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by saying he thought his son was ‘pretty unhappy with his marriage … Everything went wrong from the start, I think.’
    Journalists covering the hearing they had headlined the ‘Body in the Den’ trial jerked to life when one of the accused man’s friends went into the box to speak of a drink the two had shared after the disappearance of the teenage mother. Robert Milne said that when he had asked about Helen’s whereabouts, Jimmy Wilkie had answered, ‘I don’t think they will find her. She’s well buried.’ The accused had not elaborated, he said, but the following day, he asked Jimmy Wilkie if he could recall the conversation of the night before. He had replied that he had no recollection of what they had spoken about.
    Another witness, Mrs Alice Tindall, who knew the young couple and Helen’s parents, said that some time in 1975 she had gone into a Dundee café and spotted Wilkie sitting by himself. A short time later another man came in and joined him. She eavesdropped on the pair and heard the stranger ask Wilkie if he was away from his wife and what kind of ‘pad’ he had. Wilkie had told him, ‘My wife’s at Ninewells, six feet under.’
    There was another flurry of excitement in the packed courtroom when a young woman who knew Helen Wilkie well and had baby-sat for her, said that some two or three weeks after she had been reported as having disappeared, she believed she saw the missing woman coming out of a restaurant in the centre of town.
    When Jimmy Wilkie moved from the dock to the witness-box to give evidence on his own behalf, he spoke easily and with an apparent good memory for the events of the day of the christening, explaining how he and his wife had gone from the reception to the Golden Fry restaurant for a meal. But they had fallen out after Helen had shouted a drinks order to a waitress and he had then called out to cancel it.
    ‘Helen was annoyed and kept on saying she was wanting a drink. I kept on refusing and she got up and said, “To hell with you.” She got about three-quarters up the stairs and stumbled and fell forward. Helen had blood on her clothes and hands. I cleaned one of her hands while she wiped her face,’ he told the jury.
    Jimmy Wilkie later related how they had returned home for Helen to change her clothes, then went back into town and drove around in the hope he would see his sister. When there was no sign of her, and because it was getting late, he decided they should go out to Longforgan to collect their newly christened son. On the way there, another row flared up.
    ‘Helen kept saying she wanted a drink and I kept saying she’d had enough. We stopped at the toilets at the top of Riverside Drive. When I came back Helen wasn’t in the car.’ Wilkie went on to recount how he had searched the ladies’ lavatory and had then driven around searching for her. After finally going to his mother’s to collect the baby, he drove back to his own home, fully expecting her to be there. When she wasn’t, he fed the baby then went to bed.
    Asked whether there had been any occasion when he thought he had seen Helen since her disappearance, he replied that he believed he had done so once, adding that he had asked around many times if anyone knew her whereabouts. When he was questioned about showing ill will towards her, he replied, ‘I may have slapped her and grabbed her on the arms, but never with a clenched fist or anything like that.’
    He disputed the interpretation that had been put on his comments about his missing wife being ‘well buried’, explaining that what he had probably said was something to the effect that if police had not found her by then they were unlikely to do so after such a passage of time. At the time of the conversation he and Mr Milne, whom he had made the comment to, ‘had a drink on them’ and he was getting fed up with people asking him if he had done anything to Helen.
    When the jury retired after three days of evidence, experienced