Yeardley:  Hey, Small Town Fam. How are you guys? It’s Yeardley. I have some big news. For the first time ever, we’re taking this show on the road. That’s right, Small Town Dicks live is coming to six cities in February 2025. So if you’re in Seattle, Portland, Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City or Los Angeles, then listen up. Tickets will go on sale Friday, November 22nd at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. That’s Friday, November 22nd at 10:00 AM Pacific time. To get them, you just go to smalltowndicks.com/tour. That’s smalltowndicks.com/ tour. We are so excited. We can’t wait to see you out there, Small Town Fam. This is going to be good.

 Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. I want to remind you that if you want access to bonus episodes and regular episodes a day early and ad free and our community forum and other behind-the-scenes goodies, you got to go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and then in the top right-hand corner, hit that little tab that says join. And then listen to the end of today’s episode for a sneak peek at today’s new bonus episode.

 Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I hope you’re all well. We have a really interesting case for you today that is as much about the hurdles of investigating a case when your own command staff doesn’t support your methods as it is about the serial sex offender, our guest, Detective Constable Simon, is trying to get off the street.

 I’m always surprised to hear stories of someone’s ego hindering an investigation in police work, especially when the people that police are supposed to protect are in imminent danger. And ordinarily, I’d be shouting in the car or on the treadmill while I listen to this episode, hearing Simon describe the many ways he and his partner were told to stand down. But Simon has the best attitude, unfazed. And he is so lovely to listen to that I just settled in and waited for the story to unfold, confident that Simon would get his man. Here is The Long Sprint.

Yeardley:  Hi there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  I’m Dave.

Paul:  And I’m Paul.

Yeardley:  And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan:  Dave and I are identical twins.

Dave:  And retired detectives from Small Town, USA.  

Paul:  And I’m a veteran cold-case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.  

Dan:  Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Dave:  Each case we cover is told by the detectives who investigated it, offering a rare personal account of how they saw the crime.

Paul:  Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan:  And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave:  -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

Unison:  Thank you.

Yeardley:  Today, on Small Town Dicks. It is a very good day, my friends. The house is full. We have Detective Dan.

Dan:  Good afternoon.

Yeardley:  You’re missing the usual suspects. I thought God, they’ve heard that so many times. They just want me to zip it. No reply.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  Anyway, we have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul:  Hi there.

Yeardley:  [laughs] I’m just here to mess it all up. And we have Detective Dave.

Dave:  Buenos dias.

Yeardley:  Buenos dias, senor. And Small Town Fam, we are so excited to welcome back to the podcast Detective Constable Simon.

Simon:  Hi there. How are you?

Yeardley:  I’m so good. Thank you so much for sitting down with us again, Simon.

Simon:  My pleasure, totally. I get enthusiastic just as soon as I hear your voice.

Yeardley:  [laughs] I appreciate it. And Simon, you come to us from certainly many miles away from where I’m sitting here in Los Angeles. You’re over in Scotland?

Simon:  That’s right, in Glasgow on the West Coast of Bonnie Scotland.

Yeardley:  What’s the weather like there today?

Simon:  It was actually nice today. We saw a thing today that we don’t see very often. Apparently, some people were phoning in about a UFO, but it’s called the sun and we saw it for about half an hour today at one point. [Yeardley laughs] It’s been absolutely horrific and it hasn’t stopped raining for the last two weeks, honest to God, we just get rain all the time.

Yeardley:  I couldn’t manage all that rain. I don’t know how you do it, but I don’t think our audience tuned in to hear the weather report. So let’s give them what they came for, shall we? Simon, by now you know the drill. Please tell us how this case came to you.

Simon:  To put a bit of perspective on it. I was based at a CID office, Criminal Investigation Department. I was a fully-fledged detective at this point.

Yeardley:  About what decade are we in?

Simon:  This would be about– we’re in the 80s, late 80s, in one of the busiest divisions in Glasgow at the time. At that time in Scotland, we had a kind of perfect storm. We had Afghan heroin hitting the country and that changed everything. Everything changed overnight because crime was driven by the habits of drug-addicted people. And we were chasing two serial killers at the same time across the breadth of Scotland. Robert Black was responsible for child murders in the East Coast. And we also had the World’s End Murder inquiry that was ongoing at that time. So a lot of things going on at the same time, and heroin being the real underlying problem that was denied by the police for so long by the senior police who thought that drugs was just a fad, a passing phase, and that it would peter out.

 But younger detectives like myself knew that it was the driver behind most of the problems that we were having in communities all over our cities. And amongst all that, we then had a horrific crime committed where a wee boy of 11 years of age was on his way home from school. He was on the last leg of that journey and took a shortcut across some spare ground within half a mile of the police office, actually, and he was raped by a male on that spare ground and left alive, thankfully, and managed to get some help when he came out of the field onto the road. A wee boy being sexually assaulted and raped like that, sodomized, is out of the ordinary obviously, and sends alarm bells ringing.

 So an incident room was set up immediately, which is an administrative setup where resources are placed and record keeping is much more formalized. And the inquiry thereafter is run from the incident room. And that was a great move at the start of it. The trouble was that my boss at the time, a Detective Superintendent Joe Jackson, had set up the incident room, but he then went on annual leave within a day or two of this having taken place, and someone else was brought in to run the inquiry, a Detective Chief Inspector, a DCI, who I’ll call Michael, who was in charge of the inquiry. And this wasn’t his division, he had come from a different division, so he didn’t know the manpower, he didn’t know the geography, he didn’t know really what was going on.

 But that was fine until five days later, a similar crime occurred to another boy, a younger boy, this time eight years of age, not too far from where the original crime had happened. This happened on a car park, actually, which was unoccupied during the week because it’s a car park that’s used for a big football stadium, soccer stadium nearby at the weekends primarily. And this wee boy we saw had been crossing across there on his way back from his grands to his mum and dad, and he’d been attacked by this male individual who had sodomized him and left him. He had injuries that the first boy didn’t have. Maybe the boy had resisted or tried to escape and it required a bit more violence to subdue him.

 So now we’ve got the press involved and we’ve got public involved to a degree, because we’re bringing more resources, as you would imagine. We’re canvassing very intensely. We’ve got resources at both loci to speak to passersby at that time of day. We’re in the newspapers, we’re in the media. It’s a double-edged sword because it’s a fantastic way of generating information and leads. It’s also a fantastic way of generating spurious information and people who generally waste the police time, but that’s the job is to plough through that. You set up phone lines, you set up staff to man those lines and every piece of information that then starts to flow through the incident room, Yeardley, is looked at properly as its own information and acting on accordingly. And at this period in time, we didn’t have access to the computer system. So at that particular point of the inquiry, it was being done on paper the old fashioned way.

Dave:  The index card thing.

Simon:  Yes, index card carousel system, the way it had been done for 100 years prior to that. [Yeardley laughs] If that wasn’t bad enough, 11 days after the second attack, we had a third attack on another wee boy, same age, who was coming home from school. He had been detained at school on sports or something, it was a bit later, it was actually dark when this happened and again the violence had increased. This wee boy was in hospital, not with life-threatening injuries, but certainly there was a worry there that things were escalating and that this guy had to be caught pretty quickly.

Yeardley:  Simon, did any of the boys give you a physical description of the person who assaulted them?

Simon:  Yes, the description was quite good. Between the three boys, we knew what age this guy was going to be. We even knew that he was a worker, that his hands were rough. He wasn’t an accountant or a lawyer, he worked with his hands. He was Glasgow, Glasgow accent. Because he had spoken during the course of this, it was enough to tell us that he was Glaswegian. We had a good idea of his height. On each occasion, he was coming towards the boy, but the boy hadn’t paid much attention. You know, like young boys who would. You don’t stare at someone coming towards you, especially in Glasgow, if you get any wits about you at all. At the end it all was the same in that regard, that he came towards the boys, asked them a question and when the boys stopped, grabbed them and dragged them into the undergrowth nearby.

Dave:  I imagine during that initial flurry of activity that you guys are rounding up all the known sex offenders or people that would be possibly inclined to do something like this, that you guys have an idea of who’s in the area.

Simon:  Yes. There’s no question that was going on to a degree, because every officer knows straightaway, they’ve got a suspect in mind of who it might be. And we would all be doing checks and seeing where these guys were and what they were up to, whether they were in prison or whatever. But the officer in charge, Michael, didn’t see it that way. The DCI didn’t see that as a prioritized line of inquiry. The incident room is a place that everything goes through and is filtered through and comes back out to Michael to make decisions on lines. And you can only go down so many roads at a time because you only have X amount of resources. So you might prioritize the school, making inquiries at the school if you think there was maybe a link to the school.

 Two of the boys went to one school and one went to another. You might prioritize family and start interviewing family and extended family. You might prioritize workmen in the area who happen to be in the area working on the roads. So I could go on and on about who you might prioritize, but you can’t do them all at one time. That’s the problem. And this is where myself and my partner come in.

Break 1

Simon:  So to put this in perspective at that time, working at gov/CID busy office as I described, I had a new partner. In their wisdom, the bosses had partnered me with my nemesis, Jim, who worked in the same office as me. Jim and I, from the first day we set our eyes on each other, we didn’t get on, you’ll understand, Yeardley, the banter in a place like a police office, especially back in those days, I know it’s not the same now because whenever I go into one now, I get taken outside to chat-

[laughter]

Simon:  -because some of the things I say don’t go down too well anymore because I’m a dinosaur. But in those days, the banter, there was a kind of unacknowledged toughness about us that was demonstrated by the banter that we could take and give, and you had to be sharp witted, you had to be on your toes and you had to be thick skinned. There’s nothing furor than that. I think at the time we all thought that it was just locker room stuff that kept us on our toes. Most of it was actually probably inappropriate in hindsight. So Jim and I were two of the worst protagonists because we just ignored and avoided each other at all costs. Because there wasn’t once we had spoken and not argued. Because if I said it was raining outside, he’d say, “No, it’s not. It’s actually very dry. It’s one of the driest days I’ve ever seen.” [Yeardley chuckles] And vice versa. I’m not blaming Jim entirely for this. He was always first in in the morning. I could never get in before him ever. It didn’t matter. If I stayed there all night, he’d be in before me. And if I went to see the boss about something, you can guarantee Jim was there already chatting to the boss. It just was pain, real pain.

Yeardley:  It’s like a cartoon.

Simon:  Oh, him and I just had this competitive edge and nobody could get the last word then. We’re just opposites in a lot of ways. And two or three times we had been pulled away. Come on because it looked as though we were going to square up to each other. We were too close probably, and it just needed somebody to snap and neither of us would have been in the police anymore. [Yeardley laughs] But anyway, I went in one morning and got told, [laughs] “You’re working with Jim.” And it was a colleague that told me, not the boss, it was a colleague, you’re working with Jim. And I laughed, yeah, very funny, cracker. And I went in to see the DI next door, the detective inspector, and I said to him, “The boys are winding me up, saying that I’m working with Jim, who’s my real new partner.” And the DI said, “He’s right enough, it’s Jim.” He said, “Don’t start shouting and balling.” I’ve already had Jim in here shouting and balling.

Dan:  He beat you in there.

[laughter]

Simon:  He’d been in before me, of course.

Yeardley:  Of course.

Simon:  Jim disappeared fuming. He’d stormed out the office and gone for a coffee somewhere absolutely distraught at the thought of working with me. [laughs] But Jim was such a hard worker.

Yeardley:  Were you guys roughly the same age?

Simon:  Yes. We were roughly the same everything.

Yeardley:  So it really is just like a rivalry on a team.

Simon:  Yes. I was chatting to Tom a couple of weeks ago and he said that in a major inquiry, a protracted inquiry, I mean, he’s worked on a 37 year inquiry of the World’s End Murders. There are two types of detectives really in the world. There’s a sprinter and there’s a marathon runner. And what Tom was saying that with a long inquiry that’s protracted over weeks, months, sometimes years, you need the marathon runners, you need the guys that are going to be there every day, doing the basics, being thorough, doing it properly, taking statements and never complain and just get on with it. And you’ve got the sprinters who like to get things done immediately. Now when he said that, I let it go over my head. I agreed with him and we moved on.

 Then I was in the car with my partner a couple of days later when we listened to the podcast and she said, which were you? This is an interesting question for the guys here because it shows you what little self-awareness you’ve got sometimes. She said, which were you, Simon? Were you a sprinter or a marathon runner? And I gave her the obvious bland answer that every deductive. I said, well, both because sometimes I worked in cases where it was very dynamic. Go and kick the door in, get the drugs, whatever it might be. And other times I worked on longer inquiries. I was driving along and a few minutes later I said to her, “That’s not true.” I was a sprinter and I was always picked by the hierarchy for the job that needed done for go and get the firearms, go and get the drugs, go and get the door kicked in, go undercover. I worked on lots of major inquiries, but that was in my 40s when I looked back at it. I wonder what your team of detectives here would say to that.

Yeardley:  I think I know what Paul is. He’s obviously a sprinter. ha ha ha. [laughs]

Paul:  Yeah. As Simon is describing that, the sprinters and marathoners, you know that’s like the narcs versus your homicide investigators. The different types of skill sets and personalities that just naturally fall into those two categories.

Dave:  I didn’t have to be a marathoner because I just solved everything very quickly, very efficiently.

[laughter]

Simon:  Sorry, Yeardley. There’s a third type of detective that we didn’t cover. There’s the sprinter, the marathon runner, and the bullshitter. I forgot about them. [laughs]

Paul:  There you go.

Yeardley:  What about you, Dan?

Dan:  I was certainly capable of doing the marathon, but I preferred the sprint. When we would work big cases. I loved when it got to a point where the pace really quickened. I was addicted to it.

Simon:  Yeah, so I think we got courtroom answers there, Yeardley.

Yeardley:  I think so.

Simon:  Totally non-committal, really. [chuckles]

Yeardley:  I feel like we revealed a lot of stuff on this podcast and yet Paul won’t even say, yeah, I investigated a guy for most of my career and finally caught him. I mean, I’d say that’s the ultimate marathoner, my friend.

Paul:  A little bit of a marathon for sure.

Dan:  Really slow sprint.

Paul:  There’s another way to look at it.

[laughter]

Simon:  So Jim and I total opposites. Both sprinters, in my analogy or Tom’s analogy, both chaffing at the bit to get out and catch this guy. But the guy who’s in charge of the inquiry, Michael, the Detective Chief Inspector, is of a completely different mindset, and he’s already settled on the marathon he was in for the long haul. That’s the way Michael chose to approach the case. And yes, there’s lots of different ways of doing inquiries and being in charge of inquiries, but to my mind, there’s an urgency to this. The suspect has already raped three young boys and put one in hospital. So Jim and I had an idea. In fact, it was the evening of the third incident. We had a thing in every division in the force. It was called the Female Child Unit, FCU.

 This was a unit that had been created mostly with policewomen, I think exclusively with policewomen at that time. And they had been created to deal with crimes of a sexual nature so that the victims would be interviewed sympathetically. Because there’s no question that rape cases were looked at completely differently back then. And your first job was to interrogate the victim in a lot of cases to find out the veracity of it and whether she was going to make a witness in court, which was entirely the wrong approach compared with how we do it now. But that’s another debate entirely. So this Female Child Unit, we knew the policewomen that were there, they were detectives, and if ever you had a case that had a young child or a sexual assault, we referred it to them.

 So Jim said to me, I think their files will be full of the guys we are looking for. I think our guy will be in their files somewhere and this hadn’t been tapped into. One of you said at the start, that’s the place. Dave, was it you that said, there’s a starting point for you? And it’s an obvious starting point. But nobody had gone and spoke to the Female Child Unit. So Jim and I did, and they had about probably two or three hundred sex offenders. This was people who would now be on what we call the sex offender register, which is a form that the courts now do. In those days, we didn’t have that.

 So this was our sex offender register sitting in front of us. And Jim and I, we both went and spoke to Michael, closed his door and said, “Boss, can we try an inquiry to the site here specifically to have a look at some of these guys, start looking at them in more detail, pick some favorites and go and have a look at them in great detail and maybe go and interview some of them and get descriptions. And he said no and dismissed us and didn’t even listen to what we said. And he asked us to go and buy an anniversary card for his wife for him. That’s what two detectives were asked to do. Whether he was distracted because it was his anniversary and he hadn’t bought his wife a card or whatever else was going on in his empty head, I don’t know. But he wasn’t interested.

 Maybe we should have gone to a detective sergeant or detective inspector and sold the idea to him first and let him take it to the boss, I don’t know. But he pretty much threw us out and sent us to get a card for his wife and that was the end of it. But it wasn’t the end of it for Jim and I, because we decided we had sold each other on this idea by now and we’d seen the files, we had seen some of the names and realized that between us, we could go through these names quite quickly. Because Jim and I decided to come in two hours early in the morning. So we’re coming in at 6 o’clock and that was our sifting and sorting and by 7 o’clock were chapping a door.

 We could narrow it down from those few hundred to maybe 30 or 40 that fell into the right parameters. And we thought we could chap two or three doors a day. And then at night when went off, him and I would have our own debrief after the debrief, probably over a pint most of the time, and we would agree on who the favorites were for the next day. We were still doing our work, we were still doing the inquiries we’re given every day while we were running our own inquiry on the site.

Break 2

Paul:  Simon, you’ve got 300 of these index cards of sex offenders. And I’ve had to do this numerous times where I’m sorting through just gobs of data, trying to figure out which of these potential suspects fit within the criteria that I know about the offender. Was there anything from a forensic standpoint, shoe impressions, tire impressions, that could give you more information?

Simon:  There was lots of trace evidence. There was no vehicle involved that we knew of, unless it was parked half a mile away or whatever. We had a plethora of forensic evidence. We had lots of fibers, we had lots of samples, and we knew that he probably had blood and whatnot on his clothing from the boys and vice versa. We had not DNA at that time. DNA was very much a dream at that point. But we had lots of forensic evidence and we knew that when we got this guy, we would know who it was, we would be able to prove it was him if we physically got our hands on him. We didn’t have an ID, but they could all give us descriptions facially. And there’s no question it was the same guy, for example? Absolutely no question, both forensically and from the boys.

Dave:  So the entire population is aware that three boys have been sexually assaulted?

Simon:  Yeah. No, the whole of Scotland, the whole of the UK probably at this point. There was lots of information, lots of statements. People really want to help with these type of cases. It’s not a problem instigating public support. The problem is that most of it’s not helpful. Most of it’s very time consuming and ties up resources.

Dave:  So, you guys, there’s a lot of pressure on your team to find facts quickly. The public doesn’t want a marathon investigation.

Simon:  Yeah. Because we know he’s going to strike again. We think he’s going to kill the next one. Why we’re coming in at 6:00 in the morning and leaving at 10 o’clock at night is because we think the next case is going to be a murder. We had to catch him. That was our mindset. We’re sprinters. We just wanted the shortest possible route to get this guy behind bars. Because the suspect has now seen the press coverage as well. After the first one, he’s probably quite pleased with himself that there’s not much of a furor. After the second one, he’s probably thinking, “Oh, for goodness sake, I better lie low.” But whatever’s driving him, he does the third one and he’s violent, progressively more violent.

Yeardley:  So, Simon, your side of inquiry is focused on combing through these index cards, looking for information on likely suspects. But what’s happening with the official inquiry? What is Michael expecting you to do?

Simon:  All the inquiry was focused on was to find someone that had seen this guy coming or going from either of the three loci, because we hadn’t found a witness yet that could point us in the right direction. But Jim and I, our gut was telling us our guy was going to be in their files somewhere.

Yeardley:  Do you mean the files from this Female Child Unit?

Simon:  Yes. If it had been up to Jim and I, everybody would have been chapping doors of perverts for the next two or three days. And we didn’t ask the boss to do that. We didn’t ask him to give us all the manpower or resources. We were prepared to do it. And this is the frustration for Jim and I, because if Michael had said yes, then we would have apprehended the suspect on that first day. As it turns out, he was number eight on our list, Bill Smith. As soon as Jim read his card, there was something in Jim’s face. He just liked him, he liked him for it.

Yeardley:  When Jim shows you the card of Bill Smith, the guy he thinks is the bad guy, did you go, “Oh, I like him too?”

Simon:  No.

Yeardley:  No.

Simon:  I’ve become a marathon runner at this point. We’re both sprinting full belt and I’m trying to slow Jim down, right.

[laughter]

Simon:  So at this point, it’s chase, interview and eliminate. That’s what we’re doing. So when we first knocked on the door of Bill Smith, who lived with his mother, he wasn’t in the house, he was at his work. So we spoke to his mum and his mum told us where he worked and we made some excuse why we had to speak to him, whatever. We were never going to tell his mum that we were looking at him for the rape of three wee boys. And went into Glasgow City Centre where he worked and sure enough, Mr. Smith was working away and we had a chat with him and we didn’t want to make a big fuss of it at this particular point in time.

 And it’s a simple task then, to check where he was on the three dates. Bill gave us his working shifts and he had been working on the day of the last one, so that was fine. We had something to check. We went and got his boss and we got his boss’ boss, actually. And the written record showed that Bill Smith had been working that afternoon. He’d been stamped in. Is that a term that means anything in the US?

Yeardley:  Sure. Like your time card.

Simon:  Yes. And he was stamped in that day. His foreman, who was his immediate boss, confirmed that he had been working that day. He remembered clearly, they had been at work that day. So we go back to the office and in my mind, we’ve just eliminated Bill Smith. I’m already thinking about the next one. And Jim said to me, “I don’t like this, I don’t like this guy.” There’s something not right. I said, “His boss says he was there, Jim, we’ve seen the paperwork, that he was there.” He said, “I know there’s something about him, something not right, Simon?” I said, “Well, we’ve no good time to dwell on what you think’s no right and what’s no wrong.” I gave him a big lecture because Jim was great at jumping to conclusions and saying it must be him.

 I was more of a, well, let’s have a look at the evidence first and see where it takes us. I didn’t fancy this guy at all, Smith. I didn’t have any feelings about it one way or the other. I was quite happy that we had alibied him. But when I came in in the morning, I had time for my subconscious to work on it. I said to Jim, “We should never ignore that gut instinct, ever. Let’s go back.” And we encroached into what we should have been doing that day. We went back to Bill Smith’s work and detained his boss. If you detain someone, if you take them and don’t ask them any questions, if you just put them in the car, put a set of handcuffs on them and take them away to the police station, maybe that takes 20 minutes, 30 minutes, that’s a long time to be mewling over, what have these guys got? What have they done? What’s happened?

 So Jim and I drew up in the CID car, made no bones about it, didn’t ask for Smith or anyone else, went straight to the foreman’s office, said to him, “We spoke to you the other day and you gave us a statement.” Yeah, that’s right, yeah, you’re coming with us. You’re cautioned, you’re not obliged to say anything, but anything you say is going to be taken down and that might be used in evidence. Now come with us and we take him out the door and put him in the car. When we got to a police station, we got the breakthrough that we deserved, because the boss in the police station said, “Guys, he was off that day, he took time off, but I marked him in, I clocked his card in.” So Bill Smith’s boss had marked his card, clicked his card, that he was working that day. Which is what workplaces, people do for each other all the time, friends and colleagues and bosses, it’s favors.

 He wasn’t going to tell us the truth the first-time around, but he did the second time around. So all of a sudden Mr. Smith had risen in our estimation as having been off work on the day of the third attack, which is the one that had alibied him originally. So the gloves were off now, and by this time there’d been no repeat offense for about 10 days, I think, at that point. So in our mind, there’s a wick burning, there’s a candle burning here that you would never forgive yourself for if he had done something that night, whilst we went home and planned what we were going to do the next day, that was never going to happen with Jim and I. And we didn’t want to go and arrest him and show our hand right away or annoy his mother and he’s not there and end up having to pursue him and all the rest of it.

 So what we did was try to clinch the case right there and then. I phoned up the mother of the second boy and arranged to go and show us some photographs because Bill Smith was a criminal. So we had lots of information and photographs of them that had been taken whilst they’d been in custody, Yeardley. So I said to Jim, “You go and make up the card that we used in those days.” It’s all done digitally now, but in those days we had a brown cardboard piece of paper with slots in it that you could put photographs in, photographs that we took for criminal record purposes. So Jim went and got photographs and made up the card. And what you do is put a minimum of eight and one of them is our guy and the other seven are different, other people who hopefully have some resemblance in age and description to the suspect. And we arranged to go and see the mum and the wee boy before he went to his bed about 7 o’clock that night.

 We didn’t tell anybody what we were doing. We didn’t make that phone call to anyone. We just went and did it because were hot on the trail. And it’s really still an instinct from Jim because the fact that Bill had lied about where he was, it didn’t mean anything, really. It just meant he’d been somewhere else. But we felt we were onto something. And this is the part of the story that gets my hair still standing up and then the little that I’ve got at the back, because I can still remember it was me that had the card and sat, knelt in front of the wee boy and we explained to him what we’re doing. This is just part of the process. You might not see the man here. It’s just part of what we do, not to worry about it.

 I opened up the folder and showed him the photographs and now my hair is standing up in the back of my head because I’ll never forget his face when he looked at it. And he looked at his mum and he said, “Mum, that’s him there, that’s the man.” That silence there is exactly what was going on at the time, because nobody knew what to say. It was the last thing, really, that you expect. Unfortunately, the wee boy also said, and that’s him there as well.

Unison:  Oh.

Yeardley:  God.

Simon:  That’s him, mum, with a beard. Jim had put two pictures of him in.

Dan:  Oh, oh.

Yeardley:  Two pictures of Bill Smith.

Simon:  Yes, two pictures of our suspect, Bill Smith. He’d put one from a year or so before the last time he’d been arrested clean shaven, which was the first one the wee boy picked out. And he’d put in an older one with a beard.

Yeardley:  Did Jim do it on purpose to see if the boy really identified Bill Smith?

Simon:  It was a genuine mistake. At the time I nearly strangled Jim.

Yeardley:  Talk a little bit about why having two photos of the same suspect, even if one is bearded and one is clean shaven might be a problem in court.

Simon:  What we say in the UK is everything’s about fairness to the accused, okay. That’s a term that we’re all familiar with and it sticks in our throat sometimes because it constricts every aspect of police work. Every single thing we do is going to be judged of whether it was fair to the accused or not at the end of the day. Defense lawyers’ jobs is to scrutinize every single thing that we do and every decision that we make to see if it was made within the law, if we followed the procedures that are laid down by the court. And the worst thing a cop can do is make a mistake. And all of a sudden, a murderer or a rapist or whoever it might be, a terrorist, goes free because you slipped up and didn’t do your job properly. So that’s really what the eight pictures, two of them being accused, that’s now 25% instead of 12.5%. And it gives the defense something to then latch onto.

Dan:  In the States, you’ll hear lawyers and people involved in the court process call it fruit of the poisonous tree.

Simon:  Yep.

Dan:  If it’s a bad search, everything that you found in that search is null and void.

Simon:  Yeah. Or a bad interview. If you interview someone and don’t read them their rights, which I suppose is the most basic.

Dan:  Right.

Dave:  So your victim, there’s no doubt in your mind that you guys have the right guy. You also know that you’ve got a little hiccup with this set of photos. But we’ll deal with it when we deal with it. But the exigency is make sure this guy doesn’t get his hands on another kid. I’m assuming that was done right after that meeting, is that you guys are on to the next task.

Simon:  No, it wasn’t. Because then we made our first mistake and we phoned the boss.

[laughter]

 What we should have done was gone and arrested them because our instincts as sprinters is just to go and get them, put him in a cell and take it from there. But when you do that, I need to tell you about our procedures here, Yeardley. If we’d went and arrested Smith at that point, it’s debatable whether we had enough to charge him at that point because we had the one wee boy identification, that’s never going to be enough to go to court with. We’ll still get the other wee boys to see it. It’s too late at night to do that. Now, we’ve discovered the cock-up with the photographs. If we go and get them, we have to do the whole job. We have to go and get him and everything in that house, he is coming out of that house. He might have another residence that his mom doesn’t know about. He might not be there and you get a warning.

 So the sensible thing to do is really to wait until the morning. But we didn’t do that we phoned the boss and told him, primarily because of the photograph thing. Because the worst thing you can do when you make a mistake is try and cover it up or not mention it. It’s suicide in the police. And more importantly, you might jeopardize the case. That’s always got to be the priority. It was a lesson I learned very early, that we all make mistakes. And if you say, “Listen, I’ve just made a mistake, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know how I did it, but here’s what I did.” We can deal with it and explain it and be truthful about it and record it properly, which we did. So we phoned the boss, Mr. Michael. He didn’t even come out. He didn’t come out himself. He phoned a DS, a detective sergeant who came out and he was kind of head in hand so know, what have you done?

Dave:  So what’s the next move on the chessboard?

Simon:  So we decided to set up night shift surveillance at Smith’s house. Because if we had detained him, we start the clock ticking then. If you can’t charge him, you have to detain him. And if you detain someone, then the clock starts ticking. which gave us six hours to detain a suspect. At the end of that six-hour period, we had to decide whether to let him go or charge him.

Yeardley:  Wow, that’s not a lot of time.

Simon:  Yeah. And you can only use the six hours once for one case. But that six hours you had to guard jealously because sometimes within that six hours, you needed a lab analysis done. And that was the case here. We had lots of samples and we would have all of Smith’s shoes and clothes and all the rest of it, maybe a car, we would have all of that. But it would be 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock at night and whether we could utilize the six hours properly to get enough to charge him at 5 o’clock in the morning, it would be a mad rush that we didn’t really have the resources to do. Everyone’s been working all day and gone home. So the sensible decision was to watch his house and get him in the morning when everybody was fresh and ready to go. We had some cops there, some detectives there, surveillance unit actually there within an hour of us making that phone call.

Break 3

Paul:  So Simon, you guys are sitting on his house overnight making sure he’s not leaving to go find another kid. What do you do next?

Simon:  Well, what Jim and I did was get sent home. The boss phoned us up and said, “You two go home and don’t come in tomorrow until further notice.” We didn’t get to go and lay hands on him. We didn’t get to collar him, we didn’t get to go to his door. I don’t know what you guys did in your neck of the woods when you had a breakthrough in a major inquiry and got the guy locked up, whether it be a murder or whatever. But we always had a thing called a payoff, where the boss, in this case, Mr. Michael, the DCI, would pick a local hostelry, like a club, a bowling club or something of that ilk, and everybody who had been involved in the inquiry, the uniform boys, the incident room staff, the civilian staff, sometimes traffic cops, firearms cops, drug squad, whatever, we would all congregate at the club at a certain time of night and we would all get drunk, [chuckles] for want of a better expression. And that was the payoff, that was the boss’ thank you to the team. But Jim and I were sent home, not allowed to go and arrest them. And nobody called us. I think they were told not to phone us or anything. And they had the payoff two nights later and weren’t invited.

Dave:  Is all this punishment just because of the lineup issue, or is this because you guys did a task without being assigned a task?

Simon:  Because we did it and made a fool of him.

Dave:  This is all ego and arrogance in that oftentimes looks a lot like incompetence.

Simon:  It’s exactly what it was without putting any frills on it at all. That’s exactly what it was. And I believe that if that guy Michael had still been in charge of this today, 43 years later, he’d still be looking for Smith. Three days later we were both back at our desks and a lot of the boys were backslapping and congratulations and all that and wanting to know the story, wanting to know about the photograph. And they didn’t know that we’d been doing this. Nobody knew that him and I were coming in early in the morning. They knew something was going on. They maybe thought we were sleeping together at that point or something. I don’t know what they thought. [laughter]

Dave:  It’s really disappointing that somebody– and it’s not an isolated incident, being petty like that and not recognizing the greater good versus I don’t like that these guys did something against my advice. It’s so short sighted. And that happens in police departments where you have egos. And like I said, “A lot of times people with the biggest egos are the most incompetent because they just always think they’re right and they think that the way they do things is the only way to do those things. It’s such a big investigation. Just invite the two guys that broke the case, have them be a part of it.

Yeardley:  And also, if you’re not asking for overtime and you’re just doing this on your own time, I mean, accept the help.

Simon:  Yeah.

Dan:  Simon, in this case, you and your partner Jim are asked to stay at home. Your officers go out and talk to Bill Smith. Does Bill Smith say anything?

Simon:  Yes. The DS that I mentioned earlier that we’d spoke to the night before, him and another DS went out and arrested him in the morning, detained him in the morning, took him to the office to take his prints and samples and whatnot, search his house. It was probably a 15 to 20-minute drive from his house to the police station. On the drive back, Smith admitted to the crimes. He confessed, went straight in and went on tape and admitted to see crimes.

Yeardley:  Simon, did the mistake that Jim made, laying out the photographic lineup, did that cause any issues?

Simon:  No. When it went to the High Court, it wasn’t a big deal because we had come right out and said, “Oh, we made a mistake.” And here’s under oath, here’s how we did it. We made a mistake because it was done in good faith. That’s what the judge ruled. It was done in good faith and it didn’t in any way influence the identification of the suspect.

Yeardley:  What sort of sentence he got?

Simon:  He got 14 years. You get more for dealing heroin.

Dave:  Yeah. That crime with the victims ages, in the state that Dan and I live in, any child under 12, it’s 300 months for a sodomy charge, so 25 years. And then these would be consecutive, like 25, 25, 25. It’s interesting how the evolution of sentencings go with sexual assault cases.

Simon:  The end of the story really is that Mr. Jackson came back, the Detective Superintendent, my friend and colleague, Joe Jackson. Joe was a very famous Glasgow detective, the exact opposite of Mr. Michael [unintelligible ] and a sprinter for sure. So Jim and I were at our desk one day. In fact, we get called in to the office to see the boss and we’re both looking at each other thinking, “Oh, God, what is it now?” Because the threat of disciplinary action hung over us for quite a while. And when you’ve called in to see the boss, everybody shuns you. We had to walk the lonely walk up the staircase to the boss’ office thinking, “Oh, God, what now?” Nobody’s saying hello or anything at all. And went in and Mr. Jackson was there behind his big desk and he went into his drawer and he brought out a bottle of whiskey and put two glasses down said, “Sit down, lads. There you are, that was a great job that you did. And you know that it would have been different if I’d been here, you know that it would have been handled differently.” And as soon as Mr. Jackson came back, everything was sorted and back to normal.

Yeardley:  Unbelievable. Simon, once Michael was out of the picture and Joe Jackson’s return from vacation, were your colleagues elated and able to congratulate you on solving this case?

Simon:  No. You see, that’s a civilian question, Yeardley, because the boys are kind of smiling already. [Yeardley chuckles] Congratulate– That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Dan:  You get five more cases assigned to you. That’s the thank you. [laughs]

Simon:  Nobody’s ever going to say. If I’ve ever said anything nice about any cop, I don’t want them ever to know it.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  No wonder you all have PTSD. Good God.

Simon:  [laughs] But everybody knew that between us, it was just that tenacity and that willingness to work the case. We just wanted to get the guy, you know?

Yeardley:  Yeah. So how did you feel about Jim after you worked this case together? Is he still your nemesis?

Simon:  Well, what I should have explained to you was Jim and I are now pals, because the day we started working together, there was a real frostiness, but it doesn’t last long, because one thing sprinters want to do is get all that stuff out the road. You deal with it face to face. Jim and I were both that type of person. So one of us said, “Right, how are we going to manage this situation?” Because neither of us want to be here, but we’re going to have to do something. I think the first time we walked into the office together and somebody said something sarcastic to us, what I discovered is that Jim, his mouth was like a Gatling gun. And anyone who was in front of him within 90 degrees was getting shot down.

 Until then, whenever I got within the 90 degrees, [?] see, when I was working with him, I was behind his Gatling gun. What we became was two Gatling guns [chuckles] and they would regret ever opening their mouths. Because Jim and I would both give them the biggest mouthful that you could ever imagine in your life. And they would go a shirk away and think, I’m never going to confront those two again. So Jim and I are now buddies. We play pool together. I did a charity tournament just after this inquiry for my daughter who had cystic fibrosis. And Jim, I couldn’t begin to tell you how helped me with that. And we became close buddies, strangely.

Yeardley:  That’s great. Thank you so much for bringing this case. It’s just another great good old fashioned detective work, follow the hunch and just do the thing. I love it.

Simon:  I didn’t need to come on here, Yeardley to get called old fashioned. My kids call me that often.

[laughter]

Simon:  Apparently, I drive like an old man. Funny though, isn’t it?

[laughter]

Yeardley:  It’s quite all right, I think.

Dave:  Old school. How’s that?

Yeardley:  Better.

Dave:  Old school detective work. Love it.

Simon:  Yeah, that’s better. That’s better. The good old days.

Yeardley:  Simon, that was amazing. Thank you so much for spending the day with us.

Dave:  Thank you. Let’s have a pint sometime.

Simon:  It’s the first time I’ve been in the company of three detectives for what, five, six hours? And I’m still sober at the end of it.

[laughter]

Paul:  We’re going to have to change that.

Dan:  We’ve been drinking the whole time over here.

[laughter]

Simon:  Well, that explains a lot, actually.

[laughter]

Dave:  Thank you, Simon.

Dan:  Yes, thank you.

Simon]:  Brilliant guys. Thank you.

Yeardley:  Now for a sneak peek at today’s new bonus episode.

Dan:  You are standing there. And I think for me, I was always aware of these walls have a story to tell, and that you are standing in an environment where terrible, horrible things happened. There’s a gravity when you’re standing there in these spaces, knowing what happened and knowing that you have a job to do and that you need to do it right for justice to be served.

[music]

Yeardley:  To listen today’s bonus episode and access hundreds more, go to smalltowdicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button.

[music]

 Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editors are Christina Bracamontes and Erin Phelps. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Gary Scott is our executive producer, and Logan Heftel is our production manager.

 Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.  

[music]

 Oh, our groovy theme song was composed by John Forrest. Also, if you’d like to support the making of this podcast, go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button. There, for a small subscription fee, you’ll find exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else. The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you SpeechDocs for this wonderful service. Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 Production.

 Small Town Fam, thanks for listening. Nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]