support her habit. At the time she went missing she was living a women’s hostel in the Govanhill area. It was been reported that Emma may have been forced to walk to the woods before being murdered, but the police said she almost certainly died very soon after the last sighting of her in Govanhill.
Officers studied CCTV footage and warned men who did not come forward that they would be visited by detectives. In any effort to jog the public’s memory, the police projected a 60-foot image of Emma on to the side of a semi-derelict tower block in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.
The BBC’s
Later the police came across footage of a woman getting into a silver Skoda Felecia car outside the Riverboat Casino on the Broomielaw, Glasgow’s historic quayside. Detectives have traced every owner of a silver Skoda Felecia car in Scotland, but have been unable to track down the driver. This line of enquiry might even be a blind alley.
Detective Superintendent Willie Johnston of the Strathclyde Police said: “I am unable to say with any authority that the person who entered the car was Emma. However, I do know that she could have been in Broomielaw at that time.”
The charity Crimestoppers offered a reward of ?10,000 to anyone who could help track down her killer. But a year after she went missing 50 officers were still working on the case. The police then released recordings of 999 calls she made the weeks before she disappeared, expressing her concern about children playing on a railway line.
The officer leading the inquiry said the calls showed the kind nature of the “caring” young woman and he hoped they would help to jog people’s memories.
“I want to demonstrate to the public, who may still have reservations about coming forward, that despite her lifestyle, Emma was a loving, caring individual who was genuinely concerned for the children on the railway line,” he said. “It may also prompt people who recognize her voice and know something that could be relevant to this investigation to come forward. I make no apologies for constantly reminding members of the public of this crime and will continue to do so until the person or persons responsible have been brought to justice.”
The murdered Glasgow vice girls may not be the victims of a serial killer. It seems likely that a different killer is responsible for each murder. But that makes life no safer for Glasgow’s prostitutes, as long as the killers are at large.
On 8 September 2006, 29-year-old Gillian Gilchrist, from Ibrox, was thrown from a car by a man who had picked her up in the red light district of Glasgow. She lost part of an arm.
She had been picked up by a man in a dark coloured car in Holm Street at Wellington Street, in the heart of the red light district. He drove to Arkleston Road near to Arkleston Cemetery, on the outskirts of the suburb of Paisley, where he threw her from the car at around 1.50 a.m. From there she stumbled 100 yards across a field and onto the westbound M8 motorway, where she was found by a man in a taxi who did not want to be named.
“Suddenly the taxi brakes and there was this woman in the road,” he said. “She was covered in blood. I ran to help her and called 999 and tried to get her off the motorway, it was then I noticed she had no arm. It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen, I put my jacket around her and gave her first aid.”
Her arm was severed four inches above the wrist and doctors were unable to reconnect it.
Her sister Debbie, told the Scottish
“We have tried so hard to get her off the streets,” said her stepmother Anne Gilchrist. “I just pray this is the wake-up call she needs—we will all be there to help her.”
The Glasgow edition of the
South Africa’s Serial Killers
Since the end of apartheid there has been an explosion of serial killers in South Africa. Take the case of Lazarus Mazingane, who was given 17 life sentences for murder and rape, and over 700 years for other offences in Johannesburg High Court on 3 December 2002.
Dubbed the “Nasrec Strangler”, he preyed on women commuting between Soweto and Johannesburg. Many of the bodies were found near the Nasrec Exhibition Centre. His victims are black females, mostly between the ages of 20 and 35, who are lured from minibus taxis.
Judge Joop Labuschagne said Mazingane was a “cruel and inhuman person” who showed no remorse, and should be permanently removed from society to which he was a menace.
“He stalked defenceless women whom he robbed and raped before he killed them,” said the judge.
Mazingane was working as a taxi driver at the time and many of the victims were attacked along his route or when seeking transport. His first victims were throttled—not fatally—then raped. But as his vicious career progressed, he murdered by strangulation.
“All these women were young and in the prime of life,” said Judge Labuschagne. “I listened to the evidence of mothers… and loved ones who told me of their tragic losses. Nothing I do or say today can compensate them, but perhaps they can find some compensation in the conviction of the accused and these sentences I am imposing.”
The court also noted that some of the victims were men such as Gert Aspeling, who was shot dead when he refused to hand over his car keys after stopping to change a wheel. Mazingane then drove off with the dead man’s paralyzed wife in the car and dumped her in the veldt without her wheelchair.
The judge remarked that the chances of rehabilitation were “very poor if not non-existent”, noting that Mazingane had already been convicted of attacking his own wife.
In all, Mazingane was convicted of 74 charges, and was sentenced to life imprisonment on each of the 16 murder counts and life imprisonment for the most recent rape, which fell under the new legislation. He was sentenced to 18 years on each of the remaining 21 charges of rape. On the 20 counts of aggravated robbery he had been convicted of, he was sentenced to 25 years for the most recent one, and 15 years for each of the remaining 19. And he was sentenced to another 10 years on each of five counts of attempted murder. One victim had been shot three times but survived.
He received eight years for each of three counts of kidnapping, plus two years for assault, three years on each of the two charges of illegal possession of a firearm, and three years on each of the four charges of illegal possession of ammunition.
Twenty-eight-year-old Mazingane was already serving 35 years for a crime committed late in 1998—the kidnapping, rape and robbery of an attorney’s wife and an attack on a motorist who stopped to help. He was in jail for that offence when he came to the attention of Superintendent Piet Byleveldt, who was investigating the unsolved Nasrec killings. However, the charges eventually laid against Mazingane were only the tip of the iceberg. At the time Police Director Henriette Bester detailed the extent of the Nasrec offences: “There are 53 cases, of which 51 of the victims were killed. Of the 51 murder victims, 32 were female, all of whom were raped. Seventeen of the victims were children between the ages of five and eight, of whom 11 were girls.”
Mazingane was convicted of only 16 of the slayings. He may have committed more that he was not charged with, but the chances are that there is at least one other killer—maybe more—still at large.
Then there is the mysterious case of David Selepe and the murder of more black women in Cleveland, an industrial suburb of Johannesburg. On 3 September 1994, just four months after South Africa’s first multi-racial election, a woman’s body was found on in the bushes near the Jupiter train station next to the township of Heriotdale. Four days later, a second body was found next to the M2 freeway, on the other side of Heriotdale. Later that same day, the third body was found near a mine dump nearby. All three were partially naked and had been raped and strangled. There was nothing on the bodies or around them to aid in their identification. However, their
