Twenty-four-year-old Deirdre Kivlin lived on Greendykes Drive in Edinburgh, Scotland. On July 9th, 1995, a friend contacted her about a potential flat they were moving into in Newington. Deirdre went to the address her friend had indicated, but it turned out that her friend had been playing a prank on her; neither friend nor flat was in evidence.
Likely annoyed, Dierdre seems to have hung around the area for a while, but unfortunately for her, this decision would end up costing her life.
Weeks later, on August 16th, Dierdre’s body was discovered by a plumber in a deep drain at the rear of a tenement building nearby. She had been beaten so severely that her skull had been split open.
Not long afterward, a twenty-six-year-old drug addict named Scott Ballantyne, who sometimes squatted in the building where Dierdre was found, was arrested for her murder. He proclaimed his innocence, but a small amount of Dierdre’s blood was found on his jacket, and authorities also claimed they found fragments of his unemployment benefits form in the vicinity of the murder.
The prosecution argued that Dierdre had perhaps wandered into a place she shouldn’t have been, and that Ballantyne then allegedly bashed her in the head with a brick in the basement of the building before dumping her down the drain out back.
The defense countered that due to the extent of the victim’s injuries, whoever killed Dierdre would have been covered in blood, not just sprinkled with it, and an expert noted that the blood found on Ballantyne’s jacket appeared as though it had been transferred from another surface, like a wall, instead of being splashed there directly. The identifying papers found at the scene were also explained away; Ballantyne had been staying in the building, so the presence of some of his possessions there did not necessarily make him guilty of the crime.
In the end, the jury returned a verdict of not proven, and Scott Ballantyne was released. Though police were disappointed, as they believed Ballantyne was the man responsible, Dierdre’s brother Lawrence seemed to be more circumspect, agreeing that the case against Ballantyne was not sufficiently solid to convict him.
Following the trial, there were no further developments in the case, and as of this writing in November 2024, the brutal murder of Deirdre Kivlin is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 