Peter Manuel 4: The Murder of Sydney John Dunn

Often described as ‘the forgotten victim of Peter Manuel’, the 1957 murder of Newcastle taxi driver Sydney John Dunn is a crime that sits uneasily in the series of Manuel’s crimes - it was the only crime to take place outside of Scotland, the victim male rather than female or a family, with no apparent sexual motive or element of stealth burglary – and even though he was convicted for the crime in 1958, for nearly 60 years there have been rumbling doubts as to whether Manuel actually innocent.

Newcastle Central Station 1950s

In the early hours of Sunday the 8th of December 1957 two taxi drivers were waiting under the portico of Newcastle Central Station. The two taxi drivers were Thomas Green and Sydney John Dunn (36), the pair were friends and neighbours – both living on St Thomas Crescent, Newcastle. Thomas Green noticed two men emerge from the station at the same time, one of the men asked to be taken to the Newburn area, six miles away, and the other to a village called Edmondbyers in the moors of County Durham, 22 miles away. Green chose the shorter fare and directed the second man to Dunn’s cab. Green would later describe Dunn’s passenger as approximately 24 years of age, 5 ft 8 inches tall, swarthy, with greased black hair parted to the left, medium build, wearing a single breasted dark suit, no hat, a light shirt, dark tie, and dark grey loose overcoat. Green would later tell police that he had followed Dunn’s cab until they parted company at Scotswood Bridge, what happened after that is still as much a mystery as it was in 1957.

A Pre War Austin 18, the same model driven by Dunn

Dunn’s cab would be found some hours later and several miles away, abandoned in a gulley off the main road to Stanhope. A police cyclist came across the abandoned vehicle which was left at a right angle to the road, both the interior and exterior lights were smashed, and both the front and rear driver’s side doors were lying open. There was blood on the steering wheel and a scarf and a peaked cap lay on the grass besides the car. The policeman initially believed that the scene was nothing more ominous than a traffic accident – and cycled the two miles to Edmondbyers to check whether there were any reports of an accident or anyone admitted to hospital with head injuries – but drew a blank on both.

The desolate Edmondbyers moorland

A search team was quickly assembled and soon a tracker dog found the body of Sydney John Dunn lying in the heather about 150 yards north of the car. He had clearly been dragged to the spot by the tails of his coat, which had been pulled up and left over his head. His wallet lay nearby, but there were no signs of robbery. A pencil, a lighter, and some coins were also found near the body. A post-mortem would later reveal that the cause of death was a bullet wound to the head. The bullet was thought to be either a .32 or .38, of British make, which had likely been fired at a distance of at least 12 inches from a ‘very worn’ revolver. The blood splatters in the car suggested that the shot had been fired from the front passenger seat. After inflicting the fatal shot to the head, the killer had also exacted a 5 inch gash into Dunn’s throat.

Door-to-door enquiries in Edmondbyers and Stanhope lead nowhere, nor did a search of the surrounding moorland. In particular no one came forward to tell of either seeing, or giving a lift to, an inappropriately dressed man walking along the side of the moors in the midst of a gale - for there was a very real risk of exposure for anyone attempting to walk from where the car was found to a place of shelter. Police were at a loss to explain how the killer had left the scene and even suggested he may have fallen into a peat bog and died. They were equally puzzled as to why the killer had not driven away in the car after dumping the body – could it be that the killer was unable to drive, or somehow unable to restart the car after the murder?

So how was it that the murder of a taxi driver in Newcastle came to be attributed to Peter Manuel, a killer who usually limited his crimes to Glasgow and its outskirts?

Peter Manuel, 1958

Well, Manuel had been in the area at the time of the murder, attending a job interview in Newcastle for British Electrical Repairs Limited on the morning of Friday the 6th of December, the day before the murder. And when a serial killer with a preference for using guns happens to be in the same vicinity as a seemingly motiveless shooting, it takes no great leap to draw a connection between the two. Furthermore, the scattering of Dunn’s belongings recalls similar ‘scatterings’ in Manuel’s earlier crimes.

There were several other important pieces of evidence that were used to convict Manuel of the murder. Grass found in the turn-ups of a pair of Manuel’s trousers was found to be ‘similar to’ that found on the Edmondbyer moors. A button with thread attached recovered from the floor of the cab was ‘similar to’ those of a coat belonging to Manuel. Two red fibres and a yellow thread entwined in that button were thought to have possibly came from clothing belonging to Manuel. And we do know that Manuel committed the Watt murders with a .38 revolver, but it could not have been the same weapon as Manuel disposed of that particular gun immediately after the crime. But most convincingly, the taxi driver Green, who had spoken to Dunn’s passenger, was able to identify Manuel as that man.


Case closed? Well, not quite. If Manuel was indeed the killer, the crime stands out so singularly as being the only one of his murders committed out of his ‘comfort zone’ of Glasgow and its outskirts. Unlike his other crimes, there was no apparent sexual motive, or burglary element. Dunn’s passenger was described by Green as 24 years old, 5 ft 8, with greased black hair, and while Manuel certainly had greased black hair he was also 31 at the time, and 5 ft 4. While the identification by Green seems convincing, police did admit to showing Manuel’s photographs to witnesses in Newcastle, and this may have, perhaps unconsciously, influenced Green’s identification.

For what it’s worth, Manuel himself was adamant that he had been misidentified, after he was questioned about the murder at Barlinnie prison, he reportedly turned to a fellow prisoner and asked ‘What the f*ck was that all about?’ Manuel’s mother, while accepting his guilt on the other murder charges, would later single out the Dunn murder as the one in which she was convinced he was innocent. Manuel himself would never confess to the crime during his life, while confessing to all of the others he was convicted of. While awaiting execution in June 1958, Manuel would write to his friend complaining that he was in the frame ‘for every unsolved murder since Cain killed Abel’ and of the Dunn murder specifically he ambiguously remarked: ‘I wonder where I was that night?’

And so lingering doubts as to Manuel’s guilt in the death of Sydney John Dunn remained for nearly 50 years, until Manuel himself appeared to silence them from beyond the grave. In 2009 a poem composed by Manuel while awaiting his execution was unearthed in the personal papers of Duncan MacKenzie, the former Governor of Barlinnie Prison. In it Manuel described himself as ‘the foulest beast on earth’ and ‘Scotland’s Frankenstein’ – but he also confesses, for the first and only time, to the murder of Sydney John Dunn, writing: ‘I murdered Isabella Cook/And young Anne Knielands too/ Shot the Watts and shot the Smarts/ And Sidney Dunn I slew.’

Peter Manuel Part 3: The Watt Family Murders

The Watt family had moved into No. 5 Fennsbank Avenue, Burnside on Glasgow’s south side on the 13^th of July 1956, and had looked forward to moving to an area which they considered a step up the social ladder. A mere two months later, on the 17^th of September 1956, 3 members of the Watt family would be murdered in their beds as they slept, in a horrific and apparently motiveless crime. In the house that night was Marion Watts (45), her daughter Vivienne (17), her sister Margaret (41) and Vivienne’s friend Deanna Valente (19). Deanna had spent the evening with Vivienne listening to the ‘Hit Parade’ on Radio Luxembourg, but left the house at about 11.40pm. Luckily or unluckily, Marion’s husband William Watts, the owner of Denholm Bakeries in London Road Glasgow, was absent on the night of the murders as he was enjoying a fishing holiday at the Cairnbaan Hotel, near Lochgilphead.

Two days before the murder of the Watt family, Peter Manuel had broken into a neighbouring house, No.18 Fennsbank Avenue, owned by retired sisters Margaret and Mary Martin. While stealing very little, he enjoyed turning the house upside down, dirtying their beds with his boots, burning the carpets with a cigarette and poured a can of soup over the floor, before stealing a pair of nylon stockings which he would later use to cover his hands in his next endeavour.

Marion Watts and her daughter Vivienne standing by William Watts maroon Vauxhall with labrador Queenie

Margaret Brown

Vivienne Watt

Using the Martins house as a base, Manuel crept over to the Watts home in the early hours of the 17^th of September. After smashing the front door glass panel he proceeded to Marion Watt’s bedroom and shot her in the head with a .38 revolver. He then fired two shots into the body and head of her sister Margaret Brown who was sleeping next to her, the second shot suggesting that she had stirred after she heard the gunshot that killed her sister. Mrs Watt’s nightdress had been pulled up and her sister’s pyjamas trousers had been torn. Manuel then moved on to Vivienne’s room, where there were signs of a struggle, it is probable that she had awoken at the gunshots the killed her mother and aunt. Vivienne had been battered around the head before being shot, her hands had been tied behind her back and her pyjamas bottoms had been ripped. Before leaving the home Manuel covered each of the bodies with bed sheets and calmly smoked a cigarette before trampling it into the carpet.

Police guard the Watt house

The bodies lay undiscovered until Mrs Helen Collison, 47, the Watt’s domestic help arrived at 8.45am and could not get in – she told the press: “I usually just walked in because he door was not kept locked. But to-day the back door would not open. I went to Vivian’s window and knocked on it. There was no answer.’ It was then that Mrs Collison discovered that the glass of the front door was broken, she then alerted the next door neighbour, Mrs Valente, Deanna’s mother. The two women ran back to the Watts house where they encountered the postman, who put his arm through the broken panel and unlocked the door from the inside. It was then that the terrible crime was discovered, one officer described the scene as ‘absolute butchery.’

After the police were called, it was discovered that there had been a break-in at No.18 as well. Police made the reasonable assumption that whoever had broken into the Watts house had most likely broken into the Martins also, and the Martins crime scene had all of Manuel’s hallmarks. Police went straight to Manuel’s home with a search warrant for the .38 revolver. As usual both Peter and Samuel complained about police harassment and denied any knowledge of the crime, and the police turned up nothing in their search. Meanwhile the newspapers reported every gory detail of the crimes breathlessly, and several neighbours of the Watts fitted extra bolts to their doors, terrified that the unknown killer might strike again.

When news of the murders began to break, before police could officially notify the family of the victims, a journalist managed to get hold of the home number of the husband of murdered Margaret Brown, who was at work and did not yet know of the tragedy. Perhaps it was the same tactless journalist that called the Cairnbaan hotel claiming to be a business associate of Mr Watt. Luckily, Watt’s brother John was able to get hold of William and break the terrible news to him before the journalists could. He reportedly broke down before being driven back to Glasgow by police. It was during this drive that police began to become suspicious of William’s demeanour in the face of such a devastating tragedy. One detective reported that instead of the broken man he expected to see he found instead ‘a man with a smirk on his face and no tears.’ 

This was to compound police suspicions that Watt was somehow complicit in the murder of his family. On September 24^th the Evening Times reported the police’s belief that the victims had somehow recognised their killer, laying the seeds for a monumental decision they would make in 4 days’ time. On the 28^th of September 1956, only 3 days after he had attended the funeral of his family, William Watt was charged with the murders of his wife, daughter and sister-in-law. During his brief appearance at Glasgow Sherriff court, Watt did not speak. When he emerged to be taken to Barlinnie prison he was greeted by a 200 strong crowd booing loudly, many of whom had waited seven hours to catch a glimpse of the man they thought responsible for the horrific triple murder.

Why then did the police belief that it was possible that William Watts, who although he admitted to several instances of infidelity during the course of his marriage was by all accounts a loving father, could have driven 180 miles overnight to coldly murder his family as they slept in their beds, before driving back to the hotel to play the part of the grieving widow and father?

The Cairbaan Hotel

On the night of the murder Watt spent his time fishing, meeting friends and watching television before having a dram or two of whisky with owners of the Cairbaan hotel. The day before the murders Watt had filled his car with seven gallons of petrol, an action that may have seemed suspicious considering he had arrived at his destination and had no plans to return home for several days. However he also informed the mechanic of faults with the engine and lights of his car, conditions which would have been less than ideal for a lengthy clandestine over- night drive. During his holiday he had called home every couple of days, and on the night of the 16^th he did so again and spoke to his wife, Marion, who told him that her sister, Margaret, was staying with them overnight, and they discussed whether William should stay another week at the hotel. He told police that he had sat drinking with the hotel owners until around 12.30am before borrowing and alarm clock from the kitchens and setting it for 6am, with the intention of doing some fishing in the morning. One of the hotel waitresses reported seeing Watt at his window at around 1am. Watt would tell police that he had turned off the alarm clock in the morning, but this was later found to be wrong. Watt had either been innocently mistaken, had slept through the alarm, or, as the police suspected, simply wasn’t in the bedroom when the alarm sounded, as he was miles away murdering his family. After the sighting by the waitress at 1am, Watt was next seen at 8.10am by a waitress at the hotel clearing frost from his windscreen, something that might have been unlikely had the car been running all night.

1956 model Vauxhall Zephyr

In an effort to prove Watt’s guilt, a police driver was later able to demonstrate that it was possible to cover the route from the hotel to the Watt family home in two hours and four minutes, affording Watt just about enough time to wipe out his family before driving back to the hotel to pretend he had never left. However, the police did not use a Vauxhall Velox for the test drive, but a Ford Zephyr instead.

If the 1am sighting by the waitress is to be believed then police must have supposed that Watt had somehow slipped out of the hotel unseen at some point after 1am, bundled his pet Labrador into the car, had driven 180 miles home, murdered 3 members of his family one by one, before breaking the glass at the front door to stage a break-in and driving all the way back to the hotel, slipping in unnoticed in time to appear again in the morning as if he had never left. It also appeared that if Watt had really driven the 180 miles back to Glasgow, he had done so without lowering the fuel level. All garages in the area were checked to see whether he had filled up but none reported seeing him, and supposing that instead Watt carried a secret supply of fuel cans, none of them were found either. Police frogmen also dredged the Crinan Canal in the hopes of recovering the murder weapon or bloodstained clothing, but neither were found, for the gun used to kill the Watt family was actually lying in a different stretch of water 90 miles to the South. A spot of blood found on Watt’s hotel bed became the focus of intense police suspicion, but Watt explained it away by telling police it came from a corn on his foot.

Renfrew Ferry from Yoker

Convinced of Watt’s guilt, police appealed to the public for anyone who had seen Watt during his 180 mile homicidal journey to come forward – and two duly did. The ferryman on the Renfrew Ferry came forward to report that he remembered taking a lone male driver across the Clyde at around 3am on the 17^th September 1956. If Watt did leave the hotel at 1am then the sighting on the ferry would almost be perfect timing. Furthermore, according to the ferryman there was a black dog in the car, and Watt had his pet Labrador Queenie with him on holiday. Even more convincingly, the ferryman picked out Watt’s Vauxhall Velox out of a line-up of 24 cars before following that feat up by identifying Watt himself out of a line-up of 9 men. Of course, these details, the make of the car, the fact that Watt had a dog, could have been gleaned from the newspapers, something that the ferryman strenuously denied. Despite the extensive press coverage, he claimed to have never seen a photograph of Watt or his car. However, Taylor was later to change his story and claim that it was in fact a Wolseley, and not a Vauxhall, that he had carried across the river that night. When the police drivers conducted the test-drive from Watt’s hotel to the Watt home in Burnside to determine whether it was possible for him to have committed the murder, the route they took did not include the Renfrew Ferry, which, if the ferryman sighting was indeed Mr Watt, would have been the route he took. If they had included the ferry it would have added a considerable portion of time to the journey, and, supposing that Watt was driving into Glasgow with the intention of murdering his family, why would he risk contact with potential witnesses by taking the manned ferry?

With Taylor’s sighting falling apart, police appealed for anyone else to come forward with any sightings of Watt on the night of the murder. They were approached by a man named Roderick Morrison who told them that he had been travelling north to Fort William with his wife and driving along Loch Lomondside at around 2.30am on the morning of the 17^th, when he noticed a car speeding southwards towards him. The speeding car suddenly disappeared, Morrison thought it may have crashed off the road before he saw it parked at the roadside with its lights off. Morrison stopped his car and approached the other vehicle, inside he saw a lone male occupant smoking a cigarette who shielded his face from the glare of Morrison’s headlights. Before he could get close enough to speak to the driver, the car suddenly switched its lights back on and sped off. Morrison thought that the car he saw was either a Standard or a Vauxhall, and police mused that one explanation for the car suddenly pulling over was that the car’s lights had temporarily failed – the same fault that Watt had reported to the mechanic the day before. Morrison identified Watt out of a 30 strong identification parade due to the fact the Watt was the only one to hold his cigarette in the same peculiar manner to the man Morrison had encountered. However, he did later admit that he had never actually had a clear view of the face of the driver.

William Watt

Yet Despite the lack of motive, evidence, reliable witnesses or means, William Watt was arrested and charged with the murder of his entire family and sent to Barlinnie prison to await trail, he would eventually be released without charge when collective sanity was resumed. But at the time Peter Manuel must have thought the stars were aligned in his favour. He had wriggled out of the Mary McLachlan rape trial, police had failed to pin the Anne Kneilands murder on him, and now police seemed to be determined to pin the murder of the Watt family on the innocent William Watt. Manuel must have felt cockier than ever, and so - sure of his ability to outsmart the authorities - he determined to insert himself into the investigation and taunt both the police and William Watt.

Peter Manuel

Manuel wrote to the police claiming he knew who had committed the murder, he also contacted several newspapers claimed to have insider knowledge of the crime. He even arranged to have a meal with Watt and his lawyer at Glasgow’s Whitehall Restaurant to discuss the case. He claimed that a criminal associate, who he was conveniently unable to name, was responsible for the crime, while simultaneously providing an impressively detailed description of the Watt home, a description which he claimed had been passed on to him by the perpetrator.  In one piece of bizarre behaviour, during one of these meetings with Watt, Manuel produced a photograph of his first murder victim Anne Knielands, asking Watt if he knew her, before ripping the photograph to pieces.

While both the police and William Watt were suspicious of Manuel’s intentions, and suspected that he knew more about the crime that he was telling, equally, they supposed that it was possible that the information he was taunting the authorities with was simply gleaned from the newspapers, there was no physical evidence against him after all. And so Manuel was free to go on and murder 5 more people, and to wipe out a family in their beds as they slept one more time.

Peter Manuel Part 2: The Murder of Anne Kneilands

When we left off Peter Manuel had just been acquitted of the rape of Mary McLachlan and despite that acquittal there is little doubt that Manuel resolved never to risk leaving a witness able to identify him in court. 

Anne Kneilands, 17

On Thursday 5^th January 1956, newspapers reported a brutal murder that had taken place on East Kilbride golf course, and as such the crime was quickly nicknamed the ‘5^th Tee Murder.’ The victim was a 17 year old machinist from nearby High Blantyre named Anne Kneilands. Knielands had been missing from the 2^nd of January until her battered body was found on the golf course on the 4^th. She had been brutally raped and murdered. 

Police search the golf course where Anne's body was found for evidence

Anne Kneilands was five feet ten inches tall, fair haired and pretty, and the second eldest of six children. She worked as a machinist at a factory in Howard Street, Glasgow. Her family told detectives that on the night she went missing she was planning to meet a man whom she had met at a dance in East Kilbride Town Hall the previous Friday. Her sister Alice had also been at the dance and was able to provide police with a description of the man. The would-be date was no under immediate suspicion. That night the two sisters had danced with two men in particular, who had seen them home after the dance was over. Alice had been escorted home by a James Harrow and Anne by a Private Andrew Murnin of the Parachute Regiment. Anne had told Alice that she and Andrew had arranged to meet again at Capelrig bus terminus at East Kilbride at 6pm the following Monday, with the intention of catching the 6.15pm bus to Glasgow.

On the evening in question Anne left for her date at around 5.20pm, but when her date failed to show up, she decided to wait and catch the next bus at 6.45pm, hoping perhaps that her date was only running late. With some time to kill before the later bus arrived, she decided to visit family friends The Simpsons at nearby Capelrig Farm. She explained to them that she had missed her bus, but was going to catch the next one. Mrs Jean Simpson recalled Anne leaving at 6.40pm that night. Anne did not tell any of the Simpson family that she had been stood up, so for a while after her body was discovered police were unsure of her movements that night. They initially assumed that she had gone dancing anyway, and the following Friday, dancing at the Cooperative Hall in Blantyre was interrupted by a detective asking for any information as to the movements of Kneilands that night. But no witnesses came forward – for Anne Knielands was never there. They would later discover that Anne could not have even afforded to go dancing that night – she only had four pence in her purse when she left home. 

When traced, Private Andrew Murnin was quickly cleared of any involvement in the murder. Having celebrated Hogmanay in traditional style, he was simply too hungover to keep his date with Anne. His movements were confirmed by friends and family. Anne’s parents had gone to Glasgow on the night she disappeared and were not unduly concerned when she did not return that night, they assumed she was merely spending the night at a friend’s house. When she did not return by the 4^th, however, they did begin to worry and reported her disappearance to the police. Later that day they were told of the terrible news that her body had been found, discarded on a golf course that they must have driven past on their way home from Glasgow.

Anne’s body was discovered at 3pm on the 4^th of January by George Gribbon, who was in the habit of walking his dogs on the golf course while collecting lost golf balls. At first he thought that he had seen someone lying sunbathing on the grass, but the bitterly cold weather made this unlikely. Once he got closer he realised that what he had taken for a sunbather was the corpse of Anne Kneilands. Anne had been attacked so brutally that her skull had been broken into pieces, a further fifteen pieces of it were found at another spot of the golf course. One of Anne’s ballet-style shoes was found embedded in the mud not far from her body, indicating that she had tried to escape from her killer but had been chased down.


The evidence points to a terrifying version of events that night - in an attempt to flee from her pursuer Anne had lost her right shoe in the mud, then in the darkness had ran into a barbed wire fence causing multiple lacerations to her face and arms, she had then lost her other shoe before eventually running in terror across the muddy field in her bare feet, as evidenced by the bare footprints in the mud – before finally being caught and subjected to a sustained and brutal attack. There could be no doubt where the murder took place, the ground was saturated with blood and littered with skull fragments, but the body was not found at this spot, indicating that the killer had either spent some time beside the body before moving it, or that he had returned and moved the body to a more secluded spot in the time between the murder and the time when the body was discovered. The killer had scattered his victims possessions around the area, her blood-stained headscarf, her watch, an earring, some beads and a French five centime piece were found in different places up to 340 yards from her shoes.

Police search the snow covered golf course where the body was found

On January 4^th one of the Simpson daughters found Anne’s purse hidden at the back of the Capelrig Farm. Had the killer stalked Anna from when she left the farm that night and returned after the crime to leave the purse in order to focus police suspicion on someone inside?

Detectives composed a list of potential suspects, and Peter Manuel was on that list. Besides the scratches on his face that week, something else should have focused police attention on him. At the time of the murder he was working on a construction project alongside the golf course on which Anne Knielands was murdered. Manuel was interviewed by detectives but was adamant that he had an alibi for the night of the murder, he had been at home all night, and his ever loyal father told police exactly the same thing. And so he got away with murder, for a while at least, and would go on to kill again.

When Manuel was finally arrested in 1958 he finally gave this confession of the murder:

‘On the first of January 1956 I was in East Kilbride about 7pm in the evening. At about 7.30pm I was walking towards the Cross when I met a girl. She spoke to me and addressed me as Tommy. I told her my name was not Tommy and she said she thought she knew me. We got talking and she told me she had to meet someone, but she did not think they were turning up for the meeting. After a while I asked if she would like some tea or coffee. She assented and we went into the Willow Café. I do not remember how long we were there but it was not long/. When we came out, she said she was going home and I offered to see her home. She said she lived miles away and I would probably get lost if I took her home. I insisted and she said ‘All right.’ We walked along the road up to Maxwellton Road. From there we went along a curving country road that I cannot name. About halfway along this road, I pulled her into field gate. She struggled and ran away and I chased her across a field and over a ditch. When I caught up to her I dragged her into a wood. In the wood she started screaming and I hit her over the head with a piece of iron I picked up. After I had killed her I ran down a country lane that brought me out at the General’s Bridge at the East Kilbride Road. I do not know where I flung the piece of iron. I then ran down to High Blantyre and along a road that brought me to Bardykes Road. I got home about 10.15pm.’

Whether any of this is true is anyone’s guess – Manuel was never one for the truth. And like his version of events in the Mary McLachlan rape case, he minimises his own responsibility for the crime, emphasising instead the recklessness of his victim – after all, hadn’t she approached him first? And when she started to scream he just panicked and picked up a piece of iron that just ‘happened’ to be lying there. The real truth was that this was a brutal and opportunistic attack on a defenceless young girl. The murder of Anne Knielands, with the benefit of hindsight, be seen within a gradual escalation of violent behaviour, starting with petty crimes, graduating to rape and then murder, that would go on to claim the lives of at least 8 other people.

Peter Manuel Part 1: Early Life and First Crimes

Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel was born in Misericordia Hospital in Manhattan, New York, on the 15^th March 1927. His parents had left Lanarkshire for the United States in 1925 leaving Peter’s elder brother, James, then two, with relatives, intending to send for him once they got settled. Peter was born in 1927, and the Manuel’s lasted a few more years in the states before the Great Depression brought them back to Motherwell in 1932. The Manuel’s had one other child, a daughter named Teresa in 1934. In the 1930s Samuel moved his family to Coventry in search of work and it was there that Peter, aged 12, had his first of many run-ins with the law when he was convicted of shop breaking and larceny, between 1939 and 1946 he appeared variously at a succession of youth courts in all over the country, from Coventry, Ely, Cambridge, Darlington, Manchester, Southport, Hull, Beverley, Market Weighton, Chatham to Glasgow, mostly for breaking into shops and houses. Of this spree of petty crimes two in particular stand out as a portent of what was to come.

On June 24^th1942, aged 15, Manuel appeared at Southport Juvenile Court on three charges of housebreaking and one charge of unlawful wounding, he had broken into a house where he made his way to the bedroom of a sleeping girl. He viciously attacked the victim with a hammer which he had wrapped in a handkerchief to prevent leaving fingerprints, before stealing her purse and leaving the home. Not only was this Manuel’s first conviction for violence, it was the first instance of a nocturnal assault on a sleeping victim, something that was to become a signature of his later crimes.

After at least two previous unsuccessful attempts, Manuel committed, and was convicted of his first rape in 1946. At the time, Manuel was only at liberty to commit the series of sex attacks because his indulgent father had stumped up the not inconsiderable sum of £60 for his sons bail on charges of housebreaking. There may have been others, but it’s now considered fact that Manuel carried out three attacks in 1946. The first attack occurred when a women was walking with her three year old child along an unlit path between Mount Vernon Avenue and Carrick Drive at night. Manuel was waiting in the shadows and grabbed the woman as she passed, but the woman fought back, screaming hysterically and Manuel ran off, before suddenly running back to repeatedly kick the woman until she fell to the ground, before running off again. Significantly, Manuel would go on to murder Isabelle Cooke on this very footpath 11 years later in 1957.

Four days later at around 9.30pm, a young nurse finished her shift at a local hospital and was walking along Calder Road, Bellshill, about six miles away from the site of the previous attack. Manuel struck the woman in the face, covering her mouth and warned her not to scream, in the struggle the pair of them ended up on the ground against a hedge at the side of the road, and at this point she managed to scream. At that moment the attack was interrupted by the sound of a passing motorcycle, which caused Manuel to run off into the nearby woods.

Only twenty four hours later, the victim wouldn’t be so lucky. Only two miles away from the attack on the nurse, a 26 year old woman alighted from a bus and started to walk along Fallside Road to her house on Ferry Road, Bothwell. Her husband expected her return at any time. She had seen Manuel waiting at the bus stop but had no cause to suspect him of anything. A few minutes later she realised that someone was walking behind her, glancing back she saw the same young, well-dressed man she had seen at the bus stop. Suddenly, he ran up behind her, punched her and pulled her to the ground, holding his hand over her mouth he growled for her to be quiet. When she bit his hand, he became furious and smashed her head against the ground several times. She pleaded that if it was her money he wanted, he could have it. But it wasn’t her money that he wanted.

He pulled the woman up from the ground and forced her over a fence to a railway embankment. Once there he threw her to the ground, tore off her clothes and raped her. He then tied her scarf around her eyes and ran off. The victim was able to give a description matching that of Manuel, and when police called at his house on March 9^th he was arrested for the crime. The victims of the previous two attacks also identified Manuel at their attacker.

Despite the fact that all three women identified Manuel as their attacker, and despite the fact that all three attacks occurred in the same area, a few days apart, and were of a similar character, the Crown made the strange decision to proceed only with the rape allegation from the 8^th of March 1946. Had the crown proceeded with all three attacks together, and achieved a conviction on all three, it is likely that Manuel would have been imprisoned for a much longer time that he actually served, and at least some of his later crimes might not have occurred. As it was, Manuel appeared at Glasgow High Court, on the 26^th June 1946, and the 19 year old Manuel, full of self-conceit, elected to represent himself in court.

During the course of the investigation, detectives recovered a broken dental plate belonging to the victim from the crime scene, along with two distinct sets of footprints tracing to an area of flattened grass, thereafter the two sets of footprints set off in different directions – all apparently corroborating the victim’s version of events. Furthermore one of the set of footprints matched a pair of shoes belonging to Manuel, and fibres resembling those from the scarf of the victim were found on Manuel’s clothes, and when his shoes were examined, a mixture of dust and dirt consistent with that of the vicinity of the crime were found. All the evidence at least appeared to confirm Manuel’s presence at the crime scene.

The jury agreed – and Manuel was convicted and sentenced to 8 years, set to commence at the end of the 12 month sentence for housebreaking which he was currently serving. But Peter Manuel would be back on the streets in a mere 7 years. Peter Manuel was released from Peterhead Prison in 1953 at the age of 26, and it seemed that perhaps he was really was a reformed man when he met and became engaged to a young woman named Anna O’Hare in 1954. Anna worked as a us conductress at the bus terminus at the Mossend goods yard where Manuel worked, and knew nothing about his criminal past. Manuel was by every account a generous and loving fiancé, well –dressed, well-spoken and well-liked by Anna’s family, they were engaged on the 20^th of May 1955 with a wedding date set for the 30^th July that year. But that wedding wouldn’t happen and that date of the 30^th of July would take on a more ominous meaning.

What split up Anna and Peter was his lack of religion, the O’Hare’s were devout Catholics, and although Manuel’s family were Roman Catholics too, he had long given up the pretence of actually practising any religion. As a consequence, Anna called off the engagement, and from there, Manuel rapidly gave up on any notion of social compliance.

On the date on which Peter was meant to marry Anna O’Hare, July 30^th 1955, Manuel abducted and assaulted a 29 year woman named Mary McLachlan. Mary was travelling home from a failed rendez vous at a local dance in nearby Blantyre, sometime around 11pm that night she made her way into Lucy Brae, only a few minutes’ walk from her home, it was here that Manuel sprang out, covering her mouth and holding a knife to her throat. He made Mary climb over a fence into a field, warning that if she screamed he would cut off her head. Manuel made her lie with him for over an hour with his knife pressed against her throat, while he groped and threatened her. At one point Manuel stopped the attack, apologised, explaining that he was drunk, he had lost control, and overcome with the desire to kill someone. In true Manuel style he defected responsibility for his actions, he explained that he was meant to be married that day but his fiancé had left him the day before, that he thought about drowning himself in the Clyde before he remembered he could swim, that he had seen her and she bore such a strong resemblance to his fiancé with her red hair, if her hair had been any other colour she would have been safe. He offered her a cigarette, mused that they must travel on the same bus, and even offered to see her home.

Mary McLachlan would go to the police about her ordeal, and although she didn’t know her attackers name, she did recognise him as travelling on the same bus as her. Manuel was identified and charged. The case gained strength when his knife, complete with his fingerprints, was found in the field, and even more so when Mary McLachlan’s blood was found on his clothes. Once more, Manuel arrogantly elected to represent himself on court, giving him the opportunity to cross-examine his own victim in court. Manuel claimed that yes – he did know the victim, they had been seeing each other but had had a falling out. Yes – he had met her on the 30^th, and in the course of an argument had hit her, splitting her lip and thus accounting for the blood found on his clothing. In short, he portrayed Mary as a vengeful, scorned ex-girlfriend out for revenge.

And it worked – Manuel received the peculiar Scottish verdict of ‘Not Proven’ and walked free. While Mary McLachlan was shunned by her neighbours, faced gossip and prejudice and was spat on by Samuel Manuel at a bus stop, and Peter Manuel learned not to leave witnesses, and he never would again.