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Summary
The following set of newspaper articles are from the trial of Jason Campbell of Bridgeton Cross.
Mark Scott was the victim of an unprovoked attack as he walked through Bridgeton Cross whilst returning from the Celtic – Partick Thistle game in 1995. He died on the street and his murder became the main impetus for the establishment of the charity ‘Nil by Mouth’.
To all his family and those connected to the young man, our sincere sympathies and condolences.
You’ll never walk alone.
RIP
External Link
- The Mark Scott Foundation
- The Mark Scott Foundation was formed in 1996 in memory of Mark Scott. Since its inception the Foundation has made over 400 awards to individual young people living in or closely connected with Scotland.
Knife blow to Mark’s throat left a 26-yard trail of blood
Daily Record 07/03/1996
A Schoolboy had his throat ripped open in a street attack as he walked home from a football match, a murder trial heard yesterday. Celtic fan Mark Scott, the son of a top Glasgow lawyer, died at the scene despite frantic attempts to save him.
A seven-inch wound from his chin to his ear severed Mark’s jugular vein and left a 26-yard trail of blood, the High Court in Glasgow was told.
On trial is Jason Campbell, 23, of Heron Street, Bridgeton, Glasgow.
He denies murdering Mark in London Road, near Bridgeton Cross, by striking him on the body with a knife or similar instrument.
Campbell claims he was at home at the time of the alleged incident.
Mark’s pals, James Friel and Iain Speirits, told the start of the trial how the three of them were heading home after watching Celtic beat Partick Thistle 2-1 on October 7 last year.
They were walking along London Road towards the city centre to get a train home.
James told Iain Bonomy QC, prosecuting, that a man standing in a group of people outside a pub near Bridgeton Cross spat beer at them.
The beer hit Mark and Iain, but none of them reacted to it. They just kept walking forward.
James said he then heard footsteps running up from behind.
“When I turned round I saw a person standing behind Mark with his hand beside Mark’s neck,” he said
Asked by Mr Bonomy if he saw what happened with the hand, he replied: “I only saw the hand up at the neck then the person took the hand away.
“Mark held his neck and blood came out. He staggered forward diagonally across the pavement and fell beside the gutter.”
James said a group of women tried to staunch the blood with clothes. And then volunteer ambulance-women who had been at the match also came to his aid.
He admitted that walking through that part of Glasgow might have brought them into contact with Rangers fans.
But he said they had never experienced any trouble before.
He said his Celtic scarf was in his jacket pocket. Mark and Iain had Celtic tops on, but they were covered by their clothing.
They did nothing aggressive or anything to attract attention to themselves. “We were just walking along and talking.”
James told Mr Bonomy that he identified two people at an identity parade on the basis of their build and hair.
And in court he identified Campbell as one of the two people he picked out.
Cross-examined by Donald Findlay QC, defending, James admitted he only got a “momentary passing glimpse” of Mark’s attacker.
Mark’s other pal Iain told the trial he saw a man with something black in his hand near Mark’s shoulder.
He added: “Mark started holding his neck and began to scream because he was in pain.”
Consultant pathologist Professor Peter Vanezis of Glasgow University said he went to the scene and found a trail of blood 26 yards long.
During the post mortem he found a gaping seven-inch wound in Mark’s neck which stretched from his chin to under his ear.
It had been caused by a single blow from a smooth-bladed knife.
Mark’s jugular vein had been severed and the wound went through to the spine. He also had a deep defensive cut on his left hand and had bled to death.
Dr Gordon McNaughton, a registrar at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, said the injury severed skin, muscle and blood vessels on the right side of Mark’s neck.
The doctor described his injuries as “non-survivable”. The trial before Lord Sutherland continues.
Court told of attempt to help dying fan
The Scotsman 08/03/1996 ARNOT McWHINNIE
A YOUNG father told yesterday how his baby’s blanket was used to staunch a gaping wound in a dying Celtic fan’s throat.
Garry Horne, 28, described how he saw Mark Scott’s life ebbing away as he lay in London Road near Bridgeton Cross, Glasgow.
Mr Horne told the High Court in Glasgow people were trying to stem the blood with beer mats and bar cloths. “I gave them my baby’s blanket off the pram and someone stuck it to the boy’s neck.” Mr Horne, a former Barras market trader, said: “Three months earlier I had seen my son taking his first breath coming into the world and three months later I saw this young boy take his last breath lying in a street in Glasgow.”
Jason Campbell, 23, denies murdering Mark, 16, a Celtic fan, in London Road on 7 October as he was walking home from Parkhead.
Campbell has lodged a special defence of alibi, claiming he was in his home at Heron Street, Bridgeton, at the time.
Mr Horne said he saw Campbell among a group of youths in the doorway. Mr Horne said Campbell was carrying a knife. Campbell is alleged to have run up behind Mark, who was walking with his two friends, and slashed his neck open. Sisters, Ellen Jones, 30, and Jean Newlands, 25, described how Celtic fans coming from Parkhead had to walk a gauntlet of abuse.
Mrs Jones told the court she singled out Campbell. She said she had later picked out Campbell at an identification parade and yesterday she again identified him in court.
Miss Newlands, from Bridgeton, claimed she got a good look at Mark’s attacker because she was wary of him. Miss Newlands said she got the impression he was looking for trouble because he was standing outside a pub shouting at Celtic fans. A man beside him was wearing a Rangers top.
Miss Newlands said she saw Campbell pull something out of his waistband, walk up behind Mark and his two friends, and slash him in the throat.
The trial continues.
Mark cops had one name
Daily Record 12/03/1996
COPS knocked on Jason Campbell’s door just 45 minutes after a young Celtic fan bled to death, a court heard yesterday.
A police officer told the jury Campbell was the “only name in the frame” after Mark Scott, 16, was found dying from a knife wound in Bridgeton, Glasgow, at 5.15pm.
At 6pm, the High Court in Glasgow was told, police officers went to interview 23-year-old Campbell.
But he wasn’t at home.
Detective Sergeant Wilson McMillan, 42, said Campbell arrived at the police station with his lawyer 24 hours later.
In a taped interview he claimed he was at home with his mother, father, sister, brother- in-law, two nephews and an aunt at the time of the killing. And he didn’t leave till shortly after 6pm.
Campbell, of Heron Street, Bridgeton, denies murdering Mark last October 7 as the teenager was walking home after a Celtic game at nearby Parkhead. He has lodged a special defence of alibi.
DS McMillan told Iain Bonomy, prosecuting, that it was not unusual for police to fail to find a murder weapon.
Asked if there had been any other serious contender in the murder investigation, Sergeant McMillan said: “At the time I was involved in the investigation there was no other name in the frame.”
He said it would be the duty of the police to investigate any other name put forward.
Cross-examined by Donald Findlay, defending, DS McMillan admitted Campbell was open and forthright when he was questioned.
The first uniformed police officer at the death scene told the court how he found a trail of blood which ended in Mark’s body lying half on the kerb and half in the gutter.
Asked if he was alive, he said: “I heard some gurgling sounds briefly and then they stopped.”
Earlier the jury heard allegations that when he was on an identification parade, Campbell told a stand- in next to him: “Long live the not proven verdict.”
The trial continues.
I wouldn’t lie to shield a murderer
Daily Record 13/03/1996 Arnot McWhinnie
A mother yesterday denied lying to shield her son from a murder charge.
Rangers fan Jason Campbell is accused of slitting open a schoolboy Celtic supporter’s throat.
And witnesses who put him at the murder scene said the killer wore a checked shirt – like the freshly washed shirt alleged to have been found at Campbell’s home.
Unemployed Campbell said that when 16-year-old Mark Scott was killed, he was at home.
At the High Court in Glasgow yesterday, 52-year-old Agnes Campbell backed up her son’s alibi.
She also denied that she had washed blood from the shirt.
And she said that when her 23-year-old son arrived home wearing his orange anorak he was perfectly normal and was not upset, agitated or angry.
Asked if she was “standing in the witness box lying your head off to help your son”, she replied: “No.”
Mrs Campbell admitted her husband had been convicted of a serious crime in 1979 but denied she had been an alibi witness for him.
Campbell, of Heron Street, Bridgeton, Glasgow, said he had been wearing what he called his “trademark” orange anorak on the day of the killing.
Mark had been walking home from a Celtic game with two pals when he was suddenly slashed across the neck from behind in London Road, Bridgeton.
Campbell denied that he ever carried a knife.
But when he was cross-examined, he admitted that once, while employed by an evening newspaper, he was instructed to carry a knife for cutting twine on newspaper bundles.
He denied going to Greenock later on the day of the murder to “keep out of the way”.
He also denied saying at a police ID parade: “Long live the not proven verdict.”
The jury is expected to start considering its verdict today.
Murder jury at hotel
Daily Record 14/03/1996
The jury in the schoolboy Celtic an murder trial was sent to a hotel last night after failing to reach a verdict.
After nearly three hours deliberation, they were asked by judge Lord Sutherland if they were close to a verdict on Jason Campbell, 23, then sent out again.
Campbell denies murdering 16-year-old Mark Scott by stabbing him in the neck as he walked home from a Celtic match along London Road, Bridgeton, Glasgow, on October 7.
Campbell, of Heron Street, Bridgeton, has lodged a special defence of alibi claiming he was at home with his family. The trial continues.
Life sentence for sectarian killing of football fan
The Scotsman 15/03/1996
A MAN was jailed for life yesterday after being found guilty of the murder of a schoolboy Celtic fan.
Jason Campbell, 23, whose father and uncle were Protestant terrorist paramilitaries, stabbed 16-year-old Mark Scott outside a pub at Glasgow’s Bridgeton Cross on 7 October last year.
Iain Bonomy, QC, prosecuting, revealed to the jury that Campbell had a previous conviction for carrying a knife.
The defence QC, Donald Findlay, suggested that Campbell, of Heron Street, Bridgeton, had originally intended just to slash his victim.
Campbell denied murder and lodged a special defence of alibi, claiming he was at home with his relatives at the time of the killing.
During the trial the court heard how minutes before he died, Mark, a Glasgow Academy pupil and the son of a corporate lawyer, had been watching Celtic’s 2-1 win over Partick Thistle with two friends at nearby Celtic Park.
As the three youngsters – one the son of James Friel, the procurator-fiscal at Paisley -walked along London Road towards Bridgeton Cross they had to pass through a gauntlet of hate from Rangers fans outside the pub.
The attack, in broad daylight, was witnessed by other fans, women out shopping with their children and people in cars and buses.
After the killing, Campbell sprinted to his home just a few hundred yards away where the family was having a party for his nephew’s 12th birthday.
He quickly showered and changed, then left, travelling later that night to stay with friends in Greenock.
During the first hours after the incident police received at least 50 telephone calls naming Campbell as the killer.
The next day Campbell gave himself up to police with his lawyer Massimo Franchi.
He was picked out by various witnesses as the young man in a pink shirt and denims they saw running from the scene.
One witness identified Campbell as the killer at a parade and in the dock. Another couple saw him with a knife before the murder.
Life for fiend who killed Celtic fan Mark
Daily Record 15/03/1996 ARNOT McWHINNIE
Twisted bigot Jason Campbell was locked up for life yesterday for the brutal murder of a schoolboy Celtic fan.
Campbell, 23, whose father and uncle were feared Protestant terrorist paramilitaries, slashed the throat of 16-year-old Mark Scott.
Yesterday, after a seven-day trial at the High Court in Glasgow, Lord Sutherland told him: “You have been found guilty of a horrific attack on an entirely innocent youth.”
As he was led away Campbell, of Heron Street, Bridgeton, gave his family a thumbs-up sign.
The trial heard how minutes before he died, Mark, a Glasgow Academy pupil and the son of a top corporate lawyer, had been watching Celtic’s 2- 1 win over Partick Thistle with two pals at nearby Celtic Park.
As the three youngsters headed along London Road towards Bridgeton Cross, Rangers fans screamed abuse.
Campbell, who regularly hung about Bridgeton Cross wearing a bright orange anorak to show off his Loyalist leanings, was spotted by various witnesses.
The boys did not react to Campbell’s abuse but he sneaked up behind them, grabbed Mark and slashed at his throat.
He then sprinted to his home where the family was having a party for his nephew Carson’s 12th birthday.
He quickly showered, changed, and then left, travelling later that night to stay with friends in Greenock.
During the first hours after the incident police received at least 50 telephone calls naming Campbell as the killer.
The next day Campbell gave himself up to police and was later identified by several witnesses as the man they saw running away.
One woman identified Campbell as the killer at an identity parade and in the dock.
Campbell claimed he was at home with his family at the time Mark was being attacked.
He was backed up by his mum, Agnes, 52.
And he was so confident that he wouldn’t be convicted that at one identity parade he said to a stand- in: “Long live the not proven verdict.”
In June, 1979, his father, Colin Campbell, now 53, and his uncle William “Big Bill” Campbell, 54, and another seven Ulster Volunteer Force terrorists were sentenced to a total of 519 years.
Charges ranged from the bombing of two Catholic pubs in Glasgow and a criminal conspiracy to further the cause of the UVF by gathering arms and explosives. The brothers were convicted of the conspiracy.
“Big Bill” Campbell, then the UVF’s top commander in Scotland, got a total of 62 years in concurrent sentences. The longest was 16 years.
Colin got 57 years, which included a 15-year sentence.
Yesterday both were in court to watch Jason sentenced to life.
A detective who was involved in hunting Mark’s killer said yesterday: “This murder chilled the public because the victim could have been your son, my son, indeed anyone’s son.
“He was picked at random and killed for no other reason than he supported the wrong football team.
“What happened shocked people so much that the dogs were barking Campell’s name in the street soon after it happened.
“Our phone was red hot and each caller named Campbell as the killer.
“The trouble was the Campbell family is so feared in the area witnesses were just terrified to give their names.”
A game of two halves
When Cara Henderson was 15, her boyfriend died, killed for supporting the wrong team. Since then, she has fought to kick sectarianism out of Scottish football. By Kirsty Scott
Kirsty Scott
Guardian
Tuesday May 15, 2001
On the day that he would die, Mark Scott’s mother urged him not to wear his Celtic top in case it brought him trouble. Zipping his jacket to cover the green and white hoops, the 16-year-old schoolboy had laughed. “Don’t worry, Mum,” he said. “They don’t do that kind of thing any more.” But they did, and hours later Mark had his throat cut by a man who picked him at random from a group of Celtic supporters as they walked home from a match through a Protestant area of Glasgow. His jacket was still zipped.
In the six years since his death, sectarianism has continued to plague Scotland, claiming the lives of seven other young men, scarring and maiming countless others, and clouding the achievements of devolution.
At its most visible, the bigotry is played out on the Old Firm terraces, between Celtic’s traditionally Catholic supporters and Rangers’ Protestant following. But the infection has run deep across west central Scotland for generations, communities split by prejudice, boundaries marked by late-night violence and graffiti.
No one has offered a solution to this ugly, age-old conflict. But there is one voice that has not allowed Scotland to forget it exists – and now the Scottish parliament has proposed, for the first time, that sectarianism should be a criminal offence.
Cara Henderson was 15 when Mark died. They were classmates at an exclusive private school and he was her first boyfriend. Devastated by the brutality and senselessness of his death, her final school years passed in a blur of grief and incomprehension. She ended up in hospital with an auto-immune condition before moving south to study in England.
It was while she was at Oxford University, studying history, that she learned that the prominent lawyer Donald Findlay QC, who had defended Mark’s killer in court, had been caught on video singing sectarian songs at a Glasgow football function. It was too much. After graduating in 1999, she put her career plans on hold and returned home to set up Nil by Mouth, Scotland’s leading anti-sectarian group.
In no time, the quiet, studious girl from the leafy west end of Glasgow found herself in Barlinnie prison, talking bigotry with Scotland’s hard men, and out on the grim estates of the city’s east end, talking knife wounds with children who defined themselves by hate. She won endorsement from officials at Celtic and Rangers, and launched a devastating poster campaign with pictures of a bloodied victim in a hospital casualty unit, under the headline: “Sectarian humour can have you in stitches.”
Henderson has been vilified by some fans for her intervention. At her first and last Old Firm game last year, she shouldered the vicious slurs of those who chant cheap hatred from the terraces. “Cara Henderson takes it up the arse,” they sang, as she sat, alone, in the stand.
“When Mark was killed, I didn’t understand it,” she says. “I was left with just anger and bitterness. Doing Nil by Mouth has been about taking back some of the belief that things can be better.”
She has always been brutally honest about her own level of prejudice. She is Protestant. Mark was Catholic. When he first asked her out, she rang a friend to ask if she should date him. “I must have had a low-grade prejudice,” she says. “It is very subtle, but it must have been an issue for me. It is an issue for too many people.”
She asked permission of Mark’s parents before she launched Nil by Mouth and she has been careful not to exploit him or their relationship. She laid him to rest a long time ago.
Her hardest job, she says, is trying to convince people that sectarianism is not confined to football; that the bigotry of those who wound or kill is bolstered by the “polite sectarianism” that infects much of west central Scotland. “One of the problems is that debate on this has been limited to Old Firm rivalry, so people view the violence and abuse as football hooliganism and they can say, we’re not football hooligans. But this is not just about football fans. The bigotry is alive and well in the middle classes.”
She believes that there have been some changes – “I think it is becoming unfashionable to admit your prejudice” – but it has been a hard slog. “We are up against the wall with this, but we have been chipping away at it. You do get little chinks of light, especially with young kids.”
Tony Stapleton is the only publicly-funded anti-sectarian worker in Scotland, based in Easterhouse in Glasgow. The post will last only a year. He says Henderson has done an invaluable service with her work, but has not received enough support. “Scotland reminds me of an alcoholic refusing to admit its problem,” he says. “The country doesn’t want to face up to it. But you just have to look at the statistics – eight murders in five years. It needs to be tackled head-on.”
Henderson has been frustrated that the fledgling Scottish parliament has failed to get to grips with the issue. Two weeks ago, however, a Liberal Democrat backbench MSP proposed a draft bill to make sectarianism a criminal offence, punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment
Donald Gorrie’s initiative, which has rocked Holyrood, was prompted by a deeply embarrassing incident in January when the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was advised not to travel to Scotland to visit a Catholic shrine on the weekend of a Rangers-Celtic match in case his presence heightened sectarian tensions. The scandal, like Mark Scott’s death, prompted a fresh burst of soul-searching and hand-wringing about the bigotry, but nothing changed.
Henderson believes the move is highly significant and will keep the issue on the political agenda. “It is very important as a symbolic gesture. It says that we need to acknowledge this, this should have no place in Scotland. I used to think it was a conspiracy to keep it quiet, but I think there is a genuine fear of it in some quarters. And there are too many people who are comfortable with it, who use it to define themselves and others. They may not even be aware that they are doing it.”
Still only 21, Henderson has not wearied of the fight but feels it is time to step back, for her own sake and the sake of Nil by Mouth. Next year she will go to Australia for a working holiday; she then hopes to carve out a career in print journalism. She will still work for the group, but as a backer rather than a figurehead.
“In many ways I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” she says. “Since Mark’s death, sectarianism has had a huge bearing on my life. I see it in two stages: before and after. I know I’m still young but when he died I felt that was the end of something. My childhood, perhaps. I don’t know what kind of person I would have been if it hadn’t happened.” She feels for all the victims of religious bigotry, among them 16-year-old Thomas McFadden who was stabbed to death after a Rangers-Celtic match in 1999, and father-of-six James Hardie, who died last year, and it hurts that their fate and faces are forever linked with such a destructive, divisive force. It hurts most about Mark. “The saddest thing is that his name has become synonymous with all this,” Henderson says. “He had no part in it. It was not his life.
SCOTLAND’S most notorious sectarian killer should rebuild his life away from Glasgow now that he has been released from prison, locals have urged.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/news/crime-courts/locals-urge-paroled-killer-to-move-away-1.1104022
Jason Campbell, who slashed the throat of 16-year-old Mark Scott in an unprovoked attack in Glasgow in 1995 simply because Mark supported Celtic, is now out on parole from his life sentence.
Campbell, now 38, walked free from Shotts Prison on Monday and has been seen around the Bridgeton area of Glasgow’s east end, close to where he murdered Mark in a crime that sent shockwaves throughout Scotland.
But with renewed attempts to eradicate sectarianism in Scotland, and fearful of impressionable youths making a hero of Campbell, residents in Bridgeton say his presence continues to cast a shadow over the area.
One said: “Jason Campbell was the worst thing to happen to Bridgeton. The area has never shrugged off what he did to that boy and seeing him around is a reminder. For 15 years now the only thing many people know Bridgeton for is that terrible murder and the Campbells.”
Another said: “He’s been keeping his head down and not been around the pubs. But he went into jail with no skills and has come out the same. The best thing for him to do and for the rest of the people who live round here is for him to move on, start again somewhere else. If he wants to play the big man then I’m sure there’s still places in Belfast that would welcome him. If he wants to go somewhere people won’t know him there’s always London.”
The Herald exclusively revealed in January 2010 that Campbell had been granted home leave in preparation for his release and spent several days over that Christmas period at his family home in Bridgeton.
Campbell, whose father and uncle were notorious Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) terror chiefs in Glasgow, was initially jailed in 1996 without limit of time but the introduction of European human rights legislation meant the courts fixed the period he must serve, with a minimum of 15 years set in 2002. Mark’s family has remained silent on the matter and again declined to comment.
Local SNP MSP John Mason said: “This was a despicable crime that horrified Scotland and my thoughts remain with Mark Scott’s family. Campbell has served the full term he was sentenced to but any breach of his licence and he risks going back inside.”
The Scottish Government said Campbell would be closely supervised, adding: “This was one of the most extreme examples of the needless sectarian violence that often aligns itself with football in Scotland. There is no place for sectarianism in any area of Scotland.”
In the minutes before he died, Mark, a Glasgow Academy pupil and the son of a leading corporate lawyer, had been watching Celtic’s 2-1 win over Partick Thistle with two friends at nearby Celtic Park.
As the three youngsters walked along London Road towards Bridgeton Cross they were subjected to abuse from Rangers fans outside a pub.
Campbell ran up behind Mark, who was wearing a Celtic top, and slashed his throat. The attack, in broad daylight, was witnessed by other fans, women out shopping with their children and people in cars and buses.
A row erupted in 1997 when it emerged that Campbell requested to be transferred to Belfast’s Maze jail as a “political prisoner” because of his UVF connections. In June 1979, his father Colin Campbell and his uncle William “Big Bill” Campbell and another seven UVF terrorists had been sentenced to a total of 519 years, with charges ranging from the bombing of two Catholic pubs in Glasgow and a criminal conspiracy to further the cause of the UVF by gathering arms and explosives. The transfer was vetoed by then First Minister Donald Dewar.
In the aftermath of the murder, Mark’s girlfriend, Cara Henderson, set up Nil By Mouth, Scotland’s first organised anti-sectarian campaign group, which continues today.
