Recalling a violent history

Published on Sunday 13 July 2008 20:00

LONG before he appeared at the High Court in Glasgow accused of murdering eight people, Peter Manuel was known to police across the UK as a vicious, cold-hearted lawbreaker obsessed with guns.

Less than 20 years separated his first court appearance on 20 October 1938, where he was charged with breaking into a shop, and his execution at Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, on Friday 11 July 1958.

Born in New York on 15 March 1927 (during a period in which his parents had considered emigrating to the US), probation, approved school, borstal and prison were all staging posts on Manuel's march to the gallows.

Before he graduated to murder, his charge sheet contained 47 cases of theft and housebreaking, robbery with violence, rape, unlawful wounding, fraud and indecent assault.

Released on licence from borstal shortly after the Second World War, Manuel went to live with his parents in Lanarkshire. In March 1946, he appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court charged with 18 counts of housebreaking. He was barely three months into his 12-month sentence when he was taken to the High Court in Glasgow and charged with "assault and ravish". Eight years in Peterhead prison followed.

As a resident of Scotland's toughest jail, Manuel would boast of his strength and his crimes, and lie about his past.

Just two days into 1956, Anne Kneilands, 17, a factory worker, was killed. Her badly beaten body was discovered two days later, close to the fifth tee at East Kilbride Golf Course.

Interviewed about the crime by Lanarkshire Police, Manuel claimed he had received the scratches on his face in a fight in Glasgow on Hogmanay. Half a century before the routine employment of DNA in murder investigations, there was nothing to connect him to Anne's death.

Arrested following a police raid at Hamilton Colliery on 23 March 1956, he was granted bail and ordered to appear in court in October. This was a decision with horrific repercussions.

On 17 September 1956, Manuel targeted 5 Fennsbank Avenue, High Burnside, near Glasgow. Three people were asleep inside – one of them, a girl, awoke and saw him in the room. By his own account, they "struggled around for a while and then I flung her on the bed and shot her too".

Police identified the victims as Marion Watt, her 16-year-old daughter, Vivienne, and Mrs Watt's sister, Margaret Brown.

A source claimed Peter Manuel had been seen carrying a gun, but a thorough search of his house found no evidence. The .38 Webley revolver that killed the Watts was already lying at the bottom of the River Clyde.

Short of any other leads, the senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent James Hendry, concentrated his attention on Marion Watt's husband, William.

A former policeman and one-time athlete, now turned master baker, William Watt had been enjoying a short holiday break at the Cairnbaan Hotel in Argyll with his black Labrador, Queenie, when the murders occurred.

Police were told that a motorist, accompanied by a large black dog, had been aboard the Renfrew Ferry at 3am on the day of the murders. William Watt said it took him two and a half hours, travelling by way of Loch Lomond and Loch Fyne, to drive the 82 miles between his home and Cairnbaan. A police driver demonstrated that the journey could be accomplished in just over two hours.

The authorities conjectured it would have been possible for Watt to leave his hotel when everyone was asleep, drive to his home in Burnside, dispose of his wife, daughter and sister-in-law, and return to Cairnbaan in time for breakfast.

On 27 September, 1956, William Watt was charged with murdering his family and taken to the untried prisoners' wing at Barlinnie Prison. While he waited to go on trial for his life, the real killer held court in another part of the same jail.

Barely two weeks after the Watts and Mrs Brown died, Peter Manuel was sentenced to 18 months in prison, arising from the housebreaking charge deferred from earlier in the year. Now he boasted to other inmates that he could tell the authorities a thing or two about who killed Anne Kneilands and burgled the Watt family home with such lethal results.

Even more astonishing, he asked for a meeting with William Watt's solicitor, a prominent Glasgow lawyer named Laurence Dowdall. Manuel described the Watt family home to the solicitor and explained in detail how each of the victims died. Finally, he offered to draw a picture of the murder weapon.

Manuel claimed he had been told what occurred by a man he refused to name. Asked why he volunteered this information to the defence, he replied: "I don't want to see an innocent man hanged."

On 3 December, 1956, with a suddenness that surprised reporters following the case, William Watt was released. A statement from the Crown Office confirmed: "He is completely cleared of all charges."

William Watt then began his own search for the killer of his family, visiting bars and clubs frequented by Glasgow's underworld figures, pleading for help and offering money to anyone who was prepared to assist. Stranger still, he arranged meetings with the man he believed discharged the gun that disrupted his world forever. Those who believed he was wasting his time were shown to be wrong when a prominent underworld figure disclosed: "I fixed a gun for Manuel."

Watt's release was bad news for Lanarkshire Police, who were still trying to find the killer of Anne Kneilands. So far there was nothing to connect the two crimes, except a constant whisper that Peter Manuel was involved.

On 28 December 1957, Isabelle Cook, a schoolgirl on her way to a dance in Uddingston, vanished. Frogmen discovered clothing belonging to her beneath a railway viaduct a mile from her home. One report stated: "Lanarkshire Police are convinced she was murdered after putting up a fight for her life."

Days passed and there was no sign of the missing girl. Someone developed the outlandish theory that Isabelle's body had been dumped over a railway bridge into a passing goods wagon – thousands of railway yards all over Britain were alerted.

Reporters likened the idea to a scene from the popular Ealing comedy film, The Ladykillers. One incautious editor commissioned a cartoon depicting the imagined scene. The final version showed a loathsome figure throwing the half-naked body of a young woman over some anonymous parapet, while a steam train belching smoke thundered below. I never saw that particular editor again.

Similarities with the murder of Anne Kneilands were obvious, and before long, people close to the investigation were speculating privately about the whereabouts of Peter Manuel.

It was known he had been released from Barlinnie on 30 November 1957, but few people were aware he had visited Newcastle eight days later, hoping to find work. His presence in the area coincided with the murder of taxi driver Sydney Dunn. Sydney had been found on a remote stretch of road near Edmundbyers, in County Durham, shot in the head and his throat cut.

Police were told Sydney was last seen leaving the taxi rank at Newcastle Central railway station. His passenger was said to have had a strong Scots' accent.

Back in Lanarkshire, the hunt for Isabelle Cooke was growing more frantic. New Year passed with no more news of the missing girl; parents refused to let their teenage daughters go out at night. There were increasing calls for Glasgow CID, with its superior resources, to take charge of the investigation.

Within a week, the clamour for change in the investigation was unstoppable. Three more people had been found dead in their beds in their home, at 38 Sheepburn Road, Uddingston – Peter Smart, his wife, Doris, and their 11-year-old son Michael, all killed on New Year's Day by an intruder using a Beretta automatic pistol.

One commentator noted: "A considerable section of the most thickly populated area of Scotland was in a blind fear, knowing a killer was loose who murdered without need or reason."

The bodies lay undiscovered for five days. But within hours of their being found, Detective Superintendent Alex Brown of Glasgow CID took charge of the murder hunt.

According to underworld sources, Peter Manuel had been spending freely in pubs around Lanarkshire. Some of this money was recovered and traced to Peter Smart.

Eight days after taking charge of the case, DS Brown made a dawn raid on Manuel's home. Until then, he had been fearful "Manuel might kill again before the case was sufficiently complete to justify his arrest".

A search of the house produced a number of items stolen in minor burglaries and Manuel was charged with possessing stolen goods. Simultaneously, it was made clear to him that if he did not assist the police with their inquiries, his father would be charged with complicity in the burglaries.

On 15 January 1958, Manuel made a brief appearance in court and was remanded in custody. Later the same day he was allowed a short meeting with his parents at Hamilton Police headquarters. There were, he told them, " a few mysteries" he wanted to clear up.

"Faced with the inevitable," wrote Bill Knox, the reporter closest to the Manuel family, "Peter Manuel had cracked."

That same night, following a brief visit to Barlinnie Prison (to comply with the terms of his committal warrant), he took police to a field in Mount Vernon, a short walk from Baillieston Brickworks, and showed them where to dig. Beneath their feet was the body of Isabelle Cooke. She had been strangled.

His signed confession, dated 16 January 1958, covered the murders of Anne Kneilands, the Watts, Isabelle Cooke and the Smarts. His trial opened at the High Court in Glasgow four months later. By then he was telling his mother: "I told the police a lot of nonsense about those murders. I just wanted to get my dad out of jail."

His trial opened on 12 May 1958, and people queued throughout the night hoping for seats in the public gallery.

Scottish Television had been on air less than a year and demonstrated a then-revolutionary approach to news-gathering – by employing Bill Knox to deliver twice-a-day reports on the trial. He later recalled: "It was the first time a murder trial had been reported on TV."

Manuel entered the dock dressed in a black blazer, blue trousers, grey shirt and tie. According to his defence, he had an alibi covering the times Anne Kneilands, Isabelle Cooke and the Smarts died. And he impeached William Watt for killing his own family.

An attempt to have the details of Manuel's confession kept from the jury was rejected by the trial judge, Lord Cameron. To some observers this was Manuel's last hope.

Ten days into the trial he dismissed his counsel, Harald Leslie QC, and proceeded to conduct his own defence. How well did he perform? Opinions varied. In his summing up, Lord Cameron suggested he had presented his own defence "with a skill that is quite remarkable", but Harald Leslie thought Manuel's "forensic skills were pathetic".

Instructed by the judge to find him not guilty of murdering Anne Kneilands (due to a lack of corroborative evidence) the jury, made up of nine men and six women, then took two-and-a-half hours to find Manuel guilty of the other seven charges. Lord Cameron donned the symbolic black tricorn hat to deliver the death sentence. .

An appeal failed and an attempt at suicide was foiled. At 8am on the appointed mid-July morning, Peter Anthony Thomas Manuel was taken from his Barlinnie cell to the execution chamber to "suffer death by hanging".

Earlier this year, Dr Richard Goldberg, of Aberdeen University Law School, suggested that the Crown Office withheld medical evidence from the defence team to ensure Manuel went to the gallows. He told the BBC there was "clear evidence" the killer was a psychopath and may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.

A few months after Manuel's death, Harald Leslie QC wrote of his former client: "Medical authorities believe that he had a psychopathic personality. But to describe him as a psychopath might suggest that he was not responsible for his actions. I am quite satisfied that he was mentally responsible. He knew what he was doing."

&#149 Russell Galbraith is the former head of news, current affairs and sport at Scottish Television. He was a reporter on the Glasgow Evening News during the hunt for Peter Manuel and reported on the murder trial for the Sunday Mail.