NEED TO KNOW
- Sandra Brown’s father, Alexander Gartshore, was jailed in 1957 for raping a teenager – around the same time 11-year-old Moira Anderson vanished after boarding his bus.
- In 1992, Gartshore all but confessed to Sandra, calling himself “the last person” to see Moira, and a dying friend later named him as her killer.
- Gartshore died in 2006 without charge; Sandra has since written a book and done a podcast accusing him, prompting new witness leads.
- Despite searches of a graveyard, canal and mineshaft, Moira’s body has never been found.
Sandra Brown remembers her dad, Alexander Gartshore, as an intimidating figure.
He would physically punish her and she tells New Idea she always felt uneasy around him.
Then, in mid-1957, when she was eight, he disappeared and Sandra was told he was in “hospital”. The reality was far more sinister.
Gartshore was jailed for raping a 17-year-old babysitter in their hometown of Coatbridge, in Scotland.
“My father also preyed upon some of my cousins and neighbours, but nobody said anything because he was my dad,” Sandra, who is now 77 and still lives in Scotland, tells New Idea.
It was only years later that she learnt the truth, and not until 1992 at her grandmother’s funeral that she confronted him.
To Sandra’s surprise – and horror – her dad, a former bus driver, brought up Moira Anderson, an 11-year-old schoolgirl who’d gone missing in a blizzard in February 1957, just before he was jailed.
“The conversation will be forever embedded in my head,” Sandra says. “[My dad said] ‘Moira got on my bus. I was the last person to be in her company, and I was the last person to see her.’”
“And then he stopped. And I just knew he was going to say ‘alive’ there. He was going to say ‘alive’.”
Sandra remembers more. “He said, ‘My dad wouldn’t forgive me.’ I asked him what for and he said, ‘For the Moira Anderson thing … Dad thought I had something to do with Moira’s disappearance.”
The revelation sent Sandra on a traumatic journey that has lasted more than 30 years. She discovered that her father was not interviewed at the time of Moira’s disappearance, despite witnesses having seen Moira get on a bus with Gartshore out on bail for rape.
She became convinced that her father was the prime suspect, learning that he was a serial paedophile well known to police.
When convicted child abuser James Gallogley named his former friend Gartshore as Moira’s murderer on his deathbed in 1999, it confirmed all Sandra had already discovered.
After her father’s death aged 85 in 2006, Sandra published a book, Where There Is Evil, in which she accused him of the schoolgirl’s murder.
More recently, she took part in the podcast Coatbridge: The Disappearance of Moira Anderson.
Both ventures have introduced new clues, including witnesses who saw a young girl being dragged near the Coatbridge bus terminal by a man they now identify as Gartshore.
Possible locations for Moira’s body have also been provided.
Police have excavated a graveyard, spent weeks dredging a local canal and looked into a theory that Moira’s body was dumped into a mineshaft.
“We’ve had experts working with the police with the highest integrity, but the people who did this crime were devious in the extreme and their wickedness knows no bounds,” Sandra says.
“My belief is that Moira is not far from us but she remains concealed by extremely wicked people.”
Police have now said if Gartshore was alive they have enough evidence to bring a murder case against him.
But, even after his death, Sandra is not ready to let the case lie.
She is determined to find the little girl’s body and prove her father was her killer.
“A wee girl of 11 still deserves justice and Moira’s two sisters need closure. They need to know what happened,” she says.
For almost 125 years, New Idea has been Australia’s most trusted source for celebrity news, royal updates, and real-life stories. We don’t just share the news – we live it, verify it, and stand by it. Read more about us, our history, and our contributors here.
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