
By Jane Hamilton
Author, and former Daily Record crime reporter
When Gina McGavin’s mother Mary was murdered in 1984, she didn’t just lose a parent, she lost every chance of knowing who her mother really was.
Mary McLaughlin, 58, was found strangled in her Glasgow flat on October 2 – six days after she was killed. Her body was discovered by her son who had popped in to visit her.
She was lying on her bed, her body cold. Her killer had used the cord from her dressing gown to strangle her.
For decades, her murder remained unsolved. The police file gathered dust, buried in the archives of Scotland’s cold cases.
But for Gina, now 71, the file never closed. She carried it with her through marriages, motherhood, and heartbreak.
And after 35 years, a DNA match finally identified her mother’s killer: Graham McGill, a convicted rapist who was on home leave from prison the night Mary died.
I first met Gina while covering the case for the Daily Record as part of an unsolved murder series I was writing in 2016.
As a crime journalist for over two decades, I’ve spoken to many families wrecked by murder.
But there was something about Gina’s story. She wasn’t just devastated, she was determined. She didn’t just want a headline, she wanted the truth.

That’s why we wrote My Mother’s Murder. This isn’t a book about a killer. It’s a book about a woman whose life was cut short, and a daughter who never stopped asking why.
Mary wasn’t the mother Gina grew up with. She wasn’t even the mother who raised her. Like many women of her generation, Mary had a complex, sometimes chaotic life.
She had 11 children by two different partners, and left most of them behind at various points.
Gina was raised by her father, Joe. She saw her mother only occasionally. Their relationship was fractured and sometimes painful.
Mary wasn’t cruel, but she wasn’t maternal in the traditional sense either. That sense of abandonment haunted Gina long before her mother’s death did. After the murder, things got worse.
Whispers swirled in Partick. Rumours that Mary had a ‘dark past’, that men had been in and out of the flat, that someone close to her knew more than they were letting on.
“Part of me thought someone in my family might have been involved,” Gina admitted to me during one of our many interviews. “That was the hardest thing, not knowing if the person who did it had sat at my table.”
She tried for years to get the case reopened. Sometimes resources and staffing issues, or a lack of new leads, meant the police weren’t interested.
“There was something about Gina’s story. She wasn’t just devastated, she was determined”
David Threadgold, SPF chair
Too long had passed. The forensic science didn’t exist. Mary didn’t tick the boxes for public outcry or political pressure. But Gina kept pushing.
In 2017, cold case detectives quietly reviewed the evidence. A small amount of semen on Mary’s nightdress was sent for reanalysis. The profile came back in 2019 and it matched McGill.
He had been in prison for rape at the time of Mary’s death. He was granted home leave and returned two days later. He never mentioned Mary.
There was no forced entry at her flat. He followed her home and killed her. Then he left again, and it wasn’t until 2021 that he was finally convicted.
I covered the case from 2016. After the trial, I wrote the story behind the verdict from Gina’s point of view. But what emerged during those many conversations with Gina was far bigger than a single feature.
She didn’t just want to write a book. She wanted to reclaim her mother’s story.
I’ve spent most of my life chasing other people’s horrors, killers, rapists, cover-ups, corruption. But this case was one of several that hit me differently.

As a reporter, you learn to detach. You sit in homes where people describe the unimaginable, then you go back to the office and file your copy. But with Gina, it was personal. Not just for her, but for me.
We’d built trust. She wasn’t a statistic or a sob story. She was a woman who had lived in the shadow of trauma for most of her life and still refused to be bitter.
Working together on My Mother’s Murder meant long conversations, revisiting grief, digging into secrets even Gina didn’t want to confront.
She told me: “It’s not just about the murder. It’s about the legacy. My mother’s death damaged all of us. I carried the shame. The guilt. The wondering. And even now, I’m not sure the full truth came out in court.”
Because even after McGill’s conviction, Gina isn’t convinced he acted alone. The book explores that theory and tells some hard truths.
“As a journalist, I could not understand why politicians and much of the media showed such little interest in what was happening”
The hardest part of writing this book wasn’t reliving the murder, it was confronting Mary’s life.
She wasn’t a saint. She made choices that fractured her family. She hurt people. But she didn’t deserve to die alone, murdered in the place she called home.
We could have written a neat true crime story: killer caught, justice served, daughter heals. But that’s not real life. The truth is far messier.
Gina is still reckoning with who her mother was and who she could have been.
I’ve sat across from dozens of grieving families. But rarely do they have the clarity or courage to stare into the abyss and write it all down. Gina did.
My Mother’s Murder is for Mary, but it’s also for the women like her. The ones who fall through the cracks, who get labelled ‘troubled’ or ‘unworthy’, whose deaths don’t make the front page unless someone keeps shouting.
It’s also for the daughters. The sons. The children who grow up carrying questions no one wants to answer.
Gina’s story proves that you don’t need to be a detective to solve a mystery. You just need to refuse to let it go. It’s a book for the forgotten.
My Mother’s Murder is available from July 3 at bookshop.org and in all good bookshops.