Every Town - Limbs In The Loch - How A KILLER The System Freed Struck Again

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Today we have a story that will leave you frustrated, disgusted, angry, probably all of the above actually and if you’re tuning in form the States, you’ve likely never heard about it at all. �� Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/gXHCCWT-dUE 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Every town has a dark side. In 1991, a young man threw himself through a closed window to escape a killer.

And he went straight to the police, gave them the name, and told them plainly, well, this guy's going to kill someone. A conviction followed, and then three years later, the killer walked out of prison and went back to his bad ways, only this time he'd do something worse than most people can even imagine. Eight years after that warning came on a cold December night, an 18-year-old boy named Barry Wallace got right into the killer's car. And this is the devastating story of what happened out there, but really, it's a tale of what happens when the system is told exactly what it's dealing with

and decides to look the other way anyway. Hey, guys, it's Andrew. Welcome back to Everytown. Thanks for tuning in. And today we have a story that will leave you frustrated, disgusted, angry. and probably all the above, actually, and if you're tuning in from the state, but you've likely never heard about it at all. Let's get into it and head on over to Scotland now. This is Limbs in the Lock, the murder of Barry Wallace.

To really understand what happened to Barry that night, you first have to go back a bit. Back before Scotland and before the night everything went wrong. Because the man responsible didn't appear out of thin air. Now, he came with a history and a long one at that. And that history is where this story actually starts. William Beggs was born in Lurgan, Northern Ireland. His dad taught her to college and his mom ran a school, so solid, respectable people,

a type of family that gets invited to events and gatherings all over town and nobody ever has a bad word to say about them. He grew up in Mora, a small village and county down, that had him hitting up Baptist Church on Sundays in Quaker School during the week. He played the organ at those services and sat right up front in full view of the congregation, proudly doing his part.

And as Beggs got older, he got into politics, or at least he made sure people thought he did. And this was Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, and a preacher-turned politician named Ian Paisley that launched a campaign called Save Ulster from Sodom. And yes, that was its actual name. See, Paisley wanted to stop the British government from decriminalizing homosexuality in Northern Ireland,

the way they already had in England and Wales a decade earlier. It was a full-blown religious and political crusade, newspaper ads everywhere, street demonstrations, pamphlets, the works. And they collected 70,000 signatures. The whole thing was loud, public, and everywhere. And if you asked anyone in that community about their politics, well, Beggs was right there to loudly step up and let you know how he felt. He was a vocal supporter of the campaign from start to finish,

publicly and performatively opposed to homosexuality at every opportunity. He wanted everyone he came across to know exactly where he stood, which made what he was doing in private all that more calculated, because by night, Well Beggs was nothing short of a sexual predator, whose targets were gay men. The contradiction was total and deliberate. And that public face he put on was a shield he'd been building since adolescence, brick by brick. The louder he was about it in public, well, the safer he felt in private.

His first known act of violence was as a teenager, cutting another boy with a knife during a camping trip. And they went nowhere, just sort of got absorbed. And these types of incidents sometimes go like that, and the people who are, who brush them aside, rarely understand what they've just let walk until it's too late. Eventually, he was forced out of Northern Ireland entirely. The precise circumstances aren't fully documented, but accounts suggest that parliamentary groups have become aware of what he was doing in his downtime, which made his continued presence in the community impossible. So he moved to England, new place, but same man. And he was educated, articulate,

and he knew exactly how to present himself. He'd been practicing that for years. He settled into a new life in the northeast of England, and for a while, it was enough to keep the mask on. In May of 1987, though, that mask came off. The remains of a young man were found in Cleveland Forest, in the North Yorkshire Moors. His name was Barry Oldham, 28 years old, student from Bolton.

His throat had been cut and attempted. had been made to dismember his body. Within a month, William Beggs had been arrested for that. He had met Barry at Rockshots, Newcastle's busiest gay nightclub at the time. At his trial in December of 87, Begg's claim self-defense. He said Oldham had attacked him during a camping trip, and he acted to protect himself. It was a good try, but it didn't work. And so William was convicted of murder, and then,

sentenced to life in prison. Except that life in prison is not what he got, not even close. And just 18 months later, in June of 89, Beggs walked right on out and was a free man once again. His conviction had been overturned on appeal, not because new evidence emerged or because there was any doubts about what he had done, but because of a procedural error. The trial judge had allowed the jury to hear evidence of other wounding charges. alongside the murder charge. The Court of Appeal ruled the prejudicial effect had been too great. The original judge later said publicly he believed he had directed the jury correctly.

The Court of Appeal disagreed, though, and they won. So, that was it. Not even two years is all he served for murder. And the detective who led that investigation actually said afterward that when they caught begs, they were convinced they had caught a serial killer in the making, that they had gotten lucky that this was only his first. And now, that killer was out amongst the people once again. The predator then packed his bags for a fresh start,

and moved on over to Kilmarnock, Scotland. Beggs arrived in his new town, having lied about his criminal record on his CV so he could secure a job as a housing officer with the local council. He bought a flat, he had a salary, and once again, he had a respectable surface to present to a world that did not know his past. In July of 91, Beggs went to Bennett,

a popular nightclub in Glasgow. That's where he met 28-year-old Brian McKillan. The two of them ended up talking outside after they both helped break up a fight. There's two guys doing the right thing on a night out. After that, Beggs invited Brian back to his flat and, once there, offered him a drink. Well, Brian then woke up six hours later in a bed,

inside a room he had never seen before. Lying beside him was Beggs. He had been drugged, and slipped something without knowing it, without consenting to any of what had clearly happened while he was unconscious. Before he could get out of that place, well, Beggs came at him with a razor.

What followed from there was a fight for his life. Brian was slashed multiple times across the chest and face, and only survived by doing something most people couldn't make themselves do. He threw himself through a closed window, glass and all, and then he ran. He went straight to the police, and he told them something that should have changed the path of this entire story. He said it plainly, and on the record, that this man will kill someone. Despite being right about that, nobody listened to him at the time.

So once again, Beggs found himself in that familiar court setting. And this time, he was convicted of assault, permanent disfigurement, and dainable. danger to life, and for that he received six years. But somehow, once again, Beggs wormed his way out early again. In the end, he only served three. Released in 1995, he went back to that same flat and dune-place Kilmarnock. Once again, Beggs did what Beggs did. He rebuilt.

He had shown himself to be extraordinarily good at this. Absorbing consequence and re-emerging somewhere new. same composed face, fresh set of credentials, and new people who didn't know his name. And by 1999, at 38 years old, Beggs was working at a call center and studying for a doctorate at Paisley University and lecturing part-time at two universities. But anyone who encountered him, he was simply an educated professional

with an academic career ahead of him. He still had his flat and just kept quiet for the most part, laying low. But someone like this can't do. do that for too long. Eventually, the stripes began to show. Saturday, December 4th, 1999, was just another winter day off for 18-year-old Barry Wallace. He'd been out Christmas shopping during the afternoon, running into his parents Ian and Christine by chance outside Tesco's supermarket around 5.30. His mom asked him what he wanted for dinner and when he'd be home, the normal type of exchange that happens between parents and their kids a thousand times and means nothing,

except that it was the last time they ever saw him. And Barry worked at that Tesco and Kilmarnock, and that night was the staff Christmas party at the Fox Bar Hotel. And he'd taken the entire weekend off, and was planning to have a good time. His dad called him around eight that evening to make sure he'd eaten before heading out. Barry told him not to wait up. He said he was planning to meet some friends in town. after the party and might go on somewhere else after that. By all accounts, Barry had a lot to drink

at that party. When I went down in the early hours, he left a little after one in the morning. Some colleagues gave him a lift into the town center and dropped him off near the Marksonson-Spenser store. There was actually a brief flare-up with a friend he ran into on the street, but that wasn't anything, really just a drunken exchange. They squashed it fast and shook hands. And then Barry, he was alone. He was in the middle of town in December, trying to find his way home or to wherever the night was taking him next. And William Beggs just happened to pull up. What was said between them, nobody knows for sure, but Beggs offered him a lift, and Barry said yes.

He was 18 years old, he was drunk, and it was freezing. And a man was offering to help him get home, so what's the worst that could happen? And he had no way of knowing about Barry Oldham, found in pieces in the North Yorkshire Moors. He had no way of knowing about Brian McKillan crashing through a window to survive. And he had never heard the name William Beggs in his life. As it turns out, this would be the last person he would ever meet. In the days that followed, his family reported him missing. And they knew the way tight-knit families know that Barry was not the kind of kid who vanished without a

call or a word. His dad went to the police on the Monday evening after Barry failed to show up for a shift at work. Something was wrong, and Ian Wallace knew it. And then something happened that investigators would later describe as a one-in-a-million chance. In that very same weekend of the Christmas party, a Strathclyde police diving team had been out on Locke Lomond, conducting some routine training, nothing to do with Barry at all. Just to skilk, scheduled session in cold December water, 60 miles from Kilmarnock. And during that dive, they came across a number of trash bags sitting on the bottom of the law. They pulled them up, and inside them were freshly severed limbs.

And then, nine days from when he had gone missing, a woman named Margaret Burley was walking her dog along the beach and Brasser near Trune. She found another trash bag washed up, and inside that, was Barry's head. Forensic analysis of the tidal patterns of the Firth of Clyde showed they were consistent with a bag entering the water from the Trune Ferry Crossing. William Beggs, investigators would establish, had taken that exact ferry in the days after Barry disappeared.

The police moved fast. They got a warrant and went straight to Begg's apartment, however, by then he was already long gone. Still, though, the state of the apartment told him, authorities, all they needed to know. First off, the place had been cleaned thoroughly, methodically even. Forensic teams later said they had to essentially strip the property apart layer by layer. Carpets pulled up, floorboards lifted, surfaces gone over inch by inch. And even then, even after everything Beggs had done to erase what had happened in those rooms,

well, he hadn't quite managed it. Barry Wallace's blood was found in the folds of the washing machine, sweat stains, and there was enough. The formal charge, when it was eventually laid, described what happened to Barry in the precise cold language of a legal document. Handcuffs on his arms and legs, a needle, the assault, the murder, and then the dismemberment, done by a saw and a kitchen knife. Eight pieces, chopped up in total, all distributed across a lock, a beach, and a stretch of cold gray Scottish sea. Barry had struggled so desperately to free himself from those handcuffs, by the way, that he snapped a bone in his hand. And Beggs was out there somewhere, probably doing what he had always done when consequences

came for him, starting somewhere new. He had missed work on a Monday after Barry disappeared and showed up briefly on the Tuesday then left, claiming illness. He took the ferry from Trune to Belfast, came back to Scotland briefly, and then left again. So, police went to Interpol and a manhunt spread across Europe from there. With the heat on all around him, two weeks after vanishing, well, Beggs walked into a police station in Amsterdam and handed himself in. It looked like a surrender, but it actually wasn't.

You see, he had chosen the Netherlands deliberately. Dutch extradition law was more complex, more protective of defendants, and considerably more open to drawn out legal challenge than anything he'd face if he stayed in the U.K. And the moment he walked in to that Amsterdam police station, he started filing claims. He said he couldn't receive a fair trial in Scotland because of media coverage and challenged everything he could challenge, delayed everything he could delay, working every legal angle available to him from inside a Dutch cell, while his lawyers worked the same angles from outside.

So this was not a man who had panicked and run. This was a man who had a plan. The extradition fight lasted over a year. In April of 2000, the Dutch court finally ruled against him, and he was returned to Scotland. But while Beggs had been playing the system from Amsterdam, the investigation back home had picked up something nobody had anticipated. A former friend of Beggs named Richard Botch had received a phone call in the immediate aftermath of Barry's disappearance. Before the limbs were found and before the manhunt had fully ignited,

Beggs was in his car driving, and he was in high spirits. He had told Richard he had met a really sweet young boy the night before. He just couldn't help himself, couldn't resist saying it out loud to someone. Then Richard started seeing newspaper headlines, a teen missing after a Christmas party in Kilmarnock. He thought about the timing of that. He thought about the timing of that call, and about what Beggs had said and how he had sounded saying it. Happy, satisfied, like a man recounting something he was proud of. And he went to the police with that. And that phone call, that single moment where Beggs needed to perform his own satisfaction to someone who would actually hear it, it became part of the case that put him away.

And some people just can't help themselves, and sometimes that's exactly how they get caught. The trial opened at the High Court in Edinburgh on September 18th of 2001, and it ran for nearly four weeks. The jury heard about the blood and the washing machine, about the ferry crossing and the title patterns, about the trash bags and the lock and on the beach. They heard Richard described that phone call, and they heard about Beggs' history, the 1987 murder conviction and its overturning on appeal, and the attack on Brian McKillan. The years served in the early release.

Police officers who worked the case described what the forensic evidence suggested it happened to Barry in that flat. Medical witnesses said the assault had been so severe that Barry may have actually died from Shaw. The pathologist couldn't determine a precise cause of death. The dismemberment had made that impossible, but what the evidence showed was a sustained premeditated attack on a young man who had accepted a lift from a stranger and had no way of knowing what he was walking into. And so, on the 12th of October of 2001, the jury returned a majority guilty verdict and Beggs got life in prison. And he's been there since December of 1999, and now he's in his early 60s. Since that conviction, Beggs has raised action after action in the Scottish courts. He's challenged his conviction, challenged his conditions in

prison, and he has gone to court demanding the right to vote in elections and even sought a computer in his cell for his ongoing legal work, and he has never stopped launching appeal after appeal. The Scottish Legal Board confirmed that the total paid in order to fight all this has reached over $1.3 million. Brian McKillan, a man who went through that window at Dune Place in 91, was called for a new broader police investigation on begs, leaving there may be other victims out there who survived and just never came forward. He has said that knowing what happened to Barry Wallace, knowing what

Barry would have experienced in that flat, hunts him more than his own attack does, because he got out and Barry didn't. He has spent more than 30 years living with what happened at Doom Place, and he is still, in his 60s, fighting on behalf of people who perhaps didn't make it out. Barry Wallace is buried in Kilmarnock, and he has been in the ground for 26 years. He was 18 years old when he went to his work holiday party, had a few too many, and then accepted a lift from a stranger because it was cold and he was drunk, and that's what you do sometimes. There is no version of that night where Barry should have known better. There's no big lesson here about what he could have done differently. He did what an 18-year-old would do.

He got in a car. He just didn't know whose car it was. The man who took him should never have been able to. He had been convicted and released, attacked another man, and been warned about explicitly by people who had survived him. And none of it had been enough to keep him off that street corner in December of 99, with his car and his offer, and the privacy that his apartment gave him.

So that's going to do it for today's episode of Everytown. Thank you so much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, well, then go check out our new Scary Mysteries Clips channel, link down in the description. Just a quicker way to soak up some true crime stories for when you're on the move. And if you go there, well, please do subscribe because it'll help us out a lot. And remember to come on back next week for another episode of every town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know.

Maybe your town will be next.