The DNA results came back and the forensic scientist’s words hung in the air. “The odds of another person matching this sample are 8,200 to one. ”
Gavin Maguire sat in the dock, his face a mask of cold fury. Across the courtroom, 16-year-old Mari Julian’s parents listened as every detail of their daughter’s final, agonizing moments was laid bare.
Mari had been walking home from a pantomime on the night of December 16, 1995. The play had finished early and she’d decided to make the short half-mile journey by foot. Her best friend had waved goodbye through the car window. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.
When she didn’t arrive home by ten-thirty, her mother walked the route her daughter should have taken. She found nothing. The police were called, and within hours, they discovered Mari’s body in a bus depot, just two minutes from her home. She was naked except for her boots and socks.
Her blouse was tied around her neck. Her own bra had been shoved into her mouth as a gag. The post-mortem revealed 47 injuries. There were defensive wounds on her hands.
She had been dragged along the ground, and she had fought for her life. “This was a very torturous death,” investigators said. “It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t easy.
It was agonizing. ”
The small Scottish community of Kilmarnock was shattered. Every parent who had a teenage daughter kept her indoors. The police launched a massive investigation, but with no relationship between the victim and her killer, they had no starting point.
Stranger murders are the hardest to solve. Then, in early January, came the anonymous letter. It was addressed to Mari’s parents. It read: “I think my son may have killed your daughter.
” It described how the son had come home on the night of the murder and said, “I’ve done something bad. ” It ended with: “Sorry, I can’t give him up. I love him. ”
The writer never came forward.
But the police had evidence. At the crime scene, they found a torn shoelace and blood-soaked clothing. On the sleeve of Mari’s jacket, tests revealed two different sources of blood. One belonged to Mari.
The other belonged to her killer. This was 1995, and DNA testing was still new. But Strathclyde police had a plan. They would conduct one of the largest DNA screening operations ever attempted in Scotland, sampling over 20,000 men between the ages of 20 and 40 in the local area.
It was a mammoth task. They started with everyone who worked at the bus depot. Nothing. They expanded the search.
Still nothing. Then a sharp-eyed officer reviewing CCTV footage from the night of the murder spotted a familiar figure in a shopping mall just a few hundred yards from the crime scene. It was footage taken just before the murder. The man was Gavin Maguire, a 37-year-old convicted rapist who had spent most of his adult life behind bars for attacks on women.
When police interviewed him, he claimed he’d been at a bar called the Cuda Bar until 10:45 that night. But the CCTV showed him elsewhere, Christmas shopping near where Mari had been at the theater. His alibi crumbled. A search of his mother’s house recovered a piece of broken shoelace that matched the one found beside Mari’s body.
His DNA was tested, and the match was confirmed. In January 1996, he was charged with Mari’s murder. Two decades earlier, in 1976, an 18-year-old named Gavin Maguire had already been terrorizing the women of Stevenston. He had attacked a 15-year-old girl, then another 15-year-old, then an 18-year-old who managed to escape.
Released on bail for just £10, he attacked again. An 18-year-old pregnant woman was severely beaten. Then he raped a young lady, threatening her with a broken glass. He was sentenced to 10 years in a young offenders’ institution.
The judge told him the tariff was necessary to protect the girls and women of Stevenston from him. But it didn’t stop him. In the summer of 1986, 33-year-old Doris Thompson was on a family holiday at Saltcoats with her husband, her sister, and her children. One night, after a few drinks at a local pub, she found herself walking alone in the dark, deserted streets.
A man appeared from a side street and grabbed her around the neck. “Take off your tights,” he demanded. He wrapped them around her throat and pulled as hard as he could. She began to faint.
He dragged her into a gap in the harbor wall and ordered her to strip. Then he beat her, punched her, kicked her. When she told him she had five young children, one just a baby, he laughed. “How can he laugh like this?
” she wondered. After sexually assaulting her, he picked up her dress. Thinking he was going to let her go, she felt a flash of relief. Instead, he threw her off the harbor wall into the sea.
Doris struggled in the cold, dark water. She floated on her back, her head tilted to the side, watching him pace along the wall, searching for her in the moonlight. She waited until dawn began to break, then dragged herself out of the water, terrified he would see her. She was shaking, covered in blood, but she was alive.
Two days later, she spotted him in a café. She walked up to him and said, “That’s me. I’m the woman you tried to kill down at the shore. ”
He shouted, “You’ve got the wrong man.
”
But he wasn’t. Doris’s husband and bystanders held him until the police arrived. Gavin Maguire was arrested and convicted of assault and rape. The attempted murder charge was dropped, something Doris never forgave.
He was sentenced to 10 years. He served only part of that sentence. In 1993, he was released and returned to his mother’s house in Stevenston. In August 1995, just months before Mari’s murder, a 21-year-old woman was attacked in a park in nearby Kilbirnie.
A man held her in a stranglehold, but she bit his finger and escaped. Days later, she saw him in the town. He wasn’t hiding. She identified him as Gavin Maguire.
The police were alerted, and he was arrested. But the case fell apart. A doctor determined the bite injury had occurred within the last 72 hours, which was inconsistent with the victim’s timeline. The case was dropped for lack of corroboration.
Maguire was released at the end of November 1995. Nineteen days later, Mari Julian was murdered. At his trial in May 1996, the prosecution played CCTV footage showing Maguire following a young woman out of an underpass before she turned into her house. He came back and followed the victim instead.
His mother, Netti, took the stand and testified against her own son. She said she had found his jeans in the washing machine the day after the murder with blood on them. He had claimed he tripped while going to the toilet. In court, Maguire was furious.
He shouted, “You’ve not got me on video killing her, so prove it. ”
But the DNA was irrefutable. The shoelace found at the scene matched the one found at his mother’s house. The torn ends fit together perfectly.
On the 30th of May 1996, Gavin Maguire was convicted of Mari Julian’s murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The judge called the crime an atrocity without mercy. Doris Thompson was in the courtroom. When she heard the sentence, she felt relief.
But she also knew the truth. “For me, that 30 years was not enough. I don’t think a man like that should ever be released because I know what’s in him. I’ve seen it.
”
In 2002, Maguire’s sentence was reduced to a minimum of 22 years, making him eligible for parole in 2018. The rage, the urge within him, is a hard fire to extinguish. Doris still suffers from post-traumatic stress. She still remembers his words that night in 1986: “Nobody ever gets away from me.
”
“It’s never left me,” she says. “My children were my lifesaver. I had to look after them. I wouldn’t leave them.
Never. But I’m still here, and I’m living to tell the tale. ”
