DAVID LEASK and FRANK RYAN
A pensioner was yesterday formally accused of the 40-year-old murder of a teenage girl whose body has never been found.
Thomas Young, 72, a prisoner in Peterhead jail, was fully committed on petition after appearing by video link at a special court.
The former lorry driver was first charged with the killing of 17-year-old Patricia McAdam three years ago but the Crown, its petition revealed, does not know how she died.
She went missing on February 19, 1967, as she hitchhiked to her Dumfries home from a dance in Glasgow. Her remains have never been found, despite a massive search operation.
Ms McAdam, a factory worker, and a friend had hitched a lift from Glasgow in a lorry. The driver dropped Ms McAdam's friend off at a layby between Annan and Dumfries.
Ms McAdam has not been seen since she said goodbye to her friend in the layby. Her parents, who have since died, were convinced she would never have left home voluntarily and failed to keep in touch.
Police, although initially uncertain that "something ill had befallen the girl", quickly ratcheted up their efforts to find her. There was a poster appeal to try to find the missing girl "with a Mia Farrow hairstyle".
A Dutch clairvoyant was even brought in to help find Ms McAdam. Gerard Croiset, of Utrecht, had previously used his powers to help police forces all over the world. Mr Croiset, using a mental picture, described an area where he believed Ms McAdam had met her death.
She died, he claimed, at a bridge over a river, with exposed tree roots on the banking, a house with advertising signs and part of a car with a wheelbarrow. The image was to prove uncannily accurate, newspapers claimed at the time.
Mr Croiset came to the conclusion that Ms McAdam had been murdered and her killer had thrown her body in a river, from where it had been washed out to sea. Detectives examined an area similar to the one Mr Croiset described but no body was ever found.
Police looking for Ms McAdam also searched moors near Annan with dogs, focusing on Kinmount estate close to the A75 Dumfries-Carlisle road. Officers from England were drafted in to help. They dug up large areas using earth-moving equipment, but all to no avail.
Police revisited the killing several times. A decade after her death, in 1977, they requestioned a lorry driver who had cropped up in their initial investigation.
Mr Young was charged three years ago after the investigation was reopened in a cold cases review. Detectives reassessed evidence from the initial inquiry and interviewed retired police officers.
Yesterday the Crown alleged that Mr Young assaulted and murdered Ms McAdam, either on the B7020 Lochmaben- Annan Road near Charlesfield farm or elsewhere.
The hearing was held, through the video link, at a court convened in the offices of the procurator-fiscal in Dumfries.
It was heard in the presence of Sheriff Kenneth Ross of Dumfries Sheriff Court.
Depute-fiscal Bob Morrison said: "Young made no plea or declaration and was remanded in custody."
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