Killers, Crooks and Cons by Reg McKay

Author:Reg McKay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845025540
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2012-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

MAN OF THE NIGHT

‘Is he mad?’ asked one journalist turning to an older colleague as a buzz ran through the packed court.

‘Mad? Oh, he’s mad all right,’ replied the older man. ‘The question is can he pull this off?’

‘It’s some gamble,’ continued the younger man, scribbling shorthand on his pad, ‘big stakes.’ The older man smiled and scratched the stubble on his chin from yet another hurried morning, when he’d had to rise early to queue among the other hacks to make sure he got a seat.

‘Gambling with his life?’

‘Aye, that’s …’

‘Or his final show?’

‘A show?’

‘He likes a show does our boy. Maybe this is all he wants.’

It’s what the crowd wanted, that was for sure. But this was an unexpected twist. An accused person had simply used his right to sack his lawyers and represent himself. It’s a move that judges always consider ill advised but was it pure madness in this case?

From day one on 12 May 1958, hundreds of people had queued overnight, desperate for a seat in the public benches in the famous North Court in Glasgow. Newspapers had run front-page headlines for months. It was the biggest murder trial on record in Scotland and his name was on everyone’s lips – Peter Manuel.

Accused of eight horrific murders, he would hang even if he was found guilty of just one. The evidence against him together with his own confession meant the case against was strong – very strong. Yet here he was pleading not guilty and sacking some of the best lawyers in the land. Who exactly was this Peter Manuel?

Manuel was American – by birth, at least. His parents had moved to New York searching for a better life for their family and he’d been born there. After a few years spent in New York and Detroit, the family returned to their home turf, Birkenshaw near Uddingston in Lanarkshire and, almost immediately, their middle child, Peter, was in trouble.

Kids can be cruel. Maybe it was five-year-old Peter’s broad Yankee accent, his lack of height or his Walter Mitty fantasies – whatever it was, they gave him hell and a loner was born.

Manuel was well known to the Lanarkshire cops as a petty thief from the age of ten. By eleven, he was on probation for breaking into a shop. But housebreaking was his real buzz, especially when the occupants were in. Although he was often caught, he still went back to it, getting a high from tiptoeing around someone’s home while they slept feet away in their own bed. For the young Manuel, it was an addiction.

Soon the burglaries landed him in reform schools, which were truly hellish institutions. That worried the cops and his parents but it’s what they didn’t know that should have terrified them.

Manuel loved the night. After dark, the loner would wander the fields near Uddingston at night and any unsuspecting sheep, horse or cow got the sharp end of his blade. Yet this same man loved his own family dog, an Alsatian called Rusty.

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