Full inquiry launched into Moira Anderson case
FRESH reports have been made to detectives about sexual attacks carried out in the 1950s by Alexander Gartshore, the convicted child rapist believed to have murdered Coatbridge schoolgirl Moira Anderson.
As a result of the new claims, and the failure to find Moira’s body during the exhumation of a grave at Old Monkland Cemetery last week, Strathclyde Police has upgraded the 56-year-old investigation, putting a full inquiry team in place.
Strathclyde officers took calls from two women, one in Scotland and one in England, during the excavation at the cemetery, less than three miles from Moira’s home. Both said they had been victims of Gartshore as children, and both were considered highly credible.
Full statements will be taken from them in the days ahead, and other callers – some have offered information about sex attacks on other victims and some claim there was a paedophile ring in the area in the 1950s – will also be interviewed.
It is understood one victim’s story involves an attempt to abduct and molest her around the time Moira disappeared in February 1957.
Gartshore died in a Leeds hospital on 1 April 2006, never having been charged in relation to Moira’s disappearance.
But in 1998, he had been denounced as Moira’s killer by his own daughter, Sandra Brown, in her book, Where There is Evil.
Gartshore had also been suspected of abducting and killing Moira by his father, also Alex, who ripped up the floorboards in his son’s home and insisted on examining the boot of the bus that Gartshore drove.
