Who Killed Emma?

Emma’s parents knew about her addiction. On the night she told them, knowing very little about drugs, they took their daughter to hospital to try to get her some help.

This drug habit would span the final years of her life. Emma was still Emma though, says Margaret. Still the kind, thoughtful daughter they’d always loved and cherished.

Her friend ‘Laura’, who stayed at the same hostel and also used to sell sex to fund her drug use, says Emma “shouldn’t have been in that world”.

“She wasn’t tough enough. She was kind of naive, too trusting. Emma was just hurting through losing her sister.

“She was lovely, funny, caring. We used to walk into town every night and we would just talk. Not about the bad stuff in life, just the good stuff.”

Emma walked that road for the last time that night in April 2005. The hostel’s CCTV captured her as she stepped out into the darkness.

Her body was found five weeks later in woods, 40 miles from Glasgow. Naked and strangled.

But Emma wasn’t the only sex worker who visited those woods.

Natalie’s story

The white Transit van had travelled 15 miles south of Glasgow when Natalie says she began to feel scared. Her client ‘Peter’ wanted to have sex outside, but he’d driven her much further than she expected.

She says he agreed to pay extra because of the distance. They would end up 40 miles from Natalie’s usual spot in the red light district.

The 32-year-old had been selling sex since she was 17. Like Emma Caldwell, Natalie’s path to working Glasgow’s streets was driven by heroin addiction.

This client was a regular, she’d started seeing him in 2005. Natalie recalls taking him to her flat previously. This time, she says, they were in his works van heading down the M74 in Lanarkshire

She thought Peter was too good looking to use sex workers. He was about 30, dark-haired, with a strong build. He was tattooed and wore expensive-looking jewellery.

Within an hour of leaving Glasgow they were driving along a deserted road, with densely packed fir trees at either side.

It was a dark, lonely, isolated place. There were hills to the left, fields to the right, no houses nearby and no street lights.

Natalie says they parked at the side of the road and had sex. It wasn’t the last time Natalie went to that remote location with him.

The next time they went further into the woods, where it was eerily dark. Apart from the bumping noise of the van rolling over a cattle grate, there was complete silence.

Peter parked at a big silver gate. They walked down a long, winding path surrounded by a thick forest of fir trees. And it was here, in the darkness, that she says he told her to strip naked. Despite being terrified, she refused.

She recalls him flying into a rage, shouting and screaming, and shaking her. She felt certain he was going to attack her.

Natalie says he clenched his hands into fists and repeatedly punched the sides of his head. ‘No no no no no’, he shouted, as if he was talking to someone.

Natalie describes being nearly naked and petrified in the middle of Limefield woods, near the village of Roberton in Lanarkshire.

She's not the only woman to claim this man took her into the woods where Emma Caldwell was found dead. Three other sex workers from Glasgow say this client brought them there too.

Several women identified Natalie’s client ‘Peter’ as a man called Iain Packer - who admits to being a long-time user of sex workers.

Iain Packer, age 51, is from Glasgow and has had multiple former partners. He used to work for a firm putting up signs and neon lights, but was since made unemployed.

Ex-partners claim he was obsessed with buying sex. It’s said he would use prostitutes two or three times a week, sometimes more.

He would disappear for hours on end, so much so that one ex says she began to hide his shoes to try to stop him going out.

As well as using street prostitutes, he would repeatedly telephone sex lines, visit saunas and lap dancing clubs.

Iain Packer admits Emma Caldwell was one of the women he paid for sex.

When her body was found in 2005 police took several statements from him. And in 2015 Scotland’s Sunday Mail newspaper named him as “a forgotten suspect” in the murder inquiry.

Since that time he says his life has been on hold. He says he has been ostracised by friends and members of his family and that people shout abuse at him in the street.

In 2018 he contacted the BBC asking to tell his side of the story.

In an interview with investigative journalist Sam Poling he admits to being a frequent user of prostitutes in the past, but insists he is no killer.

“It was like a business transaction,” he says. “If you go into a shop, you pay your money for what you get.

“We both are getting what we want. This person wants money and I want sexual acts. I could go months without using them, weeks without using them,” he says.

“It wasn’t something that I had to do every week or every second day or anything like that. It was just as and when.”

Some of Iain Packer’s former partners say their sex life disappeared because of his frequent use of prostitutes.

One says that under the guise of a “run in the car” he would drive her around the city’s red light area. Another packed her bags after finding him at home with a prostitute.

His exes also say he asked them to have sex outside, though never in Limefield woods.

But Iain Packer did tell police he took Emma Caldwell there.

The dog walker couldn’t quite believe it was a body. Emma Caldwell was in a shallow drainage ditch 20 metres into the dense forest. She’d been lying there for five weeks.

Emma was naked, apart from a hair clasp and a gold ring. There was no sign of her clothes or her bag.

In these same woods, under the thick canopy of trees, porn magazines were scattered on the ground and underwear was hanging off branches. While none of these items were linked to Emma, the spot was clearly a haunt for sexual activity.

Margaret and Willie Caldwell were spared the awful task of identifying their daughter. DNA tests confirmed it was her.

Emma had been missing since that Monday night in April. Her parents had been frantic. Night after night they went out in the car, searching the streets.

Emma’s post mortem indicated that she had been strangled. The missing person inquiry became a murder investigation.

Strathclyde Police, which had in the past been accused of not examining vigorously enough the murder of sex workers, put an unprecedented level of resources into this one. It was to become one of Scotland’s biggest murder inquiries.

Attention turned first to Emma’s client list. The police garnered names from her mobile phone records, from CCTV of car registration plates and local intelligence.

The whole spectrum of society was on that list - bankers, doctors, tradesmen, company directors, students, priests and a police officer.

Doors were knocked across the city and beyond. Secret lives were revealed to wives and employers as police tried to establish exactly what these men were doing on the night Emma went missing.

One of her clients, Bekir Oncu, was in Turkey getting married when he heard his house in Glasgow was being searched by police. He was the last person to phone Emma’s mobile on the night she disappeared.

The last place her phone signal was located was round the corner from a Turkish cafe in Glasgow’s Bridge Street.

It soon became apparent that most sex workers in the city had been paid for sex at the Turkish cafe, including Emma. The police thought they were on to something and raided the cafe.

Two spots of Emma Caldwell's blood were found on bedding there.

At the Turkish cafe a covert surveillance operation was launched. Just half a mile away, a 60ft image of Emma stared down at the city from the side of a tower block.

Despite the clandestine nature of sex work, police had already managed to take hundreds of statements from women and their clients. What was revealed was Glasgow’s dark underbelly of vulnerability and danger.

One woman told officers she placed a few strands of her hair in the footwell of cars she stepped into, in case she never made it back alive. It would give police a forensic trail of her last movements.

Another said she always dropped the condom where she’d had sex, knowing that both her and her client’s DNA would be on it.

It also quickly became clear that the Turkish cafe had been a hub for prostitution. After the cafe closed and the shutters were pulled down, women would be brought in. It was often a terrifying experience for them.

Emma’s friend Laura, who stayed with her at the hostel, also “did business” at the cafe.

She says: “I just found it really uncomfortable because I thought there was only going to be the one guy there that had picked me up, and there would be other people there.”

Laura got out of the cafe unscathed. Other women, however, told detectives investigating Emma’s murder they’d been raped and physically attacked there.

The women said they were attacked in an upstairs room which had a mattress on the floor. Police installed hidden cameras and recording devices after they found traces of Emma’s blood there.

They bugged the homes and cars of 69-year-old cafe owner Huseyin Cobanoglu and Bekir Oncu - the last person to ring Emma’s mobile.

They even installed an undercover policeman in the cafe where he would watch football and play cards. For two years the police recorded thousands of hours of conversations and had them translated by officers of Turkish descent.

In 2007 Huseyin Cobanoglu and Bekir Oncu were among four Turkish men arrested and charged. But just three months later the case collapsed.

Police had thought their secret recordings proved that the Turkish men had killed Emma. But they contained no admissions of guilt.

Cobanoglu’s defence lawyer, Matthew Berlow, says: “There was talk about the murder of Emma Caldwell in the recordings.

“But it transpires it was talk among men who’d been interviewed by police, and had come back and relayed what they’d been asked about.

“So there was talk about that, and talk about the use of prostitutes in the cafe, but there were no actual admissions from the suspects of specialist knowledge about the murder.”

Although Emma’s blood was found in the cafe, so was the DNA of many other sex workers.

The police recordings had begun one month after the prostitute named Natalie told them a client had also taken her to the woods where Emma’s body was found.

Was there another suspect still out there?

Natalie’s story continued

Natalie had a talent for remembering landmarks – it was something she did in case a client left her stranded.

On her first journey to the woods, she says she noticed huge electricity pylons, a pallet yard and a bungalow that she thought was her dream house.

She spotted a bus stop. Her rising panic about how far she’d gone with her client made her consider jumping from the van to get a bus back to Glasgow.

Because of this knack of hers, Natalie was able to direct two police officers to the spot where she says she’d been told to strip. One officer drove and the other took notes. Natalie started to cry when she saw the fir trees.

The officers realised they were approaching the place where Emma’s body had been found. They knew there were police posters still on fences leading up to the woods, so they got out of the car to talk.

They agreed that one of them would take Natalie to a nearby service station while the other would remove the posters and flowers that might indicate where Emma was found.

When they all got back into the car, Natalie explained the layout of “Christmas trees” along the route. She told them they would approach an area with no houses.

She says there was a turn-off after hills on the left. Her distress heightened. She told the police to turn right at the farm and they’d go over “wee bumps”. The car rattled over the cattle grate.

At this point Natalie started screaming ‘It’s down here’. She was shaking as they parked the car at the big silver gate.

The three of them walked down the path that Natalie had walked before, until they got to a fork in the road. She said this was the area they’d had sex.

Natalie was taking deep breaths. She was breathing quickly and erratically, she was crying, she wasn’t listening.

Back in the police incident room, Allan Richmond, one of the detectives working on the case, detected a definite buzz around the inquiry.

The news that another sex worker said she was taken to the remote location where Emma’s body was found seemed hugely significant.

Det Con Richmond had been in the police for 30 years. He worked in the Serious Crime Squad and spent two years on the Emma Caldwell investigation.

He was the detective who detained Turkish cafe owner Huseyin Cobanoglu and spoke to Emma’s client Bekir Oncu about the phone call he made to her.

He was also the man who took a report of Emma being raped by a client shortly before she went missing.

Emma Caldwell had agreed to go behind a set of billboards for sex with a client in Glasgow’s east end. It was a man she told friends she didn’t like.

She ran out from behind the billboards crying and told her friend and her friend’s boyfriend that she’d been raped. The client ran to his van and drove away.

Emma’s friend says her boyfriend threw a bottle at the van.

Det Con Allan Richmond was told about the incident after Emma was found dead. He checked the crime reports from around that time and discovered something.

He says: “I found that the driver of a van fitting the description had reported that his window had been broken by kids.

“His name was Iain Packer.”

Det Con Richmond raised it at a murder inquiry briefing but heard nothing more about it. Iain Packer also gave an account of the incident when interviewed by police in August 2006.

He describes how he and Emma were behind the billboards having sex. He admitted that she called out and told him to stop.

He said he held onto her waist and carried on, saying ‘We agreed before we started, I have paid for this’.

He said Emma got away from him and was upset. He denies raping her.

Detectives investigating Emma’s murder took six statements from Iain Packer over the course of nearly two years. He initially told them he didn’t know her.

Later, however, he admits he’d been with Emma at least a dozen times.

He tells police he had taken her and another six sex workers to the woods near Roberton. He describes telling some of the women to strip.

The police also say Iain Packer agreed to take two officers to the woods. He tells them Emma was the first woman he’d taken there and that they went six times in total.

But he insists that he didn’t kill her.

That’s what he told the police back in 2007 when he was repeatedly interviewed as a witness - without a solicitor. He was never interviewed under caution as a suspect.

In his 2019 interviews with the BBC, Iain Packer says it was the police who took him to the woods - not the other way round - and that he’d never been there before that day.

He says he was bullied by police into falsely admitting he had taken Emma and other women to the woods where her body was found.

“If you’re sitting in a room with two guys hounding you for hours, restricting where you go for a cigarette, restricting you when you go to the toilet, restricting you by not giving you a lawyer – it’s bully tactics is the way I’d put it,” he says.

“They bully you into getting what they want.”

Iain Packer denies being an aggressive man who was obsessed with sex workers. He is adamant that he had nothing to do with the death of Emma Caldwell.

Emma’s mum Margaret still has nightmares. She can’t even have a photograph of Emma downstairs in her home, it’s too painful.

“I’ll never be me again,” she says. “Not the true me.”

Margaret's husband Willie died in 2011, never knowing the truth about who killed their daughter.

There was a glimmer of hope when the murder investigation led police to the Turkish cafe. But when those arrests were made it was bittersweet for Margaret.

“I just thought, everyone’s pleased they’ve got someone for this and I’m just empty inside," she says.

"It won’t ever bring her back. I wanted it and I didn’t want it. I would far rather she’d rushed in the door and went ‘Mum, I’m home’.”

Margaret and Willie walked out of a meeting with the Crown Office when the case against the Turkish men collapsed. Even when one of them successfully sued them in 2013, Margaret still thought they were guilty.

Back then she had no idea there was another man police had interviewed.

Detectives hadn’t spoken to Iain Packer since 2007, when he was interviewed as a witness, and they went together to the woods where Emma's body was found.

The BBC was told that when the officers realised he’d brought them to the location of the murder, they phoned their bosses and said ‘He’s ready to burst, can we charge him?’

The response from their superiors was no, let him go.

Individuals close to the case claimed that because so much effort and money had been spent on the Turkish investigation, senior officers didn’t want to be seen to have failed.

Margaret was left angry and let down. She says: “Who made the decision that it was the Turkish men and not Iain Packer?"

“He was the man who knew the remote area, he was the man who took other girls there, and he was the man that made girls strip off. If they knew all of this, why didn’t they arrest him?"

Police Scotland sent a new report to Scottish prosecutors in June 2018, with a summary of previous inquiries and the findings of a reinvestigation into Emma’s death.

But it was little comfort to Margaret. Fourteen years had passed and still no-one had been put on trial.

“I feel cheated from getting justice for Emma,” she says. “How could they have let my Emma down?”

That was all about to change.

When Who Killed Emma? was originally released by the BBC in February 2019, our story ended here.

But just hours after the TV documentary with Iain Packer was broadcast, police were contacted by his former girlfriend.

She had left him on the day he recorded the interview, after journalist Sam Poling confronted him over his role in Emma’s death.

Iain Packer’s ex finds the courage to tell officers how she’d been stalked and attacked by him. He pleads guilty and in February 2020 he is jailed for two years.

His trial hears how he assaulted his ex - throwing her on a bed, putting his hands around her neck, choking her and putting her life in danger.

Iain Packer’s ex-girlfriend was not the only person to take notice of the TV interview.

After the broadcast, Police Scotland issued a ‘production order’ to the BBC for all interview footage to be handed over.

Iain Packer had contacted the BBC with the intent to clear his name, as a man with nothing to hide.

Instead, he exposed himself as an abuser with a terrifying history of domestic violence, sexual assault and an obsession with Emma Caldwell.

But was he a murderer?

With Iain Packer now in jail for assaulting his ex and the police investigation reinvigorated, Emma’s mum has a new spark of hope to snare her killer.

In July 2021 Margaret meets with Scotland’s newly-appointed Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC - the country’s chief law officer.

This time around, with the anger over the botched Turkish case behind her, Margaret is able to walk out of that meeting feeling encouraged. 

She tells the media she’s confident the new police investigation has “left no stone unturned”. 

Six months later, they make their arrest. Margaret's patience, her determination, her never ending fight for justice has all come to this.

Seventeen years after Emma’s body was found in the woods, Iain Packer is finally charged with her abduction and murder. Prosecutors confirm she is just one of many women who suffered at his hands. 

Iain Packer faces dozens of charges of assault, rape and violence against multiple sex workers and ex-partners. His trial begins at the High Court in Glasgow in January 2024.

Margaret, now aged 76, is called to the witness stand and delivers a moving testimony about Emma.

She speaks of the drug addiction which followed the death of Emma’s big sister Karen to cancer.

"At the time I was so deep in grief that she needed my help,” she says. “But I was very selfish and I know my family suffered because of that.”

She tells them how she and William spent weeks searching the streets of Glasgow, not knowing that Emma lay dead in the woods at Packer’s hands.

The trial also hears police interviews and testimony from sex workers, including Natalie - who had directed detectives on the car journey back to Limefield woods.

A retired officer tells the jury how Natalie had a panic attack -  “crying, hysterical, hyperventilating” - when they arrived at the same spot where Emma was murdered.

The BBC’s Sam Poling also takes the stand, with clips from her interview with Iain Packer shown to the court.

She tells jurors how Iain Packer claimed he was “not a violent person” and said the only time he had ever been at Limefield woods was with the police.

But the court also hears from his ex girlfriend, who says he was "white as a sheet" after that BBC interview.

She says he looked as if he was being "found out" and "you could see something had gone badly wrong".

Forensic experts appear in court to complete another piece of the puzzle. They reveal that soil samples taken from Iain Packer’s van can be linked to the woods where Emma’s body was found.

Iain Packer himself remains defiant until the end, denying the charges against him.

He claims he lied in his BBC interview when he said he has never visited the woods. In court, he decides to admit he had been there six times with women - including once with Emma.

Under cross-examination by prosecutor Richard Goddard KC, he also admits indecently assaulting her on one occasion after paying for sex - but he continues to insist he is no killer.

The lawyer challenges him about his history of violence, after evidence from 11 women who all say that Iain Packer put his hands around their throat.

"Are these women all liars?" Mr Goddard asks. Iain Packer says: "Yes".

He is adamant that he is an innocent man. “I am sitting here for something I have not done,” he says.

The jury does not believe his lies. On 28 February 2024 Iain Packer is found guilty of Emma’s murder and violence and abuse towards 21 other women.

Margaret weeps as her daughter's killer is finally brought to justice. She says the verdict can allow her to breathe again.

Outside court, Emma's family say she was failed by police through a "toxic culture of misogyny and corruption" that left Iain Packer free to rape other women.

Police Scotland apologises for how the original inquiry was handled and for letting down Emma and his other victims.

Judge Lord Beckett says Iain Packer led an "extreme campaign of sexual violence" that caused "enduring suffering" for women and their families.

He is jailed for at least 36 years for Emma Caldwell's murder. It is one of the longest sentences ever handed out in Scottish legal history.

For Margaret, no verdict will ever bring back the daughter she lost. 

Credits

Written by Mona McAlinden
Production by Paul Hastie
Edited by Deirdre Kelly

With thanks to Sam Poling, Anton Ferrie, Graeme Esson, Zara Weir.

Images: PA, Getty, David Gillanders, Google, Mirrorpix, Spindrift

Originally published February 2019. Revised and updated February 2024.