The truth is often uncomfortable. Nobody knows this better than Iain McKie, a
former superintendent with Strathclyde police. For the past 11 years he has
run a campaign for justice for his daughter Shirley, the police officer
whose insistence on telling the truth led to a chain of official lies and
cover-ups that nearly destroyed both her and the reputation of Scottish
justice system.
In 1997, a fingerprint allegedly belonging to Shirley McKie was found at the
Kilmarnock home of Marion Ross, a murder victim. McKie, although part of the
inquiry team, was not authorised to enter the crime scene. To the scepticism
of everybody around her — including, initially, her father — she insisted
that she had never been in the house. It was a line she maintained despite
being hounded out of the police, arrested, humiliated, strip-searched and
tried for perjury. She was acquitted after it was proven in court that the
print was not hers.
The case, described as one of the worst miscarriages of Scottish justice in a
generation, cast doubt on the reliability of the Scottish Fingerprint
Service and the Scottish Criminal Record Office. The repercussions are still
being felt. The case led to the acquittal of David Asbury, who was wrongly
convicted on fingerprint evidence of Ross’s murder. Shirley McKie was
eventually awarded £750,000 in compensation. Earlier this month, it was
announced that there is to be an independent judicial inquiry led by a
senior Northern Irish judge, Lord Justice Campbell.
Such are the bare facts of the case. There have been many uncomfortable truths
along the way. Friends that Iain McKie hoped would stand by him disappeared
faster than a Scottish summer. The police service that he had dedicated his
working life to was shown to harbour corrupt bullies. A criminal justice
system he revered proved to be self-serving and fundamentally dishonest.
Some of the truths were deeply personal and involved McKie’s failings as a
father and a husband. But the most uncomfortable of all is the knowledge
that the very case that brought his daughter to the verge of suicide, that
left her emotionally bereft and damaged, has given him a sense of purpose,
fulfilment and, ultimately, redemption.
Shirley McKie has had enough of the campaign. She suffers from post-traumatic
stress disorder. On her doctor’s advice, she no longer gives interviews. Her
father describes her as “damaged”. She has not been able to put the horrors
of what happened to her behind her. But ask McKie if he would turn the clock
back and the answer is a disturbingly honest “No”.
“It’s been a wonderful experience for me,” he says, over coffee at the
Dunblane Hydro, where he and his wife, Mairi, are having a few days’ break.
“It’s been beneficial on so many levels. The challenge of this, for me, has
been fabulous. I feel fulfilled for the first time in my life.
It’s a remarkable journey that I would never have made if it hadn’t been for
Shirley’s case. Shirley’s case has been a vehicle for me to travel almost
from childhood to manhood. It’s been a quite incredible shift in who I am
and where I am.”
A former head of Strathclyde police’s press office, McKie is adept at
conversing with the media. With Mike Russell, who went on to become the SNP
government’s environment minister, he has co-authored a book about the
case called The Price of Innocence. There is not a shred of evidence that he
has not scrutinised in forensic detail and commented on. But one aspect that
has remained unexamined until now is his own motivation.
“As soon as you think you understand it, the goalposts shift,” he says.
“It’s easy to say, ‘It’s my daughter and I’m her father and you really want to
do all you can for your daughter,’ but that’s far too simplistic. One day
I’ll work it all out.”
It’s usually women who are portrayed as tigresses fighting for their young,
but in recent years there’s been a band of men who have pushed themselves to
the verge of destruction to uncover the truth about their daughters. These
are the original “fathers for justice”. They include Jim Swire, whose
daughter Flora died when Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie; Mick
North, who has campaigned against guns since the murder of his daughter
Sophie in Dunblane; and John Ward, whose tenacity uncovered the murder of
his daughter Julie in a game reserve in Kenya. The difference between them
and McKie is that their daughters are dead.
“Is that worse or is it better?”
he muses. “When somebody dies, their suffering is ended. What somebody like
Jim Swire has been through is dreadful, but the actual suffering of his
daughter is over. Shirley is still suffering. She is constantly before me.
My actions have profound repercussions for her. If she had gone to jail, it
would have been on my shoulders. I would have felt massive guilt about this
whole thing.
“Your daughter is alive and that’s great, but she is lying on the floor
weeping and you are doing things she doesn’t want you to do because you
believe that is the right tactic. She says she doesn’t want a manager, she
wants a father, but if she doesn’t have a manager, the thing goes down the
drain. Then you discover you enjoy it. The work is very rewarding. So where
are the boundaries in all of this? It is a strange, schizophrenic thing.”
There is something slightly surreal about sitting in a hotel lounge, while
young children play in the background, listening to this degree of
soul-searching. Perhaps McKie’s willingness to put his motivation under such
an unforgiving microscope has to do with his current job. When he retired
from the police service in 1992, aged 52, he went to university and
retrained as a counsellor. But I suspect it has more to do with an addiction
to the truth that is shared by his daughter.
Read The Price of Innocence and it quickly becomes apparent that a commitment
to “telling the truth” is the one thing that has sustained Shirley McKie
over the past decade. It’s had some unfortunate effects. “She’s not great
with relationships,” says McKie. “She finds it difficult to trust people.”
If somebody says he will phone her at 8pm but doesn’t ring until 10pm, she
gets angry. In the miasma of lies, cover-ups and fudges that characterise
the case and continue through to the top of the Scottish system, “the truth”
has taken on a grail-like significance for both father and daughter.
The only person McKie has found himself concealing the truth from is Shirley.
“I was frightened to death,” he says. “I knew what the system could do to
Shirley. I was sick to my stomach thinking about it. I had to keep her
focused and upbeat while realising the dreadful reality. I had to keep
things from her, all the time trying to protect her. It was sort of lying to
her in a way.”
McKie is the first to admit that he was not a model father when his six
children were growing up. Brought up in Girvan, his own father, a forester
who worked abroad, was absent for most of his childhood. He tried a number
of jobs, but it wasn’t until he joined the police that he found
satisfaction. The adrenaline-filled life of a CID officer suited him. It was
a hard-drinking, macho culture. “It was not a million miles away from Life
on Mars,” he says, referring to the hit television series.
McKie, who didn’t drink, acted as chauffeur for his colleagues. It was his
then-wife, Nancy, who raised the children. He remembers being asked to watch
his son play football one day. He drove to the sports ground, wound down the
car window, stuck the radio on and watched 22 wee boys run around the pitch.
When he got home, he discovered he’d been to the wrong match.
“For years I did nothing with my family,” he says. “Then all of a sudden I was
doing everything for my daughter. Shirley’s case allowed me to become a
father again. But behind it all is this self-need. I needed a challenge and
all of a sudden I got it and I was able to use all these skills I had. It’s
so complex. It’s driven by different things — fear, anger, the need to be a
father, gratification, risk-taking and excitement. I haven’t been able to
put it to bed yet, to understand it fully.”
At times he’s felt as if he has been living in a movie. It’s no surprise,
then, to discover that Peter Broughan, the producer behind Rob Roy and The
Flying Scotsman, is planning to base a film on the case.
“I find myself in a very strange place just now,” says McKie. “The emotion and
anger have gone. The thing has developed a life of its own. I sometimes
wonder where I would have been today if it hadn’t happened. I think I would
still have been very dissatisfied with my life, feeling unfulfilled, still
trying to make up for the affair.”
In 1992, McKie had an affair that tore his family apart and cost him his
marriage and home. He lived out of the back of the car for a year and then
moved to boarding houses.
“I didn’t feel good about myself,” he says. “It was a very difficult
time and I was lost. There was aggravation in the family. The children were
supportive, but they were also very supportive of their mother.” He was
getting his life back on track and had just met Mairi when his daughter
called him from her home in Troon in February 1997 to tell him that her
fingerprint had been discovered in a house she had never been in. His
initial advice to her was “to tell the truth”, because fingerprints don’t
lie.
“I didn’t believe her because I couldn’t afford to believe her,” he says. “A
fingerprint is infallible. It’s taken people to jail, to the gallows. These
things don’t happen. It was totally inexplicable.”
At the time his daughter, although recently separated from her police officer
husband, was “happy-go-lucky”. She loved dancing. She was ambitious and
doing well. McKie’s initial reservations about her making a career in the
police and, in particular, the CID, seemed unfounded. “I was amazed by her
and I was proud of her as well,” he says.
The full misogyny of the police force descended on Shirley when she stuck to
her line that she hadn’t been at the murder scene. Nasty rumours suggesting
that she had a fetish for crime scenes were circulated.
“I don’t think they would have gone for a man in the same way,” her father
says. “The police are almost like the mafia. The only thing that matters is
loyalty. We had stepped outside that and pointed the finger. Overnight, all
the friends I had in the police just vanished. The senior officers were
gutless. People crossed the road to avoid me.”
Despite spending the past five years campaigning for an independent inquiry,
McKie is ambivalent about the recent announcement. “Our justice system is
unfit for purpose,” he says. “It needs to be brought up to date. The legal
profession is incestuous. Everybody knows everybody. The system is
desperately difficult to break down. It’s not evil, but it is self-serving.
It has to change. I want to see things that haven’t been looked at in
Scotland examined openly — the lord advocate’s role, the Crown Office, the
minister for justice — not in a vengeful way, but in a
truth-and-reconciliation way. With a
new government, hopefully, we will get change.”
He believes the inquiry will draw a line under the case and he has already
moved on with his life. He has met enough obsessives to know the danger
signs. Once he might have worried he would experience a sense of anticlimax,
but not any more.
“I like Jim Swire a great deal,” he says. “But he has given 20 years to his
campaign. I couldn’t do that. How do you justify that? Surely you’ve got to
say ‘enough’? They’ve killed his daughter, but they are taking the life out
of him. Life is for living. Something good has to come out of it.”
For McKie, there has been no end of benefits. It’s brought the family together
and made him reassess his priorities. He’s reconciled with his former wife
and her new partner and he has the support of Mairi.
“I’ve become a better person because of it,” he says. “I’m still petty — I’m a
man after all, and it goes with the territory — but I’ve survived. Who else
has been given an opportunity like this? It’s made me twice the person I
was. I’m more truthful, stronger and more optimistic.”
He has, however, suffered two bouts of serious illness brought on, he
believes, by the stress of the case. The hairs on his neck still stand up
when he thinks about Shirley’s determination to commit suicide rather than
go to jail. He still cries about what has happened to Shirley and worries
about her.
“One part of her still blames me when things are going wrong. I am taking her
to places she doesn’t want to go and reminding her of things she doesn’t
want reminded of. It’s not always a joy for Shirley to see me. We’ve spent a
lot of time together, but it’s not always been good time. A lot of it has
been negative. All she wants is to be held by her dad, but there is always
an agenda and that drives a wedge. It’s quite a strange relationship to have
with your daughter.”
For Shirley, heartily sick of the campaign that has taken her name, a large
part of her life and, on occasion, her will to live, the independent inquiry
is just another hurdle to be negotiated on the long road to recovery. She
will attend and give her evidence because that is what she has always done.
The only thing she has left to give now is the truth — however inconvenient
it may be.
