There were few tears shed when Dundee father from hell Christopher “Sonny” Mone met his violent end 40 years ago.
Sonny was a violent bully who boasted that he wanted to be a bigger man than his notorious killer son Robert.
His boy had twice made headlines – first by shooting dead a female schoolteacher with a shotgun after terrorising her needlework class and brutalising a female pupil on November 1 1967 at St John’s High School – and then by escaping from the State Hospital at Carstairs in 1976, killing three men on the way.
Robert was rarely out of the news and every story about him slashed yet another chip from the insanely jealous Sonny’s shoulder.
He wanted to be the Mone everyone talked about.
Sonny’s body was covered in a number of tattoos including the initials IHS tattooed across his chest, which represented ‘In His Service’ (a reference to the Devil), while another said: “I’ll Walk Where Angels Fear To Tread”.
He hit on a plot that would guarantee him notoriety.
While his son waited to be sentenced for the Carstairs breakout he was visited by Sonny who begged him to use prison contacts to get him guns.
“What do you want them for?” Robert Mone asked.
Sonny had decided to shoot dead eight family members, among them his second wife Mary, who had stuck by him for 20 years, their daughters and even his own mother.
Sonny screamed abuse when his son refused.
Back in Dundee he brooded and cursed, seeking solace in drink.
But finally his frustration exploded into horror on December 29 1978.
A scene of unimaginable horror
Sonny made good on his promise when he murdered three women – one of them his father’s half sister known to him as ‘Auntie’ Aggie – after a drinking session in Dundee flats on Kinghorne Road which were known locally as “No Man’s Land”.
Sonny tied up, strangled and butchered widow Jane Simpson, 70, and her friends newlywed Catherine Millar, 29, and Agnes Robertson Waugh, 78.
Miss Waugh was well-known throughout the area.
She was looked in on by other residents, who were alarmed to find her door open and the gas fire in the living room on full, but no sign of her anywhere.
The investigation moved from a missing persons inquiry to a murder investigation when uniformed and plain-clothes officers searched every flat in the block.
The curtains remained drawn in one flat on the ground floor where the scene that greeted police when they forced entry was one of unimaginable horror.
The body of Catherine Millar lay stretched out on the bed, an electric flex and stocking tied round her neck, and who showed signs of being severely beaten about the face.
Across from the bed, Jane Simpson and Agnes Waugh were bound to chairs, their faces bloody and bruised, and both had stockings tightly wrapped round their necks.
All three women had been dead for several days and displayed wounds that were consistent with her killer having worn a prominent ring.
The Sunday Post reported on the hunt for a killer in Dundee on January 7 1979.
“Police in the Dundee triple murder hunt made a fresh series of appeals to the public late last night,” the paper read.
“They want all visitors to 2b Kinghorne Road where the three women were found murdered – to contact them. The callers could have been at any of the flats in the building. Anyone who has been there in the past week should come forward.
“Detective Chief Superintendent James Cameron said, ‘We would also request any member of the public who has seen the three described persons known to have been in the area around the 29th to come forward’.
“Police are also anxious to trace the finders of any articles of clothing, handbags, purses or other items found in the Kinghorne Road-Hilltown area since Friday, December 29.”
Sonny was still wearing the ring
One of the first people to be interviewed was Sonny, as he was the nephew of Agnes Waugh.
Sonny admitted he had been in the flat with Jane Simpson, and 22-year-old Stewart Hutton, who was known as “Billy Rebel” and who was a drinking acquaintance of Mone, Jane and Catherine.
Mone claimed that the two men had taken a carry out of alcohol to the flat and had a drinking session until mid afternoon, when Mone left the flat to get fresh supplies.
Hutton told the same story – except that he claimed it was he who had departed the flat to get more supplies of alcohol.
Hutton had never returned to the flat.
He spent the money he had been given to buy booze in a betting shop.
Sonny might have escaped justice but for a treasured gift from his idol son after his transfer from Carstairs to Perth Prison.
Mone junior presented his father with his ring, saying he would not be allowed to wear it in prison.
It was the same ring which Mone wore on the day of the triple murder and which marked one of the women on the face.
That blow, and its matching with the ring, was a crucial piece of evidence in a case not strong on matters of fact.
When arrested, Sonny was wearing the ring that police had searched so long for.
Sonny gave a statement to police where he told Detective Inspector William Hart how he wanted to be in jail with his son.
“I visit him but there’s a glass partition beside us and two screws there,” he said.
“I can’t touch him.
“All I live for is to be in there beside him.
“If I was in there, I would see he gets everything – pills, booze, anything, the lot.”
At the time, Sonny’s second wife Mary said that he had always wanted to be one better than his son and one day join him.
Sonny, whose address at the time was Glenprosen Terrace, denied the charges and 98 witnesses were cited by the Crown.
The jury took 75 minutes to reach a verdict following the trial and he was sentenced to life imprisonment by Lord Robertson at the High Court in Dundee in June 1979.
He told him: “You have been convicted of what I can only described as a terrible crime.”
He made a recommendation that Sonny should serve at least 15 years before he would be eligible for parole.
Mone responded: “Would you mind backdating it?”
Subsequently, he had his appeal to have the conviction set aside dismissed at the High Court in Edinburgh.
Sonny was never to be with his son
Sent to Aberdeen’s Craiginches prison his boasting of how he killed the women sickened other cons so much that another inmate stabbed him to death in the cobbler’s shop.
On January 13 1983, Anthony John Currie, 39, ran up to the workshop carrying two knives and stabbed him on the neck and inflicted various other wounds on his head and back.
Currie called Sonny “probably the most obnoxious person in the country”.
He lodged a special plea of self-defence.
Donald Macaulay, agent for Currie, told Lord Allanbridge his client had previously attacked a prisoner found guilty of assaulting a young girl.
He said Currie has a “certain moralistic” attitude towards such cases.
The jury took nearly two hours to decide on their unanimous verdict of guilty of culpable homicide following a five-day trial at Aberdeen High Court.
He was jailed for just another eight years.
Was the judge equally appalled by Sonny’s vile behaviour?
Aged 74, Sonny’s boy Robert is now in Glenochil prison some 55 years after the St John’s tragedy and may never be allowed to return to society.
One person who reported on the horrific exploits of the Mones at the time was Alexander McGregor, former Chief Reporter of The Courier and author of the best-seller The Law Killers, an updated edition of which has just been published.
“It’s almost impossible to think of any father and son anywhere in the UK who left such a trail of slaughter in their wake,” he said.
“But of the two, Mone senior was by far the more despicable.
“He beat then strangled to death three defenceless women for no other reason than he wanted to become more notorious than his son.
“He wanted to be a big shot. At no point did he display any remorse. In fact, all the evidence was that he basked in his achievements.
“Some would say the inmate who killed Mone had performed a public service.”
