Sam Poling on trial of Emma Caldwell killer Iain Packer

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Sitting in the public benches awaiting the verdict at the High Court in Glasgow, journalist Sam Poling was surrounded by those she had come to know.

On one side were the police detectives who Sam had come to care about. Ones who had followed the case from the start – and who had tried in vain years earlier to catch the man now in the dock.

On the other side were so many women who survived that man, despite senior police blocking the arrest of their attacker.

They had trusted Sam to give them a voice. And so many of them were in the room, not thanks to police, but thanks to Sam.

In front of her was the ex partner who had pushed him to volunteer himself to the BBC investigative journalist. He then strangled his partner two days after Sam's 2019 expose of his extreme sexual violence.

And there was Margaret Caldwell, who waited 19 years for justice for the murder of daughter Emma.

A murder committed by Iain Packer.

Iain Packer (Image: free)

"I just didn't realise how much it had affected me, how personal it had become, how responsible I felt," Sam tells the Advertiser.

The ex-partner was crying, the police were crying, the survivors of Packer were crying.

"It wasn't the scenes of celebration and happiness that I think people would expect in a moment like that," she says.

"It was a room filled with the most overwhelming heartbreak and sadness at everything that had gone on for 19 years for that moment.

"It was absolutely horrific. I haven't processed it because I haven't stopped.

"And you just need that moment to go, 'What just happened?'"

And the trial has also left Sam loathing seeing the sight and sound of her full name.

A killer interviewed

Iain Packer murdered Emma Caldwell in April 2005. Six weeks later, he was spoken to by police.

He even took detectives to the exact remote woods where he had dumped Emma's body outside of Glasgow.

Packer led police into the woods where he dumped Emma's body - but wasn't arrested (Image: BBC)

And yet he was never interviewed as a suspect, only as a witness. Senior officers had set their sights on four Turkish men who would eventually be arrested and charged, only for the case to collapse.

Packer wasn't revealed as a suspect until 2015 by the Sunday Mail.

Three years later, he wrote to Sam wanting her to prove he had no involvement.

It was actually Packer’s then partner who had written the letter for him. And she was with Packer for multiple off-the-record meetings.

He agreed to two filmed interviews - one before Sam's investigation and one after. Having previously investigated police corruption, and with Packer so forthcoming about being innocent, she initially wondered if there could genuinely be a bizarre set of coincidences that connected his name to the case.

"And it's only as I start investigating," she says, "that I realise the man that I'm hunting, the killer I'm looking for, is him."

Sam Poling leads Iain Packer to the second interview where she confronts him with her evidence (Image: BBC)

That was before even the first interview, and she already knew Packer was lying.

In the months that followed, Sam uncovered much more, ultimately laid out in the TV documentary and podcast ‘Who Killed Emma?’.

New episodes of the podcast will be released from next week.

Packer arrived for the second interview "excited" to learn what she had uncovered. He even brought a gift from his recent holiday in Florida.

"He sits down,” Sam recalls, “and the very first thing I say to him is, 'You haven't been telling me the truth' and his face changes.

"His world absolutely collapses and I start to list the victims that I found, starting with one of his very first victims, who he raped when she was just 15."

It was another five years after that documentary aired before Packer went on trial at the High Court.

Emma Caldwell

Last month he was jailed for 36 years after being convicted of 33 charges against 22 women, including Emma's murder and 11 rapes.

Packer has indicated he plans to appeal his conviction and the length of his sentence.

Meanwhile, a public inquiry is to be held into the police investigation of Emma's death.

It was seeing the indictment against Packer and eventual trial that was an "absolute shock", to realise how many women had stepped forward as a result of Sam's reporting.

"I just thought it was two or three," she says. "I didn't realise it was as many as it was."

Jekyll and Hyde

Sam spent enough time speaking to and interviewing Packer, and his victims, to know just how dangerous he is.

She says they would be talking and his eyes would slowly narrow into a "horrifically aggressive stare".

At first, she didn't draw attention to it. But on the third meeting, she asked, "Have I upset you?".

If you said something, he would snap out of it.

"If you watch the interviews with him,” she explains, “you see where he's looking at you, and the next minute his face closes in a bit and it's this seething rage that's just sitting there.

"That's how it feels to be on the other end of it.

"I remember a couple of the women during the trial described him as being a Jekyll and Hyde character.

"One minute he would be funny, telling jokes, stories. His company could be entertaining in those moments. And then in the next breath, he would be this angry, seething rage.

"I think he fits into the mould of a classic domestic abuser in that it's about control. It's about manipulating. It's about taking advantage of his partners' vulnerable situation - pregnant, just had a baby or he's just worn them down and they lost that the strength to stand up against him.

"And he's terrifying. This is a man who would resort to violence in a split second, with this uncontrollable rage. And I think that that was very apparent from all the evidence that I came across."

Marmite and toast

Helensburgh knows Sam's name.

Brought up in town, she went to school at Hermitage Primary and Hermitage Academy before starting her career in journalism – not at the Advertiser, but at the Northumberland Gazette.

But she wanted to return home, and called up then editor Donald Fullarton one day asking for a job. And he said: “When can you start?”

It was around 1995 that Sam started at the Advertiser – a paper in which she’d already appeared during her schooldays.

She soon started doing shifts at a press agency, then national papers, and ultimately the BBC. But the Advertiser was formative.

"It was just great to be back in a place that I loved telling stories about," she smiles.

"And it was great covering court and council meetings and just being a local reporter.

"You got to know everybody, everybody got to know you - I absolutely loved it.

"Going along to the police station in Dumbarton every Tuesday morning for toast and Marmite, and they'd sit and tell me all the arrests that happened over the weekend."

She adds: "It's about these relationships - that's what it should be about.

"And I knew the moment they'd accepted me was when I turned up and they had their own jar of Marmite."

Making connections - to police, to survivors - was instrumental to Sam's reporting, and to the case against Packer. And that's a core skill from local journalism.

"Local news really matters," she says emphatically.

"When you start working for the national papers, there's such a disconnect between your readers, your audience, the people that you're writing about. There's such a disconnect that it's easy to almost dismiss the emotional impact of what you're doing. 

“With local journalism, every word that you write means something to someone in that community.

"And you know that community, and if you get it wrong, you know you've got it wrong because they'll walk into that office and they will tell you.

"I think that was the biggest lesson I learned from working there: that local news matters, and you've got to get it right.

"You can do a great deal of good, but you can do a great deal of harm.

"We need local journalism. It's vital. It's a lifeline to so many people in these communities.

"There is not a day that goes past where I don't have an email or a text or a Facebook message from somebody saying, 'I need help, nobody’s listening to me, I need a voice’.

"That shouldn't be the case. When you take away local journalism, you take away the people who can give them that voice - it's utterly devastating.

"Communities shouldn't have to be their own detective. There should be that platform for them to go to."

Parallel lives

Sam still has a scrapbook of Advertiser cuttings her mum saved from winning a swimming gala, a graduation, the lifeblood of any local paper.

And next to that is the early work she did on the unsolved murders of sex workers. It was before Emma Caldwell was killed, but it was a story she was passionate about, and still is.

Sam later learned that Emma had spent part of her youth in Cardross, where her family ran the Cardross Inn.

With Emma, and so many of the other women Packer attacked, Sam saw parallel lives.

"Emma kind of grew up in the same area that I grew up, went to the same places," she says. "She ended up moving to an area I ended up moving to.

"There were so many moments in her life where my life was parallel - and then it splits and you go different ways. Yeah, learning a lot about Emma's life, I didn't realise how close it all was."

My name

Sam's interviews with Packer and her testimony were vital and left to the end of the Crown case against him.

But she hadn't realised until that moment the weight prosecutors were putting on that evidence.

And she didn't realise the weight his defence would attach to attacking HER for Packer's victims stepping forward.

"To stand and give evidence and have the defence trying to tear my reputation apart, I felt they made it very personal," she says.

"I don't think there was a day in that trial where my name was not mentioned. And that was horrific. 

"I've never hated the sound of my own name before, and I grew to hate it.

"It was all the time, and then after I gave evidence and sat in the courtroom, it got worse, because they were playing bits of the interviews.

"And when Packer took the stand, he's blaming ME for so much of it.

"He was there on trial because I was a liar, I'd manipulated him. He'd choked, strangled his girlfriend because of me, because they were arguing about my involvement. 

"He had lied because I'd lied to him. So he was lying back to me.

"And you feel that weight of responsibility, that if we get 'not guilty' here, is that on me? The jury believe that I've manipulated them somehow or I've steered them towards the police? 

"So that was hugely difficult to take in."

That has left Sam with is a deep aversion to her full name. Can't stand the sound of it, can't stand looking at it.

This was one of Scotland's biggest murder trials, following a shocking delay of justice. But she was being put at the heart of it.

It was a trial of a murderer, rapist and violent sexual abuser - yet it was about her?

"Iain Packer is up there fighting for his life," says Sam, "and I'm there fighting for my reputation almost - that's what it feels like.

"Which is nothing compared to what these women are fighting for.

"They are fighting for justice. They're fighting for vindication and validation. They reported all of these attacks, and they were never believed, because they were sex workers. That's disgusting.

"So my anger and upset is nothing compared to theirs.

"It doesn't make it easy - it's still difficult."

So, she's just Sam.