In the killing field

They all protested at the intrusion, and threatened to contact their councillor, their MP, and anyone else who sounded like they might have strings to pull.

But it was the end of the murderous career of Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel, Scotland's most notorious serial killer this century.

And although the police had at long last got their man, the journey from the arrest to conviction and execution tested the pragmatism of Scots Law, and court procedure.

Manuel was eventually to be convicted of seven murders, and a formal not guilty verdict entered by instruction of the judge on an eighth. A ninth killing of a Durham taxi driver was attributed to him, but never tried because he had already been sentenced to death in Scotland.

In the weeks before his execution at Barlinnie on July 11, 1958, it was alleged Manuel admitted to three more murders in London and Glasgow, which of course would never be tested in court.

A succession of books was later written about Manuel's trail of blood and violence. Intriguingly, the police authors emphasise how convinced they were all along about his responsibility for the killings, beginning with the murder of 17-year-old Anne Kneillands from East Kilbride on the January 2, 1956. It was just that the crucial evidence which would justify an arrest eluded them.

The legendary Glasgow solicitor, Lawrence Dowdall, on the other hand, is scornful of the police efforts. He concentrates on his own unusual role in the case, which led to an appearance as a key prosecution witness in the eventual trial.

Dowdall is blunt about the flaws in the police investigation in the two years between the Kneillands murder and Manuel's last killing, that of the Smart family in their home at Sheepburn Road, Uddingston, almost exactly two years later.

After all, Manuel had been interviewed three times by police, and had his home searched twice without the connection being made. They had also arrested William Watt, Dowdall's client, for three of the murders - of Watt's own wife, daughter, and sister-in-law - before abruptly dropping all the charges.

The farce reached its most absurd when Manuel, spectating at the police search for the body of his fifth victim, helpfully offered a lift to an officer engaged in the hunt, and chatted to him about progress.

Journalists, however, are clear that it was the press, and their contacts in Glasgow's underworld, that put the story together long before the police. What all the accounts thus highlight was the crucial importance in unlocking the case of Manuel's own confession made in the early hours of January 16, in which he outlined his responsibility for the murder of Anne Kneillands; the three members of the Watt family at their home in Fennsbank Avenue, Rutherglen; Isabelle Cooke, another 17-year-old girl from Mount Vernon; and three members of the Smart family. But would the confession be admitted as evidence in court? Without it, would the Crown be able to pull together a prosecution sufficiently convincing to persuade a jury to sentence a man to death?

And even if the confession was to be accepted as having been composed free of pressure and duress in Bothwell Police Station, how would it sit with the fundamental demand in Scots Law for corroboration of evidence? Could Manuel, liar and fantasist, corroborate himself?

What the press and the police knew, but the jury wouldn't, for example, was Manuel's bizarre history.

He was actually born in the US, in Manhattan, in March 1927. His parents had joined the mass emigration from Lanarkshire in those days. It wasn't a success, and after a spell in Detroit, where his father, Samuel, worked in a car factory, the Manuels returned to Britain.

Peter was in regular trouble from the age of 11, and spent much of the years to come in borstals, remand homes, and approved schools. The offences were becoming increasingly violent, with an element of sexual humiliation of the victims, mostly girls and women. He was also developing a pattern of house-breaking in England and Scotland.

AT the age of 18 he was sentenced to nine years

in Peterhead. Manuel's

Walter Mitty life was developed there. He claimed, for example, that his father was an American gangster, who had been executed at the electric chair.

Later, at various points, he claimed he was involved with the British Secret Service.

By the 1950s the Manuel family had returned to Uddingston. In July 1955 Manuel was arrested for a serious assault and indecent assault on a Lanarkshire woman walking near her home. He was alleged to have held a knife to her throat and threatened to cut off her head. What was notable about the subsequent trial at Airdrie Sheriff Court was that Manuel chose to conduct his own defence. He must have been most impressed by his own performance when the jury returned with a not proven verdict.

But to return to the night of January 14. When the police searched the Manuel house, among the things they found

a Philips electric

razor that fitted the description of one stolen during a break-in at Bothwell, 18 months earlier.

Samuel Manuel claimed that it was his.

The police version of the story had it that when he was told his father was to be charged with reset, Peter Manuel offered to clear up some of the unsolved crimes on their books if they'd let his father off. It was a possible, if unexpected, demonstration of filial loyalty.

But he did take two car loads of police on a midnight ramble across heath and ploughed fields until he announced they had reached the spot where he had buried the body of Isabelle Cooke. ''I think I'm standing on her now.'' The party returned en masse to Bellshill, where at 4am Manuel wrote out a confession to eight murders.

When the case opened amid great public interest on May 12, 1958, the Crown had cited 295 witnesses; Manuel 18 for the defence. His defence was to be led by Harald Leslie QC and Malcolm Morison (recently retired from the High Court bench) and they lodged a succession of defences of alibi, saying he was at home at the time of the Cooke, Kneillands, and Smart murders, and impeachment, naming William Watt as the murderer of his own family.

The Bellshill confession was his major problem, and on May 19 Harald Leslie asked Lord Cameron for a debate on whether it could be admitted

as evidence.

The jurors were asked to leave, and they kicked their heels for the rest of the day, all of the 20th and most of the 21st, as the judge heard police witnesses and Manuel himself about his state of mind when the confession was written. Lord Cameron ruled to allow it.

Manuel promptly dismissed his defence team. Perhaps recalling his triumph at Airdrie Sheriff Court he elected to conduct the rest of his defence himself, including a tempestuous 13-minute cross-examination of William Watt, borne in on a stretcher following a recent car accident, whom he insisted was the murderer of his own family.

Lord Cameron began his charge to the jury with a compliment on the ''skill that is quite remarkable'' with which Manuel conducted his own defence.

Imagine the tabloid headlines such a remark would generate today.

Remarkable it may have been, but unsuccessful. The jury took only two hours and 21 minutes to return seven guilty verdicts.

n John Forsyth is producer of Test of Evidence for BBC Radio Scotland.