VIDEO: Murder Casebook – Peter Manuel

The remains of the Hogmanay meal are cold on the table. The bodies of the three members of the Smart family, lying in their beds, are just as cold.

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Parents Peter and Doris and 11-year-old Michael had been shot in the head from close range by a Beretta pistol.

Holding the gun was Peter Manuel, Scotland’s worst serial killer – the murderer of at least nine people in a blood-spattered two-year spree, although this is almost certainly an underestimate as there may well have been several others.

According to Wikipedia, on 2 January 1956, Kneilands was stalked at the now demolished East Kilbride golf course in the Calderwood area, where she was raped and bludgeoned to death with a length of iron.

Although the police questioned him about the murder and he would confess to it two years later, Manuel escaped arrest when his father gave him an alibi. He was charged with this murder in 1958, but the case was dropped because of insufficient evidence.

Manuel is believed to have shot and killed a Newcastle taxi driver named Sydney Dunn, on 8 December 1957 while looking for work in Newcastle upon Tyne. Dunn’s body was found on moorlands in Northumberland soon after, by which time Manuel had already returned to Lanarkshire.

Manuel was never tried for this murder, as it took place in a different legal jurisdiction, but 17 days after he was hanged a coroner’s jury found that he murdered Dunn, after a button found in Dunn’s taxi was matched to one of his jackets. This verdict has been accepted in many accounts of the case, but some doubts have been expressed.

There are a few indications that the murderer might have been a local person, or he might have come off an Irish boat train which had recently arrived at Newcastle station. Two witnesses who spoke to the killer picked out Manuel at an identity parade, but these identifications are not always decisive (see the Watt case above).

One of these witnesses initially said that the apparent killer had a local accent, but when it was suggested to him that the killer might have come off the Irish boat train he said that he had an Irish accent, and Manuel had a Scottish accent.

Cooke disappeared after leaving her Mount Vernon home to go to a dance at Uddingston Grammar School on 28 December 1957. Manuel stalked, raped and strangled her, and then buried her in a nearby field. He would later lead officers to the spot where he had disposed of her body.

The Smarts were shot dead in their Uddingston home in the early hours of 1 January 1958. After the murders, Manuel stayed in their household for nearly a week; eating leftovers from their Hogmanay meal and even feeding the family cat, before stealing some brand new banknotes that Peter Smart had kept for a holiday, and taking the family car and dumping it nearby.

Manuel gave a lift in this car to a police officer investigating Isabelle Cooke’s disappearance, even telling him that he felt that the police were not looking in the right places.