SCOTLAND'S MOST EVIL SERIAL KILLER: PETER MANUEL

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime kiss today is part two of the beast of birkenshaw today we're gonna be talking about one of scotland's most evil serial killers of all time and like i said this is part two of a two-parter so if you didn't catch part one i'll link it up here in the eye you kind of need to watch that one before you watch this one otherwise this one won't make any sense i'll wait i'll just i'll just wait i will do a little bit of a summary before we get into the case just to jog your memory but go watch that one first anyway all that being said before we get into the video i just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible magellan tv magellan tv is a documentary streaming service with over 3 000 titles on a range of different topics from space nature science history earth all the way to true crime i say this all the time but this is my absolute favorite thing about michelle and tv is that they have so many documentaries on cases that i bet you've never heard of and that is what makes magellan tv perfect for true crime junkies like me or you people that watch a lot of youtube videos we know a lot of stuff about true crime and it's kind of hard to find new cases these days at least for me anyway so here you go michelle and tv have so many different cases from all over the world small town cases that you just would have never come across otherwise lately i started this new documentary series called crime files with david wilson and david wilson has always been one of my favorite criminologists ever i just love that man and his little scottish accent i just oh i love him so this whole series that he's done each episode is on a different topic so there's one on gangs there's one on heists there's one on prisons miscarriages of justice lots of different things he did one on serial killers that actually has this guy that we're about to talk about in it i actually used that episode as part of my research i recommend the whole series highly i love that man and i'm sure you will love him too michelle and tv update their selections weekly so there's always something new for you to watch they are completely ad-free as well so there's no interruptions and you can watch on pretty much any device that you have so what are you waiting for and they're very very kindly offering you guys a limited time offer of 30 off of an annual subscription making it just 3.50 a month which is crazy by the way but that's not it they're also giving you two weeks free to kick that off so take advantage of that please you can go through the link down below in the description to get hold of that offer i really recommend it thanks again to michelin tv for sponsoring this video now let's just get into it i just want to give the same content warnings before we get into it as the last one this case does involve themes of sexual assault so if that's something that you don't want to hear about right now feel free to click out of this video i'm sure i'll see you again some other time with a kiss that's a little bit more suitable for you but look after yourself in the meantime so i'm just going to give a quick summary of part one and then we'll just flour straight into the rest of the story so this case takes place in scotland specifically a place called lanarkshire in scotland well that's where most of the case takes place and over the course of three years in the late 1950s police were faced with a string of different murders quite clearly by the same person the first was of a 17 year old girl named ann nelens she was found on a golf course half naked beaten to death and very clearly sexually assaulted the next murders were that of the watt family this was three women two adults named marion and margaret and marion's younger daughter 16 year old vivian and they'd all been shot to death in their beds in the middle of the night as they slept and 16 year old vivian seemed to have been sexually assaulted as part of this ordeal for a while these two murders weren't connected the one of andeland's and then these three women and that was because police believed that the murderer in the watts family case was actually the husband father of the family william watt for years police and the public thought that he was the one that had murdered his whole family he was put in a holding cell in prison they were getting all this evidence against him but after a while they had to release him because the evidence just wasn't strong enough and for good reason because now police were finding out that this man was innocent the whole time someone else had murdered his family the third murder happened a year and a half after the last and again this was another family of three this was the smart family comprising of mother father and their 10 year old son again the exact same sequence of events as the last one someone broke into the house in the middle of the night and shot all three of them in their beds as they slept and every single one of these three murders had shown signs of a robbery they'd all had jewelry stolen watches even some money in the third murder the murder of the smart family the murderer had stolen some brand new banknotes which actually led to them being caught police managed to track down these banknotes and found some man spending them in a pub in glasgow and so they thought this man has to be the killer how else would he have got hold of these stolen bank nerds this man was 31 year old peter manuel he was very very well known to the police at this stage in his life because all his life literally since he was a young teenager he'd been committing every single crime under the sun nothing quite as bad as murder but he'd done robberies thefts all sorts of different petty crimes we'll get more into that in a second but like i said in part one peter manuel had actually been questioned in relation to every single one of these murders so far because he was such a criminal in the area he'd been a suspect in every single one because they were looking at other criminals that might have then moved on to murder so they'd spoken with peter manuel plenty of times over the years about these murders as soon as police found out that peter manuel was spending these banknotes in a pub they decided to move in and arrest him at his parents house in lanakshire and when they arrived at the house manuel was actually asleep so police came inside to arrest him and he actually begged them to just give him five minutes because he wanted to go and explain to his parents everything that he'd done he didn't want them to find out by him getting arrested and i don't know if the police actually granted this wish and let him go and sit down to his parents and let them know that he murdered loads of people but anyway peter manuel was arrested he was handcuffed and he wasn't the only one actually his father samuel was also arrested because if you remember in part one like i said manuel had been questioned in relation to every single murder including that first murder of anne nelens and he was brought in and he gave police his alibi of the night he said that he was at home with his family and they called his father who confirmed that alibi and so that was why he was dropped as a suspect in that first murder which means that his father must have been lying he must have given his son a false alibi and so he needed arresting too he'd committed a crime too and as soon as police put the handcuffs on manuel's father he started screaming he was not happy with them arresting his father he was fine with them arresting him well not fine but he started screaming verbal abuse at these offices and the officers turned around to him and said look we're gonna have to take both of you to the police station and his response to the police was you haven't found anything yet you can't take me to which police responded um yes we can eventually manuel and his father both voluntarily left their home with the police and went down to the police station with them they were separated put into two separate interview rooms where they were both questioned and much to police's surprise peter manuel actually sat there in that questioning room and confessed to all the murders but that wasn't it he actually confessed to wear more than what police even suspected him of he was confessing to almost double the victim count that police were aware of some of which happened in different countries some of which the bodies had never been found and police were so shocked how could they have no idea that half of these murders had even taken place but before we get into that story and i tell you about the other half of the murders i just want to tell you a little bit more about peter manuel and who he was and his life growing up so peter thomas anthony manuel was born on march 13th 1927 actually in new york city he was the second child to scottish parents samuel and bridget his parents were born and raised in scotland but they'd actually left there and moved to new york about a year before peter was born in search of better jobs and so he was born over there peter actually had an older brother named james that his parents had actually had before they moved to new york city and they decided to leave james over in scotland with other family members i don't know why that was i don't know if they planned to bring james over eventually when they built up a life for themselves in new york or if i don't know they were just going to leave him in scotland forever the manual family weren't actually in new york for very long because they moved to detroit michigan after just a couple of years and as soon as they moved as soon as they settled down in detroit the wall street crash happened in 1929. so this meant that the manual family started having some financial struggles they didn't have it quite as bad as a lot of people the wall street crash was devastating for so many people luckily they had it quite well and they were struggling but they were they were surviving and maintaining but it was definitely a huge huge added pressure and it was an increasing pressure as well and it only got worse over the years and eventually actually got to a point where they couldn't afford to stay in america at all anymore and so they decided to move back to scotland they settled in a place called birkenshaw in lanarkshire and this would be the first time in peter's life that he would meet his older brother and just a couple of years later his family actually had a third child this time a girl so in the space of a few years peter manuel's whole life is turned upside down he was probably around eight or nine years old now he'd been moving around all his life literally moving entire countries he had two new siblings he was no longer an only child everything must have just been so mashed up in his brain everything he'd ever known was gone and now he was suddenly sharing his parents attention with two other children this must have been quite psychologically damaging for him but peter did get on well with his older brother james who was actually really different to him because i mean take into account they're completely different upbringings they pretty much had different parents even though they had biologically the same parents they were brought up by different people in completely different countries completely different financial situations they were too entirely different people james had been quite a mischievous child back in scotland and now that he was getting into his early teens this mischievous streak actually turned into a criminal streak when he started committing different petty crimes he started with little things kind of like pickpocketing vandalism moving on to theft and through spending a lot of time with his older brother the now 10 year old peter manuel i mean he saw james as a role model someone to aspire to be i mean a lot of kids do see older siblings as a role model type figure and of course this is not the kind of role model you really want your kid to have i'm sure you can guess where this eventually goes but we'll get back to that in a second i just want to talk a little bit more about what peter manuel was actually like at this point in his life manuel was a very very intelligent child he was so bright so much so that he actually got himself a spot at the local grammar school which is a special school for smart kids in the uk well the free ones anyway for smart kids so he started at this new grammar school in scotland and he was bullied relentlessly because he was the different kid he was the weird kid i mean he'd grown up in america so he had this slightly different accent and he did things differently to the other british kids and you know what kids are like they will literally pick out anything that's even slightly different about someone else and they'll use it against them they'll weaponize that difference and even though a slightly different accent is literally nothing to be bullied about they found a way to make him feel horrible every day for just being different when this bullying started happening of course peter didn't voluntarily want to go to a school where he was being ridiculed every single day he didn't want to feel like that and so he just stopped going to school he started skipping school and just going out during the day and he would spend this newfound free time out with his brother because of course james was naughty as well he was badly behaved so he would skip school a lot so these two brothers just used to go out all day every day and if he wasn't with james then he was definitely following in his footsteps at least because peter manuel began committing the same petty crimes that his older brother had he started pickpocketing robbing from stars and this escalated and escalated until eventually he was burgling houses he even broke into the church that was right next to his school and stole all of the money out of the collection box peter manuel was rapidly becoming very known to the police they would give him different warnings every single day they would bring him back to the station and give him a talking to her because after all this is still a very young child but it gets to a certain point where obviously warnings aren't working taking him back to the station and talking to him isn't working and police knew they needed to do something a bit more stern with this boy at the age of 12 peter manuel was arrested for one of these crimes i don't know exactly what it was for and he actually had to go to court and then he was sentenced to some time in a juvenile prison or it was something of a similar nature to a juvenile prison i think it was like a boarding school for naughty kids that get sent there kind of like boston if you've ever heard of boston ball still was a detention center a youth detention center in the uk isn't still going now but it was for kids that probably should be in prison because they're that bad but they also kind of need reforming and they need to go to school and it's just a more youth-friendly version of prison and peter manuel actually got sent to boston a little bit later on in the story on his 16th birthday actually he was sent to boston for another one of his crimes but anyway he got sent to this first detention center when he was just 12 years old and he spent a few months in there eventually he was released and everyone was hoping that this would have finally taught him a lesson that he'd actually got some serious consequences for his actions but of course not of course it didn't as soon as manuel was released he was back out on the streets committing those exact same crimes and then he would just get put straight back in the detention center manuel was in and out of these child detention centers all his teenage years literally from the age of 12 when he first got put in one he was in and out of them until age 18 when you can no longer go to a youth detention center but when he was home in those times between his sentences when he was just like kicking about on the streets manuel was now alone he no longer had his best friend his older brother james because james had also been sent to these detention centers most of his teenage years so they were very rarely home at the same time because at least one of them would be in a detention center and it was around this time that the manual family decided to move again from scotland from lanicher they were actually going to move to coventry in england and again this was without older brother james because he was in a detention center and so they just said right when you get out go and live with your grandparents we're moving emanuel's parents really hoped that getting him away from his older brother and away from his environment would change him because it was clear that he was very very influenced by his environment and he was just stuck in this loop up in scotland where he couldn't get out of crime and so they thought if taking him out of that actual setting and putting him somewhere else would help him then they were willing to do that they were willing to completely uproot themselves and move to an entirely different country honestly peter manuel's parents there's a lot to say about a lot of serial killers parents a lot of serial killers had the absolute worst parents ever and i have covered plenty of those but peter manuel's parents seemed like they genuinely cared for their children but their children just got caught up in in bad cycles and they couldn't break them out of it so anyway they get to coventry and his parents are really hopeful that peter manuel is gonna be a new boy but that didn't happen as soon as he was in coventry he was right back to his criminal wares just in a different setting there was one particularly bad incident where manuel went out and robbed a house in the middle of the night and this wasn't just any house this was actually a house that belonged to one of his school teachers while he was in this house he was actually confronted by one of the women in the family i think the wife of his school teacher and manuel instead of running away instead of fleeing the scene he actually decided to fight and so he picked up a rather large heavy object and started hitting this woman over the head with it luckily the woman survived this ordeal and because this was literally his school teacher's house of course peter manuel got caught for this the teacher could literally go to the police and give an exact name because he recognized the young boy that had just broken into his house and sir this time peter manuel was in big big trouble this was nothing like he'd ever been punished for before not only was it a home invasion a burglary but he'd also assaulted a woman almost attempted murder he was actually found guilty of gbh which is grievous bodily harm which is quite severe assault over here in the uk and for that he was given a very long stare at one of these youth detention centers and while he was there peter manuel was given a bunch of different psychiatric assessments because this boy is consistently in trouble no matter where he is no matter what his situation is his circumstances his environment he is always getting into trouble he is always committing crimes which makes it seem as though it's something to do with him maybe it is something to do with his brain wiring this level of criminal activity at such a young age is so so rare so they were pretty sure that he must have some level of of mental illness but his tests actually showed absolutely zero signs of any illnesses there were a few notes on the record though that he might have a narcissistic personality because somehow manuel was always very liked by everyone and let's face it this kid is is a little monster so how he was very very charming he was always the leader of everything he was very good at persuading people and getting people on his side but he was also a compulsive liar and he never took responsibility for anything everyone else was always to blame for everything that happened in his life and these are all traits of a narcissist i don't know if had he been tested today in 2021 he would have actually got a diagnosis or a different diagnosis because maybe he did have different symptoms of a mental illness that just wasn't either wasn't considered a mental illness at the time or maybe they just didn't have i don't know as much information on different illnesses then so maybe he did have some level of mental illness but it definitely wasn't detected at the time so he had nothing on his record in the early 1940s peter manuel would have been in his mid to late teens and it was around this time that world war ii hit well i mean it had been in progress for a good few years at this point but it hadn't really posed much of a threat to their family until one fateful day when coventry was actually bombed and the manual family lost their house to this explosion luckily for them none of them were in the house and so they survived this bombing but that meant that they were left with nothing and they had nowhere to go and nowhere to live and so for that reason the manual family decided to move back up to scotland where all the rest of their family were they got a house in motherwell which isn't too far from where they lived last time but here's the thing at the time that this bomb hit in coventry peter manuel actually wasn't there he was at one of these youth detention centers all the way in yorkshire i think it was for what he did to that to that woman when he robbed the house of his school teacher and so he was in yorkshire his family's house got bombed in coventry and they said look i'm sorry that you're still in prison or like a youth detention center but we've gotta go we've gotta leave without you they just left their son in england and they went back up to scotland actually something quite important to note here was while he was in this youth detention center for this particular crime he was actually hit on the head while he was out in the yard outside by a piece of falling shrapnel from the wall obviously with all these like different vehicles flying above him and all the bombs and all the different whatever whatever there was stuff falling quite a bit and he got hit on the head pretty badly by this piece of shrapnel you can imagine surely that could kill someone luckily for him it only knocked him out but it is believed that this falling piece of shrapnel left him with a degree of brain damage i think it was also while he was in this institute that he had another pretty big injury happened to him that affected his brain manual and about five other men were working on this like electrical task at the institute i have no idea what it was something to do with electricals but there was a faulty wire or something that went off and electrocuted all five of these men and this electrocution was so powerful that it actually killed three of the men peter manuel survived and so did one of the others but he's believed to have had brain damage from that day and he suffered with quite a lot of memory loss it took him a long time to properly build his memory back up again and we've seen this quite a few times before in true crime cases particularly serial killer cases i think i covered one was it jerry bruders the shoe fetish slayer he too was severely electrocuted when he was about the same age as manuel and he turned out to be a serial killer as well so i wonder if there's something in there i'll link that video up here if you want to watch it after you've seen this one it is quite a different story but that's quite an interesting common factor between the two of them and while we're on the topic of manual's different brain injuries he also had a form of epilepsy that is believed to have damaged his prefrontal cortex at points and this part of the brain is actually associated with risk-taking and stuff like that which explains why he was so willing to commit crimes knowing that he was gonna get sent back to the youth detention center but it's because he just can't assess risks the way that the rest of us do he was not weighing up the pros and cons of actually committing a crime versus the consequence anyway when peter manuel was finally released from his youth detention center aged 18 he traveled back up to scotland to go and meet his family at their new home and it was up there in scotland where peter manuel's crimes actually stepped up a level he was no longer just robbing people pickpocketing vandalizing even burgling people's homes he decided he was going to start assaulting women in march of 1946 over the space of just one week manuel went out and assaulted three different women two of which the first two he attempted to rape and the third and final woman he actually successfully raped and this third woman manuel had actually seen her on the bus that day they just so happened to be taking the same bus and he saw her and thought she was the perfect victim for him and so he stayed on the bus longer than he had to and then he followed her off stalked her and once they got into a quiet alleyway he attacked he forced her down onto this embankment and raped her there and luckily he didn't have any kind of face covering on this seemed quite a spontaneous attack and so this woman got a good look at her attacker's face so she was able to give a really really good description of peter manuel to the police and police knew exactly who this guy was because well let's face it he's committed every crime under the sun at this point so they tracked down peter manuel and charged him with the rape of this third victim the other two women the first two that manuel attacked had actually reported their cases to the police and so when police got manual for the third one they brought these other two women in and they said look is this the guy that attacked you and both of them said that it was manual but of course because it was attempted rape there wasn't really any evidence there like there was with the third one i'm sure there was kind of biological evidence with the third one so he couldn't actually be charged with the first two and let's be honest there could have been more than just those three but they might not have connected them to manual but at least he was charged with the third one and for that he spent six years in prison he was 19 at the time when he was sent to prison so that took him all the way into his mid-20s on his release from prison peter manuel decided to move to glasgow and there he actually built up a really good life for himself he got a job as a carpenter he got a really big friend group who loved him like i said very charming individual and he actually got a girlfriend who he eventually got engaged to in the end and it seemed as though things were going really really well for manuel and that he'd finally learned from all of his crimes he was putting that behind him and he was ready to integrate into society as a as a regular citizen but of course that didn't happen things don't just happen like that in eleanor neil videos did they the relationship with his new fiancee eventually broke down due to differing religious beliefs i think and the wedding was eventually called off and this sent peter manuel into this complete downward spiral it was at this stage in his life that he actually developed a huge obsession with like big american gangsters like al capone john dillinger he thought he was a gangster and he was still a compulsive liar at this point in his life he always was always had been always would be and he would meet people in bars and in pubs and because he was this grandiose charming and lying person he would make himself sound big and intimidating and powerful and he would tell them all about his previous crimes all his robberies all the times he'd broken into people's houses but he would make them sound bigger and more intense than they really were he would tell these people that he was in the second world war and that he'd killed people in the war which no he didn't no he wasn't you can tell that he'd lost a lot of his self-esteem and a lot of his sense of self when his relationship broke down when his engagement was called off because he was now trying to completely reinvent his character and it wasn't long before peter manuel was back to his criminal ways i think that engagement was so good for him it had completely changed him as a person but now that that was gone now that the only good thing in his life was stripped away from him he had no reason now to not go back to his life of crime one day in 1955 when peter manuel was 28 years old now he went out into the night around 11 p.m with the intention of stalking and assaulting a random woman that he was going to come across so he was walking the streets for a while looking for his perfect victim and that was when he saw mary mclaughlin and a lot of people said that mary mclaughlin actually looked a lot like peter manuel's ex-fiancee mary was walking home from a dance that she'd attended that night and she was actually just a few minutes away from her house when peter manuel attacked her he grabbed her from behind put a knife to her neck and threatened to cut her head off if she didn't do what he said he dragged her down onto an embankment behind some bushes so they were rather private and there he assaulted her sexually assaulted her and actually tried to fully rape her at knife point but i think she actually managed to wriggle away and escape before he got chance to fully rape her sources do say different things about that some of them said that he did successfully rape her some of them said that she managed to get away pretty quickly i'm leaning more towards the second one because i read that a little bit more either way luckily mary mclaughlin was able to identify her attacker to the police as peter manuel and once again he was arrested this this was the first time in a few years that police had actually heard of peter manuel so they were quite surprised so manuel was put on trial for this attack against mary and unbelievably he opted to defend himself rather than getting a lawyer rather than getting a whole legal team to try and get him off this charge he thought nah i can do it myself and somehow well i mean let's be honest this is a very very charming very intelligent man he actually managed to get himself off the charge as his own lawyer i don't know how that's allowed i believe the way that he did it was that he actually pretended that mary mclaughlin was a friends with benefits type situation and he argued that she was a very very jealous person she was in love with him and he would didn't feel the same way about her he said that he was seeing other people at the same time and mary just could not handle that and so she made up this lie to the police to get back at peter manuel for having other women on the side and the court somehow believed him peter manuel was acquitted of this charge and he was able to walk free which is crazy but little did they know they were releasing a guilty man who was about to make the jump from serial rapist to serial killer in just a matter of months and it was then in january of 1956 that peter manuel committed his first murder the murder of anne nelens not much is really known about how manuel actually approached and neiland's that night all we know is that she had gone to a dance and then she was walking home so it was probably on that walk home that he approached her even though she was stood up by her date to go to that dance i do think she still attended it alone so i don't think it was before the dance i think she went there and then it was on her walk home and it was then that emanuel stalked her approached her and then battled her to the ground sexually assaulted her and then beat her to death with this large heavy object i believe he chased her all the way to the golf course and killed her there i don't think he killed her elsewhere and then transported her there just because there was a lot of blood spatter and stuff all over the ground it seemed as though the attack took place there but i think he was chasing her down for a while like i said in the first part she was missing a shoe and that shoe was found a few hundred meters away so of course once anne's body was found the next morning the prime suspect was her date that stood her up that night and then as soon as he was ruled out police started looking at other suspects they brought up that shortlist of different sex offenders in the area all the men that had committed similar crimes like violent crimes or assaults things like that or even just people that were working in the area at the time like during the night maybe they'd seen something and of course on that shortlist was none other than peter manuel and it was actually because he worked in the area at the time and also he was a criminal but i think he worked on like a construction site type thing he was a manual laborer at the time and he actually got quite heavily involved in this case even after he was ruled out as a suspect he was still heavily involved and that's because he claimed to the police and the media that whoever had murdered anne nelens that night had also stolen some things from their construction site where he worked he claimed that a pair of boots had been stolen and also a large heavy thing that could have been used as a weapon i don't know exactly what it was but he believed that the murder weapon was stolen from their site which is convenient isn't it it's almost as if he took it from his work to use as a weapon and so because he had such valuable information he was in the police station all the time like i said this was after he was ruled out as a suspect so police are just kind of using him as a witness almost not an eyewitness but you know someone that is involved in the case he was doing interviews with so many newspapers but interestingly enough all of these interviews that he would do with the newspapers they would try and get a picture of him so that they could put it in with their article and every single time he would stop them and say no pictures i don't want any pictures of me in that newspaper at the time people just thought he must have been quite a private guy and they just respected his wishes and didn't put him in the newspaper but in retrospect there is a glaringly obvious reason as to why he didn't want his face in the newspaper and that was in case he was identified but anyway going back to when he was a suspect in and nealin's murder he was taken down to the police station for an interview and when he arrived the first thing police noticed about peter manuel was that he had scratches all over his face this was a couple of days after the murder the scratchers were like partly healed is this not the biggest red flag you have ever heard in your life i don't know what reason he gave to the police as to why he had those scratches on his face i don't know why that wasn't elaborated more on in all the sources that i read because i would have locked him up then and there and that is why i'm not a police officer because that's actually really bad anyway police interviewed peter manuel over and over again in relation to this case and he gave them his alibi that he was at home with his father so they called up his father and they were like was your son at home with you and he said yes he lied for his son this is exactly why his father samuel was later arrested along with his son because he clearly lied and i don't actually know why i don't know if he knew what his son had actually done did he know that his son was a murderer and that he was covering for him for murder or did he just think that his son had committed another robbery or something and maybe he was used to it at this point and he was just trying to help his son which i don't condone but maybe that was the case some sources say that peter manuel's father samuel actually helped him get rid of his blood-soaked clothes from the murder but like i say i don't know if this is true it was only said on maybe a couple of sources so i personally don't know if i believe that but i thought it was worth mentioning we truly don't know if manuel's father actually knew what he was defending his son for at that moment in time but anyway his confirmed alibi from his father was enough evidence for police to rule him out as a suspect they trusted him they trusted his father and so they moved on to looking at all the other suspects on this list all of them were ruled out of course because they were all innocent because manuel was guilty and it would take police years to find out what truly happened to ann nelens meanwhile since peter manuel had gotten away with murder he just went back to his daily criminal activity and it was while he was out on bail for this that he committed the triple murder of the watt family emanuel's motives for his murders have always been somewhat unclear of course he did rob each and every one of his victims so maybe that's part of the motive but he never really got so much money that it made it worthwhile for him it didn't seem like that was his his big motive if it was then surely he would be robbing the richest people in the neighborhood stealing absolutely everything you know there were some valuable things that he would leave with the victims so if he was truly doing it for money and money alone charlie he would steal absolutely everything he could most people that look back on this case believe that a lot of it was down to his different brain issues so whether he did have a mental illness that just wasn't diagnosed and the different parts of brain damage that he had and the epilepsy that damaged his brain as well some people believe that he truly just enjoyed killing and that he did all of this just for the thrill i personally believe that it was probably a mixture of a bunch of these different motives i think the money was a big factor for him and then i think the fact that his risk assessment part of his brain was damaged showed that he was willing to murder three people for what like 50 pounds but i also think he did just enjoy it because there was a reason that he started assaulting women and scaring people and i think he just i think he did a lot of it for the thrill as well but anyway with the watts family murder he broke into the house in the middle of the night while all three women were asleep in their beds he first went into marion watts bedroom where her and her sister margaret brown were sleeping he shot both of them in their sleep and then he went into vivian's bedroom where he sexually assaulted her and also shot her he robbed the place not of everything that he could have like i said but he robbed certain bits of jewelry and stuff like that and then he fled the scene so of course police looking at this they immediately believed that it was william watt but then the evidence started getting shaky people like the ferryman identifying the wrong car and stuff like that so police decided it would be wise to look at some other suspects even though they were very much certain that they were going to find william what guilty they wanted to look at other people just in case so again they shortlisted a bunch of suspects previous criminals different people in the area and again peter manuel was on this list he was brought into the police station once again questioned about the whole thing and he denied everything he denied knowing who the women were he denied any involvement in any of this attack and police believed him and they just let him go little did they know that william watts lawyer was receiving all these letters from this man that claimed to know all these things he claimed to be friends with the murderer in prison little did they know those letters were coming from peter manuel he was the actual murderer writing letters snitching on himself and giving all these exclusive bits of information that no one else knew that only the killer would know why police didn't look into this man sending the letters i have no idea because all of this could have been solved here and then the smart family would have still been alive but peter manuel just couldn't help himself and this is one of the main reasons why i think he did what he did for the thrill and for the fun of killing because writing these letters he gets nothing out of this he gets no money he gets he gets nothing other than the sick satisfaction that he is stringing along the only survivor of this massacre he's killed this guy's whole family this guy's devastated he's grieving he's so upset he's in so much pain and peter manuel is like hmm come talk to me come meet me and i'll tell you more about what i know about your dead family and when they did meet up manuel was saying things like yeah i know your daughter's clothes were all ripped off and all this kind of stuff like he was doing this for some sort of twisted kick out of it you know he was enjoying this but of course at this point police had no idea that any of this was really going on and so their attentions turned back to william watt they'd ruled out this whole shortlist of suspects they were sure it was william who by the way was believed to have killed his whole family for three years police kept going with this on william watt for three years and the whole public were as well everyone in his whole community thought he was a murderer thought he'd murdered his wife his 16 year old daughter also bear in mind that she was sexually assaulted so these people also believe that this man sexually assaulted his own daughter and he didn't and he knew that he didn't he tried to tell everyone that he didn't this man then had to go through his grieving process he was in so much pain at the loss of his family but not only that he was in the police station every other week he was put in prison for two years in a holding cell while they did what nothing while all the evidence just fell away and even then he wasn't cleared his name wasn't cleared but anyway as far as peter manuel was concerned police were off his back and he was back out there in the big wide world looking for yet another victim and this next victim that we're about to talk about is one that we didn't even know of until peter manuel had already died he never confessed to this one he never spoke about this victim to anyone he didn't tell police about it nothing the only reason we actually know about it was because evidence was found after manuel was already dead so this one was quite a recent discovery i thought it would be best to put it in the timeline when it actually happened to avoid confusion but just be aware that police had no idea that this happened until the end of the case and the reason it took so long for police to connect this third murder well the fifth murder but this was kind of the third wave of manuals killings the reason it took so long to connect this one to manuel was because this one actually didn't take place in scotland this one took place in england in newcastle upon time i think it's quite interesting just how many scottish serial killers travel to england throughout their killing spree or for their whole killing spree a lot of scottish serial killers don't stay in scotland through it all anyway peter manuel traveled to newcastle in england in search of a new job he had a job interview there and so he went and stayed there for a little while i think due to his criminal record he didn't really want to stay in scotland much longer because police like as you can see they keep calling him in every time something happens because they just think probably manual so on december 8th 1957 peter manuel is in newcastle and he calls for a taxi the taxi arrived and it was driven by 36 year old sydney dunn and as soon as it did arrive peter manuel pulled his gun and shot sydney in the head honestly i don't know if police or anyone ever found out the context or the reasoning behind this of course because we didn't connect this to him while he was still alive we have absolutely no knowledge of this murder other than the physical evidence of it i don't know if this was because of an argument that the two of them had had once he got into the car or anything i don't know if this was just completely spontaneous maybe manuel just did feel like killing again that day and so as soon as the taxi arrived he just killed but anyway what we do know is that as soon as he killed sydney dunn he pushed their body onto a different seat and then peter manuel jumped in the driver's seat and drove the car away he drove all the way to the mars in northumberland and then just ditched the body somewhere in those mars i think he ditched the car somewhere and then he made his way back up to lanarkshire in scotland the reason we know that this murder was probably peter manuel okay we can't say definitely peter manuel but it was probably peter manuel and that was because one of his jacket buttons actually popped off during the altercation or as he was getting sydney's body out of the car and that button was later found inside sydney's abandoned car and that is the only piece of evidence that we have which is why we can't say he was definitely killed by manuel even though it is quite strong there are a lot of people that look into this case and believe that sydney might have been killed by someone else maybe someone that lived local to the area because let's be honest manuel was from an entirely different country he probably wouldn't have known the best places to hide a body in that kind of area the killer seemed to know exactly where to drive in order to dispose of this body in quite a far out place other people believe that the killer could have been someone from ireland because a boat had arrived in newcastle from ireland that exact day and there was reports of one witness saying that they heard someone speaking to sydney dunn in an irish accent but let's be honest sydney dunn was a taxi driver and they probably spoke to a lot of people throughout the day and i bet a lot of them were those irish people coming off of that book because they wouldn't know their way around they would be needing to go by taxi but also that witness was later questioned by the police and they were asked are you sure it was an irish accent and the person said no actually i'm not so there is proof that peter manuel attended a job interview two days earlier in newcastle so we know that he was in the area at the time but i mean it was two days earlier so that gives him two days chance to get back up to scotland so it might not have been him but also at the same time i think the button evidence is really really strong because if they literally found one of manuel's jackets with a missing button and then they found an identical button in sydney dunn's car i mean it is only one piece of evidence but it's quite strong but like i said though peter manuel was never caught or connected to this murder while he was alive so he was free to continue his killing spree after this his sixth murder took place that same month actually which was very unlike manuel he seemed to like waiting a lot of time between his kills but not this time on december 28 1957 a 17 year old girl named elizabeth cook disappeared one night when she was going to a school dance so this is pretty much the exact same circumstances as anne nyland apart from isabel cook's body wasn't found she just disappeared i forgot to mention as well this is back up in scotland now the last one was in england but we're back up in scotland mount vernon in glasgow that night isabelle was due to attend a school dance she was gonna go and meet her boyfriend douglas who by the way is the sweetest thing ever he said that she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen the most beautiful girl in the school he was really lucky to have her so she went to go and meet douglas they went to the dance and then she started walking home again that night and she was never seen again she was reported missing by her parents and isabelle cook's disappearance quickly became one of the biggest missing persons cases in the 1950s in scotland police worked on her case tirelessly they campaigned for her safe return they put things in the news they brought in like huge manual searches but absolutely nothing of her was found apart from her underwear which of course doesn't look good it definitely seems as though something happened to isabel that night a few days later in the early hours of new year's day in 1958 peter manuel commits his next murder which is the murder of the smart family so we're speeding up again now it's only been a few days between his last murder in this one and this brings his victim total up to nine now he broke into the smart family's bungalow in the middle of the night once they were all asleep and just as he had with the watt family he walked from bedroom to bedroom shooting them all in the head while they slept again he robbed the place he took all the jewelry all the checkbooks he could find and of course those five pound nuts but instead of fleeing the scene as he normally would manual decided this time that he was gonna stay a little wild and this is one of the most characteristic things about peter manuel's killing spree this is talked about a lot in relation to this guy because he spent almost a full week living among the rotting decomposing corpses of his murder victims he lived in their house he even slept in their beds where he'd killed them he didn't even move them well no he did he just pushed them to the side a little bit so he was sleeping in a bed with his murder victim and he rather surprisingly treated the house with respect not the people the house he kept the area relatively tidy and clean he even fed the family cat once a day he would feed it salmon he would let it sit on his knee and he would stroke it like this was his house he would use the smart family's car to just go out in during the day run errands using their stolen car he would come in and out of the house as normal and i'm really surprised at that actually to be fair because they had a lot of neighbours there were a lot of people around it's really shocking that he never got caught walking in and out of the house or driving around in their car to be fair in the aftermath of this case a lot of the neighbors did say that they noticed some slight weird behavior from the house like the curtains would be drawn during the day which was very unlike the smart family there would be lights on in the middle of the night which again very unlike them they had a 10 year old son so they were on quite a strict routine of bedtimes and school times and stuff like that neighbors did think it was a little bit weird occasionally people would notice that the curtains were drawn or whatever but it wasn't so weird that you would think they were murdered inside and to be fair everyone knew that they were due to be going on holiday so i think a lot of the neighbors just thought that someone was over house sitting so that would explain the different behavior and different routines so like i said manuel was just living in their house using their car feeding their cat eating their leftovers from the fridge and at one point as he was driving his murder victim's car he actually drove past a police officer and so peter manuel decides to pull over the car and ask this officer if he wants a lift to work and just think about this for a second he has just murdered a whole family stolen their car and then he is so cocky that he's literally offering a police officer that is going to be working on this murder case very very soon he's offered him a lift to the police station in this stolen vehicle how cocky can a murderer actually get anywhere in the car on the way to the police station the two of them started talking about 17 year old isabelle cook the girl that went missing literally about two weeks prior now and manual okay it gets even worse you thought it was cocky before manuel actually turned to this police officer and said well i think you're just looking in all the wrong places for it which is especially eerie when you learn later on in the case that isabelle cook wasn't actually missing at this point she'd been murdered on the night that she disappeared by none other than peter manuel that night he'd seen isabelle cook walking down the street just walking home from this dance and he decided to stalk her for a while eventually when she turned onto a quiet street manuel ran over to her grabbed her pretty much abducted her and took her to an even quieter place there he pinned her down raped her and then eventually strangled her to death when he was done he then picked up isabelle's body and took her to a local field where he then dug a shallow grave and buried her body literally less than a foot below the ground so of course he knew that the police were looking in all the wrong places because he knew exactly where the right place was and that brings us back to the timeline where peter manuel is sitting in the police station and he's confessing to all these different crimes he confessed to all of those murders apart from sydney dunn because like i said police didn't even know about that police didn't even connect that to manuel until after manuel was already dead so he confessed to ann nelands isabelle cook the three murders of the watts family and the three murders of the smart family he actually took police officers to where he buried isabelle cook's body in that field and he was walking with them for ages he was just making conversation with them and police are starting to think is he actually gonna take us there or is he just used this as an excuse to get out of the police station at one point they even paused like stood still to have a conversation and officers asked him well are you gonna take us to this body or not and he says yeah i'm standing on her right now which i think is just the ultimate final sick twist that this man could have done in this case his final day of freedom the last day that he's ever gonna walk set foot outside of the prison he goes and stands on the shallow grave of his murder victim by the way as all of this was going on as the police were questioning manuel and getting all these different pieces of evidence going to find isabelle's body another family had come forward to the police to say that they believed that they were very nearly peter manuel's next victims they were survivors of his this was the mcmunn family and you know they very much fit peter manuel's usual victim type he had two different victim types which is interesting you don't see that a lot he either went for young teenage girls or full families like a mother a father and a child which is such a different victim profile i think that's really interesting but they believed that peter manuel had broken into their home on the 4th of january of that year which by the way is while he was still living in the smart family's home he'd left the home of one of his murder victims to go and commit another murder but anyway they believe he broke into their home and they saw him hearing around their bedroom door luckily they were awake at the time and so they think this spooked him and then he ran out of the house because it seemed that peter manuel only really liked to kill people well only really like to kill families if they were already asleep in their beds which the mcmahons weren't if they had been asleep who knows maybe they would have been killed too maybe they would have been manuel's next victims on the same day that peter manuel was arrested at his home he was charged at 11 p.m that same day but he was actually only charged with the smart family murders and the break-in at the mcmunn family house i don't think they quite had enough evidence to charge him with the other murders just yet but at the same time they didn't really need to because these crimes the ones that he was charged with were enough to get him put up for the death penalty anywhere which is the maximum penalty he could even get and although peter manuel had confessed to all these crimes we knew he had he confessed at the police station they were unofficial confessions when someone confesses to a crime they have to do it verbally and then they have to do a written confession so they kind of have to do it twice but a lot of the time they change their minds between the unofficial one and the official one we've seen this before in a bunch of true crime cases different serial killers different murderers they'll confess but then they'll retract that confession and they won't give an official one guess what peter manuel did he was now saying that he was completely innocent and that the only reason he'd confessed earlier that unofficial confession was because he was under duress he said that he was coerced into giving a false confession by the police officers because they were threatening to ruin his life and all his family's lives if he didn't confess to this so he was now saying that he was completely innocent of all of these crimes and the case was due to go to trial so the trial began in may of 1958 at glasgow high court and it lasted for about 17 days and in a rather surprising move well this won't be too much of a surprise to you guys because you already know what he's like at this point but peter manuel on the first day of the trial he decided to sack his whole legal team fired every single one of them and he decided he was gonna represent himself he'd done it once before and gotten away with it actually for his first ever rape charge he managed to represent himself and he got off on that charge so he thought he could do it again and once again he was really good at it you know a lot of people said they knew he was the murderer but somehow he was getting in their heads even the judge at the trial commented on how remarkable manuel's skill was as his own lawyer he was a very persuasive man so he argued that all of these victims had been murdered by other people and that he was just being used as like a scapegoat he was being framed for all of them most notably he argued to the court that the what family were murdered by william watt because that let's be honest that one's probably the most believable one he even called william watt up to the stand as a witness and manuel himself the murderer the guy that murdered this guy's family is standing there accusing him and poor william what by the way he'd actually been in a car crash probably about a week before this trial he had to attend the trial so he was brought in on a full stretcher with like a neck brace and stuff this poor guy as if he hadn't been through enough in his life that all his family were murdered then he was the main suspect for like three years he was locked up in prison for it and now he's been put on trial as the real murderer stands across from him and accuses him of murdering his family as for the smart family murders peter manuel tried to argue to the court that the smart family was murdered by the father peter smart manuel said that peter smart must have gone on some kind of rampage he murdered both his son and his wife and then he turned the gun on himself and committed suicide i don't know what he said in respects to the ann neland's case and isabel cook especially since he led police to her body i don't know how he thought he was going to get out of that one at the end of this trial despite peter manuel's best efforts the jury found him guilty of all of the murders apart from anne nelens due to lack of evidence and for these murders peter manuel was sentenced to death he was due to be executed in just a month's time the day rolled around pretty quickly it was june 11 1958 that peter manuel was due to be executed in balini prison by the executioner harry allen his final meal on the morning of his execution so he had this for breakfast this is a weird breakfast he had fish and chips with a side of tomatoes a glass of brandy and a cup of tea interesting choice weird mix anyway and manuel's last words before he was hanged in the gallers was turn the radio up and i'll go quietly it took only a matter of 20-something seconds for him to actually die from when he was dropped he was the third to last criminal to ever be executed in scotland and peter manuel is buried in an unmarked grave just outside of block d in the prison that he was executed in baline prison and it was then after his execution that police found evidence linking him to the murder of sydney dunn that button was finally found in sydney's car and everyone knew it was manual and there's also been reports that he was connected to a bunch of other unsolved disappearances unsolved murders none of them have ever been confirmed the only one that's been confirmed after his death is sydney dunn but so many people that look into this case believe that peter manuel could be responsible for over 20 murders that he just hasn't been connected to but because he's not here anymore and due to lack of evidence in most of the cases i don't think we'll ever find out i don't think we'll ever connect them and if he could have kept quiet about sydney dunn's murder for so long then i mean sure there probably is a lot more just an interesting endnote to leave this case on is that peter manuel this depraved awful serial killer actually inspired a children's nursery rhyme in the 60s i presume you've heard of mary had a little lamb it's not that one but it goes something like that it goes mary had a little cat she used to call it daniel then she found it killed six mice and now she calls it manual which is the creepiest thing i've ever heard but to be fair most kids nursery rhymes are based on something creepy are they does it ring a ring of roses that's based on the plague or something like that anyway we're getting off topic that is all i have on this case thank you so so much for watching thanks again to michelin tv for sponsoring this video remember they are offering you guys that limited time deal to get 30 off of an annual subscription making it just 3.50 a month plus a two-week free trial when you go through my link it's down below in the description so don't miss out huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video thank you so so much for watching this video if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below because that would really help me out if you want to subscribe you can click this link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there's some fun stuff coming on there very soon um you can click that link by the way and if you want to watch another true crime video there'll be a link in other words there'll be a playlist on screen right now how have i just messed up my my ending so bad anyway bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,355,146

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, interview, news, peter manuel, the beast of birkenshaw, birkenshaw, scotland, lanarkshire, glasgow, anne kneilands, watt family, william watt, manuel, peter, smart family, michael smart, peter manuel documentary, dennis nilsen, peter tobin, robert black, trial, family, true crime daily, 2021, in plain sight

Id: eitVxEy2_1k

Length: 61min 10sec (3670 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021