Police Scotland is examining several unsolved murders of women in Glasgow after the trial of the serial rapist and killer Iain Packer highlighted the horrific levels of violence facing sex workers in the city.
Packer was sentenced to at least 36 years in prison last Wednesday for the murder of Emma Caldwell in 2005 and a catalogue of other sexual and violent offences, including 11 rapes.
Six women were murdered in Glasgow between 1991 and 1998, fuelling fears that a serial killer was targeting sex workers in the city, and four remain unresolved three decades later.
DCS Paul Livingstone, Police Scotland’s head of major crime, said the force was “aware of all of those cases”.
With the Packer case bringing public attention to the violence faced by sex workers, he added that even before the Packer verdict the team with responsibility for cold cases was considering options.
“For us they’re still live inquiries, they’re not closed until we get that conviction,” he said. “Like any inquiry, I’m not going to get into the specifics. I can tell you that recently, even before the verdict of the Emma Caldwell trial, we were in discussions with some of those cases to see what we could do.”
Of those six women who died, the killer of only one – Margo Lafferty, who was murdered in 1998 – was successfully prosecuted at the time.
In 2019, 22 years after Tracey Wylde’s body was found, Zhi Min Chen pleaded guilty to her murder after he was held for an alleged assault and his DNA matched samples found at the murder scene.
Two people were arrested in relation to the murder of Diane McInally, in 1991, but nobody was ever charged. In the murder of Karen McGregor, in 1993, a man, who has since died, stood trial, but the charges were found not proven at court.
A 51-year-old man who stood trial for the murder of Leona McGovern was found not guilty. In the case of Jacqueline Gallagher, killed in 1996, a 55-year-old man stood trial, but the murder charge was found not proven.
While Livingstone insisted that the cases of McGregor, McGovern and Gallagher remained open, they now fell “within the realms of double jeopardy”. In Scotland, since 2011, there have been narrow exceptions to the rule that it is not possible to try an individual twice for the same crime.
“We still review them but in the absence of new information or evidence coming in to say it’s someone completely different, then the threshold that we need to meet those [double jeopardy] standards is quite high,” he said.
During Packer’s six-week trial, details of sustained police failings emerged, including a dismissive attitude to reports of violence against sex workers and a refusal to follow up on warnings about his behaviour.
Police Scotland has apologised for how the original inquiry was handled by Strathclyde police, which was amalgamated into the national force in 2013, and said Caldwell, her family and “many other victims” were “let down by policing in 2005”.
Acknowledging these failings, Livingstone said: “The way that we investigate not just homicides but other crimes is totally different from back then. If in an investigation of a homicide now we come across other offences, we don’t ignore it, we deal with it.”
He added that the successful DNA match with Wylde’s killer 22 years later was testament to the team who review unresolved cases and ensure that all the relevant detail is in place, so that if a significant link is made it is “not going to slip through the cracks”.
Livingstone also praised the “phenomenal” amount of police work done by the team who brought Packer to trial.
Acknowledging that there have been questions about the time it took to bring Packer to trial, he went on: “To get convictions for all of those charges is I think unprecedented. Rightly so we apologised for the failings of the 2005 investigations but we were adamant we weren’t going to make any more mistakes and the workload that went into that case was phenomenal.”
Caldwell’s mother, Margaret, will meet Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, tomorrow to discuss her call for a public inquiry into why it took nearly 20 years to bring Packer to justice.
