The Ice Cream Wars

In the early 1980s, Glasgow was a tale of two cities. While its leaders encouraged residents and visitors to see Scotland's biggest city as 'Miles Better', refreshed with trendy bars and restaurants, its housing schemes became a battleground in criminal warfare. Gangsters found themselves fighting over an unlikely commodity – ice cream vans and the lucrative routes to be found in each of the city's sprawling new schemes, such as Easterhouse and Ruchazie. The schemes housed thousands but gave them little access to shops, pubs or other facilities. With little alternative, ice cream vans thrived and evolved to sell a range of goods, making so much money that they attracted the attention of the city's gangsters.

Competition was fierce and would escalate into violence, before becoming deadly on 16th April 1984. In the early hours of that morning, a fire engulfed a top floor flat in Bankend Street, Ruchazie, a three bed apartment housing nine members of the same family. That family included Andrew Doyle, a young ice cream van driver who had received threats and intimidation in the months leading up to the fire.
Six members of the Doyle family, including Andrew, would not survive the impact of the fire. Their ages ranged from 53 years old to just 18 months.

It was, in its time, the greatest mass murder in Scottish history and led to an inevitable demand from the media and public for the police to find and bring to justice the killers.

Featuring testimony from police officers, members of the ice cream business and reporters from the time, each with their own connection to the case, episode one examines how Glasgow's tough housing estates had developed into an environment where ice cream van routes had become prized possessions, before revealing the lengths some were prepared to go to in order to secure them.

Eyewitnesses describe events around the deadly fire which engulfed the Doyle family home and the days after, with the beginnings of the police investigation and a funeral which moved many across Scotland.

The summer of 1984 saw a criminal investigation which gripped Scotland in the aftermath of the fire that killed six members of the Doyle family. The police's efforts to find those responsible would lead to one of the biggest trials in Scottish history, with seven men in the dock. In the end, just two, Thomas Campbell and Joe Steele, would be convicted of murder, despite doubts over the strength of the evidence against them.

The next decade would see one of the most dramatic campaigns for justice in history as both men fought to keep their case in the public eye. Their campaign would raise questions about the methods employed by police in order to secure convictions. Hunger strikes and no less than three prison escapes combined with the efforts of lawyers and writers on the outside would, in 1996, see both men released on bail, pending appeal. That appeal would fail though, seeing Campbell and Steele return to prison. With both refusing to accept parole, and, by definition, guilt for the crime, it was expected the two men would be forced to fully serve their life sentences.

The formation of a new criminal commission and the revelation of new expert evidence would change that. In 2004, 20 years after they were convicted, Thomas Campbell and Joe Steele were released from prison with their case declared a miscarriage of justice.

The case has left many issues unresolved. Nobody has subsequently been convicted, despite persistent rumours about who really ordered the arson attack on the Doyle home.