Helen Archer | On 10, Dec 2024

Twenty-five years ago, Scotland’s festive season took a dark turn when, during a routine training exercise in Loch Lomond, police divers discovered bags containing human limbs. Eight days later, on 15th December 1999, a head washed up on Troon’s Barassie beach, some 60 miles away. The dismembered body was quickly identified as belonging to Barry Wallace, an 18-year-old Tesco employee, who had disappeared after his works Christmas night out in Kilmarnock, just two days before his limbs were found.

The tabloid press went wild after the main suspect was quickly identified as William Beggs, a Northern Irish man who had form for similar attacks, and who fled the country after it was reported on the radio that his flat was being searched. As the manhunt dragged on, not entirely unreasonable comparisons were made to Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer. This choppy and occasionally repetitive six-part documentary by Firecracker Scotland (series director John McLavery) moves backwards and forwards in time, from the investigation to Begg’s upbringing and, ultimately, his court case and sentencing.

A family liaison officer speaks to the pain of Wallace’s family, remembering the sombre trip to Glasgow so that his father could identify Barry’s head. The grief of the father of another of Beggs’ victims, 28-year-old Barry Oldham – who was killed in 1987, having met Beggs at a gay nightclub in Newcastle – is spoken about by an author and journalist who knew him. Brian McQuillan, who miraculously escaped an attack by Beggs in 1991 in the same flat Barry Wallace would be killed, reveals Beggs’ MO in archive footage, while an American tourist speaks of his experience after befriending Beggs in Edinburgh in a new interview.

Beggs’ religious, conservative upbringing is set against a potted history of the homophobia of the time, although as one contributor asserts, beyond all his shame about his sexuality, he was “a killer”, plain and simple. His obsession with cutting others started early, and crime experts attest to the fact that piquerism – a paraphilia involving causing injuries with sharp objects – has the highest reoffending rates of sexual offenders, although it is a fetish that is perhaps not understood adequately by police and the judiciary.

While the police officers interviewed in the documentary, who headed the investigation into Wallace’s murder, are presented as dogged, determined, and sensitive to the needs of the family, it is the criminal justice system that comes under the most scrutiny. Beggs was known to local police thanks to his attack on Brian McQuillan, but his original conviction for the murder of Barry Oldham was quashed on appeal, a technicality setting him free to set himself up in Kilmarnock and continue his violence unabated.

It is a grim, dark documentary series, with little in the way of new revelations – a rehash of a disturbing crime which shook the communities affected. While the timing of its release may be related to the quarter-century which has passed since then, it may, too, have something to do with the fact that Beggs’ minimum term prison sentence is now complete, and he continues to maintain his innocence, apply for release on parole, and appeal decisions to keep him incarcerated. It is, perhaps, something of a public service to remind the public of the degeneracy of his crimes – some of which he was never sufficiently punished for – and to keep his victims’ memories alive.

 

Limbs in the Loch: Catching a Killer is available on BBC iPlayer.

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