Glasgow Crime Stories: How Walter Scott Ellis escaped the hangman's noose

A man charged with shooting dead a taxi driver and facing the death penalty was cleared on a unanimous not proven charge.

Such was the interest in the case that when Walter Scott Ellis walked free 60 years ago having escaped the hangman noose hundreds were standing outside waiting to hear the verdict.

The end of his trial in November 1961 also sparked scenes of previously unseen pandemonium.

Fights broke out between rival newspaper reporters in a bid to secure an exclusive interview with the man who had just walked free on a capital punishment murder charge.

In the resulting chaos, a police officer was injured and a reporter suffered two broken legs when he was knocked to the ground.

Walter Scott Ellis, who lived in Bridgeton had denied shooting taxi driver John Walkinshaw, above, in Tormusk Road, Castlemilk.

His case was taken by legendary lawyer Joe Beltrami who had already successfully defended five men on capital murder charges.

Beltrami, who passed away in 2015, realised that this would prove to be a much more difficult proposition.

However, the final verdict would cement his reputation as the foremost criminal lawyer in the city.

This was a time before legal aid, and Scott Ellis's father had only £100 (worth £1900 today) to spend on his son's defence.

Even though Beltrami knew the money would cover only a fraction of the real cost, he took it on.

The cabbie had been shot in the head and was discovered slumped over his steering wheel.

Local residents had heard a taxi pull up in the early hours of Sunday morning, July 23, 1961 and two men talking.

They also heard the taxi’'s radio crackling, –then the shattering sound of two shots.

Several went to their windows and saw a man running towards the darkness of the nearby Glen Wood around 1:45 am.

Local resident Ronald Finlayson, who had phoned the taxi for a friend, found John slouched over his wheel, dripping with blood.

The windscreen of his cab was shattered, and he died a few hours later in hospital.

During the murder investigation police interviewed 1,279 taxi drivers and took statements at 1,430 houses.

In an unusual move special questionnaires were handed out to local residents asking where they were at the time of the murder.

Four days after John's death detectives charged Walter Scott Ellis, 29, who was already well known in the city's underworld.

An obvious suspect for what appeared to be a motiveless crime.

The prosecution called 125 witnesses for the trial which began on October 30 with Beltrami having interviewed each one at least twice.

The first person in the dock was the victim's widow Helen Walkingshaw, above.

Dressed in black she said her husband worked long hours and had built up a thriving taxi business owning five cabs. She'd been waiting up for him at their home in Easterhouse but he never arrived.

The jury was told that her husband had picked up Scott Ellis from a party in Bridgeton and taken him to Castlemilk.

He then shot the driver after his taxi stopped In Tormusk Road.

Scott Ellis then ran through the nearby Glen Wood emerging on the other side in Ardencraig Road, to take a second taxi the short distance to his parents home in Stravanan Road.

The second taxi driver John Mcleod, far right, identified Scott Ellis in the dock and said he was the man he had collected.

Two types of glass found on the kerb beside the murder taxi - from a broken beer bottle and the shattered taxi windscreen - appeared to match glass found in the heel of Scott Ellis's left shoe.

Bullets had also been found in his flat in Bridgeton though they were different from the ones used to kill the taxi driver.

However the prosecution said this showed the accused had access to firearms.

Detectives were never able to trace the driver who picked up Scott Ellis in Bridgeton.

This, the jury were told, also proved that he must have been John Walkingshaw. and was by now dead.

Though there were no eye witnesses to the attack the prosecution had presented a powerful circumstantial case.

They said Scott Ellis had picked up the second taxi because he had already murdered the driver of the first.

His defence team marshalled by Beltrami argued that he was never in the victim's taxi.

The fare on the meter had shown 10 shillings and four pence ( around 52 pence) but they were able to show that a normal fare from Bridgeton would only be six shillings.

They argued that Walkingshaw's killer was another man who'd probably been picked up in a different part of the city.

They said the two types of glass found in his shoe was so common they could have come from anywhere.

One witness John Craig said he had been in a pub with Scott Ellis a few days after the murder when a beer glass had broken at his feet.

There was no eye witnesses to the shooting and no forensic evidence that he had shot John Walkinhshaw or even been in his taxi.

Ronald Finlayson who saw the killer run off said he was wearing a light coloured suit, whereas Ellis's suit that night was dark coloured.

Detectives never found the murder weapon which is believed to have been a pocket revolver.

Scott Ellis's defence team said it was unlikely that a man who had just murdered a taxi driver would then try to pick up the second cab in the street a few minutes later in the same housing estate.

The jury who were expected to spend a long time deliberating agreed and took just 43 minutes to return their unanimous not proven verdict.

Beltrami watched as the man who just a few minutes earlier had faced being hanged left court a free man, mobbed by up to 60 reporters trying to sign up an exclusive with the former murder accused The trial judge reportedly summoned two of the editors to the High Court and threatened to put them in jail over the way their staff had behaved.

In one of the interviews he did give Walter Scott Ellis volunteered his own theory on who might have committed the murder.

He said: "I think John Walkingshaw was shot by a raving madman lurking in the Castlemilk woods - by a man who may strike again.

"I had nothing to do with this ghastly pointless murder."

After the verdict Scott Ellis was photographed with a glass of wine and a cigar saying the experience had "frightened me on to the straight and narrow."

However a few months later he was back behind bars after being sentenced to 18 months for possession of explosives.

In 1966 he was jailed for a further 21 years after his gang shot an assistant manager and a teller of a bank in Pollokshaws and escaped with £19,947.

In prison he became a skilled artist selling his work to other inmates including Glasgow crime boss Walter Norval.

Released after 14 years, he was later sentenced to another three years for trying to rob a grocery store.

Walter Scott Ellis eventually settled in Dennistoun and died in March 2009 in Glasgow Royal Infirmary from bronchopneumonia at the age of 77.

A death notice published in the Glasgow Times said: "Walter, much loved dad, brother and partner."

The case was one of the last capital murder trials in Scotland.

Hanging was abolished four years later which was welcomed by Beltrami and many other criminal lawyers.

In his 1988 autobiography "The Defender" he revealed how the pressure of representing someone facing the death penalty was far greater than in normal murder cases.

Beltrami told of having had a nightmare six days before Scott Ellis's trial in which he saw a faceless man swinging from a rope in the gallows. It was so graphic that he woke up at 3am in a cold sweat.

Beltrami wrote: "There was much more strain for lawyer and counsel involved in cases of capital murder - not to mention the accused."