Get the stories that matter to you sent straight to your inbox with our daily newsletter. Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

THE SON of a victim of one of Scotland’s most infamous unsolved murders has broken his silence to tell how the killing has cast a shadow over his entire life.

Derek Lannen was only three months old when his teenage mum Carol was found naked and strangled in a Dundee forest in 1979.

In what would later be dubbed The Templeton Woods murders, Carol and another woman, Elizabeth McCabe, were killed in less than a year and their bodies dumped just yards apart at the same beauty spot.

Despite similarities between the two cases, detectives believe the murders are not linked and no-one has been convicted of either of them.

Now Derek, 37, has spoken in the hope of seeing justice done for both Carol and his grandmother, Christina McCluskey, who raised him as her own and who died never knowing who killed her daughter.

He said: “said: “As I’ve got older and learned more about the murder I wanted closure for my gran. She was devastated by it and over the years her hopes had been raised the killer would be found then crushed again.

“She passed away in 2011 and I’ve struggled to cope with her death. I just wish someone who knows something would come forward so they can both rest in peace as they deserve.”

The murder in March 1979 rocked Dundee and police launched one of the biggest manhunts in history.

But in February 1980 the city was plunged into further shock when the body of 20-year-old nursery nurse Elizabeth was discovered naked and strangled in the same area as Carol.

Decades later a man was charged with her murder but ultimately acquitted.

Christina wanted nothing more than to know the truth about her daughter’s murder but she died without finding out.

And Derek, 37, feels “nothing but sadness” that she never learned the truth.

He said: “As I got older and learned more about the murder I wanted closure for my gran.

“She was devastated by it. Over the years, her hopes had been raised that the killer would be found, then crushed again.

“She passed away in 2011 and it devastated me. I’m still struggling with it.

“I feel as if I’ve lost two mums.

“I just wish someone who knows something would come forward so they can both rest in peace, as they deserve.”

Carol was last seen alive getting into a red car near Dundee city centre on the evening of March 20, 1979.

Two youths found her body next day in Templeton Woods. And a few days later, Carol’s handbag and clothes were found on the banks of the River Don, near Kintore, Aberdeenshire.

Police launched a massive manhunt, interviewed all men with red cars who had been in the area where Carol was last seen and issued a photofit of a man with a moustache.

But the killer was never found, and the reopening of the case in 2008 failed to provide the breakthrough Carol’s family so badly wanted.

Eleven months after Carol was killed, the body of nursery nurse Elizabeth McCabe, 20, was also discovered in Templeton Woods.

She was also naked and had also been strangled, but the two cases have never been linked.

Derek told how Carol’s murder overshadowed his childhood, despite all the efforts of his family to shield him from the details.

He said: “My life with my gran and my sisters was normal. I didn’t know much, as my family

were careful talking about it when I was a kid.

“They wanted to protect me from it, but kids at school would say things and tell me my mum was murdered in the woods and was a prostitute. Kids can be cruel.”

Derek said he would go home and ask questions about what the bullies had told him, and Christina “sat me down one day and told me all about it”.

He added: “I think that because there was so much said that wasn’t true, she wanted me to know from her.

“It hurt more for her sake. I hated to see her sad.

“I used to feel so angry about it all for a long time – the fact Carol was murdered and the way

people would say things or point at me and whisper when they heard my name.

“It took me many years to learn not to feel that anger.”

Derek finds it difficult to express how he feels about Carol, since he never got the chance to know her.

He was given such a good upbringing that he never felt he was missing out.

But part of him still wonders what might have been if his birth mother had lived.

Of course I don’t remember Carol,” he said. “I only know what my mum and sisters told me.

“I do sometimes wonder what life would have been like if she hadn’t died, but I don’t dwell on it. My family looked after me and shielded me

from a lot of it.”

But throughout his life, Derek has prayed that the killer would be caught, as much for Christine’s sake as his own.

He said: “We’ve had our hopes raised so many times that the police would get a result.

“With the advances in DNA and forensics we thought there would be a result, but it wasn’t to be.”

Carol was a part-time sex worker, and Derek feels she has “somehow been reduced to just a name in a newspaper as a murder victim and a prostitute”.

But he said: “She was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend with a personality and a life, and it was taken away from her in the most violent of circumstances.

“Whatever her lifestyle, she didn’t deserve that – and neither did

her family.

“We’ve all suffered in our own ways with her death. The person who killed her destroyed her family too.

“I just hope someone comes forward and gives the police something they can work with now.

“It’s time to let Carol and my mum rest in peace. They both deserve that.”