Paddy Meehan

Patrick Connolly Meehan was a Glasgow criminal with a record of safe-breaking, a "peter man" in the city’s underworld slang. In 1969 he was convicted of a murder in Ayr that he had not committed, and he spent seven years in prison before receiving a royal pardon. The case drew in some of the most famous names in Scottish law and politics, exposed an agonising conflict in a lawyer’s duty of confidentiality, and left behind a legal muddle that took years to unravel.

At its centre was a crime of real cruelty. Rachel Ross died after she and her husband Abraham were attacked by two robbers in their home in Ayr in 1969.

The murder in Ayr

The robbers broke into the Rosses’ bungalow and attacked the couple. Abraham Ross survived and told the police that the two men had called each other "Pat" and "Jim". Suspicion fell on Paddy Meehan and an associate, James Griffiths, who had been in the area at the time. Meehan said that they had been there on quite different business.

When the police went to arrest Griffiths in Glasgow, he opened fire and went on a shooting rampage through the city, wounding several people, one of whom later died. Griffiths was shot dead by a police officer. Meehan was arrested without resistance and charged with the murder of Rachel Ross.

The trial

Meehan’s solicitor was Joseph Beltrami, and his advocates were Nicholas Fairbairn and John Smith, both of whom later became prominent politicians, Smith as leader of the Labour Party. Meehan lodged a special defence of incrimination, naming another Glasgow criminal, Ian Waddell, as one of the true killers. The jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The campaign

Doubts grew almost at once. Waddell began telling journalists that he had committed the robbery himself. A long campaign for Meehan’s release was led by Fairbairn and by the writer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy. Meehan himself fought tirelessly from prison.

Beltrami carried a heavier burden. Another of his clients, William "Tank" McGuinness, had confided to him that he and Waddell had carried out the Ayr robbery. Bound by the absolute rule of client confidentiality, Beltrami could not say so. Only after McGuinness was killed in 1976, in what appears to have been a street fight, was Beltrami free to reveal what he had known.

Pardon, and a legal knot

In 1976 Meehan was granted a royal pardon and released. Later that year Ian Waddell was tried for the murder of Rachel Ross. He in turn blamed Meehan, and the judge told the jury that, in his view, a pardon did not wipe out Meehan’s conviction. Waddell was acquitted. The Secretary of State for Scotland, Bruce Millan, later addressed the confusion in the House of Commons.

An official inquiry led by Lord Hunter reported in 1982. It found no evidence that the police had fabricated evidence, as Meehan had claimed, and concluded that Meehan’s involvement had not been disproved. The report was widely criticised. Today it is generally accepted that the robbery was carried out by Waddell and McGuinness.

Aftermath

The case left a trail of violence. Waddell later committed another murder during a robbery and was himself killed by his accomplice. Meehan, meanwhile, developed elaborate theories that he had been framed by the intelligence services, linked to his claimed knowledge of the escape of the spy George Blake. He died of throat cancer in Swansea in 1994.

Legacy

The Meehan case became a landmark in arguments about Scottish criminal justice, identification evidence and the duty of a defence lawyer. It also entered fiction: the crime writer Denise Mina named the young heroine of her novel The Field of Blood (2005) Paddy Meehan. The story belongs with other Glasgow cases where the wrong person paid, above all that of Oscar Slater, and it is told more widely in Glasgow’s famous crimes.

Timeline