Shirley McKie

Shirley McKie (born August 1962) is a former Scottish police detective who was accused by fingerprint analysis staff of the Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) of leaving her thumb print on the bathroom door frame of a murder crime-scene in Kilmarnock on 14 January 1997. She denied she had ever been in the house of murder victim Marion Ross, but Detective Constable McKie was initially suspended, then sacked, then arrested by Strathclyde Police in 1998, and tried and acquitted in 1999. A scandal subsequently developed because of allegations of misconduct on the part of the SCRO and the police.

With continuing public concern over what became known as the Shirley McKie fingerprint scandal, Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill announced in March 2008, that a public inquiry into the case would begin in September of that year (see Fingerprint Inquiry).

On 6 January 1997, the body of Marion Ross was found in her home in Kilmarnock. She had been stabbed multiple times during what is presumed to have been an act of housebreaking. David Asbury, a handyman who had once worked on the Ross house, developed as a suspect. A fingerprint found on a tin box in Asbury's home was reported to be that of Marion Ross by examiners at the Scottish Criminal Records Office. The SCRO also reported they had identified a fingerprint found on the gift tag on an unopened Christmas present inside the Ross home as that of David Asbury. While checking other, unidentified fingerprints from the victim's home, examiners reported one of those prints to have been identified as Constable McKie's. During Asbury's murder trial in which he was found guilty, McKie testified she had not been inside the home and could not have left her fingerprint.

Because Marion Ross was known to hoard possessions, making it possible for Asbury to have left a print on the gift tag years earlier while he was working at the home, the print on the tin box in Asbury's home became the key piece of evidence in the case against him. McKie's testimony at Asbury's trial that she could not have left a print inside the Ross home implied, if true, that the SCRO examiners were capable of error in a fingerprint comparison. David Asbury was subsequently freed from a life sentence due to questions raised about the identification of the print on the tin box. Other features of the case include allegations that police tried to link Constable McKie to the actual murder and that they conducted a whispering campaign to discredit her, inventing a non-existent affair with a married male detective, and claiming that her denial of ever having been at the murder scene was made in an attempt to cover up a sexual liaison with the detective there.

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