Bus driver, now dead, believed to be killer of Moira Anderson in 1957 - UPI.com

Bus driver, now dead, believed to be killer of Moira Anderson in 1957 - UPI.com

GLASGOW, Scotland, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- A bus
driver who died in 2006 was almost certainly the man who killed a
missing schoolgirl more than half a century ago, a Scottish prosecutor
said Friday.

Moira Anderson, 11, disappeared in 1957 after she took a
bus to buy a card for her mother. Alexander Gartshore admitted she was a
passenger on his bus but said she was alive when he last saw her, the
Scotsman reported.

Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland released
evidence gathered by a police cold case unit that would have been used
if Gartshore was still available for trial.

"This will hopefully
bring closure to the family of Moira Anderson who have had to wait more
than half a century for ­answers," he said. "I would like to pay tribute
to the campaigners who refused to allow the memory of Moira Anderson to
become forgotten."

Last year, police searched the grave of one of
Gartshore's friends, a man who died in 1957, for Moira's body. They
found nothing, but new witnesses who saw news stories about the
exhumation came forward.

They included a woman, a child herself
in 1957, who said she had seen a man dragging Moira in Coatbridge, about
10 miles east of Glasgow. She picked a photograph of Gartshore out of a
photo array.

Gartshore was convicted in 1957 of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old.

Sandra
Brown, Gartshore's daughter, became convinced her father had killed
Moira. She wrote a book after his death, "Where There Is Evil."

Graeme
Pearson, a former deputy police commissioner in Strathclyde and now a
member of the Scottish Parliament, suggested Gartshore should have been
prosecuted years ago.

"It will remain a mystery why this man was
not a significant suspect at the time of the missing person report and
initial suspicion of a murder," he said.