I’ve started reading that “Lovers in Prison” book that I found up here. It’s a collection of case histories of women who fell in love with murderers in America. Initially I thought I was reading about Donna, but after meeting Harvey Tucker, the book takes on a whole new complexion. It’s interesting in a human-interest-story kind of way, but there aren’t a lot of surprises in it. Apparently, if you want to fall in love with a convicted murderer, it helps if you’re a fool and find it easy to lie to yourself.
The chapter I finished last night, before I fell asleep on the couch (at four-ten a.m.), said that generally the women are dissatisfied and disillusioned with their lives and see it as their last chance to attach themselves to “someone powerful.” Which means that Susie didn’t see herself as being attached to someone powerful and was trying to bridge the gap. Can every fucking thing in this unholy mess be down to my failings? I was interested to note that being Catholic, whether practicing or not, is also a predictive factor. I wonder why? Could it be the emphasis on redemption or just the ability to believe a lot of improbable shite? It’s interesting, because Donna was Catholic but Susie isn’t.
Box 2 Document 3 “Serial Beast Kills Prostitute,” 10/3/93
This is the newspaper article Gow’s tongue was found sitting on in the corner of the bothy. Susie downloaded a copy of it from Stevie Ray’s “Gow- Hard As Nails” website. The download is dated months before he was released, which just goes to prove that she didn’t have a copy to start with and so can’t possibly be the killer.
I’ve heard the website mentioned on TV, when Stevie Ray was doing his tour of the chat shows. Susie’s printed a lot of articles from it, but they’re all poor-quality. In some of them the printed text is illegibly tiny. Some have titles or paragraphs chopped in half. Nearly all of them favor the photographs over the text, even though they all use the same famous picture. Gow is standing with his shoulders hunched, fists together, elbows out to the side, pumping himself up like an end-of-pier muscle man. He has shaved the word “Growl” into his chest, although it seems to read “Groul” because his body hair is quite straight. He’s wearing a pair of children’s white plastic sunglasses. It disturbs me that they’re children’s glasses; the shaded eyepieces are much too small for his big face, and the little white legs splay out at the side of his head. But perhaps it’s only me who thinks that’s creepy: I saw a middle-aged man riding a child’s red bicycle down Dumbarton Road the other day and found it sickening, watching his old knees smash up against his chest as he tried to beat a red light.
The prosecution read this article out in court, so I’ve heard it before. I don’t think there’s anything special in it, but it was an original cutting and was five years old when the police found it, so it must have meant something to whoever left it there with Gow’s tongue on top. They’d hung on to it for long enough.
Two pictures: police tape strung around weak-looking trees on an industrial skyline and a photo of Robbie Coltrane looking moody.
Police are hunting for a serial killer after a fifth body was found yesterday, strangled and dumped on waste ground in Govan. Police say that the murder fits the profile of the Riverside Ripper. The murdered woman is believed to have been a prostitute working in the Anderston area of Glasgow. All the victims have been prostitutes so far; all have been strangled and mutilated with a knife.
Actually, they weren’t strangled. Everyone now knows that they were stabbed and had their tongues cut out, so that they bled to death. This strangling stuff must have been fed to the papers at the time to put off crank confessors.
A police spokesman called for calm and asked the public to come forward with any information they might have about a man behaving suspiciously in the Broomielaw area between the hours of twelve midnight and four on Friday morning. Women are being cautioned not to walk home after dark.
Top Criminal Psychologist Dr. Joe Fennie, who was the basis for TV’s Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane, talked exclusively to our reporter. “This man will kill and kill until he is caught,” stated Fennie. “He will give in to his sick compulsion until we stop him.”
Previous victims include Alice Thomson, 33, Martine Pashtan, 24, Karen Dempsey, 21, and teenager Lizzie MacCorronah, 19. Lizzie, whose body was the first to be found, left behind three children now being raised by her mother.
Women’s groups are calling for greater action, claiming that police protection is inadequate.
Joe Fennie was in the news a lot at the time. He was being quoted by every paper on every case that came up in Scotland. He’d been at Sunnyfields for a few years in the eighties, so he knew all that crowd. I heard he went to work in a special facility for sex offenders down in Surrey before coming home in disgrace for some minor infraction. Susie doesn’t know him, but his appearance in the press always elicited a big eye-roll and muttering. We met him at a wedding in Carlisle four years ago. He has very bad skin and a squint. Susie says that’s why they always use a picture of Robbie Coltrane.
I can’t see what is special about this article or why the person who murdered Gow would choose it above all the rest of the coverage. It might not be special, it could just be a random article about his case, or it might be that the woman whose body was found in the article was important.
I’m sure the police have already done all this stuff and done it better than I can. I should concentrate on the stuff only I know. I keep going back to the morning of the phone call from Cape Wrath, pulling it apart, pressing my eye so close to the details that they distort and I can’t remember if I’m remembering them or filling spaces between the events. I’ve worked out the following so far.
It was a Friday morning in September. Susie was in the house and not having a lie-in. I was busy feeding Margie in the kitchen. The phone rang twice, she picked up, listened. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She turned away from me, facing down the hall so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. When she picked up she must have heard someone speak, and they must have said “Hello” or “Listen” or “Help,” because if they had introduced themselves (said “Hi, it’s Donna McGovern” or “Hi, it’s Andrew Gow”), she wouldn’t then have said “Oh, it’s you.” It makes no sense to say “Oh, it’s you” to an introduction. So, given that there was no introduction, she must have recognized the voice. She’d have to know it quite well to recognize a voice from such a short greeting.
After the call she came into the kitchen and beamed at me. It was, I realized later, the first time I had seen her smile in months.
“Can I take the car, Lachie? I just want to nip out to the shops.”
I said, yeah, sure, honey, I don’t need it. She kissed my forehead and called me her darling. Good-bye, my darling. Something like that. See you soon. She knew that she was going all the way to Durness. She was setting off for an eight-hour drive, yet she took just her purse, threw her green leather coat casually across her arm, and told me she was nipping out to the shops.