However, a taxi driver and criminal who had been a suspect in the original McCabe inquiry and who admitted to being a "peeping Tom" in Templeton Woods was tried for the murder in 2007, after it was heard that DNA was found on exhibits that had only a 1 in 40 million chance of belonging to anyone else.

Niven said that at the end of the night at around 12:30 am the pair became separated as they were leaving, and she had expected to find McCabe at the entrance of the nightclub waiting for her but she was not.

She had been mistaken for a prostitute by a man who had approached her for sex shortly before she disappeared, something which she had joked about with Niven the very weekend she vanished from the nightclub.

[7] 16 days after she disappeared, McCabe's naked dead body was found in a small clearing in Templeton Woods on the outskirts of the city by two men hunting rabbits with their dogs.

[10] A professor who was asked to review the evidence again when the case was re-opened in 2005 concluded that her death would have been quite sudden due to vagal inhibition in her neck, and that she had possibly been killed during a struggle or during a sex act.

[6] Two witnesses reported seeing a Ford Cortina with a taxi sign on it emerge from a road which led to Templeton Woods on the night McCabe disappeared.

[7] He protested that he did not have any convictions for violence or sexual crimes, but in an interview on 3 March 1980 he admitted to being a "peeping tom" who used binoculars to spy on courting couples in Templeton Woods.

[11] Despite a large and widely publicised manhunt for the killer, police failed to charge anyone with the murder of McCabe and late into 1980 the investigation was wound down, but left open.

[6] Only 11 months prior to the discovery of McCabe's body in Templeton Woods, another woman had been found dead only 150 yards away in the same forest.

[14] Just like McCabe, she was strangled to death and found naked, and taxi drivers were also the key focus of the Lannen murder inquiry.

[15][20][21] In 1996, Tayside Police ordered a new review to take place of the murders of Elizabeth McCabe and Carol Lannen, following the reopening of the Bible John case in Glasgow.

[14] In 2005 police arrested Vincent Simpson, the taxi driver who had been a suspect in the original investigation, at his home in Camberley, Surrey.

[25] They had claimed he could not receive a fair trial due to the fact that some witnesses from the time had either died or could not be traced and because some documents and items were missing, whilst also saying that prosecuting him would "breach his human rights".

[25] Simpson also faced two other charges of breach of the peace, on the grounds that he had approached women in Dundee at around the same time as the murder and caused them distress and alarm.

[29] The defence claimed the DNA also was tainted because there were (at that time) only around three labs in the world that were advanced enough to carry out the techniques used to analyse the evidence, meaning it was difficult to check the results.

[31] Simpson himself claimed to have an alibi, saying he was either at home, ferrying fares around the Dundee area or at a local casino when the murder happened.

[32] On a video shown to the jury of detectives examining evidence, Kennedy said that "my recollection of that exercise was that we took every possible step to make sure there was no chance of contamination".

[6][34] McCabe's mother and other family members had attended the trial almost every day and were reported to have been distressed by the verdict, with Ally Reid of Tayside Police commenting: "Elizabeth's family are understandably disappointed at today's verdict... they understand and support the reasons behind the re-investigation of Elizabeth's death, and appreciate the efforts of those involved in bringing the matter to court".

[34] The BBC reported after that the trial that "There now seems little hope of closure for the McCabe family, or for Templeton Woods to shed its association with unsolved murder.

[37][38] After the law on double jeopardy was changed in Scotland in 2011, allowing previously acquitted suspects to be re-tried if new evidence materialised, the McCabe case was subject to a new review.

[36] In 2013, Simpson, who had returned to living in Camberley and working as a window cleaner, spoke to the Daily Record, saying he did not fear the new investigation into the murder and saying "the cold case will go on and on.