In 1980, a man who should have been under supervision walked out of a Scottish psychiatric hospital. Hours later, an alarm sounded inside another hospital building in Glasgow. What followed raised questions that went far beyond one crime scene…
Read moreYou Have The Right To Remain Silent / Tracy Main
In February 1980, 13-year-old Tracy Main was found dead in her family's flat in Norfolk Court, a tower block in the Gorbals area of Glasgow. She had been home alone. The door had been locked from the inside. And yet someone had got in…
Read moreUnexplained Death In Glasgow: The Suspicious Case of Mikhail Ackrim
In August 2024, Mikhail Ackrim was found dead and undressed in a Glasgow flat. Street valium and alcohol were in his system, along with suspicious bruising and four stab wounds to his body, inflicted after he died. Police Scotland concluded no criminality. His mother disagrees…
Read moreHe Called Home From a Phone Box, Then Vanished / Michael Bell
In 1983, Michael Bell left a Scottish camping trip to head home to Birmingham. He called his parents twice. Then nothing. Over four decades later, he's still missing…
Read moreBurke and Hare (Part 2)
After Burke's arrest, confessions revealed 16 murders. Yet only Burke faced execution. The trial captivated Britain with systematic murders by suffocation. Hanged before 25,000, his body was dissected. But the anatomist who orchestrated the sales escaped justice. This historic true crime case led directly to the Anatomy Act of 1832… (Part 2 of 2).
Read moreBurke and Hare (Part 1)
In 1828, the poorest residents of Edinburgh vanished. Their bodies were sold to anatomists. When Margaret Docherty's body was found hidden in straw, it revealed that Burke and Hare, two Irish immigrants, had become serial killers. This historic true crime case exposed how Edinburgh's medical school created a market for fresh corpses… (Part 1 of 2).
Read moreThe Casanova Conman / The Murders of Margaret McOnie & Jack Shuttleworth
Robert Morphet hadn’t seen his elderly neighbour in several days. He was concerned that 88-year-old Jack could have fallen or hurt himself, so Robert decided to call in to make sure Jack was okay. When a knock at the door went unanswered, Robert walked around to his neighbour's garden and checked the shed. It was locked, but something in the back of Robert’s mind told him to look inside…
Read moreThe World's End Part 3 / Angus Sinclair & The Murders of Christine Eadie and Helen Scott
Investigators wanted to get justice for the World’s End victims, but they would need the law to be changed in order for that to happen (Part 3 of 3)…
Read moreThe World's End Part 2 / Angus Sinclair & The Murder of Mary Gallacher
The murders of several women in Scotland in the 1970s went unsolved. During a case review into the 1978 murder of 17-year-old Mary Gallacher in 2000, a suspect was identified through DNA comparison. He was arrested and brought to trial (Part 2 of 3)…
Read moreThe World's End Part 1 / Unsolved Glasgow Murders
Over the course of two years, several young women in Glasgow disappeared after nights out, echoing a terrifying period for women in the city a decade earlier when Bible John roamed the streets. After some of the missing women were found brutally murdered, investigators noticed glaring similarities, which led many to suspect that another serial killer was operating in Glasgow (Part 1 of 3)…
Read moreA Tragic Pact / The Unbelievable Crimes Of Linsey Cotton
Passing through the hotel's hallway, one guest noticed something strange — a figure slumped against the wall outside room 25. As they got closer, the guest saw, to their horror, that the young woman was covered in blood, and a trail led back to her room. Staff members were quickly alerted and ran down the corridor. When they entered room 25, they found another woman badly injured. She was alive but barely breathing…
Read moreWrongly Accused / The Murders of Pamela Hastie & Tracey Waters
Police Sergeant John Ross then saw something at the side of the beaten path — a single black shoe. His pace quickened in the seconds it took to reach it. He also noticed something else: a school bag discarded close by, and educational books scattered beside the bag. Sergeant Ross followed the trail of misplaced items. He found what they had been looking for, but the outcome was not what anyone wanted. He saw the body of a teenage girl…
Read moreOccult Murder At Scotland's Balloch Castle
People slowly became suspicious when they hadn’t seen Sheena’s baby for almost two years. Despite the mother’s insistence that the little girl was being well looked after by someone else, there was something troubling about the child’s disappearance. Sheena had been rambling about a Tibetan spirit guide in the sky that commanded her to do things. Her parents worried that Sheena’s interest in the occult had gone too far…
Read moreMissing and Murdered / Where Are Renee & Andrew MacRae?
Emergency responders were relieved to find there were no casualties. The car had been abandoned. Puzzlingly, the vehicle was traced back to a mother who had left Inverness with her three-year-old son hours earlier. What initially seemed to be a burnt-out vehicle left after a joyride turned out to be so much more. It remained a mystery for over four decades…
Read moreLimbs In The Loch / Barry Wallace / William Beggs
It was cold and damp on the banks of Loch Lomond on the morning of December 6th 1999. Specialist officers from an underwater search unit of Central Scotland Police were preparing to take part in a training exercise in the highland lake northwest of Glasgow. Loch Lomond is the largest lake by surface area in Great Britain, spanning 22 miles between Central Scotland and the Highlands. The deep water at Rowardennan Pier reflected the sloping green hills surrounding the lake, but as divers went beneath the surface, they made a horrifying discovery…
Read moreNeighbour From Hell
A man in his mid-sixties wearing a light-coloured casual jacket and dark trousers caught the couple’s attention. Concerningly, he was clenching a piece of wood in his hand. Stephen slammed the brakes and got out of the vehicle. He realised another man was lying horizontally on the pavement, being struck about the head repeatedly with the length of wood. Blood was pooling on the path surrounding the injured man. Stephen instinctively yelled out, telling the assailant to stop. The attacker wrapped the wood in a plastic bag and turned to walk away. As he left the scene, he hollered back to the man he had just attacked: “You’ll not fucking do that again”...
Read moreSerial Killer? / Bible John - Part 2
After being linked to the murders of three women in Glasgow, the perpetrator seemed to be able to evade capture despite having one of the most well-known faces circulating in the press. Tens of thousands of statements were collected, and nearly one thousand suspects were interviewed. Due to the religious texts he quoted to a victim's sister, the nickname given to the prime suspect was Bible John. He was undetectable, but far from forgotten (Part 2 of 2)…
Read moreSerial Killer? / Bible John - Part 1
It was around 8 am on February 23rd, 1968, when a man walked down a service lane behind Carmichael Place in Glasgow. Every exhale immediately condensed into a cloud of mist that hung in the freezing air. The man’s car was parked in a lock-up on the lane, and he was looking forward to the last day of the working week. Before he could reach the vehicle, the man was stopped in his tracks by a strange sight... (Part 1 of 2)
Read moreA Nun Maimed And Murdered / Sister Josephine Ogilvie
A quiet nun in a central Aberdeen Cathedral was dealing with some paperwork when she had a visitor. She neither knew the person nor did she have any way of knowing she wouldn’t leave her office alive...
Read moreMurder In The Shadow Of Dundee Law / Gordon Dunbar / Alastair Thompson
He had already spent much of his teenage years in and out of facilities for youth offenders. Edinburgh-born Alastair Thompson, at only eighteen years old, was about to commit a heinous crime that would see him put behind bars for over a decade and a half…
Read more