The divers were just out on a routine training exercise in Loch Lomond, a cold December morning with snow, rain, and high winds battering the pier at Rowardennan. Jeff Adams was supervising the team as they entered the icy water, when one of them surfaced holding something aloft. An arm. The officer thought it was a practical joke at first, maybe a mannequin his colleagues had planted to test his search technique.
He held it up as if to say, “Found it. ” Very quickly, we realized it wasn’t a joke. It was a severed human arm, and part of a leg was found nearby. Detective Superintendent John Mitchell was called in.
It was an unusual crime for Scotland, body parts turning up in a local loch. The area was sealed off, and a specialist water team began scouring the depths with sonar and underwater cameras. But sonar is a crude method; you can’t beat putting a police diver in the water to search properly. Over the following days, divers recovered two hands, two arms, two lower legs, one thigh, and a foot.
The victim was a slightly older male, they thought, but they weren’t sure. They kept searching. Seven miles south, at the quiet village of Balmaha, they found more. The conditions were different there, muddy and with very poor visibility.
The divers had to work by touch, feeling through the mud with their fingertips. What they found was chilling: body parts with clear impressions of handcuffs around a lower leg. Restraining someone with handcuffs speaks to a need to dominate and control, a sexual turn-on for the offender. It’s rare to see that in a killing for money or revenge.
By now, the press had caught wind of the search. The assumption was gangland crime, a falling out between criminals. But detectives were scouring missing person reports and had a possible name: Barry Wallace, an 18-year-old last seen the day before the body parts were discovered. Barry was a good lad, a normal teenager working at a supermarket in Kilmarnock.
He’d been out for a Christmas night out with friends, had a lot to drink, and was last seen drunk, trying to get a taxi home. He never arrived. He had no history of going missing, no involvement in criminality, no family issues. He just disappeared into thin air.
The search of the loch continued, but the pathologist’s examination of the limbs offered few clues. The bones were cut with a fine-tooth saw, but nothing more specific. Then, on December 15th, came the most grisly discovery yet. A woman walking her dog on a beach on Scotland’s west coast, more than 50 miles from Loch Lomond, found two bags.
Inside was a human head. The head was so well preserved by the cold sea water that the victim’s identity could be confirmed. It was Barry Wallace. Detectives had to go and see his parents.
They were two of the nicest people I’ve ever met. The family liaison officer took Barry’s dad to Glasgow to identify him. People were horrified, stunned, shocked that an innocent boy could end up in this situation. The timeline was alarming.
Barry went missing in the early hours of Sunday morning, and the first body parts were found early Monday. Whoever did this acted quickly and could well have done it before. Police checked the computer system for anyone with a record of dismemberment. There was a very short list of one person: William Frederick Beggs, a known local offender with a violent past.
Beggs had previously stood trial for an incident in Kilmarnock eight years earlier, in 1991. He’d met a man in a gay bar in Glasgow, invited him home, drugged his drink, and attacked him with a knife, trying to cut him up. The victim jumped out a window to escape and was found by a local resident. Beggs was sentenced to six years.
But there was more. He had also been imprisoned for the murder of a 28-year-old man in 1987, but the conviction was quashed on appeal. The appeal court ruled that evidence of his other woundings had unfairly tainted the jury’s opinion. Under the law at the time, he couldn’t be retried for the same crime.
He was a free man. Beggs started a new life, moving north to Scotland. The details of that murder, for which he was the only suspect, were worryingly similar to the crime police were now investigating. There had been attempts to dismember the body.
Officers in Kilmarnock were aware of his previous convictions and were keeping an eye on him. Police didn’t publicly name Beggs, but it wasn’t long before the media came to its own conclusions. The press started printing things about Beggs’s previous incidents, his convictions, his lifestyle, even rumors that he kept Barry’s head in his fridge. All that does is prejudice a future trial.
An individual is supposed to have a fair trial without his background being brought into public knowledge. The press’s freedom to speculate risked jeopardizing the entire investigation. Police put together a timeline of Beggs’s movements. They realized that on the morning Barry was last seen in the town center, Beggs would have been approaching Kilmarnock around the same time, coming in the same way Barry was walking.
That’s how they could have met. Then came another key discovery. On December 7th, Beggs took a ferry from Troon over to Northern Ireland. We believe that’s when he threw Barry’s head off the side of the ferry.
He may have thought dropping it from a moving vessel would make it less likely to be found, but it makes no difference. The head would still wash up on that beach. Police obtained a warrant to search Beggs’s flat in Kilmarnock, but the press were already there, and the flat was empty. Beggs was at work, but he heard a radio broadcast about the raid on his house.
He fled. He got on the run. It was very frustrating for us. On December 28th, Beggs made an unexpected move.
He handed himself in to Dutch police, with one of the top extradition lawyers in Amsterdam. He was pleading innocent and fighting extradition. The Netherlands was one of the most difficult countries to be extradited from. His plan was that we would never get him back.
But his scheme backfired. Because he was fighting extradition, it allowed the inquiry team to carry out more exhaustive investigations. Forensic officers returned to Beggs’s home and spent weeks gathering evidence. They found items of blood, which were confirmed to be Barry Wallace’s blood.
Detectives also appealed to the gay community for information and got an immediate response. People came forward because a lot of them were frightened of him. This was a dangerous man, a fiend, a monster. We needed to get him behind bars for everyone’s safety.
Around January 8th, Barry’s torso was found a mile and a half away from Balmaha. The parts of the body were spread over four different locations, clearly an attempt to make it harder to find. The post-mortem on the torso failed to find drugs in the victim’s system, despite a needle mark on an arm. The dismemberment made it impossible to prove a cause of death.
This was a serious blow to the extradition case. But then the pathologist uncovered something that shocked the entire team: evidence of sexual assault. The injuries were so severe that it was highly unlikely anyone would have consented to that degree of violence. Add that to the presence of handcuffs, and it pointed very strongly to a violent sexual assault as a component of a violent overall assault.
Beggs was gay, but Barry Wallace was heterosexual. Beggs had admitted he preferred the company of what he regarded as straight men. His enjoyment came from forceful homosexual activity, from taking advantage of young men who would find being sexually assaulted by a man particularly horrifying. At that point, we had to make Barry’s parents aware.
I don’t think I had a more difficult conversation in my entire police career. The extradition case was granted, but Beggs appealed, arguing that due to press coverage, he couldn’t receive a fair trial in Scotland. Eventually, they ruled that he could be extradited. He was absolutely shocked.
During the trial at Edinburgh High Court, a picture emerged of Barry’s final hours. Beggs was coming into Kilmarnock. Barry was walking home drunk. Beggs offered him a lift.
They went to Beggs’s flat. Beggs gave him something that made him pass out. When Barry woke up, he was being sexually assaulted. He was handcuffed and struggled so hard that he scraped the bones in his wrist.
A senior police casualty surgeon described it as the worst handcuff injury he had ever witnessed. One witness revealed a chilling detail. On the Sunday, Beggs phoned a close friend and said he’d picked up a young sweet guy the night before. Looking at the timeline, it’s more than likely that’s when he was at or near Loch Lomond, either going to deposit Barry’s remains or coming back.
It’s chilling. More forensic evidence emerged. When Beggs fled the country, he drove to Luton Airport, where his car was discovered. His car revealed Barry’s blood.
The defense claimed the victim had consented to sex, and that the death was the consequence of a sex game gone wrong. They argued it wasn’t murder, but culpable homicide, which would have meant a lesser sentence. There was a dramatic moment when the jury came back to ask the judge for guidance on the difference between culpable homicide and murder. We thought they might be acquitting him of murder.
The jury was given clarification, and the detail of the victim’s injuries was read out. Then the jury of 15 men and women retired to make their decision. After a trial lasting nearly three weeks, William Frederick Beggs was found guilty of the murder of Barry Wallace. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation for a minimum custodial term of 20 years.
Under Scottish law, Beggs wouldn’t even be considered for parole for two full decades. There wasn’t a lot of reaction from Beggs, whether he was resigned to the outcome. But even with the killer behind bars, some questions remained. During the initial search of the house, investigators found stains of human blood, male human blood, which was not identified and still has not been identified.
They found blood samples of 17 other males. It suggests that other men have been in that flat, other young men, and they’ve been attacked and possibly even murdered. Beggs was picking men who were much less likely to come forward, stacking the deck as much as possible in his favor. I’m a firm believer that there are other victims.
The impact this man has had on the Wallace family is beyond belief. But not just the Wallace family, other families in this country and in other countries. He’s been, in my opinion, a serial predator. While everyone was pleased that there was a conviction, it didn’t alter what they had gone through.
It didn’t alter what had happened to Barry. And I think they have shown tremendous courage in the way that they have continued their lives since then.
