Unsolved: Sex Killings... How Jacqui Fell Victim To Violent Sex Fiend With A Taste For S&M
WITH fear in her face, she said: "He's a beast. We think he killed that poor lassie, Jacqui Gallacher."
The speaker was a prostitute working in Glasgow's saunas.
But she knew the street girls, the ones most at risk. And she was saying what most others were saying - they knew the brutal murderer of Jacqueline Gallacher.
When asked for a name, all she would say was "Johnstone".
A man who had particular S&M tastes and was known to go too far. So far, that most working girls in Glasgow wouldn't do business with him even if he paid extra.
They might sell their bodies on the street but they wanted to live.
The hooker had been sent by other women to tell a writer the ID of the killer, as far as Glasgow prostitutes were concerned. A man they believed would kill again.
They wanted a wee bit of justice for one of their own, Jacqui.
It was 2001 but the 26-year-old had been killed five years earlier.
In a lay by near Bowling, Dunbartonshire, Jacqui's body had been found wrapped in a curtain.
She had been strangled and battered repeatedly.
Her 118 injuries included several fractures to her skull and jaw and smashed cheekbones.
Teeth were knocked out by the power of the blows.
An S&M studded collar found at the scene might have been used to strangle her and she'd been battered senseless with a heavy hammer.
Jacqui, of Paisley, was a stunner but had fallen into bad company from an early age. Her then boyfriend, Gordon Fraser, was a smack head and introduced her to the habit.
With both of them hooked and Fraser bringing in no wages, she did what so many women do in that trap. She begged and borrowed from her family, then hit the streets and sold her body.
Yet Jacqui had standards and dreams. All she ever wanted to be was a nurse. She still hoped to turn her life around.
She was ashamed of her life and kept her addiction and profession secret from her family, especially her mum, Alice Wilson - who only found out the terrible truth after her daughter died.
There had been many violent murders of prostitutes in the Glasgow area in previous years but still cops were stuck.
The working girls could have told them more - eventually they did.
In Edinburgh and Aberdeen, a policy of tolerance applied to prostitutes.
In Glasgow, it was intolerance, driving the women to the darkest, dangerous corners and refusing to speak with the police, from whom they expected nothing but grief.
But this time, some of them broke their usual stance and spoke to every copper who would listen.
This was one dangerous man and he had to be taken off the streets. The prostitutes suspected the man called Johnstone for a number of reasons.
They might not be the most caring self-help group but they did warn each other of the real bad guys. Those who enjoyed hurting them.
Johnstone was right up there among the worst. So bad, that some simply called him The Beast.
Jacqui struggled sometimes to make enough money to feed Fraser's habit as well as her own.
Cold turkey might set in before she brought home more money. So he would beat her.
Avoiding her face - that would put the punters off - he'd stamp on her stomach and burn her thighs with cigarette ends. He'd make her hurt so she'd do better the next night.
FOR a street girl like Jacqui, that meant only one thing - taking on the Johns other women rejected. That included Johnstone, who paid less as well as expecting more.
If the woman objected, he was just as likely to go ahead, do what he wanted anyway and forget to pay.
Many women claimed to have been hospitalised by Johnstone yet there were still some women who took him on. One of those was Jacqui.
Then a George Johnstone was charged with the murder. "That's him," declared some of the working girls.
"I'm not sure," said others. The cops were sure and he appeared at the High Court in Glasgow, charged with Jacqui's murder, in June 2004, eight years after her death.
At the trial, the prosecution presented scientific proof that Johnstone's DNA was found on Jacqui and on her panties.
Johnstone admitted that he was a regular client of Jacqui's but claimed he had been with her the night before her death, not the night of it.
Jacqui's boyfriend, Gordon Fraser, countered that Jacqui changed her underwear twice a day. Johnstone must have been with her that night.
Then evidence was presented to say that a white van was seen in the vicinity at key times. A white van like the one owned by Johnstone.
His defence was that he hadn't bought that white van until a year after the murder.
He also named 14 men and three unnamed others who, he claimed, could be responsible for Jacqui's death.
The jury had faced a trying time, made to see photos of her battered body that would turn anyone's stomach.
They knew fine well that whoever killed her was a dangerous man and they had to get this decision right.
In the end, the jury found the case against George Johnstone not proven.He would have walked away from court except, unknown to the jury, he was already behind bars for the death of a woman.
Johnstone had been jailed for causing the death of Margaret Termini in a car smash in 1997.
The jury might have been swayed if they had known about that offence. Yet, is being a reckless driver - even if with deadly consequences - the same as being a cold, callous sadistic killer?
Maybe the jury would have been swayed if more prostitutes who claimed to have been hurt by a man called Johnstone had come forward.
But many of them weren't willing to give evidence, having their own secrets. As far as the working girls were concerned, they had the right man but couldn't make it stick. But had police fingered the right Johnstone?
In 1998, one John Johnstone appeared in court charged with murder.
The 38-year-old, of Kilsyth, near Glasgow, was convicted of raping Lizzie Duffy, 27, in her flat in the city's Royston.
He wrapped her head in her Celtic top and threw her from the sixth floor window to her death. The gruesome scene was caught on CCTV. Later, Johnstone was filmed leaving the block, smirking at Lizzie's crumpled body.
He was found guilty of culpable homicide by virtue of diminished responsibility and sentenced to be detained without limit of time in Carstairs Hospital. Some believed not a moment too soon.
THE cops described John Johnstone as being "the most evil man" they'd ever met and "surrounded by an aura of evil". With good reason.
That same day in court, he had been charged with raping and sodomising a man an hour after Lizzie Duffy was killed.
Though that charge was dropped, Johnstone had come under suspicion so many times before.
In 1979, he was questioned about psychiatric patient Lucille Campbell.
He was the last person to be seen with her before she disappeared.
They suspect he murdered her and buried her body in the grounds of Gartloch Hospital, where both were patients.
She has never been found. In 1990, he was accused of murdering 40-year-old Thomas Maxwell in Ibrox, Glasgow, but was eventually convicted of assault.
After he was sentenced for killing Lizzie, his wife revealed she had warned the cops how dangerous he was and he had also been interrogated on the killing of Jacqui.
Johnstone was heavily into drink, drugs and sex, spending most of his life around the world of prostitutes.
He is terrifying in appearance and so threatening, he even tried to intimidate the police when they were interviewing him. Just the type of punter prostitutes would fear.
As Johnstone spent his time in Carstairs, George Johnstone was back in the news again.
He had been working with a BBC team making a documentary about the not proven verdict.
The presenter of the show complained to the cops about what she considered threatening texts from him.
Then worse was revealed - he was in possession of a videotape of Jacqui's murder scene.
George Johnstone had the right to that tape as evidence at his trial.
But there were those who thought it obscene that a man they still considered responsible for her death had kept that tape.
George Johnstone claimed that he had never had bondage sex with Jacqui and all he was trying to do was to persuade people that he did not kill her.
Is he being truthful? Was the wrong Johnstone arrested?
Strathclyde Police announced they were not looking for another suspect for the killing of Jacqueline Gallacher.
That's shorthand for believing they had the right man.
But which man?
'Johnstone admitted that he was a regular client of Jacqui's'
