The knock on the door came in December 2019, more than three decades after Graham McGill thought he had gotten away with it. He had been living his life, working, marrying, moving around the country, all while the murder of 58-year-old Mary McLauchlin remained a cold case. But DNA evidence from the crime scene had finally caught up with him. In September 1984, Mary McLauchlin was walking home after a night out at her local pub in Partick, Glasgow.
She had stopped for her usual bag of fritters, chatted with the staff at the chip shop, and was seen by witnesses walking along the road accompanied by a young man. No one saw her go up to her house. No one saw her go inside. But somehow, a killer ended up in her flat.
Mary was a popular grandmother, a mother of 11 children and grandmother of 26. She had lived alone since her divorce and enjoyed her evenings at the pub, playing dominoes and talking to everyone who knew her as “wee Mary. ” Her daughter, Gina, remembered that Mary never liked being alone. “She liked the company of people.
She liked to have a little drink. I feel she didn’t ever like being alone, and that was her only escape. ”
Mary’s need for people may have come from a difficult start in life. Her mother died when she was just five years old, and her father, a merchant seaman, was away at sea.
He left her in the care of his two sisters, who were unkind to her. “There was no affection, and there was nobody that cared about her,” Gina said. “If Cinderella was a real-life story, Mary fitted that bill. ”
The relationship between Mary and Gina was complicated.
“My mom wasn’t there. I was mostly brought up by my father,” Gina recalled. “Having my first child, she wasn’t there when I got married. She wasn’t there at the crucial points in my life.
” But Mary was thriving as a grandmother. “The times that they did see their granny, they loved their humor, they loved their fun,” Gina said. “She was always making jokes, but I knew deep down that was all just a front for the sadness and loneliness she was really feeling. ”
In the weeks before her death, Mary and Gina had begun to reconnect after they crossed paths at Gina’s father’s funeral.
“She explained a lot of things about her life and my dad and life with her other relationship. I understood her more because I was married and I had children myself,” Gina said. “We did arrange to meet, but it didn’t happen because she was murdered. That was just cut short.
”
The murder happened on either the 26th or 27th of September 1984. Mary’s body lay undiscovered in her flat for six days. Her son, who visited about once a week, went into the flat with his girlfriend, and she ran out screaming. They found Mary lying on her bed with her dressing gown cord tied around her neck three times and double knotted.
Her dress was on back to front. When Detective Ian Wishart arrived at the scene, he found Mary partially clothed, clearly strangled by what looked like the tie of a dressing gown. There was no sign of a ransacking, but there was an ashtray full of cigarette ends and a partially smoked cigarette. No one had heard any noise.
The front door had been locked, but the key was gone. “It would have appeared at a very early stage that she may have known her attacker because obviously there was no kerfuffle, no noise whatsoever. ”
For Mary’s family, the news was devastating. Gina was at home when her maternal half-brother called to tell her.
“I was really shocked, stunned, but I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ” She and other family members were taken to the police station for fingerprinting to rule themselves out of the inquiry. “I was totally babbling. I couldn’t get my head round it.
It was just awful, awful. ”
The investigation began with an appeal for witnesses. It emerged that Mary had been at the Handland Bar, not far from her flat, until about 9:30 p. m.
She told her friends she was going to get some fritters and go home. Witnesses placed her in the chip shop around 10:45 p. m. , chatty and happy, showing no signs of worry.
Two witnesses then saw her walking along the road with a young man. But no one saw them go up to her house, and the young man could not be tracked down. Detectives considered the possibility that Mary had let her killer in willingly. “She may have been very maternal towards him if he was saying things like, ‘I’ve got nowhere to stay’ or ‘I’m feeling really sad, I need someone to talk to,’” one investigator suggested.
“The tragedy of this story is that she encountered a predator and didn’t recognize a predator when she saw one. ”
The post-mortem revealed that Mary had been strangled with the cord from her own dressing gown. It was a very personal way to kill. “There’s some sadism involved here, and he wanted to see her suffer,” an expert noted.
A bra belonging to Mary was found dumped in the garden behind the flat, but detectives could not determine if she had been raped. “When you pictured the scene of the crime, you felt even then there was some form of sexual motive because of the way the body was dressed. ”
The investigation hit dead end after dead end. Police interviewed Mary’s family, her neighbors, and known sex offenders in the area.
“We looked at the family, the neighbors, people who had access to the house, people who had motive,” Detective Wishart said. “There was just nothing that we could say, ‘Oh yes, it’s this type of person. ’ We had no way to go. ” In the 1980s, there were eight different police forces in Scotland and communication between them was poor.
The case went cold. For Gina, the lack of answers was unbearable. “I was told by one of the CID officers that they’d exhausted every avenue and the case would still lie as a cold case on the shelf. When they said that to me, I said, ‘Anything at all that you hear that you think is relevant, let us know.
’ And I just went on a mission myself to find anything that would be relevant to solving my mom’s murder. ” She worried she would go to the end of her life without knowing what happened. In 2014, there had been four case reviews into Mary’s murder. DNA technology had advanced considerably since 1984, but no breakthroughs had been made.
Journalist Jane Hamilton read an interview Gina had given and decided to feature the case in an unsolved murder series in the Daily Record in 2016. “Mary’s case hadn’t been in the newspapers for quite a long time, but I decided to have a look at it. ”
Unbeknownst to Jane, investigators had already begun retesting evidence from the crime scene. The key piece was the dressing gown cord used to strangle Mary.
There were two knots along the cord. One had been untied during the original investigation. The other had been left untouched. “Anybody’s DNA who’s on that knot had to be at that death scene,” one investigator explained.
The DNA test on the untouched knot produced a match. It belonged to Graham McGill, a convicted sex offender whose DNA was on the database because he had been jailed for assault and attempted rape in 1981. The statistical probability that the DNA belonged to anyone else was one in a billion. Thirty-seven years after the murder, McGill had finally been exposed.
Investigators then discovered that McGill had been on temporary release from Edinburgh Prison at the time of Mary’s murder. He was serving a six-year sentence for attempting to rape women, and he was on a two-day “training for freedom” program. On one of those days, he traveled 50 miles from Edinburgh to Glasgow to kill Mary. “He’d have been obsessing about this whilst he was in prison, thinking about the type of woman he’s going to attack, how he’s going to do it, almost enjoying the thought of it,” an expert said.
“By the time he gets out, he’s ready to go. And that’s exactly what he did. ”
The motive for the attack was never fully established. It was a mystery how McGill targeted Mary and how they met.
Did he see her in the street? Was he at the same pub? Did he follow her? When they got back to her flat, McGill attacked her almost instantly.
Mary tried to defend herself, but she was 58 years old and he was a strong 22-year-old. He easily overpowered her. After the murder, McGill casually returned to Edinburgh Prison and was released just a few days later after serving half of his sentence. He went on to live a seemingly normal life, working as a welder.
But his behavior never changed. In 1993, he married a woman named Susan. During a conversation, he told her he had killed a woman and said, “I wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone. If you tell anybody about that, I’ll kill you.
” He also told her that no one would come after him for the murder of Mary McLaughlin, saying, “Because she was on her own, she didn’t have anybody, and she may be more like a prostitute. ” The claim was a lie. Mary had 11 children who had fought for decades to find her killer. In 1999, McGill was convicted of the attempted rape of a 24-year-old woman and sentenced to life, but he was released on license in 2008.
In December 2019, over 35 years after murdering Mary, he received an unexpected knock at the door. Police arrived to charge him with the murder. McGill was astonished. He had convinced himself he would get away with it forever.
Mary’s daughter Gina was cautiously relieved when she heard a man had been arrested. “She was relieved but nervous and didn’t want to get her hopes up that finally she would get justice for her mom,” journalist Jane Hamilton recalled. McGill pleaded not guilty. In April 2021, he appeared at the Glasgow High Court to face trial.
Gina attended and sat two rows behind him. “I just looked at his face,” she said. “But how can you tell what a murderer’s face looks like? They can just look like nobody.
”
The prosecutor argued that Mary was “friendly and trusting, and I would suggest that ultimately this brought about her death. ” McGill chose not to give evidence at his own trial, sitting with his head bowed throughout. The DNA evidence was overwhelming. His DNA was found on the knot of the dressing gown cord, on the bra, and on a cigarette butt found near the scene.
The probability of any other person deposing that DNA at that scene was one in a billion. On the 9th of April 2021, the jury unanimously found Graham McGill guilty of the murder of Mary McLauchlin. “I felt relieved when I heard the guilty verdict,” Gina said. “Relieved that it was coming to an end and someone’s been held to account, and the family can get on with their lives.
” But she did not believe in closure. “My experience as a crime reporter, having dealt with hundreds of families of murder victims, I don’t think closure is the right word,” Jane Hamilton said. “I don’t think they ever get such a thing as closure because they know their relative isn’t here. ”
In May 2021, McGill, now 59, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
The family was upset by the short sentence. “In that 37 years, he was able to lead a very full life which included getting married,” Gina said. “He was able to work, socialize, have lots of jobs, and move around the country. He basically just lived his life.
And unfortunately, he took that away from Mary. 14 years is nothing. I think life should mean life for people who do heinous crimes. ”
McGill has never confessed to Mary’s murder or spoken about it on record.
What exactly led him to kill the 58-year-old grandmother on that night in September 1984 remains unknown. “I find it very, very hard to find any possible excuse for Graham McGill’s actions,” one investigator said. “They are truly wicked. ” Another added, “To have such a callous disregard for life is just evil personified.
”
It took almost 37 years and an advancement in DNA technology to finally unmask Graham McGill. But in the end, he could not run away from the evidence he left behind. For anyone considering committing crimes like this, the message is clear: “You will get caught. No matter how long it takes, you will get caught.
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