Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel was hanged at Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow on the morning of July 11, 1958, after a jury at the High Court in Glasgow convicted him of seven murders. The killings ran from January 1956 to the first days of 1958 and took place in East Kilbride, Burnside, Mount Vernon and Uddingston. His victims, The Scotsman has reported, were male and female and ranged in age from 10 to 45. In January 1958 he gave police statements confessing to eight killings, and he was also the chief suspect in the shooting of a taxi driver near Newcastle upon Tyne in December 1957.
The case is remembered in Scotland for three things: the length of time he went uncaught, the innocent man who was charged with three of the murders, and the trial, at which Manuel dismissed his lawyers and defended himself. The press named him the Beast of Birkenshaw, after the Lanarkshire village where his family settled.
Manuel was born in Manhattan, New York, in March 1927. The Glasgow Police Museum, whose case history was compiled by the Glasgow Police Heritage Society, gives his birth date as March 15, 1927, and records that he was the second of three children of Samuel and Bridget Manuel. His parents were Scottish. After failing to settle in Detroit, the family came back to Scotland in 1932 and lived in Motherwell before moving to Coventry, in England, in 1937, when Peter was ten and still spoke with an American accent. The Scotsman has reported that the family settled in Birkenshaw, Lanarkshire, and that he was bullied as a child.
His offending started young. According to the police museum's account, in 1938 he stole an offertory box from a chapel, and from then on he was repeatedly in trouble and was sent to approved schools and borstals. At 15 he assaulted a woman during a housebreaking and was sent to Leeds Prison. His parents lost their home in the bombing of Coventry during the war and moved back to Lanarkshire, and Peter followed them there after his release from borstal.
On February 16, 1946, Manuel broke into a bungalow in Sandyhills, Lanarkshire. Detective Constable William Muncie and a local sergeant searched the house and found no one. Muncie later went back, remembering a cup that might carry a fingerprint, saw Manuel leaving the garden and arrested him. Muncie would rise to become Assistant Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police, and he was to meet Manuel again twelve years later.
While he was on bail, the police museum records, Manuel attacked three women. He was sentenced to eight years in Peterhead Prison for housebreaking and assaults, with other charges, and the judge praised the way he had conducted his own defense. He was released in the summer of 1953, at the age of 26.
Anne Kneilands was 17 and lived in East Kilbride. She disappeared on January 2, 1956, and was found dead near East Kilbride on January 4, 1956. She had been beaten to death.
Detective Chief Superintendent James Hendry of Lanarkshire CID led the inquiry. A constable, James Marr, told detectives that a Gas Board worker named Manuel, who was working in the area, had a criminal record and fresh scratches on his face. Manuel was interviewed, but his father gave him an alibi, and no further evidence was found. He was questioned and not charged. In January 1958 he confessed to her killing.
In mid-September 1956 two houses were broken into in a manner detectives came to recognize as Manuel's. A house in Bothwell was burgled on September 15, and a house in Burnside, on the edge of Rutherglen, on September 16; cash and jewelry were taken from the second.
On September 17, 1956, three women were found shot dead in Burnside: Marion Watt, her 16-year-old daughter, Vivienne, and Marion's sister, Margaret Brown. Police searched the Uddingston home of Manuel's parents and found nothing. Manuel refused to speak to detectives, and his father complained that the family was being persecuted.
Suspicion fell on Marion Watt's husband, William Watt, a former War Reserve policeman who had been away on a fishing trip in Argyll at the time, staying at Lochgilphead. Detectives ran tests to see whether he could have driven back to the Glasgow area overnight and returned to Lochgilphead before morning. Most were inconclusive, but a ferry master and another motorist picked him out at an identity parade. Watt was charged with the three murders and held in Barlinnie Prison.
Manuel was in Barlinnie at the same time. He approached Watt, claiming he knew who the real killer was. Watt's solicitor, Lawrence Dowdall, became convinced that Manuel himself was the killer, but Manuel still would not talk to the police. After 67 days in custody, the case against Watt collapsed and he was released. He had lost his wife, his daughter and his sister-in-law, and he had been held in prison accused of their murders.
In December 1957 Manuel was in the Newcastle area of northeast England for a job interview. On December 8, 1957, a taxi driver, Sydney Dunn, was shot dead there. The Glasgow Police Museum describes Manuel as the prime suspect. He was never tried for Dunn's death, and it is not among his convictions.
Isabelle Cooke was 17 and lived in Mount Vernon. She disappeared on the night of December 28, 1957, and her father reported her missing the next day, Sunday, December 29.
The inquiry drew in senior Lanarkshire officers, among them Detective Inspector John Rae and Chief Inspector Muncie. Detective Chief Superintendent Hendry, who had led the Kneilands inquiry, retired on the day Isabelle was reported missing. In his January 1958 confessions Manuel admitted killing her.
Peter Smart, 45, his wife, Doris, and their son, Michael, were killed in Uddingston at the turn of the year; The Scotsman dates the killings to January 1, 1958. They were found shot dead on Monday, January 6, 1958.
Chief Inspector Muncie was working on the Cooke inquiry when the Chief Constable of Lanarkshire, John Wilson, told him that three people had been found shot in Uddingston. Lanarkshire asked Glasgow for help, and Detective Superintendent Alex Brown and Detective Inspector Tom Goodall of the City of Glasgow Police were seconded to the inquiry.
Peter Smart's car had been taken. Detectives later found that Manuel had been driving it, and that he had even offered a lift to a policeman. Muncie remembered the young housebreaker he had arrested in 1946. The final link was money: banknotes from the Smart home were traced to Manuel's spending in local pubs.
Manuel was arrested and charged with the Smart murders on January 14, 1958. A search of his parents' home turned up goods stolen in a housebreaking in Mount Vernon. Because they had been found in his father's room, his father was arrested for reset, the Scottish offense of receiving stolen goods.
On January 15, 1958, Manuel asked to see Inspector Robert McNeill of the Lanarkshire force. That afternoon McNeill and Detective Inspector Goodall went to his cell. Manuel offered to confess on condition that his father was freed. He then made a series of confessions covering Anne Kneilands, the Watt household, the Smart family and Isabelle Cooke. Those statements brought the number of killings he had confessed to eight, and the police museum's account calls him the most prolific multiple murderer Scotland had known.
The detectives credited with the case were Superintendent Brown and Inspector Goodall from Glasgow and Muncie and McNeill from Lanarkshire.
The trial opened at the High Court in Glasgow on Monday, May 12, 1958, and lasted 14 days. The police museum calls it one of the most fully documented trials in the history of Scottish criminal justice. Manuel maintained that he was innocent, and at points in police interviews he had explained his detailed knowledge of the crimes by claiming that he had spoken to the "real" murderer, according to an account published by the Boston public broadcaster GBH in 2019. During the trial he dismissed his lawyers and conducted his own defense, as he had done at his trial in the 1940s. GBH has reported that he kept notebooks in which he planned that defense.
The jury took two hours and 21 minutes to reach its verdict. It convicted him of seven murders committed between 1956 and 1958, The Scotsman has reported. According to the police museum, he was sentenced to death at 4.45 p.m. on May 26, 1958.
Manuel appealed, and the appeal failed, the police museum records. He was hanged at Barlinnie Prison at 8 a.m. on July 11, 1958. He was 31. The Scotsman has described him as the second-to-last person hanged at Barlinnie.
GBH reported in 2019 that Muncie had pursued Manuel for twelve years, from the housebreaking of the 1940s to the gallows, and that Manuel often sent the detective birthday and Christmas cards. The same report said that documents about the case had been closed until 2033.
The number of people Manuel killed is not settled. He was convicted of seven murders and confessed to eight, and he was the prime suspect in Sydney Dunn's death, which was never tried. The Scotsman has noted that the full number of people he attacked is unclear.
Some argue that the case raises questions about how Scotland dealt with him. GBH reported that Richard Goldberg, of the law school at the University of Aberdeen, has argued that the authorities colluded to make sure Manuel was hanged even though he had been diagnosed as a psychopath. That is Goldberg's view, as reported; it was not a finding of any court.
The Scotsman has reported that the murders led to calls for a single police force for Scotland, which was created in 2013.
Martin Compston played Manuel in the ITV drama In Plain Sight. A dramatization of the trial, based on transcripts of the 1958 court case, was staged at Stirling Sheriff Court during the Bloody Scotland crime-writing festival, The Courier reported.
In 2019 the advocate Donald Findlay QC gave a public talk on Manuel's life and crimes under the title "Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel: Killer With Saintly Names and Satan's Heart," Scottish Legal News reported. Findlay called Manuel "Scotland's only true serial killer," said the story had fascinated him since childhood, and said Manuel was partly responsible for his becoming a criminal lawyer. Findlay narrates the audiobook of Allan Nicol's Manuel: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
The police museum's account records that many families, and young people in particular, felt safer across Lanarkshire after his arrest.
March 1927: Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel is born in Manhattan, New York (March 15, according to the Glasgow Police Museum).
1932: the family returns to Scotland after time in Detroit and lives in Motherwell.
1937: the family moves to Coventry, England.
1938: he steals an offertory box from a chapel; approved schools and borstals follow.
Age 15: he assaults a woman during a housebreaking and is sent to Leeds Prison.
February 16, 1946: arrested by Detective Constable William Muncie after a housebreaking in Sandyhills.
After the 1946 arrest: while on bail he attacks three women; he is sentenced to eight years in Peterhead Prison.
Summer 1953: released from Peterhead, aged 26.
January 2, 1956: Anne Kneilands, 17, goes to a dance in East Kilbride and does not return.
January 4, 1956: her body is found near East Kilbride; Manuel is questioned and not charged.
September 15 and 16, 1956: housebreakings in Bothwell and Burnside.
September 17, 1956: Marion Watt, Vivienne Watt, 16, and Margaret Brown are found shot dead in Burnside.
After September 17, 1956: William Watt is charged with the three murders and held in Barlinnie; released after 67 days when the case collapses.
December 8, 1957: taxi driver Sydney Dunn is shot dead in the Newcastle area; Manuel is the prime suspect.
December 28, 1957: Isabelle Cooke, 17, of Mount Vernon, goes to a dance and does not return; reported missing December 29.
About January 1, 1958: Peter, Doris and Michael Smart are killed in Uddingston.
January 6, 1958: the Smart family is found.
January 14, 1958: Manuel is arrested and charged with the Smart murders.
January 15, 1958: he confesses to eight killings and offers to show police where Isabelle Cooke is buried.
May 12, 1958: trial opens at the High Court in Glasgow.
May 1958: convicted of seven murders and sentenced to death (May 26, according to the Glasgow Police Museum).
1958: appeal fails.
July 11, 1958: hanged at Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, at 8 a.m.
2019: Donald Findlay QC gives a public talk on the case.