A police officer found the body in a stagecoach bus depot, just two minutes from her home. The sixteen-year-old was naked except for her boots and socks. Her own blouse was tied around her neck. Her bra had been shoved into her mouth as a gag.
Mari Julian had been on her way home from a pantomime with her best friend, Julianne. The play finished early, so she let her dad know she would walk the half-mile journey alone. Her parents expected her home by ten o’clock that night. By ten-thirty, she still hadn’t arrived.
Her mother walked the dark route herself, the fear building with every step. The next morning, for the first few minutes, we thought she was just missing. And then the police discovered her body in that bus depot. “The injuries were horrific.
Forty-seven separate wounds, most of them to her face and head. Defensive wounds on her hands,” a detective remembered. “She fought him. She fought him hard.
The cause of death was asphyxia due to strangulation. Her own blouse was used to kill her. ” It was a torturous death, not quick, not easy. Agonizing.
The killer used her own clothing to silence her, to gasp for air, rendering her helpless before he took her life. The tight-knit community of Kilmarnock was shattered. Every parent who had a teenage daughter was terrified to let them out of their sight. The police launched a massive investigation.
London Road was a busy road, so they knew there would have been drivers, witnesses. They conducted dozens of interviews. The family made a public appeal. Mari’s father, Phillip, stood before the cameras.
“Anyone knows anything? Just come forward. I’ve got to find out. ” The Daily Record offered a ten-thousand-pound reward.
Then, just under three weeks after the murder, hope arrived in the form of an anonymous letter in the post. It was fourteen lines long, addressed to Mari’s parents. “I think my son may have killed your daughter. ” It went on to say that on the night of the murder, her son had come home and said, “I’ve done something bad.
” It ended with a chilling confession: “Sorry, I can’t give him up. I love him. ” The police appealed for the writer to come forward, but the letter writer stayed silent. The hunt continued.
Then, a break in the case. Forensic scientists found two different sources of blood on Mari’s jacket. One was hers. The other belonged to her killer.
He had his own DNA on his victim’s clothes, a critical clue in the days before DNA databases existed. The police went on a mission to find the donor. They tested every man who worked at the bus depot, then expanded to all men between twenty and forty in the area. In total, they tested over twenty thousand men, an unprecedented undertaking.
But all the tests came back negative, no match. They were running out of options. Then a sharp-eyed officer reviewing CCTV from the night of the murder noticed something crucial. The footage from a shopping mall at 9:20 PM showed a man just a few hundred yards from the crime scene.
A man the local police knew well. A man named Gavin Maguire. Years earlier, in the summer of 1986, Doris Thompson had booked a family holiday in Saltcoats. She had a baby in 1985 and wanted to spend time with her children, her parents, her sister, and her husband.
“It was nice that week. We were enjoying it, having fun. ” But the holiday took a horrific turn the night she found herself alone on the dark, deserted streets. A man appeared from a side street and grabbed her around the neck.
“Take your tights off,” he demanded. He used her own tights to strangle her until she began to faint. He dragged her into a gap in the stone harbor wall. “He told me to strip naked.
All this time his hands were on my throat. ” The man proceeded to beat and sexually assault her. Doris fought back as best she could. “It just went into another frenzy, punching, kicking.
I didn’t know where the blood was coming from. ” She tried to stay calm, but he didn’t want calm. He wanted a fight. She told him she had five young children, one just a baby.
He laughed. “How can he laugh like this? ” She was dragged by the throat, beaten, and then the attacker picked up her dress. “Put that back on,” he said.
Doris thought he was about to leave. Instead, he said, “Nobody ever gets away from me. ” He hurled her straight off the harbor wall into the cold, dark sea. She lay floating in the water, keeping her head to the side to breathe, watching him run along the harbor wall looking for her.
He was watching her struggle. He enjoyed it. But as daylight began to break, she knew she had to get out. She escaped the water, ran across the road, knocked on doors until a resident opened theirs.
Her clothes were soaked in seawater and blood. Her jaw was fractured, her front teeth knocked out. But she was determined to find her attacker. Two days later, she spotted him walking by a café.
She followed him into a nearby bar and confronted him. “That’s me. It’s me. I was the woman you tried to kill down the shore.
” He responded, “Get the wrong man. Get the wrong man. ” The police arrested him. He was identified as twenty-eight-year-old Gavin Maguire.
Maguire had been a problem since childhood. Born in 1958 in Stevenston, he was the oldest of three boys in a working-class family. His father left when he was young, leaving his mother to raise the boys alone. At eight years old, Maguire entered the care system.
He didn’t thrive. By his early teens, he was truanting, breaking into houses, and stealing cars. He set fire to his pigeons’ loft, killing all the birds, and reportedly stood there laughing. He did the same to the rabbits.
Fire-setting and animal cruelty—two huge warning signs. By fourteen, it was very clear who he was becoming. He was a loner, awkward, with no social skills. He couldn’t communicate.
By seventeen, his urges turned to women. He attacked a fifteen-year-old girl, then another. Two days later, he attacked an eighteen-year-old, but she escaped. He was arrested and released on bail for just ten pounds.
Within weeks, he attacked a pregnant eighteen-year-old and beat her severely. Then he threatened another young woman with glass and raped her. He was caught, and in February 1977, at just eighteen years old, he was sentenced to ten years in a young offender institution. The judge said it was necessary to protect the girls and women of Stevenston from the serial offender.
Maguire was out of control. There was no question about that. After his release in the early nineties, he was deemed safe enough to return to his mother’s house. But on August 12, 1995, just months before Mari’s murder, a twenty-one-year-old woman in Kilbirnie was attacked in a park.
The man put her in a stranglehold. She fought, biting his finger until he let her go. A few days later, she saw him in town and identified him as Gavin Maguire. He was arrested, but he denied it.
The physician who examined him determined the bite mark was only seventy-two hours old, which was inconsistent with the victim’s account. In Scotland, the law requires two witnesses to a crime. Without corroboration, the case was dropped. Maguire was released at the end of November 1995.
Nineteen days later, Mari Julian was murdered. When the police viewed the CCTV footage, they saw a man following a young woman. They recognized him instantly. It was Gavin Maguire.
On January 8, 1996, they interviewed him for the first time. He denied being anywhere near the bus depot. He claimed he was at a bar in Kilmarnock until 10:45 PM. But when they showed him the footage of himself outside the shopping mall, he changed his story, saying he had been Christmas shopping.
He had lied. That was enough to get a search warrant. On January 26, 1996, police searched his mother’s home and found clothes and a piece of broken shoelace that matched the one found by Mari’s body. His DNA matched the sample from the crime scene, proving he was the source.
On the 30th of January, Gavin Maguire was charged with the murder of Mari Julian. But unlike his 1986 court appearance, he refused to admit any guilt. The family would have to endure a trial. The trial at Glasgow High Court began in May 1996.
The prosecution played the CCTV footage showing Maguire stalking his victim as she walked home from the theater. He had originally followed another girl out of the underpass, but she turned into her house quickly. So he came back and followed Mari. The video evidence was damning.
Yet Maguire was defiant, furious in the dock. At one point he shouted at the court, “You’ve not got me on video killing her, so prove it. ” His previous convictions were not allowed to be mentioned in court, so the jury didn’t know the full extent of his history. But the prosecution had a key witness.
His own mother, Netti Maguire, took the stand. She gave evidence against her son. She said that when she found his jeans in the washing machine the day after the murder, there was blood on them. She had decided to wash them after believing his explanation that he had tripped and injured himself while going to the toilet.
Maguire insisted his mother was mistaken, claiming it was actually mud from walking the dog. But the DNA evidence was irrefutable. The odds of the DNA at the scene belonging to anyone other than Maguire were 8,200 to one. Doris Thompson was in the courtroom throughout the trial.
She had felt a sense of dread when she heard about the murder. She went to hear the verdict. The jury took only thirty minutes to return a guilty verdict. On the 30th of May 1996, Judge Lord Clyde sentenced Gavin Maguire to thirty years imprisonment for the murder of Mari.
He called the crime an atrocity without mercy and said Maguire should never be released back into the public. Doris felt relief, but for her, thirty years was not enough. “I don’t think a man like that should ever be released because I know what’s in him because I’ve seen it. Nobody ever gets away from me.
That’s what he said. ” In 2002, Maguire appealed his sentence. European human rights laws ruled that his extended term should be determined by a parole board, not a judge. His thirty-year sentence was reduced to a minimum of twenty-two years, making him eligible for parole in 2018.
Maguire is now one of the most dangerous criminals not just in Scotland, but in the world. For his victims, the trauma never ends. Doris still suffers from post-traumatic stress. “It would have been easy to give up because I was exhausted and frightened.
My children were my lifeline because I had to look after them. I wouldn’t leave them. Never. But at the same time, I’m here, and I’m living to tell the tale.
There’s a lot to be grateful for. ” Maguire’s compulsion to hurt others started in childhood with animals, escalated through his teens and twenties, and culminated in the brutal, senseless murder of sixteen-year-old Mari Julian. His fire has not been extinguished.
He remains a danger.
