This very day, Iain Packer was convicted at Glasgow Sheriff Court of the murder of Emma Caldwell in 2005 as well as the rape of 11 and 21 other serious sexual offences against women. He was sentenced to 36 years imprisonment and clearly is now where he has long belonged. The trial has been conducted in Glasgow where it's been headline news throughout the country and I must state from the outset that from the evidence as reported at his trial, I had no doubt of his guilt.
Emma Caldwell was a 27 year old woman who was found murdered almost twenty years ago in a remote spot many miles south of Glasgow. No one was ever convicted for her death and it became a cold case after an attempted charge against four city-centre Turkish men failed through lack of evidence. And yet the initial investigating policemen and detectives who were all certain Packer was the man, saw their case abandoned and eventually turn into a "cold case".
However, following through years later on a Sunday newspaper story, in 2018 BBC Scotland secured an interview with Packer, who obviously believed he was in the clear and no doubt thought he just had to declare his innocence in front of the cameras to make it so. Interviewer Samantha Polling pointedly asked Packer if he killed Emma which he denied, similarly dismissing claims of having a history of going with prostitutes and sexual assault against women. Although he wasn't then in custody, he was eventually arrested in 2020 and today justice finally caught up with him.
Updating the initial BBC investigation programme of 2018, we see reporter Polling directly asking Packer if he was the murderer which he calmly and unemotionally denies. Thankfully truth will out, even if it's sometimes years too late but at least poor Emma's mother lived to see her daughter's killer put away, even so belatedly as this.
I missed the initial "Disclosure" programme from 2018, featuring Packer's notorious of interview but it's obviously the centrepiece here. Polling presents this gratifyingly concluding update but doesn't shy from the richly-deserved criticism, since acknowledged, of Strathclyde Police whose two senior officers diverted their attentions away from Packer and tried to pin the murder elsewhere. The four now retired policemen who worked the case and were convinced all along as to who was the perpetrator all point the finger of blame upwards to these unfathomable mistakes. Some of the female victims of Packer's attacks also bravely step forward to testify on camera against him.
Reporter Polling and her team are to be commended on an excellent piece of investigative journalism which clearly helped bring about this much-desired but long-overdue outcome. The programme itself, with its sometimes stylised use of slow-moving nighttime drone shots of cars driving through Glasgow and recreating the long journey to the remote crime scene, nevertheless did an effective job of going behind the headlines to not only expose a depraved killer but also the contributing incompetence of the police which may yet lead to the full independent enquiry that the victim's family now seeks.
