Emma Caldwell's murder: How good journalism helped secure justice for Iain Packer's victims – John McLellan

Blowhards who attack the ‘gutter press’ forget the importance of investigative reporting

In its short life, Police Scotland has an unenviable record of serious problems. Like the Metropolitan Police, maybe it comes with the territory of being a big force, but unfair or not, the impression of lurching from one crisis to another is hard to dispel.

The undetected deaths of John Yuill and Lamara Bell on the M9, the malicious prosecutions of Rangers administrators David Whitehouse and Paul Clark, the ongoing inquiry into the death of Sheku Bayoh, bullying allegations against former Chief Constable Phil Gormley, and what looked like a campaign to make life difficult for the new chief Jo Farrell have, to put it mildly, reflected badly on the service.

Perhaps it’s obvious to point out you know about them because journalists wrote about them and they featured heavily on TV and radio news, but it’s no exaggeration to claim that not only might you never have heard of Iain Packer, but the killer and serial rapist might still be free to commit more awful crimes were it not for journalists.

Margaret Caldwell, the mother of Emma Caldwell, speaks to the media outside the Scottish Parliament following Iain Packer's long-overdue conviction for her daughter's murder (Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA)

Judge-led inquiry into Caldwell case

For nearly 20 years after his arrest and subsequent release for the murder of prostitute Emma Caldwell in 2005, despite clear evidence pointing to his guilt, he was responsible for a further 19 serious sexual assaults. Justice finally caught up with him last month when he was convicted of 33 charges against a total of 22 women, including Ms Caldwell's murder and 11 rapes. Now 50, he was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of 36 years but is appealing against both conviction and length of sentence.

Get our weekly opinion newsletter for expert analysis from The Scotsman’s team of columnists

Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain wasted little time in ordering a police investigation the same day and Justice Secretary Angela Constance announced a judge-led public inquiry to uncover why it took so long to end Packer’s sickening spree. Ms Farrell has already said there will be full police co-operation and all her predecessors are in the frame, particularly Sir Stephen House, who was chief constable of Strathclyde Police from 2007 until it became part of the unified force in 2012 which he then led until 2015 before handing over to Mr Gormley for his unhappy two-year stint. But his successor Sir Iain Livingstone, credited with stabilising the force, will be very much in the spotlight having been the deputy chief from 2016 before taking over in 2018.

The Caldwell family believe a "toxic culture of misogyny and corruption" in Strathclyde Police meant women who spoke up against Packer were ignored because the investigating officers were determined to nail a gang of Turkish men who were cleared after the case collapsed, but only after a two-and-a-half-year investigation costing £4 million. The Sunday Mail exposed Packer in 2015 and then editor Jim Wilson told sister paper the Daily Record last week that the police and Crown Office “did nothing because it was professionally embarrassing to admit mistakes and put them right”, while Conservative MSP and former Sunday Mail journalist Russell Findlay has made accusations of police corruption.

While focus will inevitably fall on early phases of the botched investigation, there must be a thorough examination of the events immediately after the Sunday Mail’s publication of overwhelming evidence because, instead of arresting Packer, the police launched an illegal investigation to discover if officers had been leaking information to the paper. It was another stain on Police Scotland’s reputation, for which it was subsequently forced to apologise.

Journalists’ hall of fame

It’s an understatement to say the public does not hold newspaper reporters in high esteem, but day in, day out they perform a valuable public service for little recognition. It just goes with the territory. While the broadcasters with the glamour of reporting from Westminster, Washington and war zones get the attention, even the best newspaper reporters are unknown without a television profile. People of a certain age might have heard of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, but probably because the Washington Post reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film All the President’s Men.

You won’t have heard of them, but Jim Wilson and his deputy Brendan McGinty (both of whom I count as friends) have earned a place in the journalists’ hall of fame for exposing the truth about Packer. They were convinced the evidence they amassed from reliable sources was conclusive, but they knew accusing someone of murder if they turned out to be innocent could cost them their jobs, so rather than putting a reporter in the line of fire, they wrote the story themselves, running full details of Packer’s criminality across nine pages, and asking why police had ignored what should have been obvious for nearly a decade. Their work is at least on a par with the Daily Mail’s exposure of the gang of racist thugs responsible for the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

It took nearly four years for the BBC to follow up the story with a documentary in which Packer denied he was responsible for Emma Caldwell’s death, and while the interview by Sam Poling which has featured widely on TV bulletins since the conviction was unquestionably powerful, it is by no means certain it would have taken place had it not been for the Sunday Mail and the bravery of Jim Wilson and Brendan McGinty.

Having succeeded Jim Wilson as editor, Brendan McGinty again found himself in official crosshairs when then Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf approved an unsuccessful legal bid to halt publication when the paper was about to expose the shocking events leading to the death of prisoner Allan Marshall in Saughton Jail. And it was its political editor John Ferguson who revealed the exodus of SNP members last year, the aggressive false rebuttal of which led to the downfall of ex-chief executive Peter Murrell.

So the next time you find yourself nodding when some blowhard attacks the gutter press, remember it was journalists who made sure there was justice for Emma Caldwell.