In November of 1981, sixteen-year-old Pamela Hastie was walking home from school in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland. As she cut through Rannoch Woods not far from her home, she was attacked by an unknown assailant, who hit her over the head with a piece of wood, dragged her into the bushes, raped her, then strangled her to death with a length of twine.
Not long after the crime was discovered, a local nineteen-year-old named Raymond Gilmour confessed to police that he had killed Pamela. The young man had been known to expose himself to passersby in the woods, and took magazines there to masturbate on occasion. Gilmour was duly convicted of the crime and imprisoned, even though he retracted his confession almost immediately.
As the years went by, Gilmour continued to assert his innocence, claiming that the confession had been bullied out of him. It was also significant that some details of his initial account of the murder were incorrect, such as the fact that he said he’d strangled Pamela with a belt when it was actually a piece of twine, and failing to mention a knife at all, even though Pamela was found to have defensive knife wounds on her hands.
Finally, after a review of the case, Gilmour was released in 2002, after serving twenty-one years in prison. His conviction was overturned five years later, leaving the murder of Pamela Hastie officially unsolved.
In 2023, cold case experts announced that they were considering exhuming Pamela’s remains to see if they could salvage any DNA evidence that would allow them to solve the crime once and for all. Authorities have long suspected that Pamela may have been a victim of one of Scotland’s three most notorious serial killers: Peter Tobin, Robert Black, or Angus Sinclair.
Notably, a person matching Robert Black’s description was seen running out of Rannoch Woods at around the time Pamela was murdered. Black was convicted of killing four schoolgirls between 1981 and 1986.
And Peter Tobin, it so happened, lived in the same town as Pamela, and was convicted of three murders committed between 1991 and 2006, though it’s believed he was responsible for many more.
Whether the renewed push to solve the case will bear any fruit remains to be seen, but investigators are hopeful that they will at last be able to give the Hastie family some closure after more than forty years.
Crime Immemorial 