Glasgow Crime Stories: Young victim Diane McInally found by dog walker in park undergrowth

Its lush and spacious grounds provide ample space for leisurely walks and pleasant picnics.

However, on the morning of October 16, 1991, it was the scene of something far grimmer when a dog walker discovered the body of a young woman in the undergrowth.

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The victim had been beaten so badly that her facial features were unrecognisable.

Even hardened police officers called to the scene were sickened by what they saw.
However, her fingerprints matched a set belonging to 23-year-old heroin addict and sex worker Diane McInally.

Hours earlier she had been working in Glasgow’s notorious red-light district to feed her habit.

The focus of the murder inquiry centred on a square mile in Glasgow city centre bordered by Douglas Street, Waterloo Street, Cadogan Street and Argyll Street.

During the day the area was a busy commercial district employing lawyers, accountants and company directors.

At night it was taken over by desperate women standing on street corners looking for a different kind of custom.

Ironically, the red-light district was also close to Strathclyde Police HQ in Pitt Street, where the investigation team sited their incident caravan.

Detectives flooded the area to speak to the sex workers and were shocked by what they found.

Most were like Diane, their bodies ravaged by needle marks, forced on to the streets to feed their habit. 

There was also a two-tier system in operation.

The older women, usually non-drug users, worked in the evening providing sexual services to the outwardly respectable businessmen and professional people who had just finished work.

The younger females, almost all addicts, worked the dangerous later shift that attracted a more sinister type of customer.

Diane had been last seen getting into a car in Cadogan Street, the most popular spot for girls to stand.

Because they were drug users Diane’s fellow sex workers remembered little of the night of her murder which hampered the investigation. The women were also prone to giving false names and addresses.

Detectives instead photographed each woman after they were interviewed.

They then put their pictures on the wall of the incident caravan thus making future identification easier.

The man leading the hunt for her killer, Detective Supt Joe Jackson, now retired, said it was one of his most difficult ever murder investigations.

At one stage he brought in a hypnotist to try and help one sex worker remember events on the night of Diane’s murder.

Mr Jackson told the Glasgow Times: “The park was popular with prostitutes and their clients because it was a large area and very quiet.

“I believe Diane was killed where we found her, probably with baseball bats.

“It had also been raining and a lot of forensic evidence was washed away.

“Our best witnesses should have been the women themselves but because most were drug addicts their recollections were poor.

“I remember interviewing one woman at length in our incident caravan then that same evening she came up to me in the street asking if I was looking for ‘business’.

“She hadn’t remembered me from our previous conversation, which had only been an hour earlier.”

Diane, originally from Castlemilk, Glasgow, had become an addict after the break-up of her relationship with her son’s father

She was still a good mother. Diane would see her son off to school in the morning and then bring him home in the afternoon. She then took the boy to his grandmother’s who would look after him while she was out on the street.

On the night of Diane’s murder, CCTV showed her leaving her tower block home in the Gorbals at around 9pm heading for the red light district.

Detectives then discovered Diane had been selling drugs to other sex workers, which opened up a new line of inquiry.

Could her killer be a dealer she owed money to or worse still, had ripped off?

The days passed into weeks and then months as police hit a wall of silence.

One name then began to appear regularly in the witness statements of the sex workers.

He was a man called Dale Clark, a 20-year-old from Yoker.

Clark, known as Dagga, supplied the women with drugs from a branch of Dunkin’ Donuts in Argyle Street.

He was taken in for questioning on a number of occasions but refused to tell police anything.

Meanwhile, Mr Jackson had obtained the car registration numbers of 300 men who regularly frequented the red light district.

However, he did not have the resources to visit each and every “punter’.

In an unusual move the police chief personally appealed for the men, particularly if they were customers of Diane, to come forward.

If they didn’t do so they would be visited at home over the festive period, including Christmas Day.

Amazingly 500 men tuned up at Pollok Police Office in Glasgow to give statements, including a police officer, a minister and a sheriff.

Mr Jackson added: “I couldn’t believe how many were there.

“I thought we would get a dozen at most,

“They were sitting lined up in the police station hiding their faces with newspapers.

“It was unbelievable. Our move certainly rattled a few cages.”

By this stage, the police had more than 1000 statements and Dale Clark was still in the frame.

He also had connections to some major underworld figures including a Garry Moore.

In 1984, Moore was one of four men who stood trial at the High Court in Glasgow for the murders of six members of the Doyle family in a fire at their home Ruchazie, but he was later cleared.

In early 1992, Mr Jackson believed there was now a strong case to charge both Clark and Moore with murder and the Procurator Fiscal appeared to agree.

“However, when the two suspects were taken to Glasgow Sheriff Court the next day, they were both released with Moore returning to prison where he was serving a sentence for possession of stolen goods.”

Having reviewed the police case, the same Procurator Fiscal had changed his mind claiming a lack of evidence.

In 1994, prime suspect Moore was convicted of killing the son of reformed murderer and sculptor Jimmy Boyle and sentenced to eight years in prison. 

Three years later, Dale Clark was found dead from an overdose.

Shortly before his death in 2010 from liver damage, Moore admitted in a newspaper interview that he was with Diane hours before she died and they had argued but he denied being her killer. 

Diane’s violent and tragic death was the first of eight prostitute murders over 14 years in the city.

Mr Jackson cannot understand why to this day the two men were not put on trial.

He said: “We had a very good case against but the Procurator Fiscal decided not to go ahead with it.

“I was never told why.

“Maybe it was because the victim was a prostitute and they didn’t want the expense of a trial they didn’t think they would win.”

Mr Jackson believes that Diane owed Clark and Moore money for drugs and her death was violent retribution.

He added: “She’d been given pills to distribute but spent the money and didn’t pass it to the people who were controlling her.

“I believe most of the violence on the night of the murder was by Gary Moore.

“I think Clark would have been standing there watching it.

“He would also have realised how violent Moore was and the consequences if he ever spoke out.”

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Mr Jackson retired the following year after 31 years’ distinguished service.

It was one of the very few criminal cases which he investigated which did not result in a conviction.

Mr Jackson added: “I’m quite satisfied that the two men we charged were the two that murdered Diane McInally.

“It didn’t matter if the victim was a prostitute or a member of high society.

“I always wanted to take every inquiry to its logical conclusion and that meant putting someone behind bars.

“Unfortunately, that never happened in this case.

“It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of effort on my part or my team of detectives.”