BBC slur

[Bookworm]

Following a cold case review into the 1957 disappearance in Coatbridge of 11-year-old Moira Anderson, the Crown Office (the Scottish prosecution authority) announced last week that they had gathered evidence that would have been sufficient, had he still been alive, to prosecute one Alexander Gartshore for her murder. Moira had gone to the shops on an errand for her grandmother and was never seen again. She was last seen boarding a bus. The BBC News website on 31st January carried a piece by James Cook, Scotland Correspondent, entitled "Moira Anderson murder: A 57-year search for the truth". After stating that the bus Moira boarded was driven by Gartshore, who was then on bail having been charged with the rape of his children's 13-year-old babysitter (for which he was later imprisoned), the article continues: "Gartshore, a freemason in a lodge where many local policemen were also said to be members, had long been suspected of being a "flasher" in local parks."

Where do you start? The attempted innuendo that the failure to prosecute Gartshore for the murder at the time was somehow due to his alleged masonic connections is blatant, and it says something about the prevalence of such attitudes that the author does not feel the need to spell it out in more detail. Nor, of course, does he provide even the least suggestion of any evidence to back it up. Perhaps if he had been less quick to make this lazy smear of the Craft, he might have pondered how, if Gartshore had such protection from these alleged masonic policemen, he came to be locked up for raping the babysitter? Oh, what's the use!

[Trouillogan]

Read Bob Cooper's The Red Triangle for reasons why this kind of slur happens, though the press seem better informed nowadays and don't tend to bring Freemasonry into that kind of reporting so much. I expect that was just lazy reporting, recycling a 57 year old archive report of the time which would have been far more likely to have contained such a remark.

[Bookworm]

Yes, I've read The Red Triangle and very interesting it is. Here though it appears the journalist's source may be Gartshore's daughter's own book. Apparently she has spent the last 20 years trying to prove her father was the murderer. Whether or not she is right on that count, some of her other theories may be wide of the mark (at her instigation the body of a friend of her father's, who had died about the time of the girl's disappearance, was exhumed because she thought the girl's body may have been hidden in the same grave - nothing was found). But I have not read her book to be certain. Thankfully the masonic allegation has not been widely reported, though it has been picked up by a few of the more feverish "antis".

[Trouillogan]

As you know from Bob's research, the more a fallacy or just a rumour is repeated, the more it becomes accepted as 'fact' by those who want it to be - often in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. Don't let facts spoil a good story, eh!