Campaigner's hopes for missing girl

Jan 10 2013

A woman who believes her father murdered a schoolgirl more than 50 years ago has spoken of her fervent hope that the child's body is recovered from a grave that is being exhumed.

Moira Anderson was 11 when she went missing from her home in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, in February 1957 while running an errand for her grandmother. It is widely believed she was abducted and murdered, but her body has never been found.

The case remains unsolved, although convicted paedophile Alexander Gartshore, a Coatbridge bus driver who died in 2006, has been connected with the disappearance.

On Tuesday investigators began excavating the plot of Sinclair Upton, said to have been an acquaintance of Gartshore, to see if the youngster's remains were hidden there.

The excavation at Old Monkland Cemetery in Coatbridge is being led by Professor Sue Black and a team from the forensic anthropology department at Dundee University.

Gartshore's daughter, Sandra Brown, blamed her father for the murder in her book, Where There Is Evil.

She told BBC Radio Scotland: "She's either there or she's not there. My fervent hope is that she is there, and there's been quite a trail that's brought us to this particular location."

She said if the schoolgirl's body was not found in the plot it "would be very difficult to know where to go from here because this is the last avenue of opportunity".

Mrs Brown added: "I hope for her sisters' sake we do recover remains or something that tells us that Moira has been placed there, but it's certainly in the lap of the gods at the moment."

She said her father "ended up saying to me that Moira, in a blizzard of snow, had got on his bus and he had been the last person to see her".