Roberts and Jacqui Gallagher, she was new to the game and only went out on the street a couple of nights a week.
She lived in a top floor flat, which she kept impeccably. People were always trooping up and down the stairs to her flat, leading neighbours to wonder if she was a drug dealer. According to her friends she was not, just a timid girl who could not say no—though others say she was warm and funny, with enough confidence to talk to everybody.
“I was shocked when I heard about the prostitution,” said a neighbour who lived downstairs. “I said to her about the risks she was taking, but she said she’d rather go out and earn money like that than steal it off anyone else. She knew what that was like.”
But her work as a prostitute allowed to keep her three-year-old daughter Megan, who was always conspicuously well dressed.
Tracy had had a troubled upbringing. She had been raised by her grandparents and called her grandfather “Dad”. He came up to her flat nearly every day and even dropped her off in the city centre sometimes when she was working on the streets.
“I feel sad for her,” said her downstairs neighbour. “It couldn’t have been an easy life for her.”
Tracy was killed in the early hours of 24 November in her home. Strangely no one heard anything that night. Her block had poor soundproofing and residents could overhear neighbours’ conversations and footfalls. But not even her downstairs neighbour, a young mother who was kept up by her 11-week-old baby, heard a thing.
After Margo Lafferty died on 28 February 1998, the police discovered that she had gone with two violent criminals that night. On the dark piece of waste ground where she was found dead, they picked up two condoms. One contained the semen of Brian Donnelly, who had previously tried to set fire to the house of his former girlfriend and their son, and he had also mugged an old woman. The other contained the semen of Scarborough construction worker David Payne, a convicted sex offender who had been jailed for holding up a woman at knife point and indecently assaulting her.
That night Donnelly had been out celebrating his 19th birthday but went into a rage after being rejected by a couple of female work colleague. Instead he decided to go with a prostitute and was captured on CCTV with Margo before the pair went to the disused builders’ yard in West Regent Street for sex. The jury was also shown CCTV footage showing a man, who the Crown said was Donnelly, walking away wearing a leather jacket Margo had borrowed.
The following day, work colleagues noticed the gouges on Donnelly’s face. He told one he had been involved in a tussle with a woman whose boyfriend had tried to jump a taxi queue before him. But he told another colleague he had been scratched by a cat. His workmates did not believe him and gave his name to detectives investigating Margo Lafferty’s murder.
During the trial, Donnelly alleged that the murder was committed by David Payne, who had been working in Glasgow at the time. However, Payne was seen with Margo on CCTV before she was seen with Donnelly. Despite his previous conviction for a violent sex crime, Payne denied being the murderer.
At his trial in 1998, the prosecutor Calum MacNeill told Donnelly: “We will never know why you killed her, whether it was a disagreement over payment, or your anger which lacks self control, or out of shame or disgust or contempt that you had for the heroin addict prostitute you had just used. You punched and kicked her and she fought back, scratching you. You were incensed, you 6 feet 3 inches and her only 5 feet tall. You were fuelled with anger and got out of control and banged her head off the wall before strangling her and finally dragging her body along the yard.”
He was found guilty on a majority verdict, but in 2001 the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh overturned the conviction on the grounds that the trial judge, Lord Dawson, had misdirected the jury over the CCTV footage.
Lord Dawson had told the jury that they were entitled to consider any evidence that Donnelly had any of the dead woman’s property on him or in his possession, saying specifically: “You’ll remember in that connection the video tape evidence where you saw a young man wearing a dark jacket.”
Gordon Jackson, QC for Donnelly, told the appeal judges there had been no suggestion during the trial that the man caught on camera wearing a dark jacket was either young or was Donnelly.
Lord Allanbridge, who heard the appeal with Lord Cameron and Lord Caplan, said: “We consider that the trial judge did misdirect the jury in inviting them to consider ‘the video tape evidence where they saw a young man wearing a dark jacket’. This was an open invitation to the jury to consider the 3.14 a.m. video recording and to recollect their viewing of it, so that they themselves might speculate about the disputed identity of a male person shown on the recording. Such a procedure is incompetent.
“If the jury concluded that the recording showed the appellant wearing the deceased’s jacket after her death, this could have been a very persuasive factor in their deliberations on the murder charge. We are accordingly satisfied that the misdirection of the trial judge in this case has led to a miscarriage of justice.”
They quashed the conviction, but granted the Crown leave for a retrial. At a second trial in 2001, it took the jury under an hour and a half to bring in a unanimous verdict of murder.
After the trial, Margo’s mother said: “I always knew Donnelly was the monster who murdered my daughter… He wasn’t any innocent young boy. I hoped someone would kill him when he went into prison after the first trial. I was wishing retribution would be served in another way. There’s no closure in this for me. Not as long as he breathes. I believe in the Old Testament, in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth… She might have been a prostitute but she was still a lovely lassie with a heart of gold.”
And Mrs Lafferty still has to live with the consequences.
“You’re sitting in work and people are talking, new staff maybe, not the ones that were there at the time. And they always bring Margo’s name up if anything happens. They’ll maybe come across a wee caption in the paper and they go, ‘Look at that. These lassies deserve it.’ I just get up and walk away. Or occasionally I’ll say, ‘Look at it this way. They’re out there, taking the chance of being jailed, and there’s others sitting next to you that are giving it away for nothing.’ Margo could have been out mugging old folk or breaking into houses. But she didn’t do that. She went out and did a job of work.”
Margo’s brothers did not know what she did for a living and had to read about it in the newspapers as well as living with the grief of losing their sister. Mrs Lafferty was afraid they would get themselves in trouble if they came to the court and the jury voted for acquittal, but the verdict was heard in total silence.
When Margo died it was three months before the family could bury her. And they were not allowed to cremate her, in case the body had to be exhumed later to look for further evidence, though Margo herself would have preferred to be cremated.
“She was afraid of creepy crawlies, couldn’t bear the thought of worms going through her body,” said her mother, but she now thinks the bureaucrats did her a favour. “Now I know I can go up to her grave and just stand there and talk to her. I know she’s never going to stand in front of me or cuddle me, which she always used to do. But at least I know where she is.”
Margo’s mother also has a grandchild to bring up who reminds her of her lost daughter.
“She’s so full of confidence. So was Margo, full of her own importance,” she says. “I hope she keeps that.”
Meanwhile, the murder of Margo Lafferty led to the girls in Glasgow’s red light district being given lessons in self-defence by specially trained police officers. They were issued with personal attack alarms and leaflets offering practical safety advice. The leaflets provide advice on what clothes to wear, where to sit in a client’s car, how to deal with a violent client and how to protect their money.
But that did not help 27-year-old Emma Caldwell, who went missing on 4 April 2005. Her badly decomposed remains were found on 8 May in thick undergrowth near Biggar, South Lanarkshire, over 30 miles away. It was found by a member of the public walking their dog in woods at Kilnpotlees, Roberton, at about 1 p.m., near two service stations on the M74 motorway link to the south at Happendon and Abington.
Emma Caldwell grew up in Erskine, Renfrewshire. Her mother said: “She was just a happy, happy child—we had a happy life. She was a lovely child, full of fun. A magical child who loved horses. There used to be a thing in the family—we’d say, ‘What would you like, Emma?’ She’d say, ‘A horsy, a horsy’. We’d say, ‘When would you like the horsy?’ She’d say, ‘Right now, right now I’d like the horsy’.”
Indeed she had worked as a horse-riding instructor before her sister, Karen, died from cancer in 1998. Then her whole world seemed to collapse. She left home, because she was a heroin addict and became a prostitute to
