Why I’m convinced this missing girl was murdered by my own father: SANDRA BROWN says her paedophile dad is to blame – and reveals the evidence that may finally locate her body and uncover an even darker secret

It is a scene which has played out in Sandra Brown’s haunted mind for most of her life.

On a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon in February, 1957, a young girl called Moira Anderson had left her grandmother’s house on a quick errand to the shops.

A blizzard was setting in, but Moira was wrapped up warm in her navy school coat, scarf and hat as she shouted to a neighbour shovelling snow from the pavement near her home in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire. The woman couldn’t be certain due to the howling wind but thought the young girl asked: ‘Is the bus away yet?’

She discovered the Co-op in Laird Street had closed early due to the weather, but rather than return home, 11-year-old Moira planned to catch a bus into town and meet up with her cousins for the 5pm showing of Guys and Dolls at the Regal cinema.

A woman who lived above a nearby sweet shop noticed the local Baxter’s bus pull away from the stop and that the girl waiting in the navy coat and distinctive red and blue knitted hat had gone too.

Before long, it became apparent that this slight child with fair hair and smiley blue eyes had failed to turn up at the cinema. Instead, she had simply vanished into thin air.

As the hours – then days – passed, the people of Coatbridge searched and searched, appalled by the growing mystery of the missing girl. But no trace would ever be found, largely due to a dreadfully botched police investigation. 

Moira’s family never saw her again and, for many years, it seemed likely that no-one would ever know what cruel fate befell her. Had she run away? Had someone abducted her? If so, why? Who could have evinced such malice against an innocent child?

But the lasting impact of this tragic case has rippled out far beyond Moira’s distraught family. For Mrs Brown, now 76, it came to not only dominate her life, but to define it. Convinced that Moira was murdered, she has made it her personal mission to bring the perpetrator to account and finally locate Moira’s remains in order to bring some comfort to her family.

Alexander Gartshore, a child rapist, has been linked to her disappearance

In the process she has managed to have the case upgraded from a missing person’s inquiry to a murder probe, while her investigations have led to two major searches being conducted at a cemetery and a canal.

Now, thanks to the continued publicity generated by her work, which has earned her an OBE, she is hoping a third search – this time of a long disused mineshaft – may ultimately crack the case and lead officers to Moira’s whereabouts.

The zeal with which Mrs Brown has pursued her one-woman crusade is all the more astonishing, however, given that she is convinced beyond a shred of doubt that the man responsible is Alexander Gartshore – her own father.

Gartshore was the bus driver who picked Moira up that wintry day. He was also a predatory paedophile who was on bail at the time Moira went missing after being charged with raping his family’s 13-year-old babysitter, a crime for which he later served two years in jail.

Not that anybody told his daughter, who was informed he was in a special hospital where children could not visit him and assumed he had suffered a mental breakdown.

In an interview with the Scottish Daily Mail, she said finding out years later what a monster he was felt like a ‘grenade going off’. She said: ‘It’s horrific. Part of me thinks I’ve done all I can to right a wrong even though it wasn’t me who was responsible for the wrong.’

Her determination, some would call it an obsession, to solve the case has scored some notable achievements. She wrote a best-selling book detailing everything she uncovered about her father’s offending, which helped persuade prosecutors to take the unprecedented step in 2014 of charging Gartshore posthumously with Moira’s murder.

But the final, vital piece of this desperately complex jigsaw – finding Moira – has eluded even her. Any hope of her father revealing where he buried her evaporated when Gartshore died in 2006 aged 85 in a Leeds hospital.

On his deathbed, he told his daughter that Moira was ‘too bonnie for her own good’ and that the little girl had haunted him all his life. It was the closest he ever came to admitting he was responsible for one of Scotland’s oldest and most disturbing murder mysteries.

From her bungalow in a smart Edinburgh suburb, where she lives with her engineer husband, Ronnie, Mrs Brown recalls vividly how Moira’s story and her own life became inextricably intertwined. She was 16 when her father disappeared from her life, running off with a 20-year-old bus conductress. It was another 26 years later before she saw him again, at his mother’s funeral. The encounter changed her life forever. By then, she had a successful teaching career, first as a primary school deputy head and then as a senior lecturer in childcare and health at West Lothian College. But, she was still angry about him abandoning his family and planned to confront him: ‘I was determined to tell him a few home truths – and, resulting from that, he started talking about Moira Anderson,’ she said.

‘He was very sorry for himself and said that his own father had blamed him for Moira, but he said: “You’re too young to remember that”. Of course, I wasn’t. I remembered Moira going missing very well. But until he had just implicated himself, I had no reason to think he would have had any connection. He told me he had been the last person to see her alive – that she had got into his bus.’

As Mrs Brown reflected on her childhood, a litany of confused, uncomfortable memories suddenly became clear. Her father was a sexual predator in denial over his abhorrent behaviour, which included his involvement in a paedophile ring.

She also learned that her grandfather had even torn up floorboards in Gartshore’s home looking for Moira. And yet, he never shared his misgivings with police. ‘The Christian part of me thinks he thought he was doing the right thing at the time,’ she said. ‘It was about protecting the family name, but at the expense of another family.’

It set her thinking that maybe her father was Moira’s killer. Over the next few years, she collated a wealth of evidence on the mystery she remembered so clearly from her childhood. Almost everything pointed to her father as the culprit. 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. He was facing trial for raping a minor and yet detectives failed to properly investigate him as a potential suspect.

Sandra Brown at Old Monkland Cemetery in Coatbridge, where police exhumed a grave as part of the search

She, on the other hand, found she couldn’t stand by. ‘As a senior lecturer in child protection, I was asking students to confront issues of safeguarding and online grooming and so on. So it would have been a huge betrayal of what I was advocating to walk away when it happened with me.’

Instead, she highlighted the shortcomings of the original investigation in an explosive book, Where There Is Evil, naming her father as Moira’s killer. The book’s proceeds were used to set up the Moira Anderson Foundation, which remains dedicated to supporting child sex abuse victims.

A mother of two herself, Mrs Brown pushed hard for the case to be reinvestigated and in the early 1990s, detectives finally interviewed Gartshore in Leeds on suspicion of murder and allegations of sexual abuse. But with many of the original police files misplaced or destroyed, prosecutors dealt a crushing blow when they decided against bringing Gartshore, then in his 70s, to Scotland for further questioning and he remained a free man to his death.

In 1999, a year after the book’s publication, the next major piece of the jigsaw fell into place when one of Gartshore’s cronies, lorry driver and former church elder James Gallogley, died at the sex offenders’ unit at Peterhead Prison while serving a ten-year sentence for molesting girls. He left behind a signed confession, in which he is said to have claimed that he was present when Gartshore and another man abused Moira, and that her death was an accident.

He said that Gartshore had used chloroform to knock her out and, after abusing her, had thrown her into the boot space of the bus, which could be accessed from the back seat. Later, he is said to have checked on her and found her dead.

Whether the cold or the chloroform killed Moira, or whether her abusers had always intended to kill her, the statement rang alarm bells for Mrs Brown. She remembered the ‘seat box’ in her father’s bus very well. And, for reasons she had never understood, he used to keep a bottle of chloroform on the kitchen window sill.

Sandra aged six with her father Alexander. She blames him for Moira’s disappearance

Alexander Gartshore in the military in 1945. His daughter has written a book called Where There Is Evil 

For several days, her father is said to have driven the bus with Moira’s body hidden under the back seat before dumping it in a ditch temporarily until a more permanent solution presented itself.

The location, his daughter became increasingly convinced of through her research, was the Old Monkland Graveyard. Figuring that the perfect way to dispose of a body was burying it in a grave freshly dug for a funeral, she researched every burial there within a six-week window in early 1957 – between Moira’s disappearance and her father’s imprisonment for rape.

One seemed to fit perfectly. An 80-year-old Coatbridge man called Sinclair Upton, whom Gartshore knew vaguely, was laid to rest in the cemetery not long after Moira vanished. Could the girl’s body have been thrown in the open grave and hastily covered with earth on the night before Mr Upton’s coffin arrived? If so, that would certainly explain why Gartshore had remarked enigmatically to a colleague a few years later that ‘Old Sinky Upton had done him the greatest favour of all’.

It took her six years to gather permission from Upton’s relatives, and secure the backing of forensic experts; the court gave permission to exhume the grave in 2013, but Moira was not found. It was shattering news for Moira’s two sisters, Janet Hart and Marjory Muir. ‘I was gutted at the time because I felt so sure we would find her,’ said Mrs Brown. However, she later learned that only two-thirds of the sizeable lair, including Mr Upton and his wife’s coffins, had been examined. ‘They seemed to go down the route of saying, “Once we’ve found Sinclair Upton and if there’s no trace of Moira in his bit, well that’s that”. It’s very frustrating, because I feel they should have done a thorough job by investigating the whole lair.’

Further disappointment came in 2017, when police searched a 100m stretch of the local Monkland canal, after a witness stated that they had seen a man walking by the canal soon after Moira disappeared, carrying a large sack. The forensic team only found animal bones.

Police divers search a canal for missing Moira’s remains in 2017. She vanished in 1957

Sandra Brown, whose story has been turned into an Audible podcast series

It seemed as though there was nowhere left to go, until Mrs Brown, now a grandmother of three, took part in a new six-part podcast, Coatbridge: The Disappearance of Moira Anderson. It threw up a brand new lead, after a credible source got in touch with police claiming they were told Moira’s body may have been dumped in a long disused mineshaft.

Strangely, there is a connection to Sinclair Upton – who worked as a miner and was one of many regularly bussed to the pits near Coatbridge by Gartshore. Could it be that the favour ‘Old Sinky’ paid Gartshore was to point out a disused mineshaft close to the bus route? ‘Just an offhand remark on a bus,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘but the perfect hiding place.’

Of the roughly 200 old shafts around Coatbridge, she said there was one which fits the bill. She won’t name the site for fear of alerting a ‘stampede’ of amateur criminologists, but said: ‘It’s very feasible, because it’s close to Gartshore’s bus route and there would be enough lighting to see what they’re doing but not too much to draw attention.

‘All I can do is pray that if we get the go-ahead, the search will be thorough.’

She said the site is close to a former children’s home from which some children may have been taken by Gartshore and others she suspects were involved in a paedophile ring. ‘If they used it for Moira, how do we know they didn’t use it for some of the kids who were reported as just runaways but never seen again?’ she said. Her investigations suggest that in the early 1960s the ring may have included a young Fred West, who moved to Coatbridge in 1963 with first wife, Rena Costello, who was from the town and later became one of his many victims. ‘What we can’t argue with is that for a time, my father and Jimmy Gallogley and Fred West all were in Coatbridge and a stone’s throw from each other. But that was after Moira.’

For now, her focus is on securing permission to unseal the mineshaft which was capped decades ago. Detective Superintendent Colin Hailstones, of Police Scotland said Moira’s case remained open, adding: ‘Any new information we receive will be fully assessed and investigated.’

Time, though, is running out for Moira’s sisters to learn the whole truth – Mrs Hart is 81 now and Mrs Muir is 78.

‘It is absolutely vital that we find Moira,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘None of us are getting any younger. My family need closure, I need closure, but most of all Moira’s sisters need closure.’