ELAINE Doyle was a popular, carefree schoolgirl when her life was taken in 1986.
Living with her mother Maureen, father Jack and older brother John, the schoolgirl would spend much of her spare time socialising with friends.
Her brother, giving evidence at the trial, described a typical relationship with his sister, who was five years younger than him. "Annoying but in a cute way", was how he described it. "We were just normal brother and sister."
Ms Doyle spent much of her last weekend with her best friend, Lynn Ryan. The night before she died Ms Doyle had stayed at Ms Ryan's house after they visited a nearby pool hall, one of their regular haunts. After waking up they had gone shopping for leggings.
Ms Doyle went home to get dressed up before meeting up with her friend again. "Be careful and watch yourself", Mr Doyle said to his daughter as she left the family home.
The pals went to a 50p disco. "We always carried on. It was just constant laughing," Ms Ryan said of their relationship.
After the pair left the disco and visited a hamburger stall, Ms Doyle turned down a lift home from a friend's brother. Ms Ryan said: "I will see you tomorrow." It was the last thing she ever said to her friend.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article