chapter twenty
THIS IS THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON GOW’S CASE BY Fergus Donagh. Later on the articles were published as a book, and he read them out himself on the radio; I remember it being on. His voice was very ponderous and slow, but it was an interesting series because he spoke to people who were central to the story but peripheral to the court case and tended to be ignored. He interviewed most of the victims’ families, and Lara Orr as well. Susie has most of the articles. I don’t think there’s any point in my transcribing them all. They’re pretty samey, more or less descriptions of the interviewees’ poverty-ridden circumstances interspersed with heavy hints about how melancholy Donagh feels about the murders and how grim the world looks to his sensitive yet manly and unafraid Irish soul. His writing is a bit florid for my tastes.
Box 2 Document 6 Article by Fergus Donagh, Guardian, 3/16/94
Karen Dempsey is one of the least important people in the Andrew Gow story. Karen was raped and mutilated, her tongue was cut out, she was dowsed in bleach and left to die by a stinking river. It is a telling indictment that in a word search of the last four weeks, the five leading British newspapers have mentioned her name 17 times. Andrew Gow’s name has been printed 203 times. Lara Orr Gow, Gow’s wife, has been named 97 times.
Karen was twenty-one years old. Last week a box of evidence relating to her death was returned to the police, unopened by the courts. There will be no trial. Gow has pleaded guilty to the charges and has been convicted. He will be sentenced next week. The box held the clothes Karen was found dead in: the thin shirt, short skirt, and flimsy silver bomber jacket, ripped at the pocket. An officer on the case told me that the sole of her high heels was worn down on one side, the result of her lopsided walk. She had a hip operation when she was a baby, and the other girls nicknamed her Hop-along. She had done a lot of walking in those shoes.
Karen worked as a prostitute in Anderston. It is a derelict area by the waterfront with many dark doorways for illicit trysts. She was last seen approaching a man in a baseball cap at the corner. The streetlights are all overhead, and the CCTV did not capture his face. She should have been home that night. She had promised to baby-sit for a friend, but a sick child occasioned a cancellation. If the baby had been well, she would have stayed in. If she had stayed in, she would still be alive today.
Unusual for the area, Karen had no children herself. Friends have told reporters that Karen began prostituting herself to support her ailing mother, but it seems more likely that she did it to get money for drink and drugs. She was well known on the club scene but had stopped going out recently after a fight with a young woman. The police were called to the fight, but Karen and the other girl had left by the time they arrived. Had they arrested her, she might still be alive today.
Fate created a plethora of chances for Karen to escape Andrew Gow, but she didn’t take them.
Approaching Karen’s home on this cold winter morning, I found the next-door tenement block burned out, sheets of gray fiberboard nailed over the windows, and the open stairwell scarred with gang graffiti. It is an unsafe area in a bleak corner of the world.
Karen grew up and lived her short life in Lambhill. This, one of the roughest council estates in Britain, has a per capita rate of burglary and muggings three times the national average. Council houses bought in the eighties are now selling for a fraction of their original valuation. It’s an all-too-familiar story, a tale of disempowered, marginalized families surviving in an economy determined to ignore them.
Veronica Dempsey, Karen’s mother, opens the front door to her dark flat. She ushers me in, anxious that the neighbors don’t see me. Shame enough, says Dempsey, to have had a daughter killed while on the game, but to be seen talking to journalists about her would be much worse.
Hers is a poor house, neither clean nor proud. The hall has no carpet, just bare hardboard streaked black with trips from room to room. In the spare kitchen, a whitish mist I mistake for net curtains turns out to be dirt on the windows.
Dempsey is a stocky woman, looking much older than her thirty-six years. Despite a heart condition, she chain-smokes Kensas Club. The fingers on her right hand are tobacco-stained. Karen was conceived when Veronica was only fourteen, but she is at pains to point out that she didn’t give birth until she was fifteen. Her parents put her out of the house and the child’s father moved away, but Veronica refused to give up her untimely daughter. She kept her child and did her best to bring the baby up decently. Veronica has never worked herself and knows few who have.
I’m the only one Dempsey has spoken to, she wants me to know that. She promises that she won’t speak to the other papers. It is only at the end of our conversation that I realize Dempsey expects to get paid. She doesn’t know that it is customary to negotiate payment in advance of giving an interview. I tell her I’m from a broadsheet and we don’t tend to pay people for stories. She doesn’t know what a broadsheet is, she says. All she knows is that Karen was all she had and now Karen is dead.
Veronica Dempsey is typical of the Riverside Ripper families. Hopeless people at the bottom of the social scale striving to make sense of a brutality that is beyond them. Their families are poor and helpless, neither able to organize nor well-resourced enough to take on the powers that be.
Now that the trial is over and Gow has been convicted, an army of questions remains unanswered. How could Gow cruise the same small group of women in an area the size of Regent’s Park, kill five, and only be caught because he confessed? Why was a multiphasic task force not set up until after the third death? Why did no one in the NCSOD claim jurisdiction over the series of crimes? Where is the companion who helped him with the first and third murders?
The DNA evidence was not foolproof: the semen samples from the bodies were badly compromised by the bleaching. Other than that, all the evidence the police had against Gow was the blood in his car and his lack of an alibi. Why didn’t his defense argue that Gow, while admittedly a rapist and possibly the driver, was not the killer? It hardly feels like justice at all.
Alice Thompson’s name has not even reached seventeen hits in the coverage. She has been mentioned only twelve times because her family refused to release a photograph to the press. Her two sons are thirteen and fourteen now. They came to the court with their father and sat next to him. Their father was drunk and shouted abuse at Lara Orr in the lobby of the court. He hadn’t lived with Alice Thomson for six years. The boys hadn’t seen her for three.
Elizabeth MacCorronah was a registered heroin addict. Her husband, also an addict, had been killed in a house fire two years before. Her three children were in care at the time of her murder. No one from her family came to the trial. Martine Pashtan’s husband moved back to Birmingham, taking with him their son, now a year old. Mary-Ann Roberts was forty-one years old and the most experienced of the women. She left no one.
This series of articles is depressing, but I think they’re meant to be. Excused as a cry for justice and a forum for pointing out the inadequacies in the police handling of the case, they’re really designed to give the middle classes a frisson of terror at the missing social safety net. I heard Donagh argue on a radio-show debate that he wasn’t cashing in by writing these articles. He was moved to pursue the case because none of the victims’ families were able to demand answers or to comment on the quality of the police investigation. He got a big round of applause, and I think he was right. These victims won’t be celebrated; they won’t be remembered as anything other than a footnote in a true-crime book. Not for them the self-named foundations doing good or ardent family campaigns advocating a cosmetic reform to some small point of law. Grief-stricken campaigning families used to mystify me, but they make perfect sense now. If I could think of anything to campaign about, I’d love to set one up for Susie. I could pour my energies into it, meet new friends through it, work really hard at wrestling order from a chaotic universe.