Roy Fontaine biography

They then drugged her 82-year-old husband with whisky and sleeping pills.

Mary Coggle put on a wig and wore Mrs. Scott-Elliot's clothes. They put the dead woman's body in the trunk of a car and set off for the 400-mile journey to Scotland.

The trio buried Mrs. Scott-Elliot by the side of a quiet road in Braco, Perthshire. Still sedated, they beat her husband to death with a spade, and buried him in a remote spot near Glen Affric,

Inverness.

The following day an argument broke out between the groups. Coggle wanted to keep Mrs. Scott-Elliot's mink coat, but the men wanted the evidence destroyed. Fontaine hit Coggle over the head with a poker and suffocated her with a plastic bag before dumping her in a stream in Dumfriesshire.

The two men headed for Fontaine's family home in Cumbria only to find Fontaine's brother Donald released from prison three days earlier. Donald was too interested in Fontaine's recent adventures, and with murder now second nature to him, Fontaine held a chloroformed rag over Donald's face and drowned him in a bath. A few days later the two murderers found themselves driving north to dispose of yet another body.

An antiques dealer in Newcastle became suspicious after two men offered him china and silverware well below its worth. He jotted down the number plate of the car the men were driving and alerted the police. The police found the car had been rented out to a Scott-Elliot and when they visited the Chelsea flat they found the walls spattered with blood and over 3,500 pounds worth of valuables missing.

Arrest and Trial

Mary Coggle's body had been found a month earlier on Christmas Day by a shepherd. Knowing that Coggle had once worked for Dorothy Scott-Elliot as a housekeeper and cook, detectives began to wonder if the two murders were connected. Was she the same woman wearing a mink coat that they knew had stayed at the Tilt Hotel in Blair Atholl, Scotland with three other men, one of them very elderly? Two days later the two younger men had returned to the hotel alone.

In January 1978, Fontaine and Kitto stopped at a hotel in North Berwick. The owner, Norman Wight, became suspicious of the two guests and called the police. During a routine check the police found Donald Hall's body.

Fontaine escaped out of a toilet window and got as far as Haddington before he was stopped at a police roadblock.

Following a failed suicide attempt on January 18, 1978 Fontaine helped the police search for Mr. Scott-Elliot's body on the Highlands. They found him, chewed by foxes near a rhododendron bush. Days later they dug up David Wright, and soon after that Mrs. Scott-Elliot was found face down in a roadside ditch, 100 miles from where her husband's corpse had been uncovered.

During the trial in Edinburgh in May 1978 Fontaine was described as a psychopath. Fontaine made a full confession to the five murders and British and Scottish courts sentenced him to life imprisonment. He was charged with four life sentences for four of the murders. The fifth case remains open.