The terrible day a soldier killed three comrades in the Pentlands for money

Police officers sometimes take a perverse satisfaction in thinking they lived through the most testing times. If you were serving in eastern Scotland during the mid-1980s, you had some justification.

The cold, snowy winter of 1984 saw a lengthy list of problems. The Miners Strike took hundreds of cops away from their home beats when they could be least spared, as the first wave of deadly heroin hit.

Deaths were rising and drug-related crime was off the scale. There were also two long-running murder investigations. As 1985 arrived, we hoped for better days. It was not to be.

One bitterly cold January morning, we got the call every police force dreads – a reported terrorist attack. A farmer feeding his sheep near Glencorse Reservoir, Midlothian, had found an Army Landrover in a ditch, a shambles of blood and bullet cases. Nearby, he found the bodies of three men, two in Army uniform, all obviously shot dead.

Missing £19,000

He raised the alarm, and it was quickly established the Landrover and its three-man crew had been on a payroll run to a bank. The £19,000 was missing and, as the forensics experts got to work, the horror of the crimes became apparent. Two of the victims had been shot execution-style, in the head, while the third had been sprayed with bullets across the chest.

At first glance the murders seemed like a terrorist attack, with the IRA active at the time. But they had never carried out an attack in Scotland before. As we gathered our thoughts, we set up as strong an inquiry team as we could.

We were hard-pressed back then but also blessed with some very good people. CID head Brian Cunningham was a shrewd operator and the local Detective Chief Inspector Kenny Shanks was an excellent detective.

But we were especially fortunate that Colonel Clive Fairweather, a famous fighting soldier, was the officer in charge of nearby Glencorse Barracks. No one knew the Army or the IRA better, and he quickly dismissed the terrorist theory.

He immediately saw that the bullet casings were 9mm, a type used by the Army. We were beginning to suspect an inside job. It may have been unimaginable that a soldier would gun down his comrades in cold blood, but it was starting to add up.

Murder weapon cleaned and returned

But where was the murder weapon? Soldiers are not routinely armed in peacetime barracks but a check of records quickly established that a Sterling submachine gun had been signed out of the armoury that morning by Corporal Andrew Walker, an experienced small-arms instructor at Glencorse.

The gun had been cleaned and returned but ballistics checks confirmed it had been the weapon used to murder retired Major David Cunningham, Staff Sergeant Terry Hoskers, and Private John Thomson.

Walker was arrested when it was revealed that he was deep in debt and desperate for cash. Despite overwhelming evidence and his conviction for murder, Walker never admitted his crimes or revealed the whereabouts of the money, which was never found.

Perhaps it’s still buried on the hills near Glencorse where it was left 40 years ago. Remember that the next time you take a Sunday stroll in the Pentlands.

Tom Wood is a writer and was a chief inspector in Lothian and Borders Police at the time of the Glencorse murders