Forty-six-year-old Catherine Duncan and her husband Thomas had spent the evening of Friday, February 2nd, 1968 engaging in one of their favorite pastimes: playing bingo at the Wallyford Miners’ Welfare Society Social Club, which was only a short walk from their home in the little Scottish mining village. The couple had, by all accounts, had an enjoyable time, and left the club in high spirits.
Thomas walked his wife back home, and then he proceeded on to the Smeaton Colliery, where he worked the night shift. He had no idea that the next time he saw Catherine, she would be dead.
Thomas Duncan arrived home from work at around six-thirty a.m. and stepped into a ghastly horror. Catherine was lying on the floor of the front room in a widening pool of blood, and the entire scene was an utter shambles, as though there had been a violent struggle. Catherine had obviously been raped, bludgeoned, and stabbed multiple times in a murder so vicious that Thomas was never able to recover from the sight of it.
Authorities immediately involved the entire town in the investigation, visiting every home in the village and taking fingerprints from every single resident. Despite the all-encompassing nature of the inquiry, though, the case very quickly met a dead end.
A few days after Catherine’s death, however, a witness claimed they had heard a man bragging about the killing in the same social club where Catherine and Thomas Duncan had been playing bingo in the hours before the murder. This man, later identified as a petty criminal by the name of Thomas Edgar Gauson, allegedly confessed to the slaying while in police custody for a separate assault.
There is evidently no record of Gauson ever being charged with the murder of Catherine Duncan, presumably because there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. According to an investigation undertaken in 2016 by the Scottish Daily Record newspaper, Gauson was a military veteran with a violent criminal history. While his movements after the 1960s are unknown, there were rumors circulating that Gauson was himself murdered at some point and buried near the M6, though he was never officially reported as a missing person and his body has never been found.
Following the death of Catherine Duncan, her husband Thomas abandoned the home where she was killed, quit his job at the colliery, and spent the remainder of his life completely heartbroken. He died in 1982. The couple’s son, also named Thomas, hopes that the case can one day be closed.
Crime Immemorial 