Something extraordinary is happening with BBC Radio Scotland’s Who Killed Emma?
It’s a podcast about a murder that went unsolved for 19 years. It’s also a podcast about an investigation by one journalist that leads to an extraordinary twist. It’s a podcast that dropped its first episode in March 2021 but then, for reasons to do with the risks of media attention around a criminal prosecution, was removed from public consumption before returning earlier this year with five new episodes. It’s a podcast about police failure and about prejudice against sex workers and the courage of those who showed up, time and again, to point the finger at someone they knew posed a threat to their very existence.
And it’s about Emma Caldwell, a young Glaswegian who developed a heroin addiction after the death of her only sister. That addiction led her to work the streets of Glasgow for money to feed her habit, which is where she met the man who, in early April 2005, brought her out to the woods and strangled her. She was 27.
Who Killed Emma? showcases Samantha Poling’s painstaking reporting, as she begins stitching the truth together with the help of her colleague Eamon O Connor, more than a decade after Caldwell’s death. She talks to Caldwell’s parents and friends, retired members of the police force, and a man who was at one point arrested along with three others for her murder but later cleared.
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And in 2018 she talks to another suspect, Iain Packer, after he contacts Poling for help in clearing his name. So Poling begins digging again, and then, in a jaw-dropping interview, confronts him with the results of her investigation. It’s a staggering moment, changing the course of the podcast and the murder investigation. This is the revelation that required the podcast to be taken down: the man who had asked for help clearing his name was arrested, tried and convicted of murder. At the trial, Poling the journalist became Poling the witness.
After Packer was found guilty, in February this year, Who Killed Emma? was free to return, with five new episodes. Because it turns out that Packer had been taken in for questioning as part of the original police inquiry, and set free despite protestations even from within the force. He went on to sexually assault several more women. Who Killed Emma? is concerned with a search for justice not only for Caldwell but for all his victims, including the many who became so after police let Packer walk free.
Poling is fierce and dogged, and her work shines a piercing light on a police force that refused to take seriously the repeated testimony from sex workers about a violent and predatory man. In the end, Packer was convicted of Caldwell’s murder and 32 other serious offences. Poling reads through the list of charges, and hearing those acts of violence named one after the other is chilling.
There’s a moment, though, that punches like a fist through the litany of horror, the hard-nosed reporting, the grim descriptions of life for Glasgow’s sex workers. It’s when Poling discovers that one of the charges against Packer was brought by a woman who had contacted her after his arrest to ask for help reporting what happened to her. “I never found out whether she did,” Poling says as she lands on this woman’s name. “And she did.” And then a whisper: “Well done, you.”
