This was cross-posting, I haven't read your previous two posts yet.
The charges are listed on the
Scotsman website but are behind a paywall, however there is a list
here.
I must have read that Scotsman article before, but I'd forgotten a lot of it. The attacks on his wife are a particularly serious issue.
This is elaborated on further down the page. (I think the "n" characters are bullet points.)
So, a violent bugger with anger management issues, which makes his suddenly losing it and going for Suzanne entirely in character. It's surprising his wife stood by him in the end, although maybe she saw him as her meal ticket. He had a well-paid job and someone was going to have to pay the mortgage. I don't know who the "two teenagers" were - if they were his own children, wouldn't the article have said so? Or would there have been a non-identification order for minors? I have a feeling this was his own children. I believe the charges relating to the fracas at Crieff Hydro (which I think was in relation to a work event) and the alleged assault were dropped as being small beer compared to a murder charge. Yes, cops will scratch around for things that might paint the accused as being of bad character, but
something must have happened.
In the list of indictments relating to his manoeuvres to get the body out of Thistle Street, there are again a couple of things I wasn't aware of, or hadn't remembered.
"Last year" would be 2010, in this context.
What was the situation as regards the "authorised access" (shouldn't that be "unauthorised access"?) to a computer? Since that began before Suzanne's death, I'm not at all clear what it was about.
I don't remember ever discussing the fact that it was a
policeman who had asked for these minutes. Is this correct? I know journalists sometimes make mistakes, but this is court reporting and it's an unlikely mistake to make. This request must have been some time in the late morning of 4th May, not long after he'd killed Suzanne, and well before she was discovered to be missing. What's a policeman doing in the story at that stage? Why did he want minutes of a meeting from Gilroy? I'm genuinely wondering if this is an error of some sort.
So he had to ask for a key to the basement area, it wasn't somewhere anyone could just wander into. That makes me wonder how he got Suzanne in there in the first place. I had imagined they'd started to argue in the front lobby, then had moved to the basement by mutual agreement to avoid the row being overheard. But if a key was needed? This would suggest that the killing happened outside the basement and he had to get that key in order to get the body into the basement in the first place. Do you know any more about that? Interesting about making up a story about a delivery to explain his interest in the basement. Also interesting that he did send a work email to Suzanne after he killed her, although he didn't continue the bombardment of texts. I wonder if he not only switched her phone off but appropriated it, and didn't think the police would be able to access her messages at all.
So the pitch inspection had already been done, very recently. Odd that it doesn't make it clear whether this was done by Gilroy himself or by someone else. Presumably by someone else. Maybe he thought the job was still outstanding, but if he'd made an appointment with the school for that purpose, someone would have told him it had just been done, less than a fortnight ago. Others have said he inspected a disabled toilet, souds a bit as if he was scratching around for a reason.
The mobile phone switch-off. "So that his whereabouts could not be ascertained" would be more like it, but obviously I think it's more than that, and that he was manipulating the phone contacts so as to deceive the police as to his route.
He wanted the bin bags to tidy his car, because he had been asked to go to the police station on his way home, and he wanted the car to be tidy when the police examined it. Whatever gave him the idea the police would want to examine the car of someone who had just called in to give a witness statement?
On that first point, for sure. He took over two hours longer than he should have done to make that journey, and nobody can call the detour down the A82 from Crianlarich to Balloch "direct". They think he went to somewhere near Ben Donich.
The evidence for this is smoke and mirrors though. Some parts of the case are absolutely solid, like the CCTV images and the phone mast pings. And then when we get to where he went during the missing time, facts simply evaporate. I don't even know what time the sighting of the man the witness thought looked like his brother-in-law was supposed to have happened at.
Then on the outward journey he's supposed to have gone somewhere "near Glen Croe Forest", which would seem to include "an area near Ben Donich", so I wonder why the two different descriptions. Why not the same place?
That last bullet point is bizarre. He told the cops he travelled back by the A819 and the A85, and that's exactly what the evidence indicates. The only definite evidence of where he was between Inveraray (where he was caught on a camera at the point where he turned off his phone) and the point on the A82 where he turned his phone back on agan is the camera sighting in Tyndrum. Both that camera sighting and the turning on of the phone (supposedly at Ardlui) show without doubt that he
did return on the roads he said he took. Again, where is the evidence he was on the A83 through the R&BT at all?
The only actual evidence we have is that he drove through Tyndrum. He was absolutely frank about this from the get-go. Then the police found the CCTV images at the Green Welly, which corroborated that. They have no reason to think he was trying to disguise the fact that he went that way. They start to imagine that the Tyndrum loop was the misdirection, so the body must be around the R&BT. But if we look at it from the other direction, we get a different picture. Gilroy surely didn't expect to be questioned about his route on that very same evening. But that's what happened, and how could he risk lying and saying he came by the A83, when he had no idea whether the police might find evidence of him on the A85 - as indeed they did. He
had to tell the truth or risk being proved to be lying.
But suppose he really did want to do what the police believe he did? If you're driving a big loop away from the place you intend to dispose of the body, surely you leave some evidence that you did that? He couldn't have known that the camera in Tyndrum would catch him. The phone switch-offs do exactly the opposite - they
conceal the route he took. It's far more likely that he took the route he didn't usually take, tried to leave no evidence that he'd done that, and hoped the police would concentrate on his usual route, the R&BT one, whereas the disposal site was on the A85 route. But then he had to abandon that plan when he was asked the direct question on the Wednesday evening.
Someone seems to have thought that Glen Orchy was in the frame at one point. It must have taken quite a long time to search the area of 200 yards on either side of the B8074. Of course, they would only have searched to the river on the NW side of the road. But,
hello???
They should have had a look at the Achnafalich track as well, and maybe one or two of the others depending on how practical they looked. And the Succoth lodge track, and the Duncan Bàn one, and maybe even Glen Strae. All of these were accessible.
I don't understand it. I probably never will.
