Acid monster 'wants new life'

ONE of Scotland's most notorious criminals, branded the 'acid monster' for organising a horrific attack which left his ex-wife disfigured, sits in his mother's Leith flat, pleading for a future.

'I only want to get on with my life,' complains Gordon Modiak, the jealous husband who paid an accomplice £3000 to callously wreck his wife's life, permanently blinding her and leaving her with shocking facial injuries.

'I'm out of prison now, but I'm still trapped. I'm made out as this monster, I've been portrayed as a nasty person - it's not true.

'I want to leave it behind. I got time for a horrific thing, but it's in the past.'

boo bloody hoo!

Just a few miles across the city, what happened 15 years ago is still deeply etched in the memory of his ex-wife Louise Duddy.

She is slim and tanned, with shining long auburn hair and elegant, manicured hands. Her face, however, has been almost destroyed. Where her left eye should be is the outline of its socket covered by a sliver of skin and a tiny, watery drop - like a permanent tear - which has settled in one corner. The eyelids of her right eye are fused together, her eyebrows are missing, part of her nose has melted away and her lips are burned, dry and sore.

The pint of sulphuric acid, which her husband's hired hitman, Kelvin Greenhalghse, threw into her face as she ushered her two terrified young children into her car during a shopping trip in February 1991, even burned the enamel off her teeth and scarred her legs where it dripped through her clothes. Worst of all, it robbed her of the chance to see her sons grow into fine young men.

She is blind, a virtual prisoner in her home and still frightened. She's also angry.

"He feels trapped!" She spits out the words. "He wants to have a future! What makes him think he deserves a future? Look at what I have to live with every day . . . he's wrecked my life.

He should never have been allowed out of jail. Perhaps justice will catch up with him eventually?