George Beattie (Hansard, 3 March 1993)

§ Mr. Jimmy Hood (Clydesdale)
Tonight's Adjournment debate is about a 19-year-old Carluke boy who was convicted of murder in 1973. A simple lad—not very well educated—he was known in Carluke as a big softie. My speech will be confined to George Beattie's conviction, and I seek to prove to the House that it was a great miscarriage of justice. George Beattie did not and could not have murdered Margaret McGlouchlan. George Beattie is innocent.
A major problem with miscarriages of justice is getting the case reconsidered by the authorities. The only way to make Ministers or civil servants sit up and take notice is to get the message through to the public, through the newspapers or television. Miscarriages of justice—particularly those involving murder—are generally so complicated that newspapers and television present only a simplified version of the case, and then from one particular angle. In reality, such cases have many aspects and involve many intricate pieces of evidence.
George Beattie was convicted of murder in 1973. BBC Television broadcast two "Rough Justice" programmes about him in 1983 and 1985, and produced persuasive evidence that he was innocent of the crime for which he is in gaol today.
Those programmes concentrated solely on the evidence put before the court, and there is now evidence concerning police conduct in the case that points to George Beattie being a victim of a miscarriage of justice on several levels.
The aspect of Beattie's case to which I refer concerns personalities, professional reputation, police bureaucracy and—yes—politics. To understand fully what happened to Beattie, one must understand what was happening during the police investigation. The leading figure in the police work was Scotland's finest detective, William Muncie. Coincidentally, Muncie was born in Carluke, where the murder took place.
Success in the case against Beattie meant that Chief Superintendent Muncie would bring his career in Lanarkshire CID to a triumphant end, in the town of his birth. After the case, he went on to be Lanark assistant chief constable—then, even better, assistant chief constable of Strathclyde. Muncie's promotion meant that he left behind him an investigative disaster, with an innocent man gaoled and a murderer gone free.
Muncie had an impressive reputation. He had investigated 53 cases of murder, and the McGlouchlan case was to be his 54th. He had found the murderer every time—not one failure in any of his cases. It was a remarkable record to live up to.
Among Muncie's big murder case successes was the serial killer Peter Manuel; Gordon Hay—the Biggar murder: and James Keenan, the Lanark case. They were all solved using Muncie's favourite method, which was outlined in his memoirs. He first decided who was guilty, then took months finding the proof. That method failed him in the case of the murder at Carluke, when George Beattie was convicted.
To understand what happened, we must imagine being present at some of the investigations. Perhaps the key moment was 6 am on 11 July 1973. In the dawn light, Chief 427 Superintendent Muncie questioned George Beattie in the Carluke glen, where the body of a young woman, Margaret McGlouchlan, had been found four days earlier. The superintendent had already been up half the night dealing with this, his last case. Perhaps it is not surprising in the circumstances that he forgot all his own golden rules, and allowed his men to charge Beattie. No doubt in other circumstances he would have shown better judgment.
In fact, Mr. Muncie was trusting to luck: he had been very lucky during his career, but his luck ran out that morning. No doubt he thought that the evidence against Beattie would turn up, but it did not. Nothing seems to have gone right in the case from the start.
When Beattie was charged, Muncie was already four days into a botch-up of an investigation over which he had lost control. Uniformed police had trampled all over the scene of the crime before Muncie even got there; the photographer, acting without Muncie's direction, had missed a vital shot of the umbrella that the victim had used to defend herself. It would have told the court so much about what had happened—but there was no photographic evidence of where that umbrella had been found, and in what condition. One of the key points is whether the umbrella was up or down at the time; but, because Mr. Muncie was not on top form, we cannot say with any certainty which was the case.
Most important of all, Muncie's men had found a knife on the ground near the victim. They were all convinced that it was the murder weapon, but they were wrong. The chief superintendent himself soon realised that the rust on its blade ruled it out. What happened to his opinion shows the lack of organisation on the team: it did not reach all its members. That may not be surprising. The team of detectives came from half a dozen different stations, and examination of the police work reveals that liaison was poor.
Mr. Muncie, however, added to the problems himself, perhaps because of his robust personality. He let a Scottish newspaper fly him around the area in a helicopter; he said that it helped him to see the hidden paths around the glen. We may wonder why he did not know all those hidden paths, having spent his boyhood in the village when all the children played in the glen. The important point, however, is that the Daily Record picture taken from the helicopter was an investigative mistake of the first order. The picture that the newspaper published gave away one of the key police secrets—where the body had been found.
But there was worse to come. Two of Mr. Muncie's officers gave a guided tour of the scene of the crime to the man on whom Muncie eventually fixed as the murderer. That suspect—my constituent George Beattie—told officers John Adam and George Waddell that he had walked through the glen at the time when they believed that the murder had taken place. The officers decided to take him to the scene—through the police cordon, past Muncie's caravan headquarters, right to where the murder had happened. It started to rain.
Hon. Members may think that what happened next was highly irregular. There the men were, standing right by the scene of the murder—on the very spot where the attack on the victim had begun. When it began to rain, they did not walk the few yards to the police caravan headquarters for shelter; instead, Detective Constable Waddell ran past the caravan, nearly a mile to the car. The other officer—Adam 428 —was left alone with Beattie at the scene of the crime. Apparently, he took no notes of what he did or said to Beattie while they were there.
The police would claim that Beattie was not a suspect at the time; he only became that when he told them details about the scene of the crime. But Beattie was the only man whom the police found who had been in the glen at about the time when they thought that the victim had been killed, so he must have been some kind of suspect. Why take him to the scene of the crime, leave him alone with an officer and then claim that he could not have known details of the scene unless he had committed the murder?
The story told by the two police officers had changed by the time it got to court. Adam, the man who stayed with Beattie in the glen, later claimed that he, not Waddell, had gone to the car. Waddell did not corroborate the second version. What was the head of a police investigation doing allowing such behaviour? Muncie knew that detectives should never show a suspect the scene of a crime. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Adam and Waddell were immediately sent back to base in Motherwell and took no further part in the inquiry after that incident.
We might wonder why none of the other detectives heard of the "guided tour" of the scene of the crime. Of course, the officers involved were no longer on the case, because they had been sent back home, but no one told the other detectives on the investigation what had happened. Later, when another two detectives questioned Beattie, they were surprised to learn that he knew so much about the scene of the crime.
The handling of Beattie got worse. He was left waiting in a room where the girl's clothing was laid out. His interrogators were doubly surprised when he described clothing that had been locked in her suitcase. The most astonished was Sergeant Dougie Mortimer from Lanark. He knew little about the case, because he had been on holiday and had only just joined the inquiry. When Beat tie came out with the details about the victim's clothing, Mortimer persisted until the young lad was having something like an epileptic fit.
There followed an aspect of the case that the police completely failed to investigate. Beattie concocted a hare-brained story that men in top hats with mirrors had committed the crime. One can imagine that such a strange story would have mystified the police, but if they had carried out any sort of investigation, they would have found where the tale came from, and realised that Beat tie was saying the first thing that came into his head at the time.
The officer questioning Beattie, Detective Sergeant Mortimer, was not a pop fan. He did not know that, just before Beattie had gone out on the Friday, the night of the murder, men in top hats with mirrors—a pop group called Slade—had been on television. Beattie had seen them, and it had been one of the few visually memorable images that he had seen that evening. I have here a picture of the men in the top hats with mirrors—Slade, a top of the pops British pop group. Such a simple answer to an important question in the case against Beattie was an answer that any teenager could have given, but it completely foxed the officers on the case.
At 1.30 am, after about six hours of interrogation, Mortimer charged him with murder. Personalities now came into the case. Muncie liked to charge suspects himself, but a mere sergeant, who had been on the case for only a day, was stealing his thunder. At 5.30 am, having 429 had no sleep, the lad was brought before the chief superintendent at the scene of the crime. Muncie was making sure—in fact, the stage was set for Muncie's biggest mistake.
Muncie was proud of his investigative technique, and often talked about it. His motto was "always alert". He had a golden rule that all his men were supposed to follow: if a suspect was apparently admitting to facts which could incriminate him, they should be repeated to an officer who was not in any way connected with the inquiry. That is a good and fair way of conducting an investigation—it is a pity that Chief Superintendent Muncie totally forgot about it when it came to nailing the murder on George Beattie.
What is more Beattie was ill when Muncie saw him, yet Muncie denied him a doctor for a further 16 hours. By then, Beattie had been awake for about 20 hours. He had already been charged, but here he was, at the scene of the crime, tired and poorly and being made to postulate what must have happened when the murder took place, to policemen who avidly took down his every word as gospel—except, of course, those sections which did not fit their theory. Of course, Beattie, although charged, had no solicitor present. What a botch-up of an investigation.
It got worse. Muncie asked the accused to retell his tale. Beattie tried to repeat his "guided tour", but he made several mistakes, on which Muncie should have pounced.
Beattie said that the knife found in the glen was the murder weapon. We must remember that most of the detectives on the case were of that opinion, but their boss knew that it was not correct. The forensic department later proved him right—there was no blood on that knife, so it was not the murder weapon. Muncie said nothing about Beattie's mistake.
Muncie should have probed for special knowledge. He did not. One fact which the police knew but which was still secret was the fact that the murderer had not taken Margaret's expensive engagement ring. Beattie did not know that. Indeed, he had no special knowledge. He knew nothing of the one item of Margaret's that was never found—her charm bracelet.
What about the fact that Beattie had described details of the clothes in the victim's suitcase? Muncie should certainly have spotted the mistakes that Beattie made about the clothing. He himself noticed that the clothes had not been exposed during the murder—so even the murderer could not have known the details that Beattie had blurted out under interrogation. When Muncie asked where the body had lain, Beattie did not know, even though Muncie had marked the spot on the Daily Record photograph.
Any reasonable person would have known that there was something wrong with the arrest, yet here was a police team that lacked simple liaison procedures, and operated without proper briefings. The men were working almost 24 hours a day. In such circumstances, people do not think straight, and officers can become desperate to write cases off.
No one heard of those circumstances during the trial, of course. In court, it seemed that police procedures were perfect, working hours magnificent, and venerable chief superintendents infallible. But no one is infallible. Although Chief Superintendent Muncie was the famous 430 detective who had spotted the teeth marks that convicted Hay in the Biggar murder case, that sharpness was missing when he dealt with the forensic evidence in the Carluke case—because that evidence showed that Beattie was innocent.
Normally, Muncie would have spotted that, in the Carluke murder, the meal that the victim had eaten before leaving home was not in her stomach. That was vital evidence, because it meant that she must have died at about 11 pm, not 8 pm. But the police missed the significance—just one mistake among many.
There is a lurking doubt that the police had smelt that there was something wrong with their case. In Scotland solicitors have the right to question prosecution witnesses such as police before the trial—but Muncie was "too busy" to give a precognition. Perhaps that was because he could not afford to be questioned before the trial.
Picture him in his office as he prepared the case for trial. He knew that at least he had one "ace"—a blood spot on a tissue handkerchief found in Beattie's pocket. The blood grouping was not Beattie's and matched the victim's in two main—though common—groups. Unfortunately, that evidence had been handled in a nonchalant manner. There were no proper notes of its discovery, and no protective measures were taken—poor police work again.
Some of the other scientific evidence was worrying. There was blood under the victim's fingernails—she had scratched her attacker. Although the scratches would have shown on the murderer for days after the murder, Beattie had no scratches. And they could not match the blood under the victim's nails to Beattie.
A greater problem was the blood on the stones under the victim's head. It was clearly hers, but the sub-grouping in the blood did not match the blood found on Beattie's tissue handkerchief. How can Chief Superintendent Muncie have felt when that news came through? His "ace" was gone. There was only one solution. It would have to be claimed that that blood had no relevance to the guilt of the accused. The snag with that argument was that it was a lie—because the blood actually proved that Beattie's guilt did not exist.
So what could be done to lessen the damage that that evidence did to the police case? Quite simply, the evidence was suppressed. We can only guess who suppressed it—but the fact is that it never appeared in the documents presented either to the defence or to the court.
I can tell the House about that evidence now only because the information was let slip after the trial in a letter to Beattie's lawyer from the deputy Crown agent in the Crown Office: Mr. Eynon did not examine stones found under the body of the deceased. Another forensic scientist did". I understand that Mr. Eynon was the forensic scientist during the case. We now know, after the trial, that a separate secret forensic test was taken on the blood.
He goes on: They were stained with human blood of group O MN. He also analysed a sample of the deceased's blood which was of group O MN. There was no O MN in the sample on the tissue, and that proved conclusively that Beattie was innocent.
The report was withheld from the court and from the defence, and it must be asked why. It is new evidence; it was not given to the court, so it should be examined closely now. The letter also said: I am not prepared to make a copy of his report available to you. 431 As George Beattie's Member of Parliament, I am asking for a copy of the report, because I want to see what is in it.
As for the problem of the wrong knife that Beattie had chosen as the murder weapon, Muncie glossed it over in court with an adroit answer. He said that the most important thing was blood. Let me refresh the Minister's memory; it was the same knife that Muncie had eliminated because there was no blood on it.
What was the chief superintendent thinking? Of course he knew that defence lawyers tend to stick by their written questions. Beattie's lawyer had no questions about the blood on the knife as none had been found. The court did not take Muncie up on the matter. It let it lie, so that the jury was left with the impression that there had been blood on the knife and that it was the murder weapon.
The kindest thing we can say about Chief Superintendent Muncie and this incident is that he must have momentarily forgotten that the knife he was describing to the jury was the very weapon that he had eliminated at the start of the case because it had no blood on it at all. It would not be nice to say that an officer with such a high reputation deliberately lied to make sure that his last case ended in a conviction, ensuring him a 100 per cent. success record before he left for one of the highest ranking police jobs in Scotland. However, we might excuse George Beattie in his cell in Saughton prison tonight for thinking that.
Those are not matters that Scottish Office Ministers would take seriously when reviewing Beattie's case, but they might well say that it was a matter for an internal inquiry into the police force concerned.
At the bottom of the case is the motive. The police totally failed to come up with any motive for George Beattie to commit the crime, but there is motive for the police to pursue Beattie. The whole case went wrong because of their botched investigation.
Beattie is not in Saughton prison because he committed a murder in Carluke in 1973. He is in gaol because, if the truth comes out, too many reputations will suffer in high places. That is the sad truth; it is something that the Scottish Office and its Ministers must stand up to and answer. They have hidden behind the many complications, twists and turns in the story of George Beattie. They must now realise that the guilty verdict was a miscarriage of justice.
As we sit in this place, proud of its history and its democratic processes, the conviction of George Beattie is a blight on us all. George Beattie is innocent, and the Minister must realise that everyone knows it. He seeks justice from Parliament and the Secretary of State for Scotland. In the name of justice and decency, I ask that George Beattie be given that justice.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Lord James Douglas-Hamilton)
In the eight minutes which remain available to me I cannot cover all the points I should like to have raised if I had the full 15 minutes. However, I can tell the hon. Member for Clydesdale (Mr. Hood) that his remarks tonight will be closely examined and carefully studied. I appreciate that he has deeply held views about the conviction of George Beattie, and in responding I shall deal first with the conviction and then with the life sentence aspects.
432 George Beattie was convicted of murder on 4 October 1973 in the High Court in Glasgow. The victim was a 23-year-old woman from Carluke. She had been stabbed repeatedly on the body and robbed. Doubts have been raised subsequently about the safety of this conviction. I know that various submissions have been made to previous Secretaries of State about Mr. Beattie's case.
In particular, a former Member of Parliament, the late Dame Judith Hart, who was Mr. Beattie's constituency Member of Parliament at the time, wrote to the then Secretary of State in November 1983. She drew to his attention the findings of the BBC production team who had studied Mr. Beattie's case in preparing a programme in the "Rough Justice" television series, which had been shown earlier that month. Having examined these points carefully, the Secretary of State replied in April 1984 explaining that there were not sufficient grounds for him to intervene in the case.
Dame Judith wrote to the Secretary of State again in May 1984, enclosing a paper written by the BBC producer involved, seeking to challenge the Secretary of State's decision. It dealt with several forensic matters and, again, it was carefully examined. The forensic evidence in the case was re-examined by an independent expert with no previous involvement in the case—the director of the medico-legal department at Liege university, Belgium. His report confirmed the validity of the techniques that were used by the forensic scientists in the case and showed that the BBC material did not materially affect the consideration of the case.
The Secretary of State replied to Dame Judith in June 1985, explaining that there remained a lack of any grounds on which he could properly intervene in the case.
I know that there has been some renewed interest in the conviction recently, on the part of the hon. Gentleman and others. I realise that this may have been intensified by Mr. Beattie's recall to custody. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman met my right hon. and noble Friend the Minister of State, Scottish Office, to discuss the case on 4 November 1992. I can confirm that at present there is no petition before the Secretary of State on Mr. Beattie's behalf. However, if the hon. Gentleman, or anyone else, has new evidence or other considerations of substance in the case which have not previously been examined, he or she should submit a petition to the Secretary of State as soon as possible.
The hon. Gentleman has expressed concern that a forensic report on blood found at the scene of the murder has not been made available. The report was referred to in a letter of 25 June 1974 from the Solicitor-General of the time to the late Dame Judith Hart, who was Mr. Beattie's Member. The report classified the victim's blood and blood found on stones beneath her head as group O,MN, and accordingly did no more than suggest that the blood on the stones was that of the victim. The then Solicitor-General also confirmed to Dame Judith that no blood was found near the scene of the crime belonging to a group other than Beattie's or the victim's.
Indeed, both the blood on the stones and the blood on the tissues was found on testing to be similar to the victim's blood. The confusion arose because of a misconception that the victim's blood could not have been both group O,MN and group 0 rhesus D positive. In fact, it could be both. I stress that both tests were carried out on blood taken from the same sample of the victim's blood.
433 I have noted the hon. Gentleman's criticisms of the police conduct of the inquiry into the murder of Margaret McGlouchlan. As I have said, his words will be carefully considered and examined. If he has evidence in support of his allegations, and sources, he should arrange to submit them to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who will ensure that they are closely examined.
It may be helpful if I explain the review procedures for life sentence prisoners in Scotland. The mandatory life sentence exists to protect the public from those who have committed the extremely serious crime of murder. Our system of law provides safeguards and hurdles so that the very greatest care and consideration precedes the release of any life prisoner. The hon. Gentleman said on 19 October: Prisons are there to contain people who threaten our community, but people should not be imprisoned unless they deserve it."-[Official Report, 19 October 1992; Vol. 212, c. 272.] If, at any time, a life licensee's behaviour gives cause for concern, the Parole Board may recommend his recall to custody, whereupon my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State may revoke a life licence. A person recalled to custody is informed of the reasons for his return to prison and has the right to make written representations.
In Mr. Beattie's case, there were several reviews. He had regular local and home leaves, which with the exception of one, when he returned to the hostel late, passed without incident. He was released on life licence in August 1986. He was supervised in the community first in Scotland and later—

§ Mr. Hood
rose—

§ Lord James Douglas-Hamilton
I have only two more minutes. I shall write to the hon. Gentleman. I have had only a brief—

§ Mr. Hood
I wish to be helpful to the Minister.

§ Lord James Douglas-Hamilton
I have only two more minutes.

§ Mr. Hood
Will the Minister make available to me the report to which he has referred that deals with the blood that was found under the victim's head, which was found to be O,MN? Will he provide that report, provision of which has so far been refused?

§ Lord James Douglas-Hamilton
I shall certainly make inquiries on that point in co-operation with the Lord Advocate, after which I shall write.
The key point about the blood is that the forensic report of 20 July 1973, which was a production at the trial, indicated that the blood stains on the paper tissues and the blood sample from the victim were group 0 rhesus D positive and that the blood sample from Mr. Beattie was group A rhesus D positive.
As I said, he was released on licence. He returned to Scotland in August 1990, when he took up residence with his mother and began working as a bus driver. The first incident related to his conviction for breach of the peace which gave rise to concern. He was alleged to have confronted and verbally abused the female driver of a car which was obstructing the bus he was driving. Following that, there was a breakdown in relations with his female supervising officer.
The final incident took place on 23 April 1992, when Mr. Beattie visited the office of his new male supervising officer. He was alleged to have kicked the officer on that occasion. He was subsequently convicted of breach of the peace and admonished. That incident was the culmination of what was considered to be a worrying pattern—