Killer

Killer is the pilot episode of Taggart. It was first broadcast on ITV network in three weekly parts from 6 to 20 September 1983 and was written by Glenn Chandler after he was asked by Robert Love to write a whodunnit for Scottish Television. It was only meant to be a one-off show. Consequently the opening credits of the show were very different to the infamous Taggart format and the music was classical.

It was first story to feature DCI Jim Taggart (Mark McManus) and his sidekick, DS Peter Livingstone (Neil Duncan), pathologist Dr. Stephen Andrews (Robert Robertson) and Jim Taggart's wheelchair-bound wife, Jean (Harriet Buchan).

SYNOPSIS
A murderer is loose in Glasgow and a major police investigation is mounted to find out the killer. The enquiry is headed by top detective Jim Taggart, a tough local cop who has risen through the ranks, and Peter Livingstone, one of the new breed of graduate policemen. But despite their differences they work together - breaking all the rules to hunt the killer before he strikes again.

PLOT
Eileen Ballantyne, a young women of twenty, is found strangled one winters morning on the banks of Glasgow's River Kelvin. A chunk of hair had been cut from her head. Detective Chief Inspectr Jim Taggart from the Northern Division, Glasgow CID is assigned to the case, assisted by Detective Sergeant Peter Livingstone, a graduate newly transferred from Edinburgh.

Taggart in uneasy about the case since the victim is more or less the same age as his daughter, Alison. Suspects include Billy Dalgleish, the dead girl's boyfriend, Martin Inglis, the jogger who stumbled across the body, and Alec McGowan, a man with a history of offences against girls. Then there is Michael Boyd, who lives with his school-cleaner wife, Liz, in a high rise block of flats overlooking the murder site. Boyd seems to be showing an unhealthy interest in the crime. Two days later, a second girl, video shop manageress Susan Maguire is found strangled on a canal bank. She too has had a clump of her hair cut away. Taggart closes in on the shop owner, Charlie Paterson, with whom Susan was having an affair, but, to his intense displeasure is warned off by his boss, Superintendent Murray, a golfing chum of Paterson. Michael Boyd's sinister presence at Eileen Ballantyne's funeral plus the discovery on wasteland near the Clyde of the body of a third girl, prostitute, Crystal Kent, also with hair shorn, briefly led Taggart in a different direction. But when hiring out a video from Paterson's shop, Boyd recognises him as the man he saw on the Kelvin Walkway on the night Eileen Ballantyne was murdered.

When Susan Maguire's bag turns up, a note makes Taggart too realise that Paterson is defintely the killer. Paterson has eliminated Susan because she had been blackmailing him over the earlier murder of his wife's lover. He strangled the other two women to make Susan's death appear to be the work of a serial killer. Now Paterson is being blackmailed for a second time - by Michael Boyd. Taggart races to the scene of the 'drop', but is not in time to prevent Paterson strangling Boyd, the joker in the pack.

CAST

 * Det. Chief Inspector Taggart - Mark McManus
 * Det. Sergeant Livingstone - Neil Duncan
 * Superintendent Murray - Tom Watson
 * Patricia Paterson - Anne Kidd
 * Charlie Paterson - Roy Hanlon
 * Liz Boyd - Linda Muchan
 * Michael Boyd - Gerard Kelly
 * Wilma McGowan - Joan Scott
 * Alec McGowan - Frank Wylie
 * Mary Ballantyne - Mary Macleod
 * Joe Ballantyne - Hugh Martin
 * Tom Dalgleish - Gerard Slevin
 * Billy Dalgleish - Vincent Friell
 * Jean Taggart - Harriet Buchan
 * Alison Taggart - Geraldine Alexander
 * Dr. Andrews - Robert Robertson
 * Sgt. Blackman - Gavin Brown
 * Det. Constable Grant - Jimmy Yuill
 * Det. Constable Collins - Denis Agnew
 * Lez Farquhar - Freddie Boardley
 * Bunny Cotter - Bruce White
 * Tiny - Bill Gavin
 * Martin Inglis - Bertie Scott
 * Mrs. Tennent - Jean Bruce
 * Mrs. Ramsay - Mary Riggans
 * Gordon - Stevan Rimkus
 * Minister - Robert Ellis
 * Larry Lang - Raymond Murtagh