By Tom Wood
Contributor
The winter of 1984 into 1985 was miserable and cold in the east of Scotland.
Snow and ice lay for weeks making many minor roads impassable, and adding yet another problem for Lothian & Borders Police.
1984 had been a terrible year for the force, with the miners’ strike taking officers off the street and onto picket lines, soaring heroin deaths and related crimes, and the abduction and murder of five-year-old Caroline Hogg in Edinburgh.
Everyone in the force hoped 1985 would be a better year – but it was not to be.
On Thursday, January 17, 1985, a call came in to police headquarters reporting a possible terrorist attack at a local army barracks.
The bodies of three men had been found – apparently shot dead – near Glencorse Reservoir in Midlothian.
A local farmer had come across an army Land Rover stuck in a snowy ditch, engine still running.
The back of the vehicle was a bloody mess, with a trail of blood leading to the derelict Loganlea Cottage up a track over half a mile away.
Following the trail, the farmer came upon a horrific scene – the bodies of three men lay crumpled and bloody behind the cottage at the foot of a flight of stairs.
Two of the bodies were obviously wearing army uniform, so the farmer called the Glencorse barracks, as well as the police.
By the time the barracks received the call they had already been searching for the Land Rover and its three-man crew for over an hour.
It was overdue from the weekly payroll run to the local bank in nearby Penicuik.
On the morning of the 17th, retired major David Cunningham, staff sergeant Terry Hoskers, and private John Thomson left the barracks about 9.30am.
That day it was a small payroll – only £19,000 was picked up. Some weeks it could be as much as £60,000.
When the payroll crew failed to return from the 15-minute round trip, a call was made to the bank to confirm the money had been uplifted as usual. After an hour passed, the alarm was raised and a search began.
Standing at the top of the stairway behind Loganlea Cottage, head of CID in the Lothians Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Cunningham knew exactly what had happened to the Land Rover and its crew.
It was already obvious that two of the men had been shot in the back of the head – execution style – while the third had been sprayed with bullets across the chest and abdomen.
Cunningham was a wily and experienced detective, and knew that he and his team faced a huge challenge.
“The farmer came upon a horrific scene – the bodies of three men lay crumpled and bloody behind the cottage”
Shootings were uncommon in the east of Scotland; multiple shootings rarer still.
As a priority, he had to identify the bodies, the cause of death, and establish initial lines of enquiry.
The forensics, and particularly the ballistic evidence, would be crucial.
The back of the Land Rover was strewn with bullet cases as well as blood, indicating that many of the shots were fired there. But there were also bullet casings scattered near the deposition site of the bodies.
And there was no sign of the £19,000 payroll in small denomination notes.
On the face of it, the crimes bore some of the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, but no-one was claiming responsibility for this bloody murder.
By this time Cunningham had been joined at the scene by Colonel Clive Fairweather, the commanding officer at Glencorse.
He quickly identified the bullet cases in the back of the bloodied Land Rover as 9mm parabellum cases – a calibre not usually favoured by terrorists, but in common usage by the British Army.
Perhaps it had not been a terrorist attack, but a payroll robbery gone wrong. And if it was a robbery, was it likely that local criminals would have had the nerve to attack an army payroll when there were many softer targets about?
It seemed improbable.
Cunningham and Fairweather were beginning to suspect the robbery was an inside job.
It soon emerged that a witness who was near the bank at the time had seen four men in the Land Rover, not three.
It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that the mystery man in the vehicle was a member of staff at Glencorse, who the payroll crew recognised and trusted.
The next part of the puzzle was tracking down the gun that killed the men.
Soldiers who are not on active service are not issued with firearms. No-one at Glencorse, other than the sentries, were carrying firearms that day, but there were a large number stored in the secure armoury on the base.
A check of logs for that day showed numerous weapons signed in and out.
The barracks had been locked down immediately, so detectives quickly interviewed and eliminated all the soldiers who had drawn weapons that day – except one, a long-serving corporal instructor from The Royal Scots.
Corporal Andrew Walker, a firearms instructor at Glencorse, had drawn out a Sterling sub machine gun early that morning.
He had returned it, but now could not be traced, having left the locked-down barracks without leave.
From the logbook, the serial number of the gun Walker had taken was identified, and the gun was seized.
The gun was clean, and appeared not to have been fired – or at least it had been carefully cleaned if it had.
No ammunition had been drawn with the gun, but this was not as significant as it first appeared.
It was explained that many regular soldiers kept a few spare rounds of ammunition, left-overs from the firing ranges, so that they could make up for any accidental discrepancies.
It was strictly prohibited, but a common practice, especially among old soldiers.
Aged 32, Walker had spent more than 12 years in the army and had seen active service on three operational tours of Northern Ireland.
As it happened, Fairweather knew Walker, having had to discipline him a few weeks earlier.
The corporal had been an able firearms instructor, eager to pass his operational experience to the new recruits, but recently his performance had dropped off.
He became unreliable and went absent without leave on several occasions.
The reasons for Walker’s change of behaviour soon became clear. He had been living beyond his means and was deep in debt.
This meant Walker had not only the knowledge and the means to commit the crimes, but also a motive.
As the pieces were falling into place, the forensic scientists were doing their meticulous work.
Now that the gun that Walker had drawn from the armoury had been identified, its barrel could be carefully examined.
Each rifled barrel is different in minute detail and leaves distinct striation marks on the soft lead of a bullet head as it passes down the barrel.
The firing pins of individual weapons also leave distinctive marks on the detonator caps of bullet casings.
These unique marks can tie fired bullets to individual guns.
It was just a case of recovering a bullet to make the comparisons – but that was easier said than done.
Many of the shots fired had passed through the bodies of the men and been lost, others had been flattened so that no comparison could be made.
But one bullet was complete.
“It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that the mystery man in the vehicle was a member of staff at Glencorse, who the payroll crew recognised and trusted”
It was checked against the barrel of the gun drawn out by Walker and it was an exact match.
Walker eventually returned to barracks and attempted to bluster it out, denying all knowledge, and suggesting the IRA had been responsible.
Through the painstaking piecing together of statements, sightings and forensic evidence, the full picture of what happened that fateful January day emerged.
Walker, deep in debt but determined to maintain his lifestyle, knew the routine of the Thursday payroll so drew a Sterling sub machine gun from the armoury, loaded it with ammunition he kept as spare, then – concealing the weapon under his army coat – intercepted the Land Rover and asked for a lift back to barracks.
Being known to the payroll crew, they allowed him to jump into the back of the vehicle where he was seen by the witness outside the bank.
It was a fateful decision.
Walker denied his crimes, but a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh did not believe him and the judge Lord Grieve sentenced him to life with a minimum of 27 years, describing him as a danger to society.
Indeed, the following year he was a key player in a violent riot at Peterhead Prison.
Walker never admitted his crimes and was never paroled.
In 2009, he suffered a debilitating stroke and was released from prison in 2011 on compassionate grounds.
He died in a care home in 2021, aged 67.
The £19,000 payroll money has never been found – or at least if it has, the finder has not come forward.
Tom Wood is a writer and former police officer. In 1985, he was a chief inspector in Lothian & Borders Police.