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junkcatcher wrote:Is the urban ledgend that his grave was simply tarmaced over when the Barlinnie car park was enlarged true ?
Evening Times wrote:Notorious among the murderers was Peter Manuel, the mass killer who was hung at Barlinnie at one minute past eight on the morning of Friday, July 11, 1958.
‘Manuel Dies in Silence’, read the front page headline in that day’s Evening Times: Manuel hadn’t uttered one word to officials for three weeks, since his unsuccessful appeal against his convictions for murder.
The 32-year-old labourer had
been found guilty after an
astonishing trial of the murders of Mrs Marion Watt, 45, her sister Mrs Margaret Brown, 42, and her daughter Vivienne Watt, 16, after a break-in in High Burnside.
Isabelle Cooke, 17, was killed on a footpath in Mount Vernon; and Peter Smart, 45, Doris Smart, 42, and their son Michael, 10, after a break-in in Uddingston.
The victims had all been shot, apart from Isabelle, who had been strangled.
Manuel falsely alleged that the first three murders had been the work of bakery owner William Watt, Marion’s husband. During the trial, Manuel sacked his counsel and conducted his own defence with, as one paper noted, ‘fluency, forensic skill and sharp intelligence’.
But his skills could not prevent the jury from returning unanimous guilty verdicts. The judge, Lord Cameron, had, however, told the jury to return a not guilty verdict on a charge of killing 17-year-old Anne Kneilands. Nevertheless, in Lord Cameron’s words, the charges facing Manuel were a “catalogue of crime which in gravity is certainly without precedent for many years”.
The judge passed the death sentence, then reached for his black tricorn hat and added solemnly, “This is pronounced for doom”.
Josef wrote:He also killed three people in a house in Uddingston - I used to live a few doors down from it.
viceroy wrote:But was Manuel insane and therefore a suitable candidate for Carstairs Hospital? I think not. Undoubtedly he was psychopathic, i.e. unable to empathise with other human beings. But, unlike most serial killers, he was a highly intelligent and articulate individual who must have been aware that his acts were morally reprehensible in the extreme, even though this awareness may not have been internalised. In other words he would have been perfectly capable of distinguishing right from wrong, a basic criterion for determining criminal responsibility.
Dexter St. Clair wrote:I think Bishopbriggs was originally called Spam Valley and they're reviving that name for the new prison to save any further embarrassment. The Evening Times is running some kind of competition to come with an acceptable name for the replacement to Low Moss. I've suggested HMP Furcoatnaeknickers.
Riotgrrl wrote:BTW, did you know that the people who run Carstairs are trying to 'rebrand it' to some extent? They want us to talk about 'The State Hospital' rather than Carstairs.
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