FIVE families of murder victims have already contacted Scots criminologist David Wilson since the first episode of his new true crime series which featured the Templeton murders in Dundee.
Now showing on Channel 4, In The Footsteps Of Killers began with the brutal murders of 18-year-old Carol Lannen and 20-year-old nursery worker Elizabeth McCabe, whose naked bodies were found within a year of each other in Templeton Woods on the outskirts of the city.
No one was ever convicted of the 1979 and 1980 murders but the new show names the man Professor Wilson believes killed Carol and suggests the second murder was committed by someone else entirely.
Not only does the cold case investigation unearth the probable murderer of Carol but it also changes the perception of her as a sex worker who was killed by a kerb crawler - an image her family always protested against.
“You can clearly see one woman was regarded as a sex worker and killed by a punter, the other was a ‘good girl’ who was murdered,” Professor Wilson told the Sunday National.
“What we discover changes the narrative about Carol Lannen because we found she was picked up by somebody she knew, a social worker who had known her when she was in care.
“It wasn’t a stranger who was kerb-crawling but a man who abused his position as a social worker.”
Six cases are featured in the series and misogyny was one of the aspects the team encountered.
“I could not get over how much popular attitudes towards certain victims created a narrative about them which did lead to differences in policing investigations at the time,” said Professor Wilson.
“There were adjectives used to describe some victims that would never be used today and I think that kind of misogyny did have an impact on whether the case was pursued with vigour to get a result.”
It was after the Carol Lannen programme aired that families began to get in touch with Professor Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, whose academic work centres on murderers and serial killers.
“This is almost like the last roll of the dice for some of these families and I use that phrase very consciously because even since we investigated Carol Lannen’s story two of the people we interviewed have died,” he said.
“If we are really going to make a cold case hot again, we need access to witnesses and people who can talk about the investigation. You do need those direct voices to allow you to really look at what happened at the time.”
Another case in the series involves Scot Robert Duff, whose family moved to London from Lanarkshire and who went missing on the day of his daughter’s 18th birthday party.
Professor Wilson said he was moved to re-examine the case after seeing Robert’s daughter make a TV appeal for help.
“As a father of a daughter of a similar age, I decided that if I ever got the opportunity, I would try to help,” he said.
A key feature of all the cases is that they rarely made more than a few column inches in the local newspaper.
“What really strikes me is how local the majority of murder stories are,” said Professor Wilson.
“I thought it was interesting that the Templeton woods murders were big news in Scotland but few had ever heard of them in England and by highlighting these cases we are giving them more public attention.”
However, although all the relevant police forces were approached in advance of the series being made, he said he was surprised that only one took the opportunity to work with them.
“The goal of the series is not to denigrate the police but to say to them that we’d love to work with them as we want to get justice for the victims,” Professor Wilson said.
“We want to bring forward witnesses that might not have been spoken to before, raise lines of inquiry that perhaps had not been considered and bring a fresh pair of eyes, using new criminology techniques and understanding to see if that might allow these cold cases to become hot again and I think we have done so in the majority of them.”
The team’s findings are being passed onto police forces.
“We hope they will follow up what we found as we have given them a way of rethinking what they might do,” Professor Wilson said.
“I think if it comes back for another series the police might next time embrace what we are doing.”
Professor Wilson was joined by senior investigating police officer Graham Hill who has worked on over 100 murder investigations and also trains FBI profilers. Actor Emilia Fox, star of Silent Witness, co-presents.
Asked if his work makes him despair at how low human nature can sink, Professor Wilson said the opposite was the case.
“I get cheered by how high humans can go in terms of doing good,” he said. “The kind of people I work with are a small fraction of the vast majority of people who want to do good and I concentrate on that.”
