William Watt was on a fishing holiday at Lochgilphead in September 1956 when someone broke into his bungalow in High Burnside, on the edge of Rutherglen, and shot his wife, Marion, forty-five, their sixteen-year-old daughter, Vivienne, and Marion's sister, Margaret Brown, forty-one, as they lay in bed. Vivienne had been sexually assaulted. Watt, a master baker, became the chief suspect in the murder of his own family and spent sixty-seven days in Barlinnie prison before the case against him collapsed. The man who had done it, Peter Manuel, later met him at a Glasgow hotel and described things inside the house that only the killer could have known.
Manuel was born in Manhattan on March 13, 1927, to Scottish parents who took the family back to Lanarkshire when he was five. He was in approved schools from the age of eleven and had convictions for housebreaking, indecent assault and rape by his early twenties, one of them bringing an eight-year sentence. He was articulate, vain and a persistent liar, and he had a habit of approaching police with information about crimes he claimed to be helping with. The Scottish press called him the Beast of Birkenshaw, after the village where he lived with his parents.
The killing began on the night of January 2, 1956, at East Kilbride, where he was working as a gas fitter. Anne Kneilands, seventeen, had left home to meet a date. He followed her onto the golf course, raped her and beat her to death with a length of iron. Her body was found two days later, and the marks on the ground showed she had been running. Because he was a known sex offender, police questioned him; his father, Samuel, gave him an alibi. When the Watts were killed that September, he was out on bail for a burglary.
He spent part of 1957 in Barlinnie for housebreaking. Released that November, he went to Newcastle to look for work, and in December a taxi driver there, Sydney Dunn, was shot dead. A coroner's jury found after Manuel's execution that he had killed Dunn. He came back to Scotland just before Christmas, and the pace quickened. On December 28, Isabelle Cooke, seventeen, left her house in Mount Vernon to meet her boyfriend at a bus stop for a dance at Uddingston Grammar School. She never reached him. Manuel raped and strangled her and buried her in a field. Only pieces of her clothing were found until he led police to the spot himself. "I think she is here," he told them. "I think I'm standing on her now."
In the early hours of New Year's Day 1958 he broke into the Uddingston home of Peter Smart, forty-five, and shot Peter, his wife, Doris, forty-two, and their son, Michael, ten, in their beds. Then he stayed in the house for several days, eating their food, using their car and feeding the family cat. Peter Smart had drawn new banknotes for a holiday, and the serial numbers ran in sequence. Manuel spent them in Glasgow bars, and that was how he was caught. He was arrested on January 13, 1958. When his father was charged over stolen goods found at the family home, Manuel made a written confession to the murders, apparently so that he would be allowed to see his parents.
His trial at the High Court in Glasgow ran from May 12 to May 29, 1958, before Lord Cameron. He pleaded not guilty and withdrew the confession, saying it had been coerced. Partway through the trial he dismissed his counsel, Harald Leslie among them, and conducted his own defense. William Watt, recently hurt in a road accident, was brought into court on a stretcher to give evidence, and Manuel cross-examined the man his crime had put in prison. His account of the Smart killings included the claim that Peter Smart had murdered his family and then himself. Lord Cameron told the jury he had conducted his defense "with a skill that is quite remarkable." The charge of murdering Anne Kneilands had been withdrawn for want of evidence, and the jury convicted him on the seven others.
He did not appeal. Harry Allen hanged him at Barlinnie at one minute past eight on the morning of July 11, 1958. He had confessed to Anne Kneilands's murder, and he was suspected of several more deaths beyond the nine now laid at his door; later writers have argued that the police, building so large a case, set aside evidence of others.