The mother of a woman who Iain Packer was free to rape - after murdering Emma Caldwell - has blasted police.
The mum says officers should be prosecuted because they failed to identify the fiend as Emma’s killer five years previously. Packer, 51, was allowed to roam the streets, curb crawling and attacking women in the years after Emma’s death in 2005, as police tried to pin the crime on a group of Turkish men.
And, over the five-year period, he committed a string of charges against 22 women, including the woman's daughter. She was raped twice at the same spot at which Packer killed sex worker Emma; the only difference was Emma died of strangulation, while the other woman – who was also throttled – escaped with her life.
The mum of the 2010 victim said: "My daughter was treated like a piece of dirt when she tried to report Packer for rape. I have no idea how many other women may have had the same experience.
"But he should have never even been on the streets in 2010 – he should have been arrested years before and umpteen women would have been spared their lives being wrecked.
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"Any police officer who felt a sex worker’s life wasn’t worth protecting should be ashamed of themselves. Any officers who broke laws during the case should be hauled up to answer for themselves."
Emma Caldwell's family says justice has, at last, been served (PA)Speaking to Daily Record, the mother said her daughter was attacked in Limefield Woods, near Biggar, Lanarkshire. Emma's body had been found by a dog walker on 8 May, 2005, around four weeks after she had been reported missing by family members.
Packer was given a 36-year sentence at the High Court in Glasgow on Wednesday. He had been free for nearly two decades since the killing. The 2010 victim's mum said: "My daughter told me all about Iain Packer being an animal, a monster, and she told me everyone knew he killed Emma from the start.
"I wonder if that man thought of the night he killed Emma when he raped my own daughter? Did he think of what he’d done five years earlier when he had his hands on my daughter’s neck? Or had he just turned a page in his sick mind and forgotten about it because the police had allowed him to think he’d got away with it?
"He had a thing about choking and strangling and humiliating women. My daughter said he had spat on her face, which still makes me feel sick." She said her daughter had battled addiction for many years."
The mum added: "But to hear of her being victim to an evil monster like this is very hard to accept." The mother said her daughter had been traumatised at the way she was treated by police.
She said: "My daughter broke down and told me that Packer had raped her – she named him, described him. But she said that when she went to police to make a complaint, she was told that you could not be prosecuted in Scotland for raping a prostitute.
"It seems too nasty to be true but those were the very words a police officer told her. She said she’d approached an officer who was on patrol in Cowcaddens, near the STV studios, and spoke to him and he’d just dismissed her with that phrase.
"She was furious at the time but all the fight was knocked out of her and she didn’t formally report it for years, as far as I’m aware." The mum backed calls for the Scottish Government to call an independent judicial inquiry into the bungling of the case over the years.
Police search woodland (PA)The demand is led by Emma’s mum, Margaret and has been backed by main political parties in Scotland. Trial judge Lord Beckett said many women’s lives had been wrecked by Packer.
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Laying down sentence, he told the killer: "The women involved resisted and protested but you would not listen. The trauma you caused has led to suffering which has endured for decades as you will now hear from their voices."
He added: "You would not listen to the many selfless women who, despite the substantial discomfort involved in reopening chapters of their lives which many would rather have left behind, came forward and spoke out about what you did.
"It was extraordinarily difficult for many of them but they testified out of solidarity for all of the other women you abused, to protect other women in the community and in the hope justice would be done. This jury listened and heard them loud and clear."
Strathclyde Police – which became part of Police Scotland on its formation in 2013 – has been accused of sabotaging the Caldwell case by refusing to focus on Packer, who was a glaring prime suspect.
Packer was named as a "forgotten suspect" in the Daily Record’s sister paper The Sunday Mail in 2015 but he was allowed to walk free for years. He was only charged in 2022 after he spoke to BBC reporter Sam Poling about the suspicions aired about him five years earlier in the Sunday Mail. Police Scotland reopened the investigation and finally charged Packer over Emma’s death and a string of other sex attacks.
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