FEBRUARY 1969. Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Goodall (centre), head of Glasgow CID, addresses members of the Marine Division after a Glasgow bus conductor was stabbed. The victim later died in hospital.
Goodall, a native of Fife, was a skilful detective, much admired by his colleagues. As the Glasgow Police Museum observes on its website: “He was a quiet, slightly stooping man, but no-one ever questioned a Goodall ‘hunch’. So often his brilliant mind snatched at obscure clues which proved the turning point in the most difficult of cases. “ Throughout his long career he was involved in many notable cases, including the Peter Manuel murders, and the arrest, in 1966, of a man who was wanted for the murder of three London detectives. In 1958 he was shot by an armed jewel thief; fortunately, the museum says, the bullet entered his thigh and he quickly recovered.
Read more: Herald Diary
DCS Tom Goodall died in October 1969. Every police force in Scotland was represented at the funeral of a man described by this newspaper as “one of Britain’s best-known detectives.”
The Rev Alan Boyd Robson said Goodall “had become identified in the minds of countless thousands of simple people as the man who, in their name, opposed and tackled wickedness and crime and violence and everything they hated and feared.” He had been “an unswerving leader of men” with a “reckless and courageous disregard of his own life.”
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