Lothian Murder Files: Spurned boyfriend killed typist and father

IRENE Bennett was a typical young woman living in the Edinburgh of 1959.

Always neatly dressed, the pretty 25-year-old worked as a typist and loved the new fashion of taking holidays abroad, but for the most part she lived quietly with her father on Earl Haig Gardens on East Trinity Road.

She was certainly morally upright enough to break off her romance with one Alexander Main Stirling, a second-hand car salesman, when after around five months of dating she discovered he was actually married – and living with his wife and two children in Morningside.

That should have been that – except Stirling did not take kindly to being spurned by Irene. These days it would be called stalking – and the constant pestering phone calls reached such a level that Irene contacted the police and asked them to intervene. Neighbours later remembered that in the aftermath of the break-up, in August or September of 1959, Irene often had to be driven home from work by a police escort.

It wasn't enough to see off Stirling, though. On 23 November a neighbour, alerted by morning deliveries of milk, rolls and papers still on the doorstep in the afternoon, called police who broke down the door and discovered not just the body of Irene but also that of her father, James, a 65-year-old retired cobbler and First World War veteran who had lost a leg while serving with the Royal Artillery during the conflict.

They had been shot with a .22 rifle after the killer had broken in by smashing a window. There was only ever one suspect – within hours of the discovery, a nationwide hunt was on for Stirling and the bright red Ford Zephyr he drove.

Stirling, originally from Loanhead, was apprehended in Gloucester and charged with double murder.

A jury took just 11 minutes to unanimously find him guilty of the killings and Stirling was sentenced to death by the High Court in Edinburgh.

In April 1960, however, he won a reprieve – the Lord Provost of the time, Sir Ian A Johnson-Gilbert, visited him in his cell at Saughton to break the news that he would instead serve life in prison.

Stirling died in 1970, in Fairmile Nursing Home, of cancer of the oesophagus.