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It is 40 years since the bloodied bodies of three soldiers were found in a heap next to a reservoir in Scotland’s Pentland Hills. A farmer came across the scene on 17 January 1985, after following a trail of blood in the snow from a crashed Land Rover he discovered with the engine still running.
With the IRA bombings at their height, the soldiers from Midlothian’s Glencorse Barracks were initially thought to be the victims of a terrorist attack. But Tom Wood, then a police inspector who was one of the first on the scene, said the evidence quickly led them to a fellow soldier.
He has spoken to BBC Scotland News about his memories of the triple murder on the 40th anniversary of the so-called Glencorse Massacre.
The men were discovered beside a small derelict house at Loganlea reservoir, about 10 miles south of Edinburgh. Staff Sgt Terrance Hosker, 39, and Pte John Thomson, 25, were in uniform. They were found alongside retired Major David Cunningham, 56.
“When I got there at the back of the house and at the bottom of the stairs were three dead bodies all lying on top of each other in a crumpled heap,” Mr Walker told BBC Scotland News. “There was blood and cartridge cases lying around on the snow at the bottom of the stairs.”
Col Clive Fairweather, the commanding officer at Glencorse Barracks, worked with police officers investigating the murders. An experienced military man, he had been second in command of the SAS operation that stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980.
Andrew Walker was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to at least 30 years in prison, later reduced to 27 years on appeal. In 2011 Walker was released from prison on compassionate grounds, two years after a stroke left him severely disabled. He died from a respiratory infection and suspected cancer in a care home in Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, in 2021 at the age of 67.
Andrew Walker was a cold-hearted killer who set out to rob in the certain knowledge that to escape he would have to kill his three comrades in arms.
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