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The Arrest

Crime Files

The Arrest

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 worth of valuables missing.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 18 January 1978 Fontaine helped the police search for Mr Scott-Elliot’s body on the Highlands. They found him, chewed by foxes amongst 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.