We rarely talk now of Margaret’s death. Not because the 30 years since she died has diminished her memory in any way, more because Kathleen – my wife and Margaret’s sister – is no longer troubled by the man who killed her. He means nothing to her now, nor to her three surviving sisters, Jean, Theresa and Rose.
“I can talk about it much more easily because he has no hold over us,” says Kathleen. “We have defeated him through our love for each other. What we are left with is the cherished memory of Margaret.
“She died. She was taken. But she lives. And she always will.”
Thirty years ago, my wife was a Dickson and one of five girls from Foxbar, Paisley, in Scotland. Their lives, and those of their parents, were shattered when Margaret’s husband killed her in a frenzied knife attack. Margaret – red-haired, freckled and pretty as a picture – was 24 at the time and lived in a flat in a street behind her parents’ house.
Even now, while we talk about it, it’s almost impossible to understand. And also to comprehend the consequences of his horrific act: tragically, as a result of one death came another two.
Although I have known the details since Kathleen and I first met, it’s not a subject we have spoken about a great deal simply because it has been too painful for her. But the passage of time has allowed Kathleen a greater sense of perspective, while never forgetting and never forgiving.
It was 2 September 1984. Kathleen, then 17, was living in her parent’s house in Foxbar. It was Sunday and around midday when she heard a boy in the street screaming loudly for her father. “I knew something was wrong. My dad was away working. My mum, Theresa, ran to her car and quickly drove to Margaret’s flat. My sister [also Theresa] jumped over the back fence and ran to the flat.
“I remember it so clearly. I was wearing a white T-shirt with Corfu on it and a pair of mustard trousers that needed a belt to hold them up. The wee boy was screaming that there was blood and I was thinking, do I just run out without my trousers? I got them on and ran out into the road in my bare feet.”
Earlier that morning, Kathleen and Jean, the eldest sister, had talked to Margaret in the street. She had been staying in her flat for around a year, perhaps a little longer, and was in the process of divorcing her husband.
“Jean pulled her car over and Margaret walked towards us, carrying a plastic washing basket. She smiled widely and said, ‘Did you hear? I got custody. As long as I don’t touch his house and his money.’ And she walked away, waving and smiling, so happy that she got her son.”
Later that same day, after the alarm had been raised, Kathleen arrived at the entrance to the tenement, to find Margaret lying on the ground beside her mother and sister, barely able to breath. There was a very large knife next to her and it had been used with such force that the metal blade was warped – “zig-zag-shaped” – having gone through Margaret’s body 21 times before bending on the concrete floor beneath her: brutal, horrific wounds.
“My mum held Margaret,” says Kathleen, “and I held on to Theresa. Somebody handed me a feather pillow, and I put it under Margaret’s head and neck to absorb the blood and my T-shirt was quickly covered in it. She was just saying, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum.’ And then quietly, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I pleaded with her, ‘You can, you can.’”
She pauses. “It took me a long time to overcome something as simple as a feather pillow. There was a time I couldn’t touch them because it would just remind me. I also notice the knives people have in their kitchens. The particular knife that he had, well, it was huge. And the brutality and violent nature of what went into that attack … You can imagine the force he must have used.
“But I always have this thing – all my sisters do – that it won’t beat me. That it won’t beat us. That he won’t beat us. And that’s what I tell myself.
“I like feather pillows now because he won’t beat me. It did shape us for a while. But we coped because we had a big family and such strong, caring people around us. You do become incredibly strong. After going through something like that there’s not really anything else left that can hurt you in life so you become a lot more resilient. Part of me didn’t care any more. It didn’t matter what happened to me from then on.”
As a family we rarely, if ever, mention Margaret’s killer by name. Conversations about him are inferred. A raised eyebrow is enough to indicate who is being talked about. Kathleen refuses to say his full name out loud.
His name is Allan Whyte. He was 30 at the time and he drove round to Margaret’s with their five-year-old son. The knife was in the car boot. While he was stabbing his wife, their son was standing in the tenement close [entrance] screaming repeatedly – “My dad’s hit my mum again. But I don’t like it this time because there’s blood” – before Whyte fled in his car with the boy in the back seat. He subsequently lost control of his car on a tight bend and crashed into the wall, an action he would later claim in court showed that he was trying to kill himself in remorse.
Margaret was married at 19 when she got pregnant and for part of the marriage Whyte had beaten her regularly. “I used to hear my sisters talking about it,” says Kathleen. “But it was kept very quiet. Once, when she was at my parent’s house, I saw her arms had deep, black bruises. Another time there were faded bruises on her face.
“My mum didn’t know for some time what was happening. When she found out, she was so angry but when Margaret said she was leaving and divorcing him she hoped that it might be the end of it. My mum kept everything from my father because he would have taken things into his own hands. He was such a great family man but also a very tough man. It’s a big regret not telling him because it really tortured him later what happened to his girl.
“At the hospital the doctors asked if I wanted to go in and see her and everyone was trying to protect me from how she looked. They were saying, ‘Don’t remember her like that.’ When they opened the curtains and she was lying there, I looked at her face and wondered how on earth someone could actually go that far and be so violent. Those who later defended him said he snapped. He never snapped. He was hurting her for years. He was a bad man.”
Margaret died on 4 September 1984, two days after the attack.
Kathleen fiddles with her hands before smiling. “I never think of her like that now. I only see Margaret, the beautiful young girl. I just see her at the top of the street and I think of her in her flat, starting over with her books scattered everywhere. Her life was beginning. She knew there was a way out from that monster.”
Whyte was originally charged with murder but, after psychiatric evidence, the Crown accepted a guilty plea to the reduced charge of culpable homicide. On 5 December 1984 he was given three years in prison for stabbing Margaret 21 times. It’s a line, even now, I find astonishing to comprehend.
Three years.
According to one newspaper report, Whyte claimed in the High Court in Edinburgh that he was so overcome with remorse that he tried to kill himself, twice; the first time by crashing his car into a wall and the second by jumping in front of a passing car when his first “attempt” was unsuccessful. In court he was described as a man of impeccable behaviour, intelligent and cheerful – devoted to his wife and child.
“If he was so devoted, why did he beat her up for years?” asks Kathleen. “Why did he drive his son over to Margaret’s and stab her to death in front of him? Our family didn’t know anything about the legal system and my parents were advised not to go to court because of the traumatic evidence. All that the court saw was him wearing a smart suit and being defended as if he was an innocent.”
I was 16 when I first met Kathleen on holiday in Spain, when she was with her family, although we did not start going out until I was 20. That holiday was some months after the trauma of her sister’s death. It was no longer just Margaret they were mourning. Their mother had a heart attack when she heard the sentence passed on Whyte. She died 10 days later, three months after her daughter.
Kathleen remembers: “My mum was lost, dead inside. The pressure was too much for her to bear. In truth, she died of a broken heart. The doctors and the nurses said that. I remember seeing her in hospital the night before she died. She was sitting up, staring at the blanket and picking the oose [fluff] from it. Her mental state was deteriorating. I took all the wee balls of fluff from her and put them in my hand.
“The others left the ward and I was leaving too but it was as if somebody was saying to me, really clearly, ‘Don’t go through those doors.’
“Everyone else left and I hesitated a wee bit. The voice said, ‘Go back and tell her.’
“She was still picking the oose off. I wanted to make eye contact with her but she couldn’t until I said, ‘Mum, I love you.’ She looked at me for a little bit and nodded and then put her head back down and started to pick the oose again. ‘I love you,’ I said again. She just kept picking the oose.
“She died that night. I know now that my mother had to go. She had to be with Margaret.”
When her mother died, Kathleen was still living at home with her father. It was a tremendously difficult time for them both. “It was heartbreaking,” she says. “They were terribly quiet nights, just him and me. He was such a strong man but the killing of Margaret destroyed him.
“When she died, my father was approached by other men asking if he wanted them to deal with it. They were outraged. My dad said, no, he would deal with it himself. His torment was so physical at the time and I’ve got pain talking about it now. Now, as a parent myself, I can’t think of anything worse.
“My dad was religious and began speaking with our local priest, an incredible man. He told the priest what he was planning and what he was capable of [when Whyte got out] and the priest would sit with my father at all hours and try to calm his soul.
“Meanwhile, my dad became so over-protective of me. He didn’t want me working or going out late or anything. We clashed a little because of my age but we were still so close. It was just after Christmas, 1987, a little over three years after Margaret died, and my dad bought five plastic sledges for grandchildren and neighbours’ kids. He woke me up one morning in January and asked if I wanted to go sledging. I said no, so he took the neighbours’ kids.
“Later that morning someone came to my door and I knew something was wrong. There had been an accident on the braes. A Land-Rover had skidded and was going towards a young girl. A man pushed the girl out of the way and took the full brunt of the vehicle and it killed him. The man was my dad.”
She pauses. “Saying it all out loud, it sounds almost unbelievable, but it happened. Everything happened as a result of Margaret being killed.”
Margaret was only 24. Her sisters loved her deeply. Her parents too. She was stabbed 21 times with all the brutal force that a frenzied adult male could muster. He left holes in her body and holes in the lives of those left behind. But he also became an irrelevance. Thirty years on Kathleen is remembering Margaret, her beautiful big sister, and not the man who killed her. And that is a remarkable thing.
I never knew Margaret or Theresa, their mother. I met Kathleen’s father only once, on that holiday in Spain when I was 16. All I remember is that he quietly sent his son-in-law over to check on the group of four boys talking to his youngest daughter.
A few months later, having briefly kept in touch with Kathleen, she told me her father had a new job. I sent him a congratulations card. The next time I heard anything about him was a few years later, when I opened a newspaper and read that Danny Dickson had been killed by a car when he saved a girl’s life. I went to his funeral and married his daughter 10 years later.
Even now I like to think that somewhere, beyond our imaginings, they’d all be happy with the way things turned out between Kathleen, our three children and me.
That’s all Margaret would have wished for, says Kathleen, “That the next story begin for her son and all our family. And it did.”
- This article was amended on 18 October 2014 to remove the wrong name from a photo caption.