Episode notes
Iain Packer lived in freedom for almost 20 years after killing Emma Caldwell in 2005. Despite strangling her and discarding her body in remote woods about 40 miles outside Glasgow, he was able to live a seemingly normal family life. Also to attack dozens of other women. We explore the decisions taken during the initial police investigation which allowed him to escape justice for almost two decades – but could he have been stopped even before Emma’s murder? We hear from his first known victim who he attacked in her family home at the age of 15. What might have happened had her cries for help…
Podcast
Beware Book
Bauer Media · True Crime · English
Beware Book shines the light on a spate of vicious murders which shocked Glasgow between 1991 and 2005. Eight women involved in prostitution were killed, and at least four of those cases remain unsolved to this day. Many of these women were left defenceless in a more ruthless city than the one we kn
More from Beware Book All episodes →
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S1 · E7 · 27 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 36 min
7. Beware Book
This is the concluding chapter of an investigation that has taken more than one year. Join us as we finally sit down with police to ask the questions that have built up over the stacks of interviews, door knocks, calls and emails. The questions that the families we’re working with have waited decades for answers to. We ask two senior serving Police Scotland officers what they can tell us about these murders? How they were examined and why so many have never been solved. We also challenge them about the Beware Book. Its pages contained details of the most violent clients stalking Glasgow’s…
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S1 · E6 · 20 Apr 2026 · 55 min
6. The Drag
This is The Drag – a handful of streets in Glasgow city centre which made up the red-light district in the 1990s and early 2000s. We make a visit with an experienced local crime reporter asking what life would have been like for the women who stood there on cold, dark nights all those years ago? Waiting to be picked up by one of the circling drivers, not knowing how the encounter might end. Heroin culture was still ravaging the city – pushing some women involved in prostitution into perilous liaisons to feed their habit. We hear from a charity worker who gave her time and care to many of…
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S1 · E4 · 6 Apr 2026 · 55 min
4. Emma Caldwell
Join us on the journey to the remote woods – about 40 miles outside Glasgow - where Emma’s body was found in May 2005. With us is the officer who first visited there with the man who would eventually be convicted of her murder. Her body was discovered by a dog walker more than a month after she’d gone missing from the city centre. It had been one of Scotland’s most high-profile unsolved murders, until Iain Packer was eventually convicted of the crime 19 years later. It was also the case that would be the catalyst for our investigation - but who was the girl behind the headlines? We speak to…
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S1 · E3 · 30 Mar 2026 · 39 min
3. Jacqueline Gallagher & Tracey Wylde
“I think her last words would have been mammy” The words of Jacqueline Gallagher’s mum, during a heartbreaking interview with us in the family home – as she tries to describe a pain that took their breath away in 1996 and never gave it back. A pain which started when Jackie was found dead, wrapped in a homemade curtain, near a bus stop in Bowling. The 26-year-old from Paisley, suffered more than 100 injuries. George Johnstone – a frequent client - stood trial for her murder but the case against him was found not proven. We speak to mum Alice and stepdad Robert more than 20 years later, the…
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S1 · E2 · 23 Mar 2026 · 43 min
2. Marjorie Roberts
Marjorie’s case has been described as perhaps the cruellest of all. The 34-year-old mother-of-three was found in the River Clyde, near Jamaica Bridge, in August 1995. But her death has never been treated as murder. Police say "no criminality” has ever been established but CCTV footage showed her with a man next to the river, hours before she was found dead. Weeks later, that same man was accused of trying to push another sex worker into the same river. Listen while we slowly build trust with Marjorie’s sister, following previous damaging experiences with the media and police. When she does…
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S1 · E1 · 23 Mar 2026 · 30 min
1. Diane McInally
The body of the 23-year-old Diane McInally was discovered in Pollok Park, Glasgow, in October 1991. She had been beaten and strangled. Two men were charged with her murder in March 1992 but there was insufficient evidence to try them. There are also persistent rumours that Diane was murdered because she was due to be a key prosecution witness in a drug trial. Hear from Diane’s auntie and cousin – two of her few surviving relatives – as we discuss these theories. The words of a family devastated by drugs, death and another murder. We’ll tell you a little about the murder of Emma Caldwell too.…
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S1 · 5 Mar 2026 · 3 min
Introducing Beware Book
The story of Glasgow’s unsolved murders. Beware Book shines the light on a spate of vicious killings of young women which shocked the city between 1991 and 2005. This series features deeply personal interviews with the victims’ families — many speaking publicly and at length for the first time. Can we, two Glasgow-based journalists, finally get the answers these families deserve?
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