The Scot Who Should Have Hanged ; Sentenced to Death at 23, Killer Donald Forbes Manipulated the Emotions of a Nation in Order to Cheat the Noose. Chillingly, He Went On to Murder Again and Died 50 Years On, Still Utterly Unrepentant. He Was ...
Summary
WHEN trial judge Lord Wheatley sentenced Donald Forbes to hang for murder 50 years ago, three jurors wept for him. Within days, most of the country was demanding clemency for the young man of 23. Half a century later, few could possibly weep for the grizzled patient as his life ebbed away in a Greenock hospital bed, a mile from the cell where he had been spending his 46th year behind bars.
Handcuffed to the bed, the killer once dubbed Scotland's most dangerous man died last weekend of old age, rather than at the end of a hangman's rope as Lord Wheatley intended. Many must now wonder if the judge's original sentence should have stood.See the full content of this document
Extract
The Scot Who Should Have Hanged ; Sentenced to Death at 23, Killer Donald Forbes Manipulated the Emotions of a Nation in Order to Cheat the Noose. Chillingly, He Went On to Murder Again and Died 50 Years On, Still Utterly Unrepentant. He Was ...
Charlie Gilroy, the 22-year-old former soldier stabbed to death in 1970, would surely still be alive today if Forbes had hanged in 1958.
Alison Grierson, the penpal Forbes was allowed out of prison to marry in 1980, would undoubtedly have lived a more peaceful life had she never fallen under his mysterious spell.And the taxpayer would certainly have been spared the expense of keeping an 'incurable psychopath' behind bars for almost all of his adult days.The story of Scotland's longestserving prisoner is as bizarre as it is bleak - a chronicle of changing times in t...See the full content of this document