Seeing Red A True Crime Podcast · Mark Randell & Bethan Trueman

The Torture Room: The Murder of Lynda Spence

·1 hr 20 min·10 clips

The case starts in a bad place. Linda Spence is already boxed in, with possible prison time hanging over her even if she helped police. She turned down their offer. By spring 2011, the account has powerful people looking for her, and Colin Coates was one of them. He had lost £85,000 in the Stansted Airport property deal Linda tried to con him over. On April 14, 2011, he acted. Linda was lured from her Glasgow home, though the account says the exact setup is still unclear. Whatever she thought she was walking into, it was not a truce. Coates got her to his house in Rushill, maybe with talk of a deal or a way to settle things. The hosts do not pretend to know what was in Linda's head. They sit with the possibility that she was nervous, but still trying to manage the danger in front of her. At 27, she comes across as clever and street smart enough to know Coates was a serious threat. Still, she went. Then Philip Wade helped take her. Wade, also 42, was described as a small-time cocaine dealer with minor convictions, not a major figure like Coates. But he was six feet six and strong, exactly the kind of right-hand man Coates wanted for revenge. Linda likely knew very fast that things had gone badly wrong. The episode closes on the cruelty left behind: a family with memories, but no grave, and a woman remembered as bubbly, alive, and more than what was done to her.

As heard by us

A measured true-crime account that moves from a property scam and a trap to abduction and a grim aftermath.

This episode follows Linda Spence from a property scam and a failed police-informant offer into the trap Colin Coates laid in Glasgow, then into the abduction carried out with Philip Wade and the aftermath that follows.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a dark true-crime story built around a con that ends in a brutal abduction, press play.

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