Suzanne Pilley trial: Absence of deceased leaves questions to be answered

JURIES in murder trials usually have two questions to answer … was the death a crime, was the accused responsible?In rare cases, the absence of a body creates a third question: was the victim, in fact, dead?

• In 1980, Michael Topham was jailed for life for murdering a workmate five years earlier.

The body was thought to have been buried in a forest adjoining the Queen’s Balmoral estate, but was never recovered.

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• In 1986, Alan Porter was found guilty of strangling his lover’s three-month-old daughter at Balloch Castle country park, Loch Lomond. The mother, Sheena McLaughlan, who received a five-year sentence for culpable homicide, said the body was buried at the lochside, but it was not found.

• The body of Arlene Fraser, a mother-of-two who disappeared from New Elgin, Moray, in 1998, has never been found.

• In 2010, paedophiles Charles O’Neill and William Lauchlan were found guilty of murdering a woman in Largs, who had planned to report them for abusing a boy. It was suspected she had been dumped at sea, but no body was discovered.

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