'Knife killer' bids to clear his name after 35 years

Published on Tuesday 9 September 2008 22:44

A MAN went to court yesterday to persuade appeal judges to clear his name – 35 years after he was convicted of murdering a woman in a frenzied knife attack.

George Beattie, 54, has always protested his innocence over the stabbing of Margaret McLaughlin, 23, in Carluke, Lanarkshire, in 1973. However, he was found guilty by a jury and has twice before failed in attempts to have the conviction quashed.

Using new psychological evidence, Beattie, out of jail on parole, returned to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh to repeat his claim of a miscarriage of justice.

The prosecution case had been built round statements he made to police, in which he said men in top hats with mirrors – in the style of the glam rock group Slade – had carried out the murder and forced him to watch.

It is now being argued the statements were unreliable because of Beattie's psychological make-up, and an expert told the court yesterday that modern tests revealed Beattie had "an abnormal tendency to provide inaccurate information".

Ms McLaughlin, a typist, left her home in Carluke on a wet Friday evening in July 1973 to walk the short distance to the station to catch a train to Glasgow. Her body was found next day in a wood known as Colonel's Glen. She had been stabbed 19 times.

Beattie, then 19 and described as "a bit simple", spoke to police during door-to-door inquiries and said he had been in Colonel's Glen but had not seen or heard anything suspicious.

Then he told a neighbour he had seen Ms McLaughlin, and remarked to a colleague at the steel plant where he worked that he must have passed the spot about the time of the murder.

Beattie was questioned further and said he had tripped on a path and got blood on his hand. He had wiped it with a paper tissue which he put in his pocket.

In an interview, he started shaking and sobbing. Hysterical, he gave an account of six men, two wearing top hats with mirrors, carrying out the murder which he was forced to watch.

Tests showed the blood on the tissue could have come from Ms McLaughlin, but could not have come from him.

The Crown maintained Beattie had been the killer, not just an onlooker, which explained why he had been able to give details about the murder and the scene, including the fact that a ring had been removed from the victim's finger and that a knife had been left embedded in soil nearby.

A jury took only 35 minutes to convict Beattie. He was refused leave to appeal and served almost 15 years of a life sentence. For several years, he was out on licence but it was revoked after a breach of the peace.

In 1994, the Scottish Secretary referred the case to the appeal court, but it was ruled there had been sufficient evidence to entitle the jury to convict him.

Now, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has sent the case back again to the appeal court. Beattie's lawyers say there is fresh evidence from psychologists to cast doubt on the fairness of the way the statements had been taken and on the reliability of what had been said. It is claimed his capacity to understand and properly respond to questioning was limited.

The court was told Beattie had alleged consistently that he was bullied and pressurised by the police. At one stage, he claimed, his head was held under water.

Professor Gisli Gudjonsson, 60, of King's College, London, said he had

tested Beattie and found him to be of low intelligence and a "confabulator".

He added: "These are people who give an account, and will add to it so it becomes more extensive. They want to remember as much as possible but may not remember clearly and guess and add things. They make things up, not necessarily deliberately, to make it look like they have a better memory than they have.

"(Beattie] had an abnormal tendency to confabulate – to provide inaccurate information."

The hearing is expected to last two weeks.

Simple storyteller who talked his way into a murder charge

GEORGE Beattie was a man known for telling tall tales. He was a "bletherer" – and his fellow pupils and neighbours in Carluke never took him too seriously.

People on the estate where he grew up said he was the type of man who would tell a story to boost his image. He was regarded as "simple", a man of low intelligence who left Carluke High School at the age of 14. Beattie was said to live in a world of his own. He was passionately fond of railways and spent all his spare cash on a model layout he had at home.

As a child, Beattie was rarely in trouble with the police – until the day in July 1973 when he "confessed" to having intimate knowledge of the scene where Margaret McLaughlin was brutally murdered.

Six days after Margaret was murdered, Beattie told police he witnessed the killing. The police say he said it was done by six men, two wearing top hats with mirrors on them. Police also said he described items of the victim's clothing which had been inside her suitcase.

The following day, Beattie showed officers around the scene of the crime and pointed to where the men with top hats had cleaned the knife in the ground.

He accurately described the knife which had already been discovered in the position Beattie pointed to.

During his murder trial in September 1973, Beattie's defence intervened little in the prosecution case, confident there was no case in law to answer.

Police forensic scientists were called by the defence to testify that nothing was discovered to connect Beattie with the scene of the crime.

But the judge rejected the defence's plea and after just 35 minutes of deliberations the jury convicted him by majority.

Ms McLaughlin was four years older that Beattie, so they were unlikely to have been especially friendly at school, or to have socialised much.

According to some, it was the flaws in his character that led to one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Scottish legal history.