By Paul Thornton
GRUESOME photographs of head in the bag victim Heather Stacey were shown to a jury sitting at her murder trial yesterday.
Two graphic images showing the 44-year-old’s head lying beside a blue Ikea bag on a footpath in Edinburgh revealed the disturbing state of her badly decomposed remains.
Heather’s thinning, dyed red hair could be seen along with the discolouration of her skin in the pictures.
The eyes in her head were also missing.
Judge Lord Matthews yesterday (Tuesday) warned the eight women and seven men of the jury that the two photographs were “disturbing” before they were directed to them in books lodged as productions in the case.
Lord Matthews also checked that there were no members of the mum-of-four’s family in the public benches before allowing the images to be shown on two large-screen monitors in the court room.
The images were recorded by police photographers on Hogmanay 2008, after make-up artist Anita Anderson found Heather’s remains in a black bin liner at Hawthornvale Path in the Granton area of Edinburgh.
Alan Cowe, a senior identification officer with the Scottish Police Services Authority, described how a total of three bags were found at the scene.
Officers discovered two blue Ikea bags and also a black bin liner.
In the “inner” Ikea bag, Mr Cowe said police found a pair of orange rubber gloves and stained curtains and bed covers – pictures of which were also shown to the jury.
A solicitor who met Heather just weeks before prosecutors say that shop worker Alan Cameron murdered her, said that at the time Heather was looking well and preparing to put past problems behind her.
Family lawyer Jane Rattray, 44, had a 35 minute meeting with Heather on November 20, 2007 to discuss her options for getting access to her children.
She said: “The way she presented, she did not fit the mould of a mother who had lost contact with her children.
“She was clean, she was neat, she was very focused on the matter.
“She remembered names and dates, she arrived for her appointment. She was punctual and everything about her didn’t seem to add up to a lady who had lost contact with her children.
“There was no sign of her being under the influence of anything.”
When asked by advocate depute Alex Prentice QC if Heather appeared to be someone on a “downward spiral”, Miss Rattray said: “That was not how she appeared.
“From my talk with her it appeared that she did have problems in the past but she seemed to have addressed her problems and was moving on.”
Cameron, 56, admits hiding Heather’s body at her home in Edinburgh’s Royston Mains Place for over a year before chopping up her body and dumping the parts.
The dad-of-two, who was in a relationship with Heather, stole almost £5,000 from her Post Office account while hiding her corpse and lied to people that he had heard from her.
But Cameron – who also text a woman pretending to be Heather – denies murdering her between November 29 and December 11, 2007.
The trial continues.
