Peter Manuel was an angry young man who remorselessly murdered anyone who got in his way – terrorizing the streets of Glasgow throughout the 1950s. He claimed insanity as a defence for the crimes he’d committed, but the judge did not accept Manuel’s plea and he paid with his neck.
Glasgow was a rough town in the 1950s, but the spate of brutal killings committed by Peter Manuel between his first known murder in 1956 and his arrest in January 1958 shocked the city and the rest of the country. People who came into contact with him after his arrest all commented on his callous attitude and the complete indifference he showed to the charges brought against him. Unlike the majority of cases of serial killing, there was no discernible pattern to the murders Manuel committed. He didn’t target a particular group of vulnerable people or use the same method for each murder. He killed people whenever they got in his way and used whatever means were at hand.
Manuel was born in New York into a family of Scottish expatriates. The family returned to the UK when he was five, settling in Coventry. He was a difficult child, who didn’t make friends with other children easily, and he spent most of his time on his own. During his teenage years he developed into what was then called a juvenile delinquent. He was constantly in trouble for a string of minor offences, particularly theft and burglary, and was sent to young offenders’ institutes and borstal a number of times. As he got older, the offences began to get more serious. Before he went to live with his parents in 1953, who had moved to Birkenshaw in the east end of Glasgow, he had served time in prison for sexual assault and rape.
The first murder which can definitely be attributed to Manuel came in 1956. He attacked a seventeen-year-old girl called Anna Knielands with an iron bar, bludgeoning her to death and leaving her body on one of the fairways of East Kilbride Golf Course. Manuel was well known to the police in Glasgow by this time and was brought in for questioning about the murder. Always a convincing liar, he talked his way out of any suspicion he may have been under and was released without charge. A few months later he was arrested for the burglary of a colliery near Glasgow and, while he was out on bail awaiting trial, he broke into a house in High Burnside and killed the three people he found inside. A postman found the bodies of two sisters, Marion Watt and Margaret Brown, and Watt’s sixteen-year-old daughter Vivienne, on his rounds the following day. All three had been shot in the head at close range. Manuel was questioned again and released without charge. Suspicion then fell on Marion Watt’s husband William, who was held in custody for two months before police established his innocence and released him.
At his trial for the colliery burglary Manuel was found guilty and received an 18-month prison sentence. It interrupted his killing spree, but it certainly didn’t stop it. He was released in November 1957 and, on 29 December, he killed seventeen-year-old Isabella Cooke. She had left her flat that evening to go to meet her boyfriend and didn’t arrive. The next day she was reported missing. On New Year’s Day 1958, Manuel shot Peter and Doris Smart and their ten-year-old son Michael in their home in Uddingston, a village a few miles outside Glasgow.
Manuel was caught 12 days later when a barman in a local pub grew suspicious of him and called the police. He had been buying drinks using money from a bundle of brand new notes. The police traced the serial numbers of the notes back to a payment that had been made to Peter Smart. After his arrest he took the police to the field where he had buried Isabella Cooke. As they were standing in the field, he was asked where exactly the body was buried. ‘I’m standing on her now’, he said. Although thought to have committed other murders, Manuel was charged with eight. At his trial in Glasgow High Court in May 1958, he conducted his own defence. He entered a plea of insanity, but, although he is said to have been surprisingly articulate, he failed to convince the judge and the plea was dismissed. He was found guilty on seven of the eight charges, the judge instructing the jury to acquit him of the murder of Anna Knielands even though he had confessed to the killing. The judge, Lord Cameron, would later write that he could detect no illness or abnormality in Manuel ‘beyond callousness, selfishness and treachery in high degree’. He went on to say he thought Manuel’s defence had been based on a calculating attempt to show he was not a criminal, but a man in need of medical care.
Lord Cameron passed sentence on Manuel, to be hanged by the neck until dead. Before going to the gallows, he confessed to the murders and to several others he had not been charged with, although this may have been an attempt to delay the execution. He was hanged in Barlinnie Prison on 11 July 1958, the penultimate execution in Scotland before the death penalty was abolished. He appeared as unconcerned for his own life as he had for the lives of his victims, asking the hangman to turn the radio up just before he was hanged. The Scotsman newspaper reported that ‘a black cloud of terror has been lifted from the west of Scotland’.
The police and other people connected with the case believed Manuel had committed at least another eight murders besides those he was convicted for. It is impossible to know how many people he actually killed, but he remains one of the most cold-blooded killers in British history, killing for no other reason than he thought he could get away with it and, after he was caught, showing no signs of remorse for his crimes and the devastation he left behind.