Lynda SpenceIn April 2011, Lynda Spence went missing. The 27-year-old financial advisor had two years previously set up her own mortgage and lettings company, Fraser Properties, in Glasgow, an appeared a successful businesswoman. However, unbeknown to her family, Spence had been spending money given to her by prospective clients and spending it to fund a lavish lifestyle. After her death, details emerged of the horrific slow death she suffered at the hands of Glasgow criminals she owed money.
On April 20, 2011, John Glen, a property developer from Glasgow was paid a visit by Colin Coats, a well-known and violent criminal. Glen had previously invested money, upwards of £180,000, with financial advisor Lynda Spence. Frustrated at not getting his money back, Glen had decided to take matters into his own hands.
He had sent Spence abusive text messages threatening to cut off her fingers and to chop off her head. This appeared to have the desired effect, and Spence repaid some of the money. When Coats paid Glen a visit, he came with a warning. He too had been owed money by Spence, and told Glen that he had heard she paid him money that, Coats believed, was rightfully his.
In order to menace Glen, Coats showed him a plastic bag, which he told him, contained the thumb of Lynda Spence. Intimidated, Glen paid Coats the money he had received from Spence. Several months later, Glen had another visit from Coats. He had not heard anything from Lynda Spence since early April 2011, and believed she would never repay his money.
On August 15, 2011, Coats went to Glen and forced him to strip naked in an attempt to extort more money from him. Believing that Spence was dead, at the hands of Coats, he decided to go to the police. Terrified that he would be killed next, Glen told police everything he knew, and that he suspected Lynda Spence had been murdered.
Police were initially hampered by a reluctance of witnesses to talk, however they soon began to piece together what had happened. They uncovered a story to money, scams and retribution from serious criminals, who were owed hundreds of thousands by Spence, and who took the law into their own hands and enacted gruesome revenge.
At the time of her disappearance, Lynda Spence was being investigated by Strathclyde Police for fraud. When detectives looked into her previous dealing with police, they learned she had also been recruited as an informant by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
This was in relation to information sought about an Albanian national called Sokal Zefraj, who, it was claimed, was the husband of Lynda Spence. Authorities strongly suspected the marriage was a sham and one of convenience. The fraud investigation stemmed from Spence’s business dealings in the property market.
Initially, Lynda Spence worked as a financial advisor, despite her only experience in finance being five years working in a call centre. In December 2008, after several years of taking other people’s money, which she used to fund an extravagant lifestyle, she was declared bankrupt with debts of £39,716.75.
When those debts were written off a year later, Spence set up her own mortgage and lettings company, Fraser Properties, in Glasgow. Despite the appearance of a successful business, there did not appear to be any formal record of the company’s existence. Money given to Spence was spent lavishly.
According to Lynda’s best friend at school, Amanda Robertson, who worked for her at the firm in the city’s west end, Spence was generous and extravagant, often buying £300 bottles of Cristal champagne during nights out. At one point she owned two flats in smart Buckingham Terrace and also drove a black Mercedes convertible. She was generous with the money she received from client, and lavished entertainment on her friends.
Despite this, Ms Robertson described Lynda Spence as “a compulsive liar” who “ripped people off”. Among her many victims, were members of Glasgow’s Chinese community, from whom she was given deposits totalling £175,000 for properties in a development in the Maryhill area of the city.
But instead of using the money to secure the flats she had spent it to fund her spending habits. It was around this same time she owed £180,000 to property developer John Glen, who issued threats to return his money. Lynda had initially started her business with money her parents James and Patricia had inherited from the sale of her late grandmother’s bungalow.
Despite this, she remained close to her family, and would speak to her mother almost every day on the telephone. By April 2011, those calls stopped and her family reported Lynda missing. With no sign of her whereabouts, her mother made an emotional appeal for information about her missing daughter.
At a tearful news conference on June 14, 2011, Patricia Spence was distraught, sobbing uncontrollably as she pleaded for anyone who knew what had happened to her daughter to contact the police. As it happened, certain did know what had happened, but for their own reasons they decided to remain quiet.
Unfortunately, Lynda Spence had also taken money from Colin Coats, a 42-year-old violent criminal who was previously been convicted of an air rage attack in September 2009, when he assaulted a member of the cabin crew and threatened passengers. Coats had invested all of his money with Spence.
Convinced by Spence that he could see a return of £100,000, as well as millions more from a land and property deal near Stansted Airport in Essex, Coats had given Spence £85,000. Coats did not know at the time, but there was no deal. He began issuing threats to Spence, who in desperation, persuaded a Glasgow printer to produce fake Danish government bonds.
These bonds were supposedly worth £6.6m, but were in fact worth nothing. When Coats discovered this, he became enraged and plotted his revenge. He enlisted the help of his loyal accomplice Philip Wade, also 42, who was a cocaine dealer with a conviction for drink driving. Together, the men devised a way to reclaim Coats money.
On April 14, 2011, Coats and Wade lured Spence from her in Glasgow to Coats’ house in the Ruchill area of the city. There they abducted her, and drove their victim to a quiet residential street in the Ayrshire village of West Kilbride where two other members of the gang enlisted the help, 37-year-old David Parker and 47-year-old Paul Smith, were waiting.
There, in Flat 4 at 114 Meadowfoot Road, Lynda Spence would spend the last two weeks of her life, in a dingy attic taped to a leather computer chair. Imprisoned, Lynda Spence endured a cruel catalogue of violence, in what had become a chamber of horrors. In an effort to learn the whereabouts of his money, Coats decided to torture Spence into revealing what she had done with his investment.
Wade had brought with him a “torture kit” to the flat, that consisted of a bag containing garden loppers, bandages, surgical tape and a bucket. The property belong to Parker, and it was from him that many of the details of Lynda’s horrific ordeal are known. In his interviews with police, Parker revealed what happened to the young woman.
Almost daily, Coats and Wade would arrive at the flat and go upstairs. According to Wade, Coats would torture Lynda while he watched. The loppers were used to crush wone of her toes, and the tip of her little finger was cut off. She endured even worse as the torture continued.
Her hands burned with a hot steam iron and her kneecaps were smashed with a golf club. Parker’s accomplice Smith was given money by Coats to “babysit” Lynda during her captivity. He told detectives that he and Parker had given Lynda, who was made to wear sunglasses with tape over the lenses, cups of tea and soup.
One thing they were forbidden from doing was to allow Spence to use the bathroom, and she was forced to sit in her own waste. Parker told police: “I know she was injured, but I didn’t know in what way. I didn’t want to know. She was in a frightened state. When they put the hacksaw blades through my door I realised it was high-duty serious.”
Smith told police that during one visit with Wade, Coats had cut off the tip of Lynda’s little finger, but then returned alone later and cut off her thumb. He said he saw her hands covered in surgical tape and that she was beaten up during questioning by the two men about her bank accounts.
Both Parker and Smith would later admit to assaulting Lynda Spence and keeping her prisoner, and were asked why they did not intervene to save her. They explained they were both too scared to do anything. “I quite liked my fingers the way they were”, said Smith. As the torture of Lunda continued, Coats learned she had given money to John Glen.
It was during his visit to Glen that Coats show the terrified property developer Lynda’s severed thumb, removed during her imprisonment. Seven days later, Parker and Smith said they were told by Coats they could leave the flat. For the two men, it seemed as though they would either let Spence go, or had decided she would die.
Two days later, on 29 April 29, 2011, Coats and Wade drove to Tighnabruaich, Argyll, in Lynda’s hired Vauxhall Astra and there asked Wade’s friend Lee Winyard if they could use his boat. He reportedly refused, saying later: “I thought I was being asked to dispose of a body.” Police searched for the vehicle but no trace of it has ever been found.
Despite a thorough search of the property and surrounding area where she had been held, police could find no trace of Lynda Spence’s body. In August 2011, Coats was arrested after John Glen went to police and told them he had been threatened into handing over money, and shown a severed thumb Coats claimed belonged to Spence.
Colin Coats was arrested on suspicion of the abduction, torture and murder of Lynda Spence, while Philip Wade was charged with helping with her imprisonment and torture. Parker and Smith were given deals if they gave evidence against Coats and Wade, and the two men provided detectives with everything they knew about the crime.
On January 13, 2013, Colin Coats, Philip Wade, David Parker, and Paul Smith went on trial for the abduction, torture and murder of Lynda Spence. All four men denied all charges. On the second day of the trial, the proceedings, overseen by judge Lord Pentland, were briefly deserted and restarted the following day after a juror was unable to continue.
The High Court in Glasgow heard testimony from Det Con Alexander McEwan, who recounted how he spoke with Colin Coats about Lynda Spence’s financial dealings. He said Coats told him she had taken money from the Chinese community and was involved in acquiring fake passports for Eastern Europeans.
Det Con McEwan told the court that he met Mr Coats in Glasgow on June 6, 2011, during the investigation into Ms Spence’s disappearance some two months earlier. During that meeting, the detective said that he wrote down a number of figures, but Mr Coats refused to give an official statement.
The detective said, regarding his notes: “There’s figures that Colin Coats said Lynda Spence owed to various well-known criminals in Glasgow that he said he had now incurred the debts for.” Det Con McEwan said Mr Coats talked about “power of attorney” during the discussion and mentioned figures of £90,000 and £150,000.
“There’s mention of people in the Chinese community being owed £175,000,” he said. “There’s mention of other well-known criminals in Glasgow.” Under cross-examination by Derek Ogg QC, defending Mr Coats, Mr McEwan said: “Colin Coats told me that Lynda was to get three passports for three Polish Eastern Europeans, fraudulent passports.”
In reference to a deal mentioned in the policeman’s notes, Mr Ogg asked McEwan: “Was that Colin Coats telling you that one of the deals she was involved in was a land deal at Stansted Airport?,” to which he replied: “Yes.” Further details emerged concerning the amounts given by Mr Coats to Ms Spence.
DC McEwan agreed that Coats had told him that Ms Spence used “approximately £8,000 or £9,000” of Mr Coats’ money, from his own parents’ funeral fund, to buy a caravan for £22,000. Mr McEwan told the court that Coats told him, “by way of recompense,” that Spence said he would take possession of the caravan in Fife, however that was a problem with the landowner and “it couldn’t be done”.
Mr Ogg asked McEwan: “He (Coats) had a lot of business dealings with Lynda Spence and she owed him a heck of a lot of money?” Mr McEwan agreed. The court then heard testimony from David Parker, at whose property Lynda Spence was held, and for which he was offered £1,500 by Coats. A tape recorded interview was played for the court.
Parker was questioned by police about the imprisonment and torture of Lynda Spence. During the interview he was asked: “Her kneecaps were broken, weren’t they?” Parker replied: “Yes. I remember my golf club was missing,” adding: “When I went up to give her a cigarette or a cuppa I noticed my golf club was all twisted to bits.”
The club used to beat Spence was a seven iron, he said, which he had found and had used to try to teach his son to play. When asked who had used the club, Parker said he did not know. In an interview given on October 31, 2011, Parker told police he had agreed to allow his Meadowfoot Road flat to be used after being approached by Mr Smith.
“This has given me post-traumatic stress disorder,” he told police. “I’m on medication, I’m seeing a psychiatrist after this.” When asked about his role in the torture and murder of Spence, Parker claimed he only “fed her, gave her tea, smokes” while she was being held captive at his home.
In a tape played at the High Court in Glasgow, Parker said Ms Spence was frightened and bound to a chair by tape and occasionally beaten. He protested him innocence, claiming “I had no part in hurting her or anything like that at all. I fed her, gave her tea, smokes.” He said he only agreed the use of his flat because he was offered money.
“I didn’t know what it was about at the time. He said it might happen and might not happen. A day or two after that he said the thing was on. I took him up to my flat and he said people would be coming soon.” Parker claimed he only knew that someone who was in trouble and owed money and he had been asked by Smith if they could be kept at his flat.
Parker told the court he was frightened of Mr Coats and a man he only knew as Philip and claimed that during the time Ms Spence was at his flat, hacksaw blades were pushed through his letterbox. “When they put the hacksaw blades through my door I realised it was high-duty serious,” he told detectives.
When asked about the injuries sustained by Lynda Spence, Parker said: “A couple of bruises on her face, I think. I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t ask for this. I had no idea how serious it was.” Parker said Spence had been “stuck in the chair and taped,” and that she had been taped around her torso and there was also tape around the chair.
“She was in a frightened state,” he said during the interview. When police challenged Parker that Spence had more injuries that a couple of bruises, he replied: “I know she was injured, but I didn’t know in what way. I didn’t want to know,” before adding: “I think she was punched about quite a bit.”
When asked about Coats and Wade, Parker said the two men would arrive and go upstairs to the attic and speak to Ms Spence, while he and Smith stayed downstairs. Parker was asked if he had seen Ms Spence being assaulted and said he had not, but added: “I could hear it from downstairs.”
After initially being offered £1,500 for the use of his property, Parker said events had begun “snowballing,” and what he described as “a train-wreck”. He told detectives that Spence had been burnt with an iron, but denied any involvement in her death, and insisted she had been alive when he last saw her.
When asked if he had he done anything to prevent her being harmed, he replied: “No, I was scared.” Although he had seen pictures of Lynda Spence in the newspapers, he claimed he did not recognise her as being the same woman imprisoned in his house. A tape recording of Paul Smith’s interview with police was then played before the court.
When asked how he had become involved in the plan Smith said: “I was kind of hoodwinked. I was doing a favour and it kind of turned sour.” Smith claimed his role in the scheme had been described to him as “babysitting”. When Lynda Spence was brought to Parker’s home, “She had dark sunglasses and Colin Coats guided her up the stairs.”
He claimed in his interview that during the whole time she was held in the attic area of the flat, Ms Spence was bound to a computer chair by gaffer tape. Smith said he and Parker were told they could feed Spence, but were not allowed to let her out of the chair, not even for toilet breaks.
When asked about the torture Spence endured, Smith told police that Coats had beaten up Ms Spence a couple of times while questioning her about bank accounts. He went to allege that co-accused Colin Coats was responsible for cutting off Ms Spence’s thumb and part of her small finger.
Smith went to say that when he left the flat on a later occasion Mr Coats made a thumbs up sign and gestured as if he had something in his pocket. “He though it was funny,” he said. Smith said he saw Ms Spence’s small finger and thumb covered in surgical tape but claimed he saw no blood on either occasion.
During his taped interview Smith told police that he spoke to Ms Spence and she told him that situation was to do with bearer bonds in the Cayman Islands. “She said something about bearer bonds and said they were going to be proved to be fake if someone tried to cash them.” When asked how much of Colin Coat’s money was missing he replied: “She said £3.2m.”
On other occasions he said she mentioned the figure £70,000 to £80,000. Shortly after Ms Spence’s thumb was allegedly cut off, Smith told detectives he and Parker “bailed out”. He said: “Colin and Phil said to us: ‘Look you can go. There’s guys from London coming up to talk to Lynda’. We were quite relieved,” he said.
“She was alive. There were injuries on her. She wasn’t dead. She was compos mentis and alive.” He was asked by police if Ms Spence had asked him to free her and said she had not. Although Paul Smith told police that he felt sorry for Lynda Spence, he claimed he was too scared of Colin Coats to let her go.
The court heard testimony from Amanda Robertson who spoke fondly of her high school friend. She said Lynda drank champagne and entertained friends lavishly at casinos and restaurants. Considered by friends as confident, charming and generous, she liked the high life: expensive champagne, fast cars and casinos.
But the court was told that it was too often she was spending other people’s money. Ms Robertson, 29, had briefly worked for a company, Fraser Properties, set up by Ms Spence in Great Western Road, Glasgow, as an office worker, but left in September 2010 after many customers began to complain about the mortgage and lettings company.
When questioned by Derek Ogg QC, legal counsel for Colin Coats, Ms Robertson agreed that many of her friend’s business dealings appeared “dodgy”. The court was told that Ms Robertson sent a text to a friend about Ms Spence saying: “She’ll never get what’s coming. Just the people around her suffer.”
She agreed with Mr Ogg that Ms Spence had taken deposits of £3,000 in cash per flat from 30 members of the Chinese community for a development at Lochburn Gate, Glasgow. Mr Ogg said: “No reservations fee had been paid for a single flat at Lochburn Gate by Ms Spence, what happened to the money?” Ms Robertson replied: “She spent it.”
Mr Ogg added: “We are talking about a considerable amount of money,” and she said: “Yes,” adding that she had never seen Ms Spence do any banking of cash. The jury was told that Ms Spence was also involved in a scheme at Stansted Airport in London which she boasted would “make her millions,” however, nothing came of this sceme or another project in Spain.
After the Stansted Airport deal fell through, Robertson recalled that a man called John Glen began phoning repeatedly looking for Ms Spence. At one point Ms Robertson said she was told by Spence to meet Mr Glen in Byres Road and hand over £15,000 in cash, money owed to him from the deal-gone-bad, while he sat in his car.
On a different occasion, Robertson told of being asked by Spence to fly to London with documents she handed over to a man known as “Uncle Ben” who she thought was Russian. Around that same time, Lynda Spence also borrowed money from Colin Coats, taken from his parents’ funeral fund and, Robertson remembers she had not paid her workers any wages.
Mr Ogg asked Robertson: “There were a number of people with a grievance against her,” and she replied: “Yes.” In September 2010, Robertson said she left Ms Spence’s company Fraser Properties, but continued to spy on her through her emails as she knew the password. She said that after many years of being a loyal friend to Ms Spence, her attitude had changed.
Asked by Mr Ogg: “Did she have a nice personality,” and Ms Robertson said: “Yes.” He then said: “Although she was a compulsive liar, she was a very nice person,” and she agreed. Ogg then asked: “Did she buy champagne, Cristal champagne, go to casinos and take people out for dinner, flash her money about,” to which Ms Robertson said: “Yes.”
During her testimony, Robertson recalled that Mr Coats was one of the people that Ms Spence entertained at dinner and she said the last time she saw the two of them together he had given Ms Spence a hug. It came after an earlier occasion when Coats had given Spence cash, but when she got back to her office in Glasgow, she noticed that it was short.
Ms Robertson told Solicitor General Lesley Thomson QC, prosecuting, that Ms Spence told her she was going to phone Mr Coats about it. “When she came off the phone she said Colin was going to deal with it and said fingers were getting broken.” Ms Thomson asked: “What was Ms Spence’s attitude,” and she replied: “She wasn’t angry. She was kind of laughing.”
When Lynda Spence first went missing, Robertson said she thought her friend had run off, but later changed her mind. She was then questioned about the marriage of convenience Spence entered into with Sokal Zefraj, who she went to meet in Albania in 2009 in order to marry after breaking up with her partner Kate Reilly.
In questioning Ms Robertson, Mr Ogg asked: “When Lynda Spence told you she had married Sokal Zefraj did she say that it was a marriage of convenience so that she could use his name?” She replied: “Yes.” He asked: “From your knowledge of Linda and all the emails of hers that you spied on was she someone who ripped people off?” She replied: “Yes.”
It was Spence’s dealings with known criminal Sokal Zefraj, whom she had been recruited to provide intelligence on him, that some thought had led to her death. A police witness said this information could have put her life in danger. Mr Ogg told the court, “She was recruited specifically to provide information, not on Colin Coats or anyone else in the dock but on Albanian Sokol Zefaj.”
“She was, in fact, married to him and it was for this reason that she was recruited by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) and the UK-based Serious Organised Crime Agency.” Det Sgt Aileen Boyle, from Strathclyde Police’s major crimes investigation team was cross-examined by Mr Ogg.
Asked by Mr Ogg: “Would you agree with me, that would place Lynda Spence in very serious risk of her life if it was to be disclosed she was informing on an Albanian organised crime gang?” She replied: “If that was the case.” A the time she went missing, Lynda Spence was living with Ukrainian woman in Glasgow who was a former lover of Mr Zefaj.
Mr Ogg then asked: “As a serving police officer, would you consider it safe for a confidential human intelligence source’s identity to be known to the criminal underworld?” She replied: “No.” Defence QC Gary Allan, representing Mr Wade, had earlier asked Det Sgt Boyle if Ms Spence was “up to her neck involved in criminal activity” and she replied that she “was involved”.
Mr Allan added: “She had been recruited by the SCDEA to be a grass, a mole on the inside of a criminal organisations,” and Det Sgt Boyle said: “I don’t know. It’s not information that would be shared.” Solicitor General Lesley Thomson QC asked the police officer if anything pointed to an Albanian gang being involved in the alleged murder of Ms Spence.
To this she replied: “Absolutely not.” The court heard about Spence’s fraud investigation. Det Sgt Colin McKenzie told the court that Ms Spence had been under investigation by the SCDEA for mortgage fraud involving large numbers of the Chinese community – and that the inquiry was closing in.
The jury was told that Interpol and Europol revealed in October 2011 that it had received intelligence that Ms Spence, whose body has never been found, had fled to Albania with Mr Zefaj and was alive and well. Det Sgt McKenzie said that he did not know if anyone had phoned the Interpol office in Tirana, Albania’s capital, to inquire about her whereabouts.
The most damning evidence at the trial came from those involved in the crime. Smith and Parker eventually admitted their part in the plot while Wade reportedly confessed to a friend that he had helped dispose of a body. Despite an attempt to thoroughly clean the flat, forensic officers found a fingerprint belonging to Coats and a spot of Lynda’s blood in the bathroom.
Although this would prove enough for the jury to convict her killers, testimony from Peter Hadley sealed Coates fate. A former cellmate of Coats, Hadley was told by the killer that he had smothered Spence, cut off her head and burnt her remains in a furnace. Hadley told the court: “He said he had killed her, she had tape over her mouth and he held her nose until she died.”
During the trial in early March 2013, David Parker and Paul Smith were cleared of murder after pleading guilty to reduced charges of assaulting Lynda Spence and attempting to defeat the ends of justice. After 11 weeks of hearing the most harrowing evidence of the last two weeks of Lynda Spence’s life, the trial came to a close on April 8, 2013.
Based on the evidence provided by Parker, Smith and Robertson, Colin Coats and Philip Wade were both found guilty of murder. The jury, which by the end of the trial consisted of six men and seven women, took about 20 hours over five days to come to their verdicts following an 11-week trial. Both were given life sentences.
Coats told he must serve a minimum of 33 years in jail, while Wade was given a minimum term of 30 years. Neither of the convicted men showed any remorse for their crime. David Parker and Paul Smith were each jailed for 11 years for assaulting Ms Spence and holding her captive.
In sentencing judge Lord Pentland described Coats as “the prime mover” behind the abduction, torture and murder of Ms Spence, and called him “manipulative, devious and cruel…highly ruthless and extremely dangerous”. The judge told both Coats and Wade they had been convicted of “a truly monstrous and barbaric crime”. He went on to described Coats co-accused Wade as a “violent dangerous man with no respect for human life or respect for civilised society”.
For the family of Lynda Spence, there would be no answers about what happened to the body of the 27-year-old. They understand that in the final two weeks of her life, she must have experienced untold fear and pain. Whatever the reason for her death, the young woman described by her mother as a “loving, caring girl” had picked the wrong men to scam.
How Lynda Spence was murdered and what became of her remains has never been explained, although it was determined at the High Court in Glasgow that she may have been smothered, beheaded and burnt, the exact details may never be known. Ultimately it was he boasts of her killers and the confessions of their accomplices that gave a glimpse into her grim ordeal.
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