- 1 week ago
Britain's Most Evil Killers S09E04 (Oct 29 2024)
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00.
00:13In September 1984, 58-year-old Mary McLaughlin
00:18was walking home after a night out at a local pub.
00:25Mary met her killer on that route,
00:29and we don't know how or why,
00:32but that killer ended up in Mary's home.
00:37The stranger was 22-year-old Graham McGill,
00:41a convicted sex offender who was on temporary release from prison.
00:46Once inside Mary's flat,
00:48McGill brutally murdered the popular grandmother.
00:53McGill overpowered her quite easily.
00:55He beat her up.
00:56It was a horrific murder.
01:00Mary's body was discovered six days later,
01:02by which time her killer had seemingly vanished without a trace.
01:09We were looking for a perpetrator of a sexually motivated crime.
01:14There was no doubt about it, but we got nowhere.
01:20The case went cold for nearly four decades,
01:23until DNA evidence left behind at the scene would expose McGill.
01:30The probability of the DNA which was discovered was one in a billion.
01:34Graham McGill had finally been revealed as one of Britain's most evil killers.
01:51It was justice 37 years in the making.
02:09In April 2021, 59-year-old Graham McGill was found guilty of the 1984 murder of Mary McLaughlin.
02:18It was a cold case that hadn't been covered for a number of years by any journalist in Scotland.
02:26And in 2016, I decided to feature it in an unsolved murder series that I was running in the daily record.
02:32Mary's case hadn't been in the newspapers for quite a long time,
02:35when I decided to have a look at it.
02:38Detective Ian Wishart worked on the original murder investigation in 1984.
02:46What I remember of Mary was that she was well liked in the area,
02:51and she was an absolute character.
02:53She had 11 children.
02:56Anyone who knew her said she was a wonderful person.
02:59It was evidence collected at the crime scene by Ian and his team that would prove crucial 37 years down the line.
03:08Graham McGill probably thought he got away with his murder.
03:14He felt that 30 years have gone by and nobody has come to arrest me.
03:20He lived a full life, never being held liable for what crimes he had committed.
03:26It only proves that murders and very serious crimes are not forgotten.
03:38This killer's story begins in Scotland on the 30th of September 1961.
03:48We don't know very much about Graham McGill's early life.
03:52There isn't a lot known about his past. We know that he's from the west of Scotland.
04:00But I do know that in later life, he was charged with attempt to ravish or attempt to rape.
04:10In 1981, aged around 20, McGill was sentenced to six years in prison for the assault.
04:17The younger that men like this start to offend, the more likely it is that this offending is going to continue on and on into the future.
04:28Misogyny is a much bigger problem than people think it is.
04:33And starting at that young age is predictive that there are going to be big problems in the future.
04:39By September 1984, Graham McGill was in Edinburgh prison, three years into his six-year sentence.
04:50Fifty miles away in Partick, a suburb of Glasgow, 58-year-old Mary McLaughlin, a mother of 11,
04:58and grandmother of 26, was a popular member of the neighborhood.
05:03Mary McLaughlin was a divorced woman. She lived in a flat alone. She was well-known in our local community.
05:12She liked to go to the local pub where she'd play a game of dominoes, and then quite often she'd stop for chips on the way home.
05:19And she would talk to everybody. Everybody knew her as wee Mary. She was really, you know, quite a popular member of our community.
05:25One of Mary's 11 children is her daughter, Gina McGavin.
05:32I know from the area where she would go and do her socializing at night, there was a lot of people who liked her. She was well-liked.
05:42I don't think she had any close friends, but she was well-liked.
05:46She liked to have a little drink. She liked the company of people.
05:53I feel she didn't ever like being alone, and that was her way. It was her escape.
05:59Mary's need to be surrounded by people may have stemmed from her tough start in life.
06:06Mary had a very tragic upbringing. Her mother died when she was only five years old.
06:13And her dad was merchant seaman, so he was away quite a lot.
06:17So what he did was he left Mary in the charge of his two sisters, who weren't very kind to Mary.
06:26There was no affection. There was nobody that cared about her.
06:30So she was basically left just to, you know, her own devices. And quite frankly,
06:35if Cinderella was a real-life story, Mary fitted that bill.
06:38Mary's troubled upbringing may have been why she struggled when she had children of her own.
06:44My mum wasn't there. I was mostly brought up by my father. And I have vague memories of her coming
06:52and going in my life, having my first child. She wasn't there when I got married. You know,
06:58she wasn't there at the crucial points in my life. I never understood why. The memories that I do have
07:05of her, she, to me, always seemed happy outward. But inward, I always had that feeling. She wasn't
07:14happy. She was lonely. Although Gina and her mother had a challenging relationship,
07:20Mary was thriving in her role as a grandmother.
07:24The times that they did see their granny, they loved her. They loved her humour. They loved her
07:29fun. She was always making jokes. But I knew deep down that was all just a front for the sadness
07:36that she was feeling and the loneliness that she was really feeling.
07:40By September 1984, Mary and Gina's relationship showed signs of improvement after they crossed paths
07:49at Gina's father's funeral. She explained a lot of things about her life and my dad,
07:53the life of other relationship. And I understood her more because I was married and I had children
08:00myself. So I understood where she was coming from. And she opened up quite a bit.
08:08And we did arrange to meet, but it didn't happen because she was murdered. That just was cut short.
08:16Just a few weeks after Gina's dad's funeral in early October 1984, Mary McLaughlin was found murdered in her
08:29Partic home. Mary's body lay in her flat for six days before she was discovered. So it's suspected
08:39through forensic examination that she died on either the 26th or the 27th of September 1984.
08:47Her body was discovered when her son, who used to visit her maybe once a week, went into the flat
08:54with his girlfriend at the time. And she ran out screaming.
08:57Martin finds his mother lying on the bed. She has her dressing gown cord tied around her neck three
09:06times and double knotted. And her dress, her green dress, is on back to front.
09:11And they called the police. And that's when the murder investigation started.
09:18News of Mary's horrendous murder left her daughter, Gina, distraught.
09:24My maternal half-brother called my house to say that he'd been to our mum's and she'd been murdered.
09:32I was in shock, stunned, but I just couldn't believe what I was hearing.
09:42The investigation into Mary's murder began immediately. Who would want to kill the popular
09:48grandmother? Detectives needed to find the killer fast. But with minimal evidence and few witnesses,
09:56it would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
10:02I am in shock.
10:10When Mary McLaughlin was found murdered in her Glasgow home in October 1984,
10:17Detective Ian Wishart was one of the first investigators at the scene.
10:23When I arrived at the house, obviously there was a policeman at the door. The scene was Mary lying on her bed
10:30partially clothed but clearly strangled by what looked like the tie of a dressing gown.
10:41There was no sign of the house being ransacked, but what was rather obvious was an ashtray full of
10:51cigarette ends plus a partially smoked cigarette.
10:58Obviously, a very quick inquiry revealed that no one had heard her entering the house that night.
11:09So it would have appeared at a very early stage that she may have known her attacker,
11:15because obviously there was no kerfuffle, no noise whatsoever.
11:22Mary's family, including her daughter Gina, needed to roll themselves out of the inquiry.
11:28We were directed to Glen Street Police Office in Partick to get fingerprints taken for, obviously,
11:36elimination purposes. I just was totally, I was babbling. I couldn't get my head around it.
11:45And it was just awful, awful. An awful experience. When you hear of murder and you read it in the newspapers,
11:53or you hear it in the media, and you think, oh, that's awful, that's sad. But when it actually
11:59is close to home, the impact's unbelievable. And you start feeling all sorts of mixed emotions,
12:08and you can't think straight, your head just can't get around it. Mary's partner also had an alibi. He was
12:15working away at sea. Ian Wishart and his team had no early leads. The following day,
12:25I gave a television interview and naturally appealed for witnesses. Obviously, we would like to get in
12:35touch with anyone who lived in the area, who may have been in the area of Crathi Court over the past week,
12:42or who may have seen Mrs. McLaughlin alive after last Wednesday. This was very positive because it
12:52turned out that we were able to establish, first of all, she had been in a local chip shop.
12:58Mary had last been seen on the 26th of September 1984, six days before her body was found.
13:10Tracing Mary's final footsteps, detectives, with the help of locals,
13:15soon pieced together the story of the night of her murder, which began at a local pub in Partick.
13:22The Hindland Bar wasn't far from Mary's flat. She probably had about a five or ten minute walk,
13:33if that. Mary probably stayed there that evening until roughly about nine o'clock, half past nine,
13:41and she decided that she wanted to go and get some fritters. That was part of her routine. She enjoyed a
13:46bag of fritters, which is basically fried potatoes instead of chips. She said to her friends that she was
13:52time to go home, about 45 minutes, maybe, to an hour before the pub was closing for the evening.
13:59Witnesses placed Mary in the fish and chip shop at around 10.45pm.
14:05She was in the chip shop, very chatty, very happy, speaking to the people that worked there. They
14:11knew her. She was a familiar face to them. There was nothing in her manner to suggest that she was
14:16worried about anybody. She wasn't, didn't tell anybody she was being followed or that anybody had
14:21approached her. So there was nothing there to suggest that anything untoward was going on that night.
14:29We were left with a lot of interviews with the people in the chip shop, the people in the public
14:36house. Nothing ever came of that. After leaving the takeaway, witnesses saw Mary talking with a stranger.
14:48Two witnesses state that they saw her walking along the road, accompanied by a young man.
15:00But they only take her accompanied by this young man as far as Crow Road or Ashley Street,
15:07which are two roads that lead up to Crathi Court. No one saw her going up to her house and no one saw her in the house.
15:17So at that stage, yes, we have witnesses, but it becomes very, very difficult to track down this young man.
15:28And indeed, we cannot, at that stage, say that this young man was a perpetrator, because we have absolutely no evidence that he had accompanied her up to her house.
15:44It's impossible to know what happened next, but at some point, a killer was invited into Mary McLaughlin's home.
15:59I think what we need to remember about Mary is that she's mum to like 11 children.
16:06This is a woman whose whole identity is around being mum.
16:12And she meets a young man in the street. Now, this is a mum. She may have been very maternal towards him if he was,
16:22you know, saying things to her like, I've got nowhere to stay, or I'm feeling really sad, I need someone to talk to.
16:28It's quite possible that it's that kind of thing that got Mary to trust him.
16:36The tragedy of this story is that she encountered a predator and didn't recognise a predator when she saw one.
16:43When Mary's body was eventually found, it was hard to determine exactly what had happened.
16:49The scene is quite problematic because there is a dead woman in the house for several days.
17:00This is where now they have to be very careful what they bring into the scene and what they take out of the scene,
17:06because the killer probably walked in and out of that scene. Are there footprints on the floorboards?
17:14Are there any marks of shoe prints? Everything needs to be carefully examined, carefully documented and carefully removed.
17:23A post-mortem revealed that Mary had been strangled to death with a cord from her own dressing gown.
17:31It's a very personal way to kill someone. You're right up. You're really close to them.
17:37They are going to fight you. You're going to have to watch them struggle for breath.
17:43So this is somebody who's quite happy to be up close and personal. He hasn't gone up behind her and hit her.
17:51It's like there's some sadism involved here and he wanted to see her suffer.
17:57He wanted to know what it felt like to watch somebody die.
18:05Any relevant items at the crime scene needed to be handled with care by the forensic team.
18:14If you went to a murder scene, and I have been at quite a few unfortunately,
18:19anything that was relevant to the murder had to be taken possession of, bagged, labelled and preserved.
18:28Because you might catch someone one day and you would have to present this evidence in court.
18:34Items bagged and taken away included the dressing gown cord, a discarded cigarette,
18:41and an item of clothing found in Mary's garden.
18:46One of the things they discover a few days later in the garden behind the flat is a bra of hers.
18:52It's not on the body. It's been dumped in the garden. But they have got no idea of how it got there.
18:58Due to the passage of time, it was inconclusive whether they would say she had been raped.
19:08They couldn't say. But when you pictured the scene of the crime,
19:15you felt even then there was some form of sexual motive in this.
19:20Because of the way the body was dressed.
19:24The revelations coming from the crime scene were hard for Mary's large family to comprehend.
19:34Although Mary had a complicated relationship with her family and her children,
19:38her death, particularly the violence of it and the brutality of her murder,
19:44it absolutely devastated her family and quite literally ripped them apart.
19:48I went home that night and I wasn't expecting when I put on the TV for it to be on.
19:55And I remember shaking and things like that and going,
19:59I can't watch this because I didn't really want to accept anything really bad had happened to her.
20:06It was horrible.
20:11After ruling out family members, detectives were still trying to find a potential suspect
20:17and there was no sign of a break-in at Mary's flat.
20:23When police began their investigation, one of the most striking things that stood out at that very,
20:29very early stage in their murder hunt was that Mary's front door was locked and the front door key
20:36was gone. It was missing.
20:38The man who lived next door, he had the keys for the house.
20:44He had the ability to have entered that house.
20:48We interviewed him at length and well, we were quite satisfied at the end of the day
20:54that he was not who we were looking for.
21:02They exhausted every avenue and no one came forward.
21:05They couldn't pinpoint anyone. They couldn't arrest anyone.
21:10As the investigation continued, detectives were left stumped.
21:15There appeared to be no ill will towards Mary and no evidence of an intruder.
21:23As the leads dried up, there was a real concern that Mary's killer was going to get away with murder.
21:30As investigators widened the net in the search for Mary McLaughlin's killer,
21:46there appeared to be no obvious suspects linked to the brutal murder.
21:51There were eight different police forces in Scotland at the time and communication,
22:00shall we say, was not particularly brilliant between every force area.
22:05And Ian Wishart told me that they put a dragnet around the media area and they pulled in
22:12known sex offenders, housebreakers.
22:15So you look at the family, you look at the neighbours, you look at people who have access to the house,
22:23you also look at people who have motive. There was just nothing that we could say,
22:30oh yes, it's this type of person, it was that person, you know, we had no way to go.
22:38The minute a stranger, a complete stranger comes into the picture, we have difficulties.
22:43Not knowing who may have killed Mary was an extremely difficult time for her family.
22:50When I was told by one of the CID officers that they'd exhausted Devonry Avenue,
22:56the case would still lie as a cold case on the shelf. And when they said that to me,
23:01don't give up hope. And I said, anything at all that you hear, if you think it's relevant,
23:06let us know. And I just went on a mission myself to anything that I felt would have
23:14been relevant to solving my mum's or identifying who her killer was.
23:20And I thought I was getting older and I would go to the end of my life
23:23without knowing what happened to her.
23:32I work with a lot of bereaved families, bereaved through homicide. And the one thing that they all
23:38consistently say is, we just want to know what happened. We need to know what happened.
23:45And Mary's family, they just kept the fight up year after year after year. They were not
23:52going to let Mary get forgotten.
23:55As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, by the summer of 1985,
24:01detectives were no closer to tracking down Mary's killer.
24:06I would say about six to nine months later, you realise you're not getting anywhere,
24:15but it's never dead. If someone gave some information, there had to be an officer nominated
24:22who would look into that case.
24:26Murder investigations nowadays are typically solved very, very quickly. Back in the 1980s and the 70s,
24:33there was a bit more legwork needed, you know, before anything was solved. But police did not have
24:38endless resources, so the hunt for Mary's killer was scaled down.
24:46People put things to you, should you have done this? Could you have done this?
24:51No, nothing came out of it. For some reason, I always remembered her name.
24:57And I always remembered that case because of the fact that when I was in charge of murders,
25:05this was the only one that hadn't been solved.
25:09The investigation into Mary's murder remained cold for decades. It appeared it would never be solved.
25:19Journalist Jane Hamilton began looking into the case over 30 years after the horrific attack.
25:27By 2014, there had been four case reviews into Mary's murder by police. Unfortunately, DNA prior to
25:372014 was not advanced enough for the police to make any significant breakthroughs in Mary's murder.
25:45And I read an interview that Gina had given, and in it she'd spoken about her devastation and how she
25:51couldn't move on until her mum's murderer had been caught. And I, um, I just wanted to, you know,
25:58see if there was anything I could do.
26:01Jane's article in the Daily Record, published in 2016, shone a light on the case again.
26:09But unbeknown to her, investigators had already begun the process of retesting the evidence
26:16collected at the murder scene.
26:20Mary dies in 1984 and the DNA is eventually revisited 30 years later. Now, in those 30 years,
26:29the DNA sensitivity and specificity capabilities skyrocket. We have better technologies and we can
26:38actually identify more specific genes on every DNA profile that can pinpoint one person as opposed to
26:46many, many, many, many others. And so in this case, in 30 years, we go from looking just a handful of DNA markers to over two dozen DNA markers.
26:56Forensic scientists began by analyzing the murder weapon,
27:03the makeshift ligature that strangled Mary to death, her dressing gown cord.
27:14When recovered from the crime scene in 1984, there were two knots along the cord. One was untied during
27:21the original investigation, while crucially, the other was left untouched.
27:31Anybody's DNA who was on that knot had to be at that death scene. Mary and her killer are more likely
27:40to be the only people whose DNA would be found on that second, never touched before knot.
27:46I got a phone call from a contact who said that police were interested in a man for Mary's murder and that
27:56they believed that they had a DNA match to a man because of Mary's dressing gown cord.
28:03The search on the sex offenders database gives us a name. It's Graham McGill.
28:09And his DNA is on the database because many years before he was convicted of a sexual crime.
28:21So 30 years after Mary's death, we get a match.
28:26Graham McGill had been jailed for assault and attempt to rape in 1981 and was supposedly behind
28:34bars at the time of Mary's murder. But in the light of the DNA results, a new revelation was discovered.
28:43McGill was on day release from Edinburgh prison where he was serving a six-year sentence for
28:48attempting to rape women in 1981. He was on a two-day training for freedom program.
28:54During his trial release from prison, McGill had traveled 50 miles from Edinburgh to Glasgow to kill Mary.
29:10Investigators had no way of knowing that back in 1984.
29:15It's all very well in hindsight to say, should we have known about Graham McGill? Well, no,
29:22there was just no way that we could have at that time homed in on Graham McGill.
29:29There's never ever been any real explanation as to why back in 1984, when transport wasn't as reliable
29:38as it is nowadays, why he decided to get a bus, why he decided to do that when he only had two days.
29:44out of prison.
29:49He'd have been obsessing about this whilst he was in prison, thinking about, you know,
29:54the type of woman he's going to attack, how he's going to do it, almost enjoying the thought of it.
30:00So by the time he gets out, he's ready. He's ready to go. And that's exactly what he did do.
30:06The motive for McGill's apparently unprovoked attack on Mary has never been established.
30:17It's always been a bit of a mystery as to why McGill targeted Mary and nobody quite knows how
30:23they met. Did he see her in the street? Was he in the Hindland bar that she was drinking in that night?
30:29And did he see her? Did he follow her?
30:33It's thought that when Mary and McGill got back to her flat, he's attacked her almost instantly.
30:38Mary wasn't a violent person, but she did try to defend herself and she would have fought quite
30:46ferociously for her life. But she was 58 years old. McGill was 22. You know, he was quite a strong
30:52young man and he would have been very easy for him to overpower her, which is what he did.
30:58After murdering Mary, Graham McGill casually returned to Edinburgh prison until he was released
31:05just a few days later in October 1984 after serving half of his six-year sentence.
31:14McGill lived a seemingly normal life working as a welder, but his misogynistic behavior never went away.
31:22In 1993, he gets married to a lady called Suzanne. And at one point in a conversation with his wife,
31:35he tells her that he's killed a woman and says to her, I wanted to know what it felt like to kill
31:40someone. And he also says, if you tell anybody about that, I'll kill you. It's a good indication
31:48of McGill's attitude. He didn't care for women and he was prepared to use violence.
31:55He's probably been dying to brag about it for years. This is not the type of person who
32:03worried about what he's done in the past, but he will use it to control people in the present.
32:10McGill actually said to her that no one was going to come after him for the murder of Mary
32:14McLaughlin because, and I quote, because she was on her own, she didn't have anybody,
32:19and she may be more like a prostitute. Oh, it's a dreadful thing to say about the poor woman.
32:24She certainly wasn't. But that's the way it occurred to him.
32:29He said she had no one. That was not true. She'd spent that evening with her daughter. Her family
32:37have fought and fought and fought over the years to find out who Mary's killer was. He could not have
32:44been more wrong. By the time DNA revealed McGill as Mary's killer, he had already been back in prison
32:56and subsequently released for another sexual assault on a woman.
33:04In 1999, McGill is convicted of the attempted rape of a 24-year-old woman and is sentenced to life.
33:13He does not serve a life term. In fact, he's released on license in 2008.
33:19In December 2019, over 35 years after murdering Mary McLaughlin, Graham McGill received an unexpected
33:29knock at the door. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, McGill is astonished when the police arrive at his door
33:37to charge him with the murder of Mary McLaughlin.
33:39I was delighted, but don't forget what was at the back of my mind. Had I made a mistake? Had the person
33:53they were about to arrest been someone we had interviewed? I was delighted they'd caught the
34:00murderer and I was delighted that it wasn't somebody we had let slip through our fingers.
34:06I spoke to Gina, Mary's daughter, in the immediate aftermath of the news breaking that there had
34:14been a man arrested. And she was relieved, but nervous and didn't want to get her hopes up that
34:23finally, you know, she would get justice for her mum. When he was arrested, some of the newspapers were
34:31saying that he had committed previous crimes of rape. And the parole board felt that he was able to
34:38go back into the community and he wasn't a danger to other women again, when in fact, he went on and
34:44murdered my mother. Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Graham McGill, now aged 58,
34:53wasn't going to confess to anything. As preparations were made for his upcoming trial,
35:00McGill refused to admit to murdering Mary. In a final insult to her family, McGill was going to plead,
35:07not guilty.
35:19Graham McGill was absolutely convinced that he would take Mary's murder as a secret to his grave. He thought
35:29that he would get away with it. It possibly made him quite cocky and quite arrogant. And as time went
35:34on, he probably just thought that, you know, nobody was ever going to look at Mary's murder again,
35:40and therefore he would get away with murder. 36 and a half years after the murder of Mary McLaughlin,
35:47Graham McGill finally faced justice.
35:49It wasn't until April 2021 that he appeared in the Glasgow High Court to face trial. McGill pleaded not
35:59guilty. Mary's daughter, Gina McGavin, was in attendance at the trial. She finally got to look
36:06Graham McGill in the eye. The 59-year-old welder was now aged one year older than Mary McLaughlin was
36:13when he killed her. I seen him because I was sitting two rows behind him.
36:17I just looked at his face. But how can you tell what a murderer's face looks like? They can just
36:24look like nobody. You can't, you can look at somebody or you can't say, well, he looks like a murderer
36:29to me because you can't tell. The prosecutor during the trial said, and I think it's very telling,
36:37that Mary was friendly and trusting. And I would suggest that ultimately this brought about her death.
36:43These were different times. We have to accept that. The awareness of stranger danger of vulnerable women,
36:51which is so clear to us all now, was much less evident then.
36:56Although McGill pleaded not guilty, the DNA evidence against him was indisputable.
37:04McGill's DNA is on the database. And when compared to other people's DNA, we get a statistical probability
37:15of one in 85,000 chances of any other male depositing that DNA at the scene of Mary's death.
37:25McGill's DNA is found in multiple items. Each one of them has its own statistical probability of belonging to
37:34somebody else. But when you combine his DNA on the bra, his DNA on the knot, his DNA on a cigarette
37:43bud found near the scene, the probability of any other human being depositing that DNA on that day
37:51at that scene skyrockets to one in a billion. It is no small number and it points that our killer is definitively McGill.
38:06McGill appeared unmoved as the overwhelming DNA evidence against him, collected when he was just 22 years old,
38:15was presented in court.
38:19McGill chose not to give evidence at his own trial. He reportedly sat with his head bowed throughout.
38:26Not, I think, from very much in the way of remorse, but more from the sense of embarrassment.
38:30After all, by this point, he's an old man and is being tried for something that happened 37 years ago.
38:36But he doesn't disguise, not for one moment, nor does it excuse, the utterly wicked nature of the crime.
38:41On the 9th of April 2021, the jury had unanimously reached their decision.
38:54I felt relieved. When I heard the guilty verdict, I felt relieved that it was coming to an end and
39:02someone's been held to account. And family can get on with their lives. For me personally, I didn't have closure.
39:14In my experience as a crime reporter and having dealt with literally hundreds of families of murder victims,
39:23I don't think closure is the right word. I don't think that they ever get such a thing as closure because they know their relative isn't here.
39:36Graham McGill got away with Mary McLaughlin's murder for nearly 37 years.
39:43But in the end, he could not run away from the DNA evidence he left behind.
39:48In order for a conviction to happen, jurors have to believe, beyond a reasonable doubt,
39:55that we're talking about the correct suspect. Without DNA matching, this would not have been the case in this case.
40:05The thing is, when a lot of these men were committing their offenses, there was no such thing as DNA.
40:12They would have had no idea that leaving behind all of these things at the crime scene would eventually
40:19come back to get them. But they are starting to realize it now. And I think that there's a lot of
40:27serious offenders sitting in their homes, waiting for that knock on the door, because it's almost inevitable.
40:35For anyone considering committing crimes like this, then hopefully that's a deterrent,
40:43that you will get caught. No matter how long it takes, you will get caught.
40:47In May 2021, at Aberdeen High Court, 59-year-old Graham McGill was sentenced to 14 years in prison
40:56for the murder of Mary McLaughlin.
40:59The family, not surprisingly, were upset at what they saw was a very short sentence.
41:06And it's difficult not to sympathize with them.
41:12There was 37 years between Mary's murder and McGill's conviction. And in that 37 years,
41:20he was able to lead a very full life, which included getting married. He was able to work and socialize,
41:29have lots of jobs and move around the country and basically just live his life. And unfortunately,
41:36he took that away from Mary.
41:3914 years is nothing. And I think life should mean life for people who do heinous crimes.
41:47But it's nothing really compared to the last nearly 30, 40 years the family had gone through,
41:55but nothing at all compared to the torment that my full siblings and my maternal half-siblings had gone through.
42:06McGill has never confessed to Mary's murder or spoken about it on record.
42:12What exactly led him to kill the 58-year-old grandmother on that night in September 1984 remains unknown.
42:23There is nothing about the killing of Mary McLaughlin that really makes sense to me,
42:28except that it was a man, a 22-year-old man, anxious to fulfill his sexual desires.
42:32And if that was really the only reason, why on earth would he wind her dressing gown cord round her neck three times and then double-knotted?
42:42I find it very, very hard to find any possible excuse for Graham McGill's actions. They are truly wicked.
42:52I see McGill as somebody who is just particularly depraved for the fact that, you know, he not only got away with murder for 37 years,
43:02but in the intervening years, he actually bragged to somebody that he killed a woman just to see what it felt like.
43:10And he had, for somebody to have such a callous disregard for life is just evil personified.
43:16McGill was a convicted sex offender who traveled 50 miles to kill a stranger in September 1984.
43:33We may never truly know what happened that night,
43:36but we can be sure that innocent victim Mary McLaughlin was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
43:43It took almost 37 years and an advancement in DNA technology to finally unmask Graham McGill as one of Britain's most evil killers.
44:13But in this last time, he was trying to associate McGill as Drngulo.
44:20No.
44:23No.
44:27So like 4 or 7 inches.
44:29Don.
44:33I've had this.
44:34Let me know.
44:34It's hard to say.
44:38You