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Split Thread David Gilroy: murder conviction goes to Scottish Review Commission

Rolfe said:
Out of curiosity, if you were tasked with finding her body, how would you set about it?
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Cadaver dogs. Maybe also bloodhounds who have been provided with her scent (from clothing).

For visual searching, you would want to avoid areas with dense trees or rocky soil as those would be difficult to dig through.

Trained dogs should be the best strategy. Besides that you would want dozens or hundreds of people doing visual searching for disturbed soil or mounds.
 
anglolawyer said:
Great question. I would drive the route in a car like his and try to put myself in his shoes, interview his parents about childhood holidays, consult local foresters, shepherds, gamekeepers, ramblers etc and analyse the plant material under his car to see if there was anything distinctive about it. I would also try to get to know him and/or his cell mates to see what could be gleaned that way. I would post in a thread at ISF to consult the knowledge pool. Can't think of anything else just now. You?
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I'd do all that, and I'd talk to the people who work on the land about the problem. I'd ask them to keep their eyes peeled. I might even offer a moderate reward for the person who found the body. Enough to motivate people to go an extra mile or so.

Thinking it through, the state of the car suggests she didn't go into Loch Awe - that and the difficulty of organising a boat without risking being seen. So she's on the land somewhere. The forest is more likely than the open hillside. So, up a forestry track and run the car some way off the track. Find a hollow or something, that's doable as far as carrying her is concerned.

I'd assume he's more intent on hiding the body than avoiding being obvious about where he goes. He's going to be thinking about casual discovery, not about police catching on to his detour on the way to Lochgilphead. So I'd put my biggest bet on the forestry area around NN 076 194. I don't know if I'd have the manpower to institute a proper search on such a low-information guess, but I might send a couple of local cops in a Landrover up these tracks and get them to investigate likely-looking spots.

Of course that's assuming he didn't really detour off the most obvious route between Tyndrum and Inveraray. He could have struck off some distance down another route. There's a lot of forest. Needle in haystack is easy in comparison.
 
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I don't know how much searching they actually did, at the time. Maybe old newspaper reports will say something about it. Of course, there will be corpses there anyway. Deer, small animals, the occasional sheep.

As far as I remember from the original news reports, he switched his mobile phone off at Tyndrum and switched it back on again at Inveraray. That was where the time was lost. That was bad planning, he should have kept it switched off for the whole journey. It's still a lot of hillside though.
 
Here's an interesting index page.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/all-about/suzanne-pilley

The Daily Record is a local red-top tabloid and the journalistic standards are questionable, but it should be relatively reliable on this sort of topic. I see from one of these articles that the police were looking round the Rest And Be Thankful, which isn't the road I thought they were talking about. That they searched the area thoroughly, allegedly, and found nothing. Last year there was a Crimewatch special about it and they thought they had some new leads and they searched some more but still didn't find anything.
 
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Ah, here's something. I only remembered about the 400-square-mile thing. I thought that was from the mobile phone. But this article from four weeks after Suzanne's disappearance is talking about narrowing it down to about 5 square miles using mobile phone mast data. There's nothing about the phone being turned off.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/murder-cops-home-in-on-suzanne-pilley-1060699

ETA: And then they analysed the soil from the car and that led them to the Queen Elizabeth Forest, which is in the same general neck of the woods but not the same place.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/soil-clue-widens-hunt-for-body-1060776

There's talk of getting the RAF in to take detailed aerial photos. There are concerns (denied) that they're going to give up unless they get some new leads. They're really keen on this Glencroe area, and get mountain rescue teams in to help in a huge new push three months after her disappearance. They seem to have given it a massive shot, but didn't find anything.
 
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Rolfe said:
Ah, here's something. I only remembered about the 400-square-mile thing. I thought that was from the mobile phone. But this article from four weeks after Suzanne's disappearance is talking about narrowing it down to about 5 square miles using mobile phone mast data. There's nothing about the phone being turned off.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/murder-cops-home-in-on-suzanne-pilley-1060699

ETA: And then they analysed the soil from the car and that led them to the Queen Elizabeth Forest, which is in the same general neck of the woods but not the same place.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/soil-clue-widens-hunt-for-body-1060776

There's talk of getting the RAF in to take detailed aerial photos. There are concerns (denied) that they're going to give up unless they get some new leads. They're really keen on this Glencroe area, and get mountain rescue teams in to help in a huge new push three months after her disappearance. They seem to have given it a massive shot, but didn't find anything.
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From your first link:

It still presents huge challenges because of the mountains, steep terrain and dense forests.

I can't see him getting very far up steep terrain. The killer of Joanne Yeates couldn't even heave her body over a chest-high wall. Desperation would lend him some strength I guess. I wonder how much she weighed. He was a 47 year old so not in his prime.
 
anglolawyer said:
I bet you are a veritable Miss Marple. I would love to tramp the Highlands with you solving this.
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A lot of people have tramped a hell of a lot of miles looking for this woman, and found nothing. They started quite soon after she disappeared and they seem to have pretty much covered Glencroe in August 2010. That glen runs from Ardgarten to the Rest And Be Thankful, carrying a steep-sided road which is absolutely notorious for being blocked by landslides.

The mountain to the east of the road, The Cobbler, is one I climbed as a child on a school outing. We had a geography teacher who liked to drag us up mountains, and when I think about what we did, I'm sure health and safety would never allow it now. But on that occasion I remember a few of us asking if he'd take us down the long way to the Rest And Be Thankful instead of just retracing our steps, and Mr. Intrepid Child-endangerer said no way on earth, forget it kids.

I don't know why they mentioned Tyndrum. If Gilroy went by Tyndrum, he would have taken the A819 through Glen Aray, which is where I was looking. If he took the Rest And Be Thankful, he'd have turned south at Crianlarich towards Ardlui and Loch Lomond, and not gone near Tyndrum. From Crianlarich, it looks to be six and half a dozen on the map, which way you'd choose.

I'd love to know more about the mobile phone mast data, and how sure they are about what road he took. (You know, I think they found a couple of other bodies when they were searching! And I also remember another body that was found in a park in Edinburgh itself, by chance, and they wondered at first if that could be her and the whole Argyll thing was a red herring, but that was somebody else too.)

I wonder if they've been looking in completely the wrong glen?
 
Rolfe said:
A lot of people have tramped a hell of a lot of miles looking for this woman, and found nothing. They started quite soon after she disappeared and they seem to have pretty much covered Glencroe in August 2010. That glen runs from Ardgarten to the Rest And Be Thankful, carrying a steep-sided road which is absolutely notorious for being blocked by landslides.

The mountain to the east of the road, The Cobbler, is one I climbed as a child on a school outing. We had a geography teacher who liked to drag us up mountains, and when I think about what we did, I'm sure health and safety would never allow it now. But on that occasion I remember a few of us asking if he'd take us down the long way to the Rest And Be Thankful instead of just retracing our steps, and Mr. Intrepid Child-endangerer said no way on earth, forget it kids.

I don't know why they mentioned Tyndrum. If Gilroy went by Tyndrum, he would have taken the A819 through Glen Aray, which is where I was looking. If he took the Rest And Be Thankful, he'd have turned south at Crianlarich towards Ardlui and Loch Lomond, and not gone near Tyndrum. From Crianlarich, it looks to be six and half a dozen on the map, which way you'd choose.

I'd love to know more about the mobile phone mast data, and how sure they are about what road he took. (You know, I think they found a couple of other bodies when they were searching! And I also remember another body that was found in a park in Edinburgh itself, by chance, and they wondered at first if that could be her and the whole Argyll thing was a red herring, but that was somebody else too.)

I wonder if they've been looking in completely the wrong glen?
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I need to check the map to get some orientation. I like this idea though.
 
The route thing is funny. If you ask AA Route Finder how to get from Edinburgh to Lochgilphead, it will take you over the Rest And Be Thankful, but only after going right through the middle of Glasgow on the M8, over the Erskine bridge, and up the west side of Loch Lomond. Speaking as a local, you'd be mad to go that way. Also, the talk is all about Callendar and Crianlarich, which to me is a far more sensible route. It's about the same length and it keeps you away from the city centre.

The thing is, if you go by Callendar and Crianlarich, you don't then go over the Rest And Be Thankful. You do what I originally assumed, you go north to Tyndrum, across to Dalmally, then south through Glen Aray to Inveraray. The Glencroe/Rest And Be Thankful road is a definite detour south back to the Loch Lomond road which isn't a very sensible way to get to Inveraray from Crianlarich.

Glencroe and the Glen More/Hell's Glen road which they were also talking about are very bad places indeed for this sort of game. The sides of the glens are way too steep and there aren't that many forestry tracks. They don't call this area the "Arrochar Alps" for nothing. Glen Aray is a far better bet. You could get up pretty far on a forestry track, then drag the body down, which you can't readily do in the more southerly area.

Why the hell didn't he switch his phone off completely? They wouldn't have known which of maybe three possible routes he had taken. Could he have gone through Glen Aray with the phone off, got rid of the body, then detoured back to the Rest And Be Thankful with the phone on to make them think he'd taken that route?

I'd dearly love to know just what data they were working on when they decided which way he went. They also seem unsure of whether he disposed of the body on the way there or the way back. And there's talk of him going back by an unusual route, too.

Maybe I need to look at some records of the actual trial.
 
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anglolawyer said:
I need to check the map to get some orientation. I like this idea though.
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The cops aren't daft, but they can miss things. I still regret not phoning in to Crimewatch when they did the special on the murder of Anne Locke in 1986. I think they would have found her body weeks earlier than they actually did, if I'd told them what I was thinking. I thought at the time she might have got off the train at Potters Bar and started to walk the line path to Brookman's Park, being murdered on the line path. The police assumed she'd got off at Brookman's Park itself. Her body was found on the line path, half way between the two stations. Eventually. She was south of the county boundary, and the cops working south from Brookman's Park stopped at the county boundary. (It never occurred to me they would stop the search at the county boundary, but they did, and that's why it took so long to find her.)

We'll never know. The eventual theory of the crime was that she'd been ambushed after she got off the train at Brookman's Park, by the murderer who had hidden her bicycle. Then somehow she was forced or dragged a mile back down the line path, away from the quieter Hertfordshire part and into the London Metropolitan area before being killed.

I still think she caught a fast train that didn't stop at Brookman's Park, got off at Potter's Bar, maybe looked for a taxi but there weren't any there on a Sunday evening, and set off to walk the two miles to Brookman's Park up the footpath that paralleled the railway line. And was ambushed by the railway killers on the line path, where her body was found. (I worked it all out at the time with a railway timetable. My mother said, why don't you phone them. I said, for goodness sake, the cops have railway timetables too and they must know there are fast trains from King's Cross as well as stopping trains from Moorgate. Silly me.)
 
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I know the burden of proof is on the prosecution and the defendant doesn't have to account for his actions if he doesn't think that burden has been met, but Gilroy would have a much better case if he would just step up and say where he went on his long drive, how his suspension got broken, etc, etc. As far as I can tell (from the brief reading I've done this evening after looking at this thread) he has never done so. Am I wrong?
 
Rolfe

I don't know how to break this to you but I have appointed myself head of this enquiry. Detachment, legal qualification, general English arrogance, call it what you will but decisive leadership and direction are necessary. Console yourself with the fact that the deputy always has all the brains (consider Lewis and Hathaway).

Anglo
 
Matthew Best said:
I know the burden of proof is on the prosecution and the defendant doesn't have to account for his actions if he doesn't think that burden has been met, but Gilroy would have a much better case if he would just step up and say where he went on his long drive, how his suspension got broken, etc, etc. As far as I can tell (from the brief reading I've done this evening after looking at this thread) he has never done so. Am I wrong?
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You're not wrong.

I'm very curious about the route he's supposed to have taken. There seems to be no suggestion that he went through Glasgow to Alexandria and up the west side of Loch Lomond. That route would certainly have taken him across the Rest And Be Thankful. But it involves traversing the city centre, and tackling that Loch Lomond road which I admit is better now than in the days when I used to avoid it like the plague but I still wouldn't go that way if I was coming from the east.

All the talk is of Callander and Crianlarich. This makes perfect sense to me, I'd go that way too. You come to Crianlarich, inevitably. But then most of the articles talk about Tyndrum, which is north of Crianlarich. That still makes sense, I'd go that way. But it doesn't cross the Rest And Be Thankful. To do that you'd have to turn sharp south at Crianlarich, away from Tyndrum, back to the north end of Loch Lomond, and traverse the north part of the Loch Lomond road, coming to the Rest And Be Thankful road from the other side. It's a detour nobody coming from Crianlarich (as opposed to Alexandria) would take. It puts about an extra seven miles on the journey and it's a rotten road.

As soon as you say Tyndrum to Inveraray, which is what they keep saying, you're looking at Glen Aray, not Glen Croe. But they seem so sure they've placed him in Glen Croe by mobile phone masts. And someone saw a silver car, though there are plenty of these around.

The A819 through Glen Aray is a much quieter road. It's also less hemmed in than that bloody gorge they call Glen Croe. And it's got a lot of very promising-looking forest around it, with a network of tracks going high up the sides of the hill, from where you could pull a body down into an inaccessible location.

Why aren't they looking round Dalmally or in Glen Aray? Just the phone signal? But if they know for sure he went by Arrochar, why do they keep talking about Tyndrum?
 
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anglolawyer said:
Rolfe

I don't know how to break this to you but I have appointed myself head of this enquiry. Detachment, legal qualification, general English arrogance, call it what you will but decisive leadership and direction are necessary. Console yourself with the fact that the deputy always has all the brains (consider Lewis and Hathaway).

Anglo
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OK, you explain how you get both Tyndrum and Arrochar into the same route from Edinburgh to Lochgilphead.

Here, somebody gets it. Quite where do police want campers and walkers to look for Suzanne Pilley’s body?

The problem is, though, that despite the weight of attention now being paid to the territory between Tyndrum and Inveraray, Rest and Be Thankful is still being kept on the picture.

This is confusing for those walkers and campers who might, as asked, keep their eyes open.

Rest and Be Thankful, even if one interprets generously the area that it covers, is nowhere near the territory between Tyndrum and Inveraray. It is a minimum of 15 minutes by car away to the east of Inveraray.

Today’s edition of The Herald describes the time lapse and the territory thus:

‘The missing time came between Tyndrum and Inveraray, a stretch of just more than 25 miles, and which is surrounded by vast tracts of woodland, and difficult terrain running alongside the banks of Loch Fyne.’

Anyone who can find exactly where the road from Tyndrum to Inveraray runs ‘alongside the banks of Loch Fyne’ will be in a position to show up the Ordnance Survey mappers as a bunch of numpties.

Clarity please.
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There has also been mention of Glen Orchy, which is near Dalmally which I mentioned earlier and is on the road from Tyndrum to Inveraray. But hey guys, have you looked at Glen Aray? I mean, the only question is, why wouldn't you choose that?
 
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Rolfe said:
OK, you explain how you get both Tyndrum and Arrochar into the same route from Edinburgh to Lochgilphead.

Here, somebody gets it. Quite where do police want campers and walkers to look for Suzanne Pilley’s body?




There has also been mention of Glen Orchy, which is near Dalmally which I mentioned earlier and is on the road from Tyndrum to Inveraray. But hey guys, have you looked at Glen Aral? I mean, the only question is, why wouldn't you choose that?
http://forargyll.com/2012/03/quite-...and-walkers-to-look-for-suzanne-pilleys-body/
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When I can figure out how to work the bleedin' Maps thing on the iPad I will get up to speed. This sounds interesting.
 
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