Friday night and it was freezing, one of the coldest nights of the winter. But it was warm inside Base 75, the prostitutes' drop-in centre in Glasgow. Margo Lafferty lingered there for a while, trying on a new suit she'd bought. It was pale blue lace, a wee skirt and top to match, nice, though one of the other girls teased her about putting on weight.

Then Margo went out to work. At some point in the early hours of Saturday, 28th February, she went to one of the lanes that run off Glasgow's major shopping and business streets. There are security lights up on the buildings, so you'd think there'd be nowhere to hide there, but look in most of the doorways and you'll find a used condom. In a dark car park in one of the lanes, 27 year old Margo was found dead, viciously battered and strangled and lying in a swamp of mud and blood. She was left naked, a detail which made the other working girls pause. Margo would never have undressed for a client.

 . . . reading on

Sex on Glasgow's streets is a brutal business - Margo is the seventh prostitute to be murdered here in six years. Seven murders and not one has produced a conviction: the men accused in two cases were acquitted and suspects in two others were never even brought to trial. There have been no arrests in the last three murders. But then prostitute murders are notoriously difficult for the police. As many as 35-40 went unsolved in England and Wales last year.

Traditionally prostitutes have always been regarded as worthless in our society, their deaths of little moment. The lives of ordinary women are of no interest to the press and that is even more true of these women whose lives are less than ordinary. They become a quick headline, usually with the word 'hooker' or 'junkie' in it, and their stories are discarded as lightly as their lives.

All of the murdered women were drug addicts, Diane McInally in 1991, Karen McGregor in 1993, Leona McGovern and Marjorie Roberts in 1995, Jackie Gallacher in 1996, Tracey Wylde in 1997 and now Margo Lafferty. But some were further down the line than others. Tracey Wylde, the 21year old single mother who was murdered in November, only went out on the street a couple of nights a week. Her three year old daughter Megan was always beautifully dressed and their flat impeccably kept.

Tracey was killed in the early hours of Monday 24th November in her top floor flat. Like most post-war flats these have poor soundproofing. You can hear neighbours' conversations and kids running about and floorboards squeaking. But nobody heard anything that night, not even Kelly McCord (not her real name), a young mother living downstairs who was often up in the night for her 11 week old baby.

'I feel sad for her,' says Kelly. 'It couldn't have been an easy life for her.' Tracey was brought up by her grandparents, and her grandfather, whom she called 'Dad,' came up to the flat most days. He even dropped her off in the town sometimes when she went to work on the streets. If Tracey felt her life was difficult she never said so. She was warm and funny, talking to everybody. People were always trooping up and down the stairs to her flat, till neighbours wondered if she was a dealer.

Her friends say she wasn't, that she was a timid girl who couldn't say no. 'I was shocked when I heard about the prostitution,' says Kelly. 'I said to her about the risks she was taking, but she said she'd rather go out and earn money like that than steal it off anyone else. She knew what that was like.'

The constantly shifting nature of the drug world has made it difficult for Strathclyde police to track down the prostitute killers. We are talking killers in the plural here. The police have found nothing to link any of the murders. It would be easier if there was a single serial killer out there, one man to pin all the darkness to; one man to take the blame for all the men who beat and stab and rape and live off these girls.

Diane McInally was the first to die, on October 15th, 1991. She was 23 years old and she came from the Gorbals, where drugs are sold in broad daylight in some of the streets. But they found her body in Pollok Estate, home of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow's famous art gallery. There she lay, the junkie hooker, hidden under the bushes in her black mini-dress and stockings, with nothing but the clothes she died in. Left for dead near the shipping tycoon William Burrell's temple to art, his magpie hoard of artifacts from places Diane couldn't dream of going to.

Two men were arrested for the murder - said to be over money Diane owed them for drugs - but no charges were ever made by the Procurator Fiscal (Prosecutor). There just wasn't enough evidence. But Scotland's legal system, with its Not Proven verdict, has also contributed to the police's problems in solving the murders. It's a verdict that is fine and logical in theory, but in practice allows juries to absolve themselves from the responsibility of making a decision. Take the case of Karen McGregor, who in April 1993 was found dead at the Scottish Exhibition Centre. 26 year old Karen had been struck viciously round the head and face, battered with a hard object; her neck had been throttled and she had either been raped or an object had been forcibly inserted into her private parts.

Her husband, Charles McGregor, was charged with the murder. He appeared in court with a new short hair cut and a smart suit and overcoat, looking like a prosperous young businessman, not the desperate, drugged-up addict he was. A street girl gave evidence that Karen was fed up giving all her money over to him for his habit. Another woman said she saw him in the cemetery, crouched over his wife's grave and saying, 'I'm sorry, Karen. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it.'

Two witnesses retracted their statements in court. Both had told the police that they saw McGregor battering his wife to death with a hammer. A third witness stuck to his story of having seen Karen's cut and bruised body through the curtains. He had been afraid, and had run off home without going into the house. Charles McGregor left court with a Not Proven verdict.

He died recently, of a drugs overdose. A sad life, sad man, a sad end. But an end that in his world was the norm. Take the case of Leona McGovern, who was murdered on a warm summer night in 1995. Her best friend had died just before - Leona had found her dead in bed. And then two weeks before Leona's murder, her boyfriend died of an overdose. 'He meant a lot to her. When he died she really lost it,' says Detective Chief Inspector Nanette Pollock, who was in charge of the investigation.

Leona was tiny, barely five feet tall, though her slight build made her look even smaller. She was skippering, living rough. On the night she died she owed a dealer money and asked her brother for the loan of £35, but he didn't have it to give her. It was June, bright and sunny. At seven o'clock in the evening a security guard saw a man stabbing something on the ground. He thought it was a bag of rubbish. He did not think he would ever walk along a Glasgow street and see a murder in broad daylight. But he did. He saw Leona McGovern being stabbed seven times with a screwdriver.

In court the man accused of her murder was acquitted on a Not Proven verdict. He fingered another man, a man who had been with Leona in the last two weeks of her life, not as a boyfriend but as a pal. Like her he too was homeless. 'Homeless people tend to stick together,' says Nanette Pollock. 'They're in the same situation. She'd lost a lot in her life.'

Drugs left all the girls open to attack, but at least three of them were also inexperienced. Tracey Wylde, Marjorie Roberts and Jacqueline Gallacher had all been on the street only five or six months. Jacqueline's own mother didn't even know she was on the game. 'I know those girls,' says Alice Wilson. 'See the way they're dressed? When I saw Jacqueline she was never like that. She was always prim and proper. People used to say, My God, she's beautiful. If she was a wee bit taller she could be a model.' Like Leona McGovern and Margo Lafferty, Jackie was only five feet tall. But then these are the logistics of assault the world over - the small, the slight, the vulnerable all are easy targets.

Jacqueline's partner, Gordon Fraser, is vulnerable in a different way, a wreck of a man destroyed by grief - and drugs. He describes his life with Jackie as idyllic, marred only by the drugs and his various spells in prison for shoplifting. She wrote to him when he was inside, hundreds of love letters that he keeps in plastic shopping bags. 'Gordon, I know myself it's not going to be long till you're walking through the door, and baby I will be there for you. I always will be, Gordon, no matter what. You know that yourself, baby.'

They met when Jacqueline was a teenager and Gordon 10 years older. He was taking drugs when she met him; so were most of her friends. But she seems to have been besotted with him. 'On our 10th anniversary together she was running and singing, Our House in the Middle of the Street,' remembers Gordon. 'She was happy. I came in with a big, massive card and I got her a gold necklace. She loved gold. I put bits of gold in her coffin, things that we'd given each other.'

Six months after Jacqueline's death, Gordon was up on the roof of his close, throwing down slates and threatening to set fire to and kill himself. Without Jackie his life seems to have disintegrated. Perhaps it was disintegrating already. On his last prison stint Jacqueline didn't visit him the way she had before. 'She knew I hated this,' admits Gordon. 'I told her, I worry about you from the moment you walk out that door to the moment you walk back in. It's frightening. You don't know how much strain you're putting on me.'

Jacqueline was picked up by car from the drag in Glasgow, but her partially clothed body was found near a bus stop in Bowling, a village some way out of the city. She was hidden in shrubbery and wrapped in an unusual home-made curtain, in grey and pink fabric, its white lining covered with blue polka dots. It's the nearest to a detective novel clue the police have had in any of the killings, but not even a showing on 'Crimewatch' has unearthed it provenance.

For the police this is just part of the long, painful process of trying to solve prostitute murders. It's like trying to trap moonlight. There are around 100 unsolved on the Holmes computer, the country-wide police database. The girls can't remember; the places are remote and dark; the punters fade away into the shadows. 'The same names come into the frame all the time, the same punters, the same cars going down the drag, the same car numbers,' sighs D.C.S. Fleming. 'But folk don't want to get involved.'

Even when a murder appears to be solved, there is the difficulty of pinning down the evidence. Marjorie Roberts' body was pulled out of the River Clyde in August 1995, four days after she drowned. The Citywatch cameras picked her up, walking down by the river with a man. A month later the same man was in trouble again after trying to push another working girl into the river. She struggled with him and ran for help to a taxi driver, but afterwards she didn't want to take matters further. She was a prostitute and she slipped back into the shadows, leaving the procurator fiscal unable to put forward a case. 'She was a drug addict. They don't care about their own life,' says Marjorie's younger sister, Betty.

It was Marjorie's boyfriend who introduced her to drugs, temgesics at first, until people began selling heroin in the scheme where they lived. Marjorie's boyfriend left her and their two children and she started letting prostitutes use the house to take their hits. 'He came back when Maj was on the game, but he just went, "Well, hen. As long as you're using plenty of protection." He didn't care,' says Betty venomously. In the last few months of her life 34 year old Maj seemed to be slipping downhill. The doctor put her on Valium and she looked like a skeleton. Her habit grew. She had thick black curly hair and one day she came in and sat with the black weight of hair all over her face. She sat for eight hours. 'She was dead shy and quiet. She never had any confidence. That's how we couldn't believe she could go and do that,' says Betty.

There were no marks on Marjorie's body and no witnesses, nothing to say she didn't slip accidentally into the water and drown. Betty stands looking at the river running where her sister died. 'When she went into that Clyde she had no strength to fight. She had Valium in her body. It's been dark. Pitch black. No lights or anything. ...'

It's a strange and potent experience to stand in a place where you know someone has been murdered, as if the ground there takes on some deep meaning. What is there here, in the lane where Margo Lafferty died? Only a few flowers, bleached of colour in the darkness. You need to flick on a cigarette lighter to see the small card attached to one bunch. My Angel, it says. Mum.

Margo Lafferty was no angel. Some people say she was violent to other women, a drug dealer as well as user. Others say she was kind, the sort of girl who'd give you money if you wanted to get tights from the all night garage down by the river. She was certainly brave, as all the women who walk the streets are. On the threshold of the disused car park where she died, it is so dark that you can't see what is in front of you. You have to put a foot out to test the ground, which is shifting with water and mud.

Inside there are a few places where light from a building hits the wall, but just a step takes you back into the shadows, with old plastic sheeting and bits of tree branch. This is no place to be, this piece of muddy ground, open to the sky. Outside you hear people shouting from a street beyond, but you don't go to help them, any more than anyone came to help a woman who was dying.

Madge

Follow up story on the mother of one of the victims

This story appeared in The Sunday Herald, 25th February, 2001

The place where Margo Lafferty died on February 28th 1998 was a grim tract of desolation in the middle of the city. In this muddy yard, just off streets that were thronging with people during the day, Margo, the latest but undoubtedly not the last prostitute to be murdered in Glasgow, fought bitterly with her killer, gouging proof of her desperation to live into his face. Afterwards the yard was locked and chained, no longer open to the contemplation of the curious. It was as if the people who owned it wanted to forget it had ever been the locus of such a terrible and violent event, wanted an end to their own unwilling involvement in it.

Such an end has not been possible for Margo’s mother Madge Lafferty, never could be for any mother who has lost a child. But Madge’s pain was compounded by having to live again the rawness of her daughter’s death. Just days before the third anniversary, she had to endure the suspense of watching Margo’s convicted killer, Brian Donnelly, stand trial all over again - not because further evidence had come to light but because the original trial judge had misdirected the jury. ‘Everything came to the fore again as if the last two years had never happened,’ she says. ‘I’ve just got to start all over again. You never come to terms with it. You accept it. You know it’s happened. I don’t sit and wait for her phone calls now, which I did for a long long time.’

She was there every day in Glasgow’s High Court during the first trial in November 1998, listening intently as calm-voiced pathologists and forensic scientists rehearsed the minute detail of her daughter’s injuries, the repeated blows to the head, the smashing of her head against a wall, the mad throttling of her neck that resulted in death by strangulation. They even described the contents of Margo’s stomach, the ordinary white bread, the orange segment she’d gulped down, the one cherry from a can of fruit cocktail.

By the time of the second trial Madge Lafferty was missing from the South Court for days on end, unable to listen to it all over again, unable to bear the photos of her daughter’s naked body curled up on her side as if in the foetal position. Unable to hear them talking dispassionately of the tide mark of dirt round Margo’s buttocks where her killer had dragged her across the stagnant pools and churned up mud of the yard. ‘When people hear the word “prostitute” they think, Dirty midden. But Margo used to do my head in with her showers and baths. She’d have three or four a day. She was so very very clean. When she had her own wee house you could have eaten a meal off the floor. She was very particular about herself and her environment.’

Madge herself is immaculate, a tiny, neat woman whom grief has made two-dimensional. Her eyes are unreadable as two currants on a gingerbread lady, and every day she seems to weigh less and less, as if the pain of her life has leached all appetite, all joy from her. Margo was the second of her seven children to die. Her son Billy was killed in a road accident at the age of 18. ‘That was different,’ she sighs. ‘Nobody forcibly took his life. The last time I saw him I was working night shifts at the Central Hotel. I can still see him standing looking out the window. After the accident he had a bandage round his head and was hooked up to machines. The hardest thing was when the doctor told me they were going to switch them off; he’d been brain dead for 24 hours. But you could say your final goodbye to him. You could feel him going away. With Margo there was nothing. The sense of loss was unreal. It was as if she’d walked out the door and I had to go and look for her because she wasn’t there any more.’

If Madge Lafferty compels sympathy it is not because she solicits it. She is absolute in her dignity, absolute in her loss. Her life has not been easy. Her husband Billy died in 1974, when Margo was only a toddler of three or four. He’d been out drinking the night before and choked in his sleep. If he’d been a drinker, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened, but he was a labourer and couldn’t afford it. He only went out with his pals every six or seven weeks.

After he died Madge was left to struggle along on her own. The children often had to wait if they wanted anything, though they knew Madge would get it for them in the end. They were the first family where they lived to have a video. ‘My oldest boy, Monty, was 16 and kind of took on the role of father figure in the family, but the final responsibility was mine, paying the bills, making sure they had enough to eat,’ remembers Madge. ‘Many a day I went hungry, but luckily, working in hotels you usually got food.’

Theirs was a happy family, the house always full of the kids’ friends. Madge would often have 14 sit down for Sunday dinner. Margo was second youngest, the only and much longed for girl. Monty wanted his sister to be a little princess and was always buying her frilly things, but she was a tomboy, who would wear her trousers right up to the school gate before changing into the hated uniform skirt. She captained a local football team and could play better than most of the boys. ‘She was never feart of anybody or anything in her life,’ says Margo. ‘She was the only one that would face up to Monty. The rest of them would never answer him back but Margo would stand and confront him.’ Ironically for a girl who later made her living in the sex industry, she was naive with boys. There were plenty who were crazy about her and would have done anything for her, but when they came up for her she’d be off. ‘I can’t be bothered with it, Ma,’ she’d say. ‘They’re too serious.’

The family lived in Barlanark, then a run-down estate riddled with social problems. For every decent family there was a drug dealer, for every working person a hopeless drug addict. Now the houses have been done up and many of the problem families moved on; the kids are being educated about the dangers of drugs. Then it was part and parcel of where they lived. Margo started by sniffing glue, then moved on from there. ‘She was a daring lassie. She wasn’t scared to try anything once. If only she’d realised where it was going to end up,’ says Madge.

From the outside the path to prostitution looks a simple one. In Glasgow most of the women who work the streets are drug addicts, following a basic fiscal law - working class women can only earn the sort of money executives earn by selling their bodies. But this simple economic equation is dense with complexity when examined in human terms. There is nothing straightforward about it. Margo was on drugs, so she was in the house one minute, out the next. She was staying with this ‘friend’ one night, with another ‘friend’ the next. She was laughing and carrying on one minute, gouching on the sofa the next, head bent, her mind out of it.

Things came to a head when Madge came home from work one day. She had the kettle on and was relaxing before making dinner when she heard this unearthly moan from Margo’s room. When she went in her daughter was lying on the floor. Madge thought she was dead. She was blue. Her lips were blue, and her face, and there was a needle sticking out of her groin. Madge pulled the syringe out and slapped Margo’s face to make sure she was breathing. When Margo woke 15 minutes later and was told what had happened, she called her mother a liar. ‘I says, “I’m sorry, Margo. I can’t take any more of this.” By this time I knew she was out on the streets as well. She says, “Fine, Ma.” She left. I didn’t put her out of the house. The lassie knew herself she couldn’t go on like that. It had got to the stage where you were feared to leave her in the house. You didn’t know what was going to be missing when you got back. I told her I would keep HER, but I wasn’t knocking my pan in to keep her drug dealers.’

The Margo Lafferty who’d been a carefree, laughing child, charming enough to coax sweeties from the man on the ice cream van when she had no money, had become, in the eyes of the world, Margo Lafferty, the prostitute, Margo Lafferty, the junkie. As a young girl Margo had been soft-hearted, always ready to help someone in trouble, always picking up pals. Once she brought home a schoolfriend who’d lost her mother; she stayed six years and whenever Margo got something Linda got the same.

Now Margo was still ready to help people, but the trouble they were in had become far more dangerous, led to a different sort of assistance being offered. Many of the other girls on the streets would go to her when they needed physical protection. This five foot woman was tough and aggressive and would use her fists to back them. ‘I’ve seen her taking the jacket off her back and giving it to an old woman in the street, but she had a bad temper,’ says her mother. ‘You needed to watch her because she’d hit you as soon as look at you. She was very brave physically. Not that she went out looking for bother, but she wouldn’t run away from it either. That was why I told the police that Margo fought, that whoever had murdered Margo had been well and truly scarred. She would fight for every minute of her life and every second.’

The transition Margo made, from family pet to prostitute, was seen by the outside world as the transition from person to problem. Madge Lafferty fights every minute and every second to hold on to who her daughter was because society writes her off, makes her an accomplice in her own death. ‘You’re sitting in work and people are talking, new staff maybe, not the ones that were there at the time. And they always bring Margo’s name up if anything happens. They’ll maybe come across a wee caption in the paper and they go, “Look at that. These lassies deserve it.” I just get up and walk away. Or occasionally I’ll say, “Look at it this way. They’re out there, taking the chance of being jailed, and there’s others sitting next to you that are giving it away for nothing.” Margo could have been out mugging old folk or breaking into houses. But she didn’t do that. She went out and did a job of work.’

Perhaps because she was as fearless in her work as in her life, Margo Lafferty ended up taking on two violent sex offenders as clients in one night. In that dark piece of waste ground, after she was dead, the police picked up two condoms carrying Brian Donnelly’s semen, and one with the semen of David Payne, a convicted sex offender who had been jailed for holding up a woman at knife point and indecently assaulting her. That two such men should be in this secret place with the same woman almost beggars belief, until you remember Glasgow’s unenviable record of seven murders of prostitutes in as many years. There never was a serial killer here, as was suggested by some newspapers, simply an endless supply of men who thought women’s lives were worth nothing.

It was Brian Donnelly who had deep scratch marks on his face; Brian Donnelly who lied both to the police and to his workmates; Brian Donnelly who had been knocked back by a couple of girls on his works outing, his virility slighted; Brian Donnelly who had battered and strangled Margo Lafferty. At the retrial earlier this month the jury took under an hour and a half to bring in a unanimous verdict of murder. Donnelly was cool in the dock, as if his whole nervous system had closed down and was in hibernation mode. He seemed too measured and dispassionate ever to indulge in rage. But he had previously tried to set fire to the house of his former girlfriend and their son and he had also mugged an old woman.

‘He wasn’t any innocent young boy,’ says Madge Lafferty. ‘I hoped someone would kill him when he went into prison after the first trial. I was wishing retribution would be served in another way. There’s no closure in this for me. Not as long as he breathes. I believe in the Old Testament, in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ she says. It’s a rare moment of anger. Mostly she speaks in so emotionless a manner that you feel she would crack wide open if she ever lost control.

Now she and her family are left with the conundrum of life after violent death. Madge says Margo’s brothers didn’t know what she did and had to read about her choice of profession in the newspapers, though that’s incidental to the pain of losing their sister. She was afraid they would get themselves in trouble if they came to the court and the jury voted for acquittal, but the verdict was heard in total silence.

At nearly 60 Madge is still a workaholic. When Margo was alive she used to keep on working for her sake. She was the only one of the family who still came and asked her for money. She’d empty her purse to the local kids and then say, ‘But I’ve got you, Ma.’ Now Madge has a granddaughter who lives with her. She’s a lot like Margo. She’s always running about dancing and singing, wanting her CD’s on. She stands in the kitchen and gives it big licks. She can’t sing but she knows the words to everything. ‘She’s so full of confidence. So was Margo, full of her own importance,’ she says, smiling. ‘I hope she keeps that.’

When Margo died it was a full three months before they could bury her. They weren’t allowed to cremate her, in case her body had to be exhumed for evidential purposes in the future, though Margo herself would have preferred to be cremated. She was afraid of creepy crawlies, couldn’t bear the thought of worms going through her body. Now Madge thinks the bureaucrats did her a favour. ‘Now I know I can go up to her grave and just stand there and talk to her,’ she says. ‘I know she’s never going to stand in front of me or cuddle me, which she always used to do. But at least I know where she is.’