The approach of Christmas 1970 seemed to signal a change in fortunes in the troubled life of Leah Bramley. Twice married and with three young children, she had moved away from Yorkshire five weeks earlier to seek a new start in Dundee, leaving her miner husband Bernard back in Castleford.
The move hadn’t begun well. After spending a few days residing with her sister, the 33-year-old took up the tenancy of a small flat in Springhill. But it was too cramped to accommodate the whole family and the three children – the products of her first marriage – had to be split up. The oldest girl, aged fourteen, remained with her, but her 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son were sent to live temporarily in a Salvation Army hostel in Lochee. Then things suddenly took a turn for the better. Out of the blue and to Leah’s surprised delight, she was given the keys to a brand new council flat in Dundee’s developing Whitfield housing estate. She moved at once into the first-floor maisonette at 389 Ormiston Crescent and wrote excitedly to her husband with the news, telling him how he could help her get established when he came north for a Christmas visit. ‘Dundee has been lucky to me at last,’ she enthused.
A few days later, as the fairy lights twinkled in the recently occupied houses in the new estate, the small, attractive blonde was found dead in the flat she had been so proud to occupy.
She was slumped in a rocking chair, an imitation fur coat over the shoulders of her green jumper, and her lower body was naked with a broom-handle protruding from her intimate parts. Although there were signs of manual strangulation and three superficial cut injuries to her neck, these did not appear to be the main cause of her death. That had come after a series of severe sexual assaults by the broom-handle and a drinking glass, which were both found nearby, heavily bloodstained. Among other items scattered near the body, and the large pool of blood which had formed under the chair, was an empty McEwen’s Export can and a tin-opener. A number of pieces of burnt paper were also on the floor beside the corpse.
Detective Superintendent William Melville, the head of Dundee CID, whose distinguished career was to see him successfully solve more than forty homicides in the city, described the killing as ‘one of the worst sadistic murders I have ever seen’.
Murder squad detectives made two significant discoveries. There was not a fingerprint to be found in the room, not even of the victim, with every surface seemingly having been wiped by a damp cloth; and there was no evidence of a break-in, suggesting that Leah had known her killer.
Although the body of the petite blonde had been found at 5.30 p.m., the city’s senior police surgeon said he believed she had died many hours before – probably in the early hours of that day. His post-mortem indicated that the light cuts on her neck could have been made by a tin-opener and that the violent injuries to her private parts had been carried out while she was still alive, but that she had probably been rendered unconscious a short time before the intimate assault by blows to the chin, combined with a form of strangulation. If she had not been insensible, she would have screamed out because of the intolerable pain caused by the massive internal injuries.
Enquiries quickly established that at about 7 p.m. on the previous night Leah had gone with a woman friend to the Heather Bell bar in William Street, where she consumed more than half a dozen lagers. As the mood became merrier, she had asked the guitarist who entertained in the pub to play a particular song. He obliged, then she asked him to join her for a drink.
Witnesses told police that Leah had become ‘very friendly’ with the singer and had proceeded to invite him to a party, requesting that he bring some drink along in the form of a carry-out. Others described how a little later that night, just after closing time, Leah had knocked on the door of the pub to ask for the musician, who had stayed behind for an after-hours drink. After apparently expressing some annoyance at being disturbed, the musician, who used the stage name Ron Gibson, bought a dozen cans of export and twenty cigarettes and left. He was last seen driving off with Leah in his two-tone red and grey Ford Zodiac.
Eighteen hours after the presumed time of the murder, the guitar player – who in reality was Alexander Stuart, a 25-year-old married man who also lived in the Whitfield estate – was invited to police headquarters to make a statement. He was a character with a complex life. As well as using assumed names to dodge the taxman when he sang round the city’s pubs, he worked as a hairdresser and also as a part-time taxi driver with Handy Taxis (one of the leading companies in town). Stuart related how the woman who had earlier asked him to sing had requested that he drive her to her sister’s home in Mid Craigie, which he did. When they arrived, the sister was walking in the street and Leah had left the car to briefly speak to her, before returning to ask him to drive her home to Ormiston Crescent. Halfway there, however, in Pitkerro Road, she wanted him to stop the car. He did so and she got out. He had not seen her since.
Stuart went on to explain to detectives how he had subsequently gone taxi-ing and had driven round various estates on the northern edge of the city but hadn’t landed a single fare. He had even tried several times to phone the taxi company headquarters seeking work, but the phone had been constantly engaged. Eventually, he had gone home to Whitfield and called at a neighbour’s house, where he knew his wife had been spending part of the evening with a couple who were friends. He had taken his carry-out of twelve cans of McEwan’s Export with him, he said.
The neighbours corroborated the latter part of his story, telling how he had arrived at the door shortly before 1 a.m. and had then spent some time with them, drinking and singing and playing his guitar. There had been nothing unusual about his behaviour or anything in his demeanour to suggest he had undergone some kind of terrible experience, they said. He had spoken about sex, which was a usual part of his conversation when in their company, and had, equally typically, taunted his wife about his supposed sexual conquests.
At 3.30 on the morning of 14 December, less than twelve hours after the body of Leah Bramley was so dramatically found sprawled and bloodstained in the flat she had been so thrilled to move into, Alexander Stuart, the singing hairdresser was charged with her murder. He replied simply, ‘I dropped her off in Mid Craigie.’
Several weeks later, while the accused man was held in Perth Prison awaiting trial, his solicitor, John Clarke, received a remarkable handwritten letter at his office in Victoria Chambers in Dundee. It read:
I gather you are Stuart’s lawyer. I want to confess the Whitfield murder to clear my mind and free an innocent man. On Saturday, 12/12/70, I picked up a woman at the bottom of Pitkerro Road at about 11.35–11.40 p.m. She asked me to take her to Ormiston Crescent.
In the car she was at my privates. We went to her house and we had intercourse. After it she laughed at me and said she was on her ‘periods’. I went berserk and I choked her. I then took her tights and strangled her. I cut her on the neck with a can-opener and a knife.
The confessor then described how he had further sexually assaulted his female companion with a broom-handle, beer can and a tumbler.
The letter went on:
I robbed her of £1 18 shillings and 3 pence. I am guilty of this murder and getting away with it. No fingerprints. I know Stuart was in her house because he dropped something with his name on it. I tried to start a fire but her blood put it out. The CID will confirm everything I have told you.
I don’t think I will have any bother sleeping now I have got this off my conscience. I am going to write to the papers and let them know.
Signed, Taxi Man.
The letter, apparently written on the torn-out fly-page of a book, was a bombshell. Police and the Crown prosecutors knew that if the jury in the forthcoming trial took it at face value Stuart would be exonerated and would walk free. The letter contained information which at that stage had never been made public and the writer had either killed her himself, or was closely connected to the person who had.
Detectives went at once to Perth Prison and launched rigorous investigations, interviewing prison officers and inmates in an effort to trace the source of the letter. They made a series of startling discoveries. A mutilated copy of The Sunday Post had been found in Stuart’s cell and a series of words had been cut from it. Checks revealed that many of the missing words were identical to some of those contained in the letter of confession and it seemed that whoever had so painstakingly extracted them from the paper may have initially intended to use them to form a letter. They thought this plan might have been abandoned because some of the words in the confession were not the sort usually to be found in a newspaper like The Sunday Post.
The police team examined every one of the four hundred or so books in the library of ‘C’ Hall in the prison, the wing where Stuart was held. They found one, The Kingdom of Melchior, with a ripped-out fly-page which apparently corresponded to the tears on the letter of confession.
Most crucially of all, however, was a third discovery. When forensic experts subjected an untried prisoner’s letter form pad, which had been issued to Stuart, to special lighting, a series of indentations were found, apparently pressed there by someone who had used the pad as a rest to write on. The indentations formed the words ‘Taxi Man’, ‘12 Victoria’ and ‘Dundee’. A more detailed examination revealed phrases and sentences which matched exactly most of those in the letter of confession.
When he stood trial at the High Court in Dundee the following February, Stuart gave the jury a different story to the one he had told police. Instead of continuing to deny that he had gone to Leah Bramley’s home in Ormiston Crescent, he admitted he had accompanied her to the flat but had become disgusted when she exposed herself.
‘I would not wear it,’ he told the jurors. ‘I lifted my beer and walked out of the house. When I got to the door she shouted she was sorry and said, ‘Will you take me back to my sister’s?’ ‘He went on to recount that he had driven her around for some time while she kept changing her desired destination and that he had finally become frustrated by her and had dropped her off in the Mid Craigie area.
Questioned closely about the supposed letter of confession, Stuart declared that he had been angry when it had turned up because it had a detrimental effect. ‘I had a good case until this letter came,’ he protested. ‘It was done to do me down and is making my case worse.’ He said he believed that someone ‘had it in’ for him.
He then proceeded to give a detailed account of how the cut-up Sunday Post finished up in his cell and how he believed the indentations had come to appear on his writing pad. The newspaper had been his, he admitted, but he had passed it on to other prisoners after he had finished reading it. Later, when he was throwing out old newspapers, he saw two papers in a dustbin in ‘C’ Hall and had removed them to read, unaware that one of them was actually the Sunday Post which he had disposed of.
He had a similar tale to tell about the writing pad. Because he had been bored sitting in his cell for practically twenty-four hours a day, he had asked for the pad so that he could make up crosswords. After drawing about half a dozen lines on the back of the pad, it had ripped and the next morning he threw it out with a pile of other rubbish when cleaning out the cell. The next time he saw it, it came through the observation hatch in his door, folded up and accompanied by a note repeating much of what was in the letter of confession that had been sent to his solicitor.
Stuart went on to relate how he had also received two other notes through the door of his cell. He read one of them out to the jury. It stated:
Don’t think I’m a nut. I know you are innocent. It’s me who done that bitch in. I thought you would get lifted for it. I’ll explain how later. But I’ll do what I can to clear you. But if you tell the screws I’ll clam up.
Pressed by the prosecution, he denied writing the notes himself.
The jury could hardly be blamed for being sceptical about the ‘evidence’ which had been intended to absolve the accused, but any lingering doubts they might have entertained about his innocence completely evaporated in the face of scientific revelations which the Crown admitted formed the linchpin of their case
Police had recovered each of the twelve cans of McEwen’s Export that Stuart had taken away with him when he and Leah Bramley had gone off together from the Heather Bell. One can, bloodstained, had been removed from her home and the eleven others, empty and bearing the identical batch number to the one taken from the murder scene, had been gathered from the refuse bin of Stuart’s neighbour where he had gone for a drink and sing-song later the same night.
On one of these tins was a minute trace of blood. Tests revealed that the blood grouping was OMN – the same as Leah’s, but also the same as the accused and all of those who had been in the neighbour’s house that evening.
The bloodstain initially appeared, therefore, to prove nothing. However, realising the vital significance of the trace of blood, Dr Donald Rushton – the senior Dundee police surgeon, who had been the principal forensic witness for the prosecution – was determined to establish if the OMN grouping could be further refined, perhaps eliminating some of those in that broad category of people whose blood was of that type. He knew of a sophisticated test, developed in England and never previously used in a Scottish criminal case, and instructed that the sample from the beer can, and others from all the people involved in the case, be sent to London for detailed examination at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory. He went south himself and stood by as the meticulous analysis was carried out.
The results were better than anyone could have hoped for. The blood on the Export can was found to be of the rare OMN AK2/1 group, found in less than 2 per cent of the population. Vitally, it was identical to Mrs Bramley’s grouping and was the only sample from those of the others tested which matched.
It meant with near certainty that the brutally murdered Leah Bramley had come by her terrible injuries before Stuart had left the house taking his unopened eleven cans of export with him.
The 25-year-old father of two sat nervously in the dock biting his lip after the jury retired. But it did not take long for him to learn his fate. Half an hour later, the jurors returned with a unanimous verdict of guilty.
The man of many parts, who thought he could outwit the police by wiping every fingerprint from the murder scene and then penning a letter of confession from a bogus killer, had been too clever by half. Instead of deflecting his guilt, the letter merely served to implicate him and he had not been as thorough with the cleaning cloth as he had believed. In his bid to remove clues, he had taken away the carry-out cans of beer but had failed to wipe them first. It was just his bad luck that the woman who had admired his singing had also belonged to a rare blood group.
Lord Emslie told Stuart:
You have been found by the jury to be guilty of the crime of murder. I shall waste no time attempting to explain to you the horror of the crime of which you have been convicted. I content myself in passing sentence against you as prescribed by law. You will go to prison for life.