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court journalists and even some of the police involved in the murder inquiry agreed that the case against the accused man was slender. There was plenty of room for suspicion and sufficient evidence that the teenage couple had had a fiery relationship, which more than once had provoked violence, but there was no overwhelming proof linking Wilkie to the actual act of murder. Without the existence of the tie used to strangle the unfortunate young mother and, more importantly, its admitted ownership by her husband, it is even possible that the case might never have arrived in court.
    No one was more surprised than the speculators gathered in the corridors of the court-house when the jury of nine men and six women returned after an absence of only seventy minutes.
    Jimmy Wilkie was brought back and sat in the dock, pale-faced and impassive between his police escorts, as he waited for the verdict. Without looking at him, the jury foreman rose to say they had found him guilty of the murder – by a majority.
    Lord Robertson told the accused man, ‘You have been found guilty by a jury of what can only be described as a horrible crime and there is only one sentence I can impose.’ When the life term was ordered, Wilkie slowly bowed his head and he was then led back down the cells. In the public gallery, his girlfriend Donna was visibly upset. His mother wept.
    In the following months, life once more returned to as near normal as possible for the principal players in the murder melodrama – apart from the convicted man himself, who was struggling to come to terms with the bleak regime of prison life and facing a sentence of indeterminate length. And that is how it all might have continued … except that a short time later Chief Inspector Fotheringham, whose skilful investigation had secured the slim conviction, received an extraordinary phone call from the Procurator Fiscal in Dundee. He heard in disbelief that a new witness had suddenly come forward to say she had been visited at her home by Helen Wilkie on 18 May 1974 – more than three months after she had disappeared after supposedly being murdered by her husband.
    The woman, Mrs Valerie McCabe, who had lived at the time in the same tenement block as the Wilkies at 43 Hill Street, had related how she had been at home that evening when the doorbell rang and Mrs Wilkie was on the doorstep to say Mrs McCabe’s husband Norman had just phoned the Wilkies’ flat. The McCabes had no telephone themselves and the call had been to inform Valerie, a woman in her early 20s, that her husband’s bus had broken down on the way home from the Scotland–England football match at Hampden that afternoon and that he would be late in returning home.
    The stunned chief inspector went at once to see the belated new witness, whose first-floor home was above the ground floor flat of the Wilkies. During a lengthy interview, Mrs McCabe disclosed that she had read reports of the trial in the newspapers and had become very anxious about the verdict because she ‘knew for certain’ that Helen Wilkie had been in her house on the day of the football international in May. They had spent a long time chatting, she said.
    The chief inspector questioned and probed, suggesting that a few years had passed and that people’s memories could play tricks. But Mrs McCabe was emphatic about her identification and stressed that because of the football match she had absolutely no doubt of the date of the visit. She became indignant that her word was being doubted and asked angrily if the policeman was calling her a liar or thought she was stupid. Chief Inspector Fotheringham responded that neither was the case, but he believed it might have been a case of mistaken identity: maybe the visitor was not Mrs Wilkie, but someone else who might have been co-habiting with Jimmy Wilkie.
    Later, back at headquarters, the detective learned that by coincidence a young police constable and his wife, who bore an uncanny