The Limbs in the Loch Murderer

In December 1999, as Scotland prepared for the biggest Hogmanay of all time, a gruesome discovery was made by a police diving team on a training exercise in Loch Lomond. One by one, limbs from a cadaver were found and brought to the surface. Days later, a severed head was washed up on a beach in western Scotland and forensically matched with the limbs. Police soon had a prime suspect for the murder—William Beggs. But how had they been able to ascertain that it was Beggs right from the start? Just eight years earlier, Beggs had met Brian McQuillan at a disco and the pair had returned to Beggs' flat. He had set upon McQuillan with a knife, slashing him severely on the body, but McQuillan escaped with his life by leaping through a first-floor window. Beggs was jailed for six years for the attack and, once released, was kept under the watchful eye of the Strathclyde police. This book investigates Beggs from his somewhat ordinary days as a member of the Young Conservatives to his eventual conviction and incarceration for the murder of Barry Wallace. It examines how he managed to create an air of respectability around himself while perpetrating the most vicious of crimes; and it looks at how, following the attack on McQuillan, police became aware that they had a serial killer in the making on their hands and how, from behind bars, Beggs still manages to make headlines.