Following the recent House of Lords judgment in Harriot v. Welsh, it is finally possible to publish, for the first time in the UK, the notorious Lachlan Harriot diaries.
These pages came to be in my possession through a series of happy accidents. In the winter of 1998 I was approached through mutual friends concerning some materials relating to Dr. Susie Harriot. A local doctor, Dr. Morris Welsh, had come to be in possession of a set of diaries written by Lachlan Harriot, the husband of Dr. Susie, and was deeply troubled by their contents. Dr. Welsh, a good man who is much maligned in this text, was keen to do the right thing but unsure how to go about it.
A week earlier, Dr. Welsh had taken Lachlan Harriot’s old computer away as a favor. Knowing that Harriot’s computing skills were minimal, Morris Welsh did a quick search of the recycle bin, checking for important files that might have been accidentally deleted. It was there that he stumbled across the diary files that were to make him famous and add yet another twist to the Dr. Susie murder case. Having alerted the police to the facts outlined in the files, Morris Welsh sold them on to me, as a collector of true crime stories and the highest bidder.
A little over a month before this discovery, Dr. Susie had been convicted, in a worldwide blaze of publicity, of the gruesome murder of Andrew Gow. The public was still intrigued by the case: how could a mother and professional woman, previously of good character, suddenly turn into a vicious animal who would cut the tongue from a man lying restrained on a cottage floor and leave him to bleed to death? As his psychiatrist, did Dr. Susie know more about Gow than the rest of the world? Was it an act of revenge by a jilted lover? Had she indeed fallen in love with him? The answers to these and many other questions were afforded by these diaries.
This is the first time that the law has encountered a set of computer diaries being sold by accident on old hardware. Even before the final judgment was delivered, the case of Harriot v. Welsh represented a significant development in the intellectual property and copyright law of this country. It was in response to this that the ExLibris(TM) Author Assignation software was developed, a system now used worldwide and subject to a series of copyright challenges itself.
The right to publish the diaries was challenged but upheld on two grounds: Had Harriot reserved copyright he would have been able to claim authorship and stop publication. However, because the files were written on his wife’s computer, Susie Harriot was deemed the user and by default the author, and the copyright defense was not available to him. Susie Harriot herself neglected to bring a copyright action. The second course of action was Lachlan Harriot’s privacy case, brought under the Human Rights Act, but the House of Lords found that Dr. Harriot had vitiated his right to privacy, having courted publicity and given a series of interviews to the Mirror newspaper. He had, therefore, left himself with no defenses.
What follows is the transcript of those diaries, complete and unabridged. The sole alterations to the text are the additions of a start date to orient the reader and then numbered headings at the beginning of new entries, put there for the sake of clarity.
Denise Mina
Glasgow, 2002