Nineteen-year-old Amanda Duffy was a student at Motherwell College in North Lanarkshire, Scotland. On Friday night, May 29th, 1992, Amanda went out with her friends to celebrate the fact that she’d been asked to audition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Shortly after parting with her friends in the wee hours of Saturday, May 30th, however, she disappeared.
Later that day, passersby spotted her body lying on waste ground near a parking lot in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire. She was nude from the waist down, and several twigs and branches had been shoved into her nose, mouth, and vagina. Her face and head were covered with blood, and it was determined she had died from severe blunt force trauma to the head and neck and had also possibly been smothered or strangled.
Not long after the murder, police took a twenty-year-old man named Francis Auld into custody, as he had been seen with Amanda between midnight and one a.m. on the day of her death. A deep bite mark on Amanda’s right breast was also found to match his dental features. Auld denied killing Amanda, claiming instead that there had been a second man named Mark whom he left Amanda in the company of.
Auld was placed on trial, but the jury reached a majority verdict of “not proven” and he was released. In the wake of this decision, Amanda’s parents spearheaded a campaign to abolish the “not proven” verdict but were ultimately unsuccessful.
Two years later, in 1994, Auld was arrested and convicted of making threatening phone calls to two of his former friends. According to one of the recipients of the calls, Auld had said, “Patrick, you thought Amanda was the last. Well, you’re next, after Caroline.” Auld was sentenced to 240 hours of community service.
In 1995, Amanda’s parents brought a civil lawsuit against Auld. They won and were awarded £50,000, though this sum was never paid.
After the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 was passed, the Strathclyde Police reopened the investigation into Amanda Duffy’s murder, hoping to try Francis Auld for the crime a second time, which previously would not have been permitted. This bid for a retrial was rejected in 2016, and Francis Auld died of cancer a year later.
Though it seems likely that Auld was indeed responsible for the gruesome murder of Amanda Duffy, the “not proven” verdict still stands, and the crime remains officially unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 