article: The date was 23 February 1957, an era now dim in the memory. Harold MacMillan had just become prime minister following the Suez crisis. The Reverend Martin Luther King of Montgomery, Alabama, graced the cover of that week's Time magazine for the first time. In Coatbridge that weekend, the weather was bad, with a blizzard blowing in, but as she stepped out into the street, Moira was wrapped-up well, in her navy school coat and a knitted hat. She was a slight, pretty girl with fair hair and blue eyes, something of a tomboy, who enjoyed swimming and playing marbles. The Co-op in Laird Street was a short distance from Moira's gran's house in Muiryhall Street, but there is no evidence that Moira ever arrived at the shop. As the hours and then the days passed the people of Coatbridge, horrified by the mystery of the missing girl, searched and searched but not a trace was ever found. Moira's family never saw her again and, for many years it seemed likely that no-one would ever know what had happened to her. Townsfolk criticised the efforts of the police and, in the absence of hard evidence, suspicion fell, unfairly, on Moira's family. In fact officers did have one important lead - witnesses had seen Moira boarding a local Baxter's bus. But detectives appear to have failed to follow it up properly. Had they done so, they would have discovered that the bus driver was Alexander Gartshore, who was on bail at the time facing charges of raping his children's babysitter. Gartshore, a freemason in a lodge where many local policemen were also said to be members, had long been suspected of being a "flasher" in local parks. On 23 January 1957 he had been charged with "having carnal knowledge of a minor and other offences of a sexual nature." In February Moira went missing. In April, Gartshore was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison. But it was not until his estranged daughter, Sandra Brown, discovered this terrible family secret that the search for the truth really began. Even then it took many more years to find it. Recalling events in her book "Where There is Evil", Mrs Brown describes how, in 1992, she confronted Gartshore about his failings as a father. To her astonishment, she writes, he told her that his own father "wouldn't forgive me for Moira Anderson". "Grandpa was always convinced I'd done it," he told his daughter. "He said to me tae tell the polis where I'd put the wee lassie. "...I was the driver of the bus the day she went missing. I told Grandpa I didn't even know her, but she got on my bus, in all the snow. I was the last tae speak tae her. I was the last person tae see her..." Horrified by the conversation, and suspecting that she now knew the killer, Mrs Brown began a long campaign to bring her own father to justice. When he was interviewed by police in 1992, Gartshore claimed that Moira had boarded his bus
summary: It was a bitter, snowy Saturday evening when Moira Anderson left her grandmother's house in Coatbridge to buy some butter.