Read The Law Killers for Free Online Page B

resemblance to the missing Helen, had separated and that she had taken up with Wilkie. The chief inspector collected a colour photograph of the young woman from her estranged husband and it was subsequently shown to Mrs McCabe, who agreed it looked like Mrs Wilkie – but it had not been her who had visited that evening in May.
    In January 1979, seven months after the original trial, Scottish criminal history was made when the appeal court in Edinburgh allowed new evidence to be heard in a concluded case – the first time there had been such an occurrence since the controversial case in 1927 of Oscar Slater, who was ultimately freed after being cleared of a murder for which he had served eighteen years.
    Jimmy Wilkie was less fortunate. Lord Emslie, the Lord Justice General, one of three judges to consider the appeal, dismissed the plea that there had been a miscarriage of justice, saying that they were far from convinced that if Mrs McCabe’s evidence had been heard at the original trial there would have been a different verdict. His Lordship said there was no reason to doubt that a woman had called at Mrs McCabe’s home on the day of the football match, but the critical question was what weight and reliability should be attached to that evidence.
    ‘In my opinion, indeed, it is the highest degree likely that an intelligent jury would have reached the conclusion without much difficulty that Mrs McCabe, although an honest witness, was quite mistaken in saying that she saw Helen Wilkie alive on the evening of 18 May 1974,’ said Lord Emslie.
    Then, in a devastating dismissal of the defence case, and with surgical precision, the country’s leading judge demolished the supposed new evidence point by point. He said her supposed visit simply could not fit with the statements of the accused man himself two days after she vanished – and in further interviews with police, and in his own evidence – that she had never been seen again and had never returned to the flat. Nor was it consistent with the evidence of Mrs Wilkie’s friends that they had not seen or heard from her, or that she failed to contact her parents or go to visit her son to whom she was devoted, after 3 February. All this evidence and the inability of the police to trace Mrs Wilkie presented a clear picture of a young woman who, if she had been alive after 3 February, had deliberately and successfully abandoned her husband, child, family and friends and had dropped completely from sight – someone who was quite determined she should not be traced.
    ‘In such circumstances it is almost impossible to believe that this young woman could have taken the risk of making a single visit to the flat on 18 May,’ said His Lordship. He suggested that if she had made this single visit it was ‘astonishing’ that she took nothing with her before completely disappearing again, since her clothes were still in the flat. Nor had she left any trace whatever of her visit, for which there appeared to be no rational explanation.
    He pointed out that if it had been Mrs Wilkie at the flat, that meant she had been murdered after 18 May, and there were ‘grave difficulties’ in the way of accepting this hypothesis.
    ‘The most important is that she was strangled by her husband’s tie,’ he pointed out. In the face of that, it was difficult – if not impossible – to believe that Helen Wilkie, having deliberately abandoned and cut herself off from her husband, would have continued to carry the tie in her handbag for months. If she had disposed of the tie, how had it come to be used by her murderer?
    In addition to all this, the jury would have been required to accept two remarkable coincidences. The first was that if Mrs Wilkie had been murdered after 18 May, her body was buried just off the route she and her husband had taken on 3 February. The other coincidence being that when she was murdered she was, in all probability, wearing the wine-coloured dress she had changed