Glasgow, Scotland, Cross Hill Suburb– 2004. Edith Mclinden lived in Cross Hill, a rough side of town riddled with unemployment, poverty, crime and alcohol abuse. Edith was a woman who would have been quite attractive had she not lived a life on the streets. Edith seemed quite suited to the life. She had graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. Not 
surprisingly, she had a difficult childhood, one of neglect and abuse. Before she was an adolescent, Edith was already a prostitute and a bully. It was almost inevitable that she would become a killer. Edith ran away from her family’s prison and became a homeless alcoholic and drifter. The poor woman drank like a fish and was in and out of prison for various transgressions.
You didn’t mess with Edith. She preyed on gullible people, especially those who were a source of cash. Unfortunately she was also the mother of 16-year-old boy, John Mclinden. Edith was a lousy mother as she was a human being. Sher and her son lived in a “homeless unit residence” where she often assaulted her son and he was in and out of foster care almost as often as his mother was in and out of prison. However, John was loyal to his mother; she was the only mother he had. It was easy for Edith to manipulate her son into doing anything she wanted. John’s best friend was Jamie Gray. Unfortunately for McRae, where John went, so did he.
Edith was a manipulative sociopath with a violent temper. She was frequently thrown out of bars for fighting. The first night after Edith was released from a 9-m0nth prison sentence for assault, Edith got into a fight with her 42-year-old boyfriend, David Gillespie, a divorcee with three daughters with his former partner, Violet Cahill, at the apartment he shared with 71-year-old Anthony Coyle. Gillespie, also a heavy drinker, was nothing like Edith: he was well-liked and considered to be a good guy. What he saw in the evil Edith I’ll never know. As the three sat drinking and partying, she and Gillespie started to fight. No one knows what the fight was about but on it was enough for Edith to lose it. She went into the kitchen and retrieved a butcher knife which she proceeded to stab into both of Gillespie’s legs while the landlord, Ian Mitchell, 67. looked on. Gillespie sat screaming in agony with the knife sticking out of one of his thighs until he bled out and died. Horrified at what she had done, Edith screamed that she would go and fetch her son and his friend to help her dispose of Gillespie’s body. Stunned by the murder, Mitchell and Coyle actually remained at the scene. They didn’t call the police for help. Not being the brightest men who ever lived, both Coyle and Mitchell had no idea that Edith was actually fetching “the boys“, as she called them, to murder the only witnesses to her crime.
When the boys arrived, they opened a duffel bag that carried all manner of weapons. At Edith’s urging, John fatally stabbed Mitchell and kicked his head repeatedly, hit him with a piece of metal, and beat him with knives and a baseball bat, which caused his brain to bleed heavily. Soon he lay dying on the living room floor. Coyle had locked himself in his bedroom but to no avail. John and Jamie took the time to find and use a drill to remove the door locks and they forced their way into the room. Jamie chased and beat poor Coyle to death with a golf club, a bottle, and a belt. To ensure that the men were dead, Edith poured boiling water over them. Nasty woman.
Two hours later, at approximately 3AM, she would eventually tell the Glasgow High Court in Dunfermline that she awoke from “insensibility through drink”, she ran to neighbour James Sweeney’s house, screaming that something terrible had happened at Mitchell’s flat. Edith attempted to act her way out of taking responsibility for the crime. Sweeney went to the flat and was greeted by hallway walls and floors that were covered in blood. Without entering the apartment he phoned 999 and contacted police. He told local reporters about the state of the hallway, which earned the apartment a notorious nickname, “The House of Blood.” Edith was nicknamed the “mother of evil.” Can’t argue with that.
When the police and paramedics arrived, they found three crumpled corpses surrounded by an axe, knives, a hammer, lumps of wood, the baseball bat, golf clubs, metal files and a belt. Talk about overkill. Still play-acting, Edith clung to Gillespie’s body, screaming at him to” wake up.” The police weren’t fooled. They charged her with first degree murder the next day, on Monday 18 October, at Glasgow sheriff court. Police figured Mclinden didn’t act alone because, “there was so much blood in the flat that it was impossible to be precise about the details of the violence.” Loyal as ever to her son, Edith ratted on her son and his friend. Initially, police found it impossible to believe that two teenagers could have committed the atrocious murders but two weeks later, Bryan Gallagher, another tenant of the “homeless unit residence” where the Mclindens lived, visited police and reported that John had actually boasted about the killings. Idiot. Clearly he followed in his mother’s footsteps. John and Jamie were arrested and formally charged for first degree murder.
In May 2005, Edith, John and Jamie appeared at Glasgow High Court. Of course all three murderers denied killing the poor men. Prosecutor Sean Murphy QC told the court that the victims had been, “beaten with knives, metal files, a belt, and pieces of wood” and “hit with a bottle, punched, stabbed and stamped on the head, and had boiling water poured over them“. Realizing the jury was appalled and their case was hopeless, the defendants changed their pleas to guilty. John admitted he killed Mitchell, Jamie admitted killing Coyle, and Edith admitted killing Gillespie.
On 29 June 2005, Edith Mclinden was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge, Lady Dorrain, stated “I recognise that you were initially charged with three murders whereas the Crown have accepted a plea to one murder and that in very different terms from the way in which it was originally charged.” She told Edith she would remain in prison until at least 2018. Seriously. A lousy 13 years for slaughtering one man and arranging for the murder of two others. Had Edith not changed her plea, she would have been sentenced to a whopping 14 years. Well that makes a huge difference. John and Jamie were each given a minimum sentence of 12 years.
After the sentencing, relatives and friends shrieked in anger. Cahill stood up and shouted, “She took a father’s life and she’ll be free in 13 years.”
Although John Mclinden committed terrible crimes, he was under the influence of a truly evil mother. It was easy for Edith to manipulate the unhappy, gullible teenaged boy. Edith had ruined her son’s life. Naturally, she showed no remorse.
Deathly Dames Inc. 