The Peter Manuel murders: Reviving the story of Glasgow's psychopath killer

Crime writer Denise Mina has been thinking about Peter Manuel for a very long time.

"He was breaking into houses and killing entire families and then hanging around afterwards," she says.

"This predates the idea of a serial killer that we have now, which is a maniac operating alone, committing the same crimes over and over again.

"But he wasn't committing the same crime. He was doing lots of different things. He was a psychopath."

Mina first wrote about him in 2013 for A Play, A Pie and A Pint at Glasgow's Oran Mor venue.

Driving Manuel starred the late Andy Gray as the killer, making his way around the pubs and clubs of Glasgow with businessman William Watt.

Afterwards a number of audience members approached Mina to say there was more to the story - particularly around William Watt.

Watt's wife, daughter and sister-in-law were murdered in their beds in September 1956, while he was away on a fishing holiday.

He was accused of the murders and sent to prison for three months.

Upon his release Watt decided to investigate the murders himself, offering payment for information and Manuel readily accepted.

Mina's novel The Long Drop published in 2017 imagines the strange pub crawl the men embarked upon when they met, as well as the subsequent trial of Manuel, his murder convictions and execution.

It was her first foray into true crime and won her the William MacIlvanney Prize.

Now it is on stage as the closing show of the revamped Citizens Theatre programme.

Adapted by Linda McLean, it stars Brian Vernel as Peter Manuel and is directed by Dominic Hill.

Hill says: "The book is so incredibly evocative of a particular time in Glasgow.

"You can smell the coal on the walls, and see the fog but it's also a time of change, just before places like the Gorbals were ripped down and rebuilt."

The Citizens Theatre is one of the few buildings to survive, and is now reopened and revived after a seven year multi-million pound refurbishment.

Inside, on the stage, they've carefully recreated the shop fronts and pub interiors which would once have surrounded the outside of their theatre.

Almost 70 years after he was hanged, Peter Manuel remains one of Scotland's worst serial killers.

Between January 1956 and January 1958, he is known to have murdered nine people, though he was only ever convicted of seven murders.

The popular press named him "the Beast from Birkenshaw", after the town in Lanarkshire where he lived at the time of his crimes.

Manuel was born in New York in 1927 to Scottish parents. Five years later they came back to the UK, moving between Coventry and Motherwell.

His life of crime began when he was seven years old. He started by stealing but by his teenage years his crimes were increasingly sexual and violent, and involved breaking into homes.

He spent time in borstal and was eventually jailed aged just 15 for a hammer attack on a sleeping woman.

The murders of the Watt family came in the middle of his killing spree, all but one of which took place in the towns and villages to the south-east of Glasgow.

On the night of 17 September 1956, he shot to death 45-year-old Marion Hunter Watt, her 16-year-old daughter Vivienne Isabella, and her 42-year-old sister Margaret Hunter Brown in the Watt home in Burnside.

He used an illegally purchased revolver which he then threw into the River Clyde in Glasgow.

William Watt was taken into custody as the chief suspect in the crimes but was released the following December.

Manuel was in jail for much of the next year for another crime, but it was during this period that he contacted Watt and his solicitor.

When released in November 1957, Manuel embarked on his final set of murders. Five victims in as many weeks, culminating in the shootings of Peter and Doris Smart and their 11-year-old son Michael in their Uddingston home over the New Year.

Police had repeatedly missed opportunities to catch Manuel for his crimes but this time the evidence pointed his way. He was arrested and went on trial in May 1958.

After just two weeks - during which time he sacked his lawyers and defended himself while crowds formed outside the court in Glasgow - he was found guilty of seven of the murders and sentenced to death.

Manuel was hanged at HMP Barlinnie in the city on 11 July 1958.

He was one of the last men executed in Scotland before the abolition of the death penalty in the UK in 1965.

Brian Vernel, playing Manuel, last appeared on stage at the Citizens Theatre in 2013.

"I've played some pretty dark characters," he says.

"It's the most interesting piece that I've worked on for quite some time.

"Obviously it's a play that has a very dark subject matter, but it's also about real people and takes place nearby, so it's almost like this play is written within the memory of what you know the city to be."

Keith Fleming, who plays Watt, said he knew little about Manuel or his crimes until he was cast in the show - but everyone he mentioned it to had an interest.

He says: "My friend's granny, she's 94 years old, she grew up in the Gorbals, so instantly recognised the name and had all these recollections of warnings about walking home and going in groups when it was at the height of his atrocities."

If the murders were shocking, the court case was sensational.

TV stations and newspapers descended on the city. The prison service had to send out a decoy van to prevent angry mobs attacking Manuel as he arrived.

Manuel was one of the first defendants in a Scottish court to represent himself.

He failed to convince the jury who convicted him on seven counts of murder.

Seventy years on, Denise Mina believes there are still further details to uncover about the crimes.

"After The Long Drop two of the sons of one of the victims came to see me.

"They said they were sure that William Watt was not an innocent who happened to meet his family's murderer, that he had commissioned somebody to kill his wife.

"They said they had been trying to tell people the real story for decades but no one would listen, because as soon as the case was over everyone decided that was the end of it."

"And they told me amazing details like he had gone fly fishing up at the Crinan Canal and he took the guard dog with him - a three-year-old golden Labrador - which is the last thing you want when you are fly fishing."

"I was mad that I didn't get that detail in."

"But mostly now it's people saying, I remember when that happened when I was a kid.

"And people's mothers would threaten them, 'If you don't go to bed now, Peter Manual will come and get you'.

"Which is a very Glaswegian style of parenting."