Fifty-year-old Mary McKinlay was the head English teacher at Duncanrig Secondary School in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, Scotland, and was described as friendly, affectionate, dedicated, and well-loved by her students. She lived alone in an eighth-floor flat in Glen Tower on Range Road, Motherwell.
On Saturday, May 21st, 1994, Mary was seen conversing with a group of women friends at around ten-fifteen a.m. It would be the last time she was seen alive.
On Sunday, two friends who were fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by Mary’s apartment after she failed to show up at the Kingdom Hall for services as usual. To their horror, they found the woman beaten and stabbed nine times on her living room floor. The victim’s windpipe had been severed, causing her to drown in her own blood.
There was no sign of forced entry, and nothing else in the flat had been disturbed, leading police to believe that the killer was someone she knew or someone she had no cause to suspect. Mary had, however, been sexually assaulted. Authorities stated that there were no indications she had struggled with her attacker.
The building where Mary lived was known to be quite secure: visitors had to be buzzed in at the entrance, and each flat had a peephole in the door. Friends of Mary’s told investigators that the victim was very security-conscious, and would not have opened the door for anyone she didn’t recognize.
A neighbor of Mary’s who had lived in Glen Tower for nearly twenty years claimed that a similar incident had occurred around 1989, when an elderly resident was sexually assaulted in her flat.
In November of 1994, a thirty-five-year-old taxi driver named William Ellis, who lived in the same building as Mary McKinlay, was charged with the crime, but after his girlfriend Susan McLean gave him an alibi, the jury returned a verdict of not proven. The decision caused a great deal of controversy, as Ellis himself gave no testimony concerning the alibi, and two of McLean’s relatives stated that Susan had lied about being with the accused at the time of the murder.
Whether William Ellis was the culprit or not, he ultimately didn’t get away scot-free. Ellis later kidnapped Susan McLean at gunpoint and forced her and her thirteen-year-old daughter to take an overdose of pills. He then shackled Susan in the back of a van and kept her there for four days until she was able to escape and get help. In 1999, Ellis was given a nine-year prison sentence.
Freed in 2008, Ellis was soon on the police’s radar once again. During his parole in 2004, he had befriended a woman who had let him stay with her, but after a year of the arrangement, the woman became concerned about his behavior and reported him. He was sent back to prison, and he apparently developed a grudge against her. He began writing letters threatening to use a stun gun on her, handcuff her, and force pills down her throat.
Authorities raided his home after finding out about the letters, and found disposable gloves and a balaclava. He was put back in prison, where he died in 2012 at the age of fifty-three.
It remains a mystery whether William Ellis was responsible for the rape and murder of Mary McKinlay, and the crime therefore is officially unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 