five rows away from Hector and Cathie, and learned he was to be immediately freed on appeal.

Three judges had heard claims that key police evidence that would have undermined the prosecution case against Arlene's estranged husband had not been placed before his legal team. Today Hector, 65, speaks, controlled and carefully, of his bitterness at a legal system that has enabled the man convicted of his daughter's death to walk free - a system that, eight years on, still has not delivered him justice.

"I sat there in court that day and thought: 'Well, here we go again, back on the treadmill,'" he says. "It's been eight years now. It should be all over and finished but it's not.

"To be honest, I'm just weary of it all now. It's become too much, it never goes away. It is always there at the back of everything we do, every decision we make.

"Arlene was the real victim in all of this, but her family, we are victims of a sort too."

Cathie - Arlene's stepmother - nods in agreement. "We live with this every day. There's not a day goes by when Arlene's name doesn't crop up. We have had eight years of this and now it feels like it's now about to start all over again - that's hard for all Arlene's family.

"It's absolutely ridiculous that he should be out, to mix with the public with no restrictions. They say it's because he isn't a risk to the public, well he was a big risk to Arlene."

Fraser - who has always maintained his innocence - was released from Shotts Prison on May 12 and taken back to New Elgin in Morayshire, and the home he once shared with his wife and their children, Jamie, now 19 and Natalie, aged 13. His appeal - which focuses on the whereabouts of Arlene's rings in the aftermath of her disappearance is expected to be heard in September, when one of Scotland's leading defence advocates, Gordon Jackson QC will lead Fraser's case.

"I can't see it happening then," sighs Hector, shaking his head. "I've lost count of the number of times we've been told something would happen in court on a certain day, and then it's not gone ahead. There's always some reason: papers aren't ready, this person isn't available, it drags it all on and on for even longer. The only person that's going to benefit is Nat Fraser and his lawyers.

"My big fear is that he'll get away with this because the judges will think the case is too well known for him to have a proper retrial."

Hector was happily living with Cathie in Preston, Lancashire, planning his retirement from work with British Aerospace when he learned his pretty 33-year-old daughter Arlene had vanished from her New Elgin home in Morayshire on April 28, 1998.

She had been seen dropping off her children at school. Her sudden disappearance was a mystery and Grampian Police launched a missing person hunt.

Hector and Cathie headed north to join in the search - Hector conscious of Nat's temper and with a deep-rooted fear he might never see Arlene again, Cathie trying to remain optimistic but inwardly sharing his fears.

Soon it became clear to everyone that Arlene's disappearance was not as simple as a stressed mum downing tools and walking out. There was a messy separation and potentially-costly divorce action in the background, along with her estranged husband's violent past. Within a year police announced they were hunting for Arlene's killer - even though they never found her body.

It wasn't until April 2002 that Nat Fraser and his friend Hector Dick were charged with Arlene's murder. The consequent trial made Scottish legal history. The unprecedented lack of a corpse did not prevent the jury convicting Fraser of murder after Dick turned Queen's evidence and told a hushed court how Fraser hired a hitman to kill his wife.

Hector, Cathie and Arlene's other close relatives remained dignified in court as graphic details of how she may have met her end were discussed - including the theory that she may have been systematically dissected to the extent that even her teeth were ground into dust.

Most of the jury believed what they heard. Fraser was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of hiring a hitman to murder his wife and dispose of her body. Yet even then Hector and Cathie doubted that it was the end of their misery.

"We weren't really that surprised when the appeal came around," shrugs Hector. "And although we were thinking that he might walk, it was still a shock when it happened. I kept thinking that the last time he was out on bail, he ended up being responsible for my daughter's death."

The cornerstone of Fraser's appeal centres around Arlene's wedding rings, said to have disappeared from the house only to turn up several days later hanging on a peg under a soap dish. The Crown insisted that the appearance of the rings showed Fraser had access to the body after the killing, removing them and then returning to the house.

"But that was just one small area of evidence from a massive caseload," Hector stresses. "My fear is that all the other evidence will be forgotten about and the case will come down to what happened to the rings."

Another consequence of the murder is Arlene's children, who once loved to spend summer holidays with their grandfather, have become distant. Jamie is now a student and still fiercely protective of his father.

"We can only hope that as time goes by they will want to spend some time with us again," says Hector sadly.

The case has also cast a shadow over those other everyday matters. "You start to dread picking up the phone or opening a letter in case it's something to do with Nat Fraser," admits Cathie. "We can't even plan to go on holiday any more because we never know when something is going to happen. We love to go on holiday, but you think as soon as you organise it, there'll be another court case and we'll have to cancel.

"Besides, people talk. They think 'that's them off on holiday because they've been paid by the papers'. It's not true -we've only ever spoken because we want justice for Arlene, never for money.

"God knows, there are enough lawyers making money out of the poor girl now she's gone."

• A 20,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of Arlene Fraser's body is in place.

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FAMILY TIES

HECTOR McINNES and his first wife Isabelle already had one 20-month-old daughter, Carol, when Arlene was born in August 1964, while he was stationed as an aircraft mechanic at RAF Lossiemouth.

Three years later Hector, originally from Dalkeith, and his young family were posted to Malta before returning to Elgin in 1968.

However, the marriage ran into difficulties and by 1971 Hector and Isabelle had separated, with Hector posted south to Cornwall.

He retained close contact with his daughters, even more so when he moved north to Preston. Arlene would regularly arrange to meet her father halfway - she travelled south from Elgin and he travelled north from Preston, meeting at relatives' homes in Dalkeith, Mayfield and Bonnyrigg. Hector and second wife Cathie changed their retirement plans after Arlene's disappearance, opting to move north from Preston to Bonnyrigg to be closer to the police investigation.