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When 54-year-old Carol Taggart disappeared from her home in Dunfermline, Scotland just before Christmas in 2014, her family was desperate for answers. Her son told police officers that they had gotten into an argument before his mom stormed out of the house & didn’t come back.
As the investigation began, something just wasn’t adding up; Carol, who never went anywhere without her cell phone, had left it behind at home. As the days passed without a single sign of her, investigators began questioning whether Carol had really left that house on her own.
What they would eventually uncover would reveal that there was so much more to Carol’s disappearance than anyone had initially been led to believe.
Carol Taggart was born in December 1960. Although there isn’t much about her early life, she had her first child, a son she named Daniel, at 19-years-old. Four years later, she welcomed her second son, Ross, into their lives. Shortly after his birth, Carol & the boys’ father split up & she began raising her sons on her own.
Moving forward to 1986, when Daniel was about seven & Ross was three, Carol felt ready to begin dating again. After she was set up on a blind date with a man named Shaun Taggart, she knew that it was love at first sight. Soon, the couple was living together & Shaun slid right in as a father figure to Daniel & Ross.
Two years later in 1988, they had a child of their own together, a little girl they named Lorraine. As young as 2 ½ -years-old, Carol enrolled their daughter into tap & jazz classes & Lorraine quickly fell in love with dancing. Carol was always supportive of Lorraine’s passion & enjoyed being there for all of her practices & competitions. According to Lorraine, her mom always had a knack for making her feel safe & secure.
After she was accepted into a dance training course, the family of five relocated from a rural area of Scotland to Dunfermline, Fife, a town along the east coast of the country.
As Carol’s three children were getting older, she decided to open an in-home daycare center since she adored children so much. Very quickly, she became a beloved childcare provider in town & as her business grew, she was able to hire two women to work with her.
Since Shaun & Carol were doing well financially, they decided to buy a vacation home along the water, purchasing a fixed caravan/trailer at Pettycur Bay Holiday Park, a resort that sits along a large inlet on the south coast of Fife, about 30 minutes from their home.
According to Lorraine, at one point, they had been a very typical family. Since she & her half-brothers were in school as well as various activities while their parents were working, their schedules were often busy. Because she & Ross were so close in age, they were especially close during their childhood, often playing outside together. Ross would even appease her by playing Barbies with her, but like most siblings, they also had their moments of bickering.
Everything was going smoothly until Daniel & Ross’s biological father died in an accident, something that understandably hit the boys hard, especially Ross. Even before his father’s unexpected death, Ross had always been the type of child who pushed boundaries & because Carol wanted to keep the peace, she often gave in to her younger son’s demands.
Now that his father was gone, those close to the family couldn’t help but notice that Ross’s behavior began to change.
He had grown accustomed to acting out with little consequence & when Shaun tried to enforce the family’s rules & expectations while establishing consequences for his actions, Carol often went directly against him. During nearly every disagreement between Shaun & Ross, Carol would step in & take Ross’ side rather than her partner’s.
By the time Ross entered his late teens, Shaun couldn’t help but notice that money, as well as other items from around the house, had started going missing. Knowing full well that his stepson was responsible, he encouraged Ross to get a job so he would have money of his own.
Although he surprisingly took his advice & found a job, it was very short-lived as he was fired when money started going missing & his bosses suspected that he was responsible.
Despite the fact that Carol usually bought her son anything his heart desired, Ross continued to shoplift or steal money from her purse. He went on to get other jobs, but each time, they ended with his termination. Any issue that Ross encountered was inevitably someone else’s fault, but rather than having a difficult conversation with her son, Carol would sympathize with him instead.
As her brother got older, Lorraine could see that Ross was becoming a womanizer who never treated the girls he went out with with kindness or respect. Tensions were on the rise at home because of Ross’ inability to hold down a job as well as the fact that he seemed to have no aspirations in life whatsoever.
Amidst the growing tensions within the home, Carol had been dealing with her own struggles as throughout much of her life, she had struggled with depression.
As things began to escalate, Carol & Shaun’s ongoing arguments that were centered around Ross began to cause fractures in their relationship to the point that Shaun could take no more. Although they were never married, they made the difficult decision to separate after 21 years together.
When Shaun moved out in 2007, Ross was about 23-years-old while 28-year-old Daniel was already living on his own by this time. At 19-years-old, Lorraine eventually chose to move out as well since home had become a place she didn’t look forward to coming back to at the end of the day.
Sometime between Shaun & Carol’s separation in 2007 & Carol’s disappearance seven years later in 2014, Ross physically attacked Lorraine over a disagreement they had about her father moving out. After an evening out together, their verbal disagreement suddenly turned physical when Ross, who was well over six feet tall, stood above Lorraine, hitting her while she lay on the floor, curled into the fetal position in an attempt to protect herself.
Although Carol had been there & witnessed the entire assault, she didn’t once attempt to intervene in any way, something that put a big strain on Lorraine’s relationship with her mom. She struggled to understand why she hadn’t stepped in, speculating she had likely been too scared.
Lorraine will also never understand why her mom was so protective of Ross, finding their relationship to be very odd. Carol would listen to everything he said to the point that Lorraine began to feel like a third-wheel when spending time with them.
Although she tried her best to maintain a close relationship with her mom, each time she tried to arrange a get-together, Ross was inevitably there, causing them to drift that much farther apart. Looking back on the situation, Lorraine now sees that her brother had begun controlling every aspect of their mom’s life, slowly isolating her from family members & friends.
After Lorraine met a man named Steve Bristow, they quickly fell in love & after they got married, they had their first child together toward the end of 2014.
When Lorraine & Steve were out shopping in town together with their baby boy on Christmas Eve 2014, Lorraine realized that she missed a call from Ross. By this point, she had become somewhat distant from her mom & especially her brother.
When she called him back, she instantly felt sick to her stomach when Ross blurted out, Mum’s missing, if you hear from her, let me know, gotta go, bye.
She soon came to learn that two days earlier, on Monday, December 22, 2014, when one of her mom’s daycare employees pulled up to Carol’s house, she was surprised to see that Carol’s car wasn’t there. Since Carol was responsible for caring for multiple children whose parents depended on her to be there, this was highly out of character for her.
When the employee asked Ross where his mom was, he told her she’d left the night before after they’d gotten into an argument. Although he assumed that she had gone to their vacation caravan for Christmas, when the employee drove out there, Carol wasn’t there.
When she came back to the house the next day to let Ross know this, she was taken aback by how unbothered he seemed that his mom appeared to be missing. After she urged him to contact the police to report her missing, rather than calling the emergency number, he called the non-emergency line, treating her disappearance as something that was of little urgency.
He was very calm when he gave the dispatcher his mom’s information, mentioning that after they had gotten into an argument, she left & hadn’t come back. He explained that she struggled with depression & he was especially worried about her because during a visit with her doctor the week before, she made a statement that she felt that she didn’t want to be here anymore. He told the dispatcher that he last saw his mom at about 1 am on Monday, December 22.
When Lorraine spoke with investigators, they asked her if there was a location she knew of where her mom may have gone. At this point, there really weren’t many places that she could imagine as her mom didn’t have a large circle of friends. Since she knew she wasn’t at their vacation home, she suggested that maybe she was visiting her parents’ gravesites since they had both passed away.
Lorraine was especially concerned because her mom hadn’t taken her cell phone with her, something entirely uncharacteristic of her as Carol never went anywhere without it. She was firm with investigators that she wasn’t someone who would have walked out of her own home, finding the situation extremely strange.
While the police searched all around the area of Carol’s house as well as the caravan she owned miles outside of town, finding it immaculate, they also asked the public to check any of their outbuildings or sheds.
In the meantime, Ross was going out with search teams as well as working with their assigned family liaison officer after his mom had been deemed a high-risk missing person.
Late on Christmas Eve, investigators found Carol’s car locally on a street that she had no connections to. After her purse & car keys were found in the trunk, the police began to strongly suspect that foul play was involved.
At 7 am on Christmas morning, when Lorraine heard a knock on her front door, an officer told her how her mom’s car had been found. Lorraine explained that her mom habitually wore her purse across her body & each time she climbed into the driver’s seat, she would take the purse off & place it on the passenger seat beside her. She was adamant that her mom never put her purse in the trunk.
Rather than enjoying her son’s first Christmas with her new husband, Lorraine was desperate for answers, sick with worry, wondering where her mom could be. In her heart, she knew that something terrible had happened to her & she was sure that Ross was responsible.
When Ross came by the police station the following day to check in on the status of the investigation, authorities were putting together a timeline of events together. They came to learn that Carol had been missing for well over 24 hours before Ross reluctantly contacted them & he had only done so at the insistence of the daycare employee.
When the police asked Shaun, Lorraine as well as her husband, Steve, if Ross was capable of harming his mom, they each said yes. Lorraine told them about the time Ross assaulted her & although she continued to scream out for her mom to help her, Carol just stood there watching.
On Tuesday, December 30, 2014, one week after Carol was reported missing, police began ramping up efforts to more closely monitor Ross, now believing that he likely knew more about his mom’s disappearance than he was leading them to believe
While monitoring his movements, he took a train to Edinburgh at 2:30 pm that day & walked to a pawn shop with two pieces of his mom’s jewelry. Although he was unsuccessful in selling Carol’s favorite diamond ring since he didn’t have proof of ownership, he was able to sell a gold bracelet for £100 that she’d been given from a grandmother. He later told investigators that the bracelet kind of belonged to me & my mum.
The fact that he was pawning Carol’s belongings told investigators that he knew his mom wasn’t coming back.
When they looked into his online activity, they discovered that right around Christmastime, he had met a girl on the dating website, Plenty of Fish. When they tracked this woman down, they realized that Carol’s car had been found outside of her house. When interviewed, she confirmed that Ross had visited her on Monday night, December 22, 2014.
With evidence stacking against him, investigators were able to obtain a search warrant for Carol’s home at 3 Hill of St. Margaret on Wednesday, January 7, 2015. It was immediately obvious that the home had been cleaned & when the carpet was pulled away in the living room, they saw a considerable bloodstain.
When confronted with this evidence, Ross claimed that his mom had recently gotten a nosebleed, something she was prone to & something family members had confirmed. The forensic team confirmed that it was Carol’s blood, but investigators did not believe it had come from a nosebleed, certain they were dealing with a homicide.
When crime scene investigators went to the family’s caravan along Pettycur Bay, they found blood smear marks inside at a low level suggestive of a cleanup. The blood was confirmed to belong to Carol & investigators felt it was very likely she had been bleeding badly there.
Each of the caravans along Pettycur Bay had an alcove beneath them that could be opened from the outside without a lock, Carol’s included. Keith Hardie, who was in charge of the investigation, felt that these alcoves could be the perfect hiding spot for a body, so he ordered a search of each caravan in the area.
When the first vacant caravan was searched on Monday, January 12, 2015, an officer opened the alcove, reached her hand inside & tragically found Carol’s body inside.
When Lorraine was given the devastating news & she asked if they were able to confirm that the body belonged to her mom, she was told that because the victim’s face had been so badly beaten, they were unrecognizable.
Lorraine & Shaun were tasked with driving down to the morgue to identify Carol by a violet rose tattoo she had on her wrist, in honor of both her & Lorraine’s favorite color. Not only had she been beaten, but the medical examiner determined that Carol had died as a result of strangulation.
Carol’s body had been wrapped in a duvet cover that was secured with a green, heavy-duty twine that was tied in a criss-cross manner that matched what was found inside the caravan. The duvet cover also matched pillow cases that were recovered at Carol’s house, both of which directly connected her murder to someone close to her.
As investigators tried to better understand the relationship between Carol & Ross, they learned that he had gradually become more & more controlling, even with her finances. Carol had been taking many prescription medications to treat a number of health issues, many of which Lorraine felt her mom had brought on herself, including migraines.
Prior to her murder, Ross had put himself in charge of giving his mom Pethadine, a medication to treat her migraines. After realizing he had been giving her more than what had been prescribed, Lorraine confronted him, but he brushed her concerns away, saying that their mom wanted more, so he was giving her more.
Text messages confirmed that Carol had been growing weary of her son’s controlling behavior. When she accused him of mooching money from her, he asked her if he should move out, saying he didn’t want to stress her out, but Carol told him she didn’t want him to leave.
Not only were they together all the time, but she had been paying for everything in his life, including a lavish trip they took to New York City to celebrate his 30th birthday in October 2014.
During this trip, in what became the last photos Lorraine saw of her mom on social media, it was clear that her brother was relishing in the amount of money that was being spent on him. He posted photos of all the sights they visited & all the expensive gifts his mom had bought him.
Police gathered all of the video evidence they could to establish Ross’ movements around the time that Carol vanished, starting at the caravan site. CCTV depicted a man who fit Ross’s description, acting suspiciously & carrying a large bag at 4 am on Monday, December 22, 2014, three hours after Ross claimed his mom had stormed out of the house.
Later that same day, he used his mom’s credit card to see The Hunger Games at the movie theater. He was also withdrawing money from her accounts, going out to dinner & to nightclubs, enjoying his time around the holidays on his mom’s dime while she was missing.
On January 14, 2015, two days after Carol’s body was found, Ross Taggart was arrested on assault charges leading to the death of his mom.
When questioned, he maintained his innocence despite the slew of evidence against him, including the fact that Carol’s car had been found outside of a home that only he was familiar with. When confronted with pawning his mom’s jewelry after she was gone, he argued that she had also done so in the past.
Ross continued to cause his family pain even from behind bars, threatening that he was going to attend his mother’s funeral on an escorted day absence. Thankfully, Lorraine won the case & he wasn’t allowed to go. After her service, Carol was cremated & her remains were buried.
Nearly one year after her murder, Ross’ trial began on November 23, 2015 at the High Court in Edinburgh. Lorraine was there, seeing her brother for the first time since her mother’s death, noticing how much weight he had gained & how he looked like a stranger to her.
Lorraine testified, describing Ross as her mother’s blue-eyed boy. She maintained that under no circumstance would her mother have stormed out of her own house after an argument.
Ross was someone who bounced around from short-lived job to short-lived job, often getting fired over accusations of theft. When confronted about attempting to pawn his mom’s expensive ring that had no doubt been removed from her finger after her death, he claimed that he hadn’t tried to sell it, he only wanted to determine the value of the piece.
Late on Christmas Eve, CCTV footage as well as credit card records, prove that Ross had gone out to a club, using his mom’s credit card to pay for his night.
While Ross testified that he had nothing to do with his mother’s death, saying, I’m the last person who would lift my hands to my mother, Prosecutor Ian McSporran, presented a slew of hard evidence that went directly against this statement. This included Carol’s blood that was found both inside her home as well as her caravan which proved she hadn’t stormed out after an argument as he claimed.
Markings of blood in the caravan were strongly suggestive that her body had been dragged along the floor of when she was still alive & actively bleeding, no doubt in the early morning hours of Monday, December 22, 2014.
Evidence indicated that after he beat his mom to the point that her face was unrecognizable, he strangled her & broke her neck. Her body was then bound in materials that were linked to Ross, items from both his mom’s house as well as the caravan.
After Carol’s car was found, investigators determined that the address of the woman Ross had met online had been programmed into the car’s navigation system, although he denied putting it in. He drove to this woman’s house later on Monday, November 22, 2014 & the car was found there two days later on Christmas Eve. This was in contrast to the story that he told investigators, that his mother had driven off after their argument at about 1 am that Monday morning.
Greenery was found attached to the bumper of Carol’s car, suggesting it had been driven off-road. The driver’s seat was pushed to a position to fit someone over six feet tall, such as Ross, rather than Carol, who was a petite woman.
The jury began their deliberations on Wednesday morning, November 25, 2015, two days after the trial began. After only one hour, they unanimously found Ross Taggart guilty of murdering his mother, Carol Taggart. That same day, he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 18 years.
After the sentencing, Lorraine attempted to begin living a new normal, not yet thinking much about her mom’s estate or will. When she contacted her lawyer, she was stunned to learn that despite his conviction, Ross was still the executor of their mom’s £350,000 estate, which allowed him to pull strings from his prison cell.
A law that applies in England, Scotland & Wales, called the Forfeiture Act of 1982, prevented him from inheriting his mom’s assets, but allowed him to legally control them from behind bars. Any personal items that Lorraine wanted to retrieve from her mom’s house, had to be done under the supervision of Ross’ lawyers.
Unable to afford the lawyers fees to remove him from the will, Lorraine, who owns her own dance studio, The Lorraine Taggart School of Dance, campaigned to change the law to prevent convicted murderers from being executors of the estate of the person they murdered.
Lorraine & her husband Steven Bristow started a petition to change the law, which got over 60,000 signatures. Following a nine year campaign alongside her family, their efforts resulted in the Trusts & Succession (Scotland) Act which passed into law in early 2024, which stops anyone convicted of murder from being an executor of a victim’s will.
There is something especially heartbreaking about a case like Carol Taggart’s, because the person who took her life was someone she had spent a lifetime loving, protecting & providing for.
What makes this story that much more disturbing is what happened after her murder. Ross didn’t just kill his own mother, he lied about her disappearance, feigned concern & went about his life as though the woman who had done so much for him meant absolutely nothing.
In the aftermath of his conviction, the pain for Carol’s family continued when they realized that the person responsible for taking her life, was able to continue to maintain control over her estate, forcing them into yet another battle for justice.
Carol had been a hardworking woman who deserved to grow old, to enjoy her grandchildren & to be surrounded by the people who truly loved her. Instead, her life was taken by someone who should have been among the very last people she ever had to fear. She had been there for Ross, blindly protecting him every single day of his life, never imagining that one day, she would need protection from him.
References:
- IMDB: Netflix: When Missing Turns to Murder – S2.E4
- Daily Record: Scots woman’s abuse nightmare at the hands of brother who killed mum days before Christmas
- Mirror: Woman was battered by brother before he killed their mum days before Christmas
- The Courier: Murder victim estate loophole closed thanks to Fife family’s campaign
- BBC News: Ross Taggart told police he would ‘never lift his hand’ to mother
- BBC News: Police officer tells Ross Taggart murder trial of caravan body find
- Dunfermline Press: Ross Taggart sentenced to 18 years for murdering his mother
- Medium: The murder of Carol Taggart: A Scottish true crime case of betrayal, control & a legal loophole
