BLOODLUST OF A MANIAC
IN adulthood, he has been a free man for only 14 years. It was at the end of that period, in 1982, that Angus Sinclair made a final, cynical attempt to bargain his way out of the jail cell that awaited him.
He asked his l awyer to tell Lord Cameron he was willing to be chemically castrated if the judge was prepared to consider imposing such an order in the interests of public safety.
His Lordship preferred another course. He told the 37-year-old the penalty for his catalogue of sex offences against defenceless girls was imprisonment for life. He did not mean a life sentence – where offenders serve ten or 20 years before being paroled. He meant Sinclair should never be freed.
Lord Cameron was aware Sinclair’s previous offences included one killing. Only Sinclair himself knew the full appalling extent of his crimes. That remains the case.
Yesterday’s convictions bring the official total to four but investigators and criminal profilers believe his tally for the year 1977 alone could be as many as six.
Over decades, the World’s End murders became a byword for grisly mystery. The mystery today is how Sinclair was able to get away with it for as long as he did. For police now think Christine Eadie and Helen Scott were murdered by a methodical serial killer during his most prolific spell.
If their suspicions are correct, Sinclair struck in Glasgow only two weeks before the World’s End murders in Edinburgh. Police also believe that, seven weeks later, he murdered another young woman in Glasgow.
The full list could run into double figures, while those scarred in childhood by his sex attacks could number into the hundreds.
When detectives asked him in the early 1980s how many children he had molested, his answer was chillingly vague. ‘I don’t know. It might be 50. It might be 500.’
Then, at least, Sinclair showed some willingness to co-operate in the investigations of his crimes. ‘If you can find out where and when, I’ll tell you whether I did them or not,’ he offered. But he has provided no help in
His murders could run
into double figures
more than 30 years. With no possibility of release, the motivation to co- operate disappears.
At 69, Sinclair is one of a handful of lifers who can neither be redeemed nor punished more severely than they have already been. It makes little material difference to him whether he is convicted of further crimes.
Yet he admits to nothing, preferring the rigmarole of expensive trials which put his victims’ families through more suffering.
Slumped in the dock at his retrial for the World’s End murders, this slight, greybearded figure, barely 5ft 3in, seems scarcely capable of such unspeakable wickedness.
Yet when he entered the witness box, his performance – an unsettling mixture of evasion and menace – offered a terrifying glimpse of a serial killing machine.
It was in 1961 that Sinclair received his first jail sentence – ten years for killing seven-year-old Catherine Reehill, who was staying with her aunt in St Peter’s Street, St George’s Cross, Glasgow, where the Sinclair family lived in a tenement. Only 16 at the time, Sinclair gave the girl money to buy him chocolate from a local shop. When she came back, he pinned her to a wall and sexually assaulted her.
Then he strangled her with a bicycle inner tube as she screamed for her father. She was still alive when he threw her down the stairwell in an attempt to make her death look like an accident. She died in an ambulance which he, in an effort to cover his tracks, called.
Police saw through his pretence quickly, but it was his older brother John who convinced him to confess, before refusing to have anything more to do with him.
Sentencing him for culpable homicide, Lord Mackintosh had a psychiatric report which revealed how dangerous Sinclair had become.
It said: ‘I do not think psychotherapy is likely to benefit his condition and he will constitute a danger from now onwards. He is obsessed by sex and, given the minimum of opportunity, he will repeat these offences, irrespective of what promises he may give to the contrary.’
How tragically prophetic those words turned out to be.
Sinclair seems to have become a thoroughly unpleasant youngster while attending St George’s Road Secondary. He was considerably smaller than most of his classmates, which meant girls ignored him and boys bullied him. According to the psychiatrist who examined him, he was of ‘below average intelligence’.
There was talk of him strangling cats. At 15, he interfered with a little girl. At 16, he killed one.
After serving less than seven years, the freed 23-year-old killer was far from a reformed character.
Imprisonment had taught Sinclair a trade and, on release, he found work as a painter in Edinburgh, living in Hill Place, off Nicolson Street. The World’s End pub was only a few streets away.
While living there, he met his future wife, Sarah Hamilton from Glasgow, a trainee nurse at Edinburgh’s Eastern General Hospital.
Not until well after they were married in 1970 did she learn about his past. ‘It floored me,’ she later said. ‘It was put across to me that he made a mistake and this young child died. That was a horror to me, but I was into my marriage by this time and I thought I knew him.
‘I never looked at him as a child killer. If you walked into my house when he was living with me you would have said I was the volatile one. He wasn’t violent, not at all.’
Yet Sinclair was terrifyingly violent – just not at home.
One detective said: ‘He would fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. He would pick fights with anyone he thought was disrespectful, launching into them in pub toilets and beating them senseless.’
By 1972, the couple had a baby son, Gary, and had moved back to Glasgow, staying with one of Sarah’s brothers. In the first half of the 1970s, Sinclair was a regular adulterer and a persistent sex pest towards primary school age girls – a habit he later admitted he had indulged ‘for years’.
But it is not until 1977 that his killing spree is believed to have begun. Something evidently prompted him to go further. But now, his victims were young adults, women he could target late at night.
He had invested in a camper van, a handy vehicle for a serial sex killer. It was scrapped in 1992, taking any secrets it may have held. Only Sinclair can know what monstrosities took place inside it.
In July this year, Thomas Young, 79, went to his grave as the man responsible for murdering Frances Barker, 37, of Maryhill, Glasgow. He was said to have bound her, gagged her with a pair of pants, raped and strangled her before dumping her in a rural road in Glenboig, Lanarkshire.
There is no question Young was a monster. He was also found guilty of two attempted murders and three rapes, but some detectives are now inclined to believe his claim that he was not responsible for the Barker murder in June 1977. They think it was the work of Sinclair.
Next to die was Anna Kenny, 20, a brewery worker who vanished while heading home to the Gorbals after a night out at the Hurdy Gurdy bar in Glasgow’s Townhead in August that year. In April 1979, her remains were found in a makeshift grave in Skipness, Argyll. Around her neck and ankles were traces of the material used to bind her. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Sinclair is the chief suspect.
Two months later, on Saturday October 1, mother- of-two Hilda McAulay, 36, was abducted and raped after a night out at Glasgow’s Plaza Ballroom. Her body was found in woods in Lanarkshire. Her hands were tied behind her back. She had been raped and strangled. Once again, Sinclair is the chief suspect.
The World’s End murders were a fortnight away. And the killer’s modus operandi now seems chillingly apparent.
But there was one crucial difference in the attacks on Christine Eadie and Helen Scott. This time Sinclair had an accomplice. While his crimes up till then were, police believe, one-man jobs, the abduction, rape and slaying of the teenagers required two killers.
Enter Gordon Hamilton, Sinclair’s br o t h e r - i n - l a w, a feckless warehouseman with few friends or interests who had been staying with his sister Sarah. Together, he and Sinclair went on several weekend ‘ f i shing tr i ps’ – or so Sarah thought.
Almost certainly, it was on one of these weekends that Sinclair and Hamilton murdered Christine and Helen. Much less certain is whether this was Hamilton’s only visit to his
brother-in-law’s sordid world. The pair fell out badly in 1978, the year Hamilton got married, and never spoke again.
Thereafter, Hamilton’s life entered a downward spiral. He died of a heart attack in his early forties, a homeless alcoholic. Those closely involved with the World’s End case suspect he was haunted for the rest of his life by what he had done.
Not Sinclair. Seven weeks after the Edinburgh murders, children’s nurse Agnes Cooney, 23, from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, was killed on her way home from a night out. Her hands were bound behind her and she suffered 26 stab wounds. There was no evidence of rape when her body was found on moorland near Airdrie. Sinclair, however, is the chief suspect.
Almost a year passed before 17year-old Mary Gallacher was pulled into bushes on her way to meet two friends. Sinclair held a knife to her throat, raped her, tried to strangle her with the leg of her trousers then finished the job by slitting her throat. Her body was found at the bottom of a 20ft wall on waste ground in Glasgow’s Springburn.
It was another 23 years before Sinclair was identified as the culprit. DNA evidence – which did not feature in any police force’s arsenal in the late 1970s – was his undoing.
By 2001, the year Sinclair was found guilty of Miss Gallacher’s murder, he had served 19 years of
‘There’s no remorse’
his life sentence for a string of sex attacks – including three rapes – on young girls. Lord Cameron’s determination that Sinclair would spent the rest of his life in jail did not deter him from applying for parole in 1999. It was refused. After the 1978 murder was added to his record, it was clear Sinclair would die behind bars.
Today, there is little question the psychiatrist who saw Sinclair as a boy of 16 was spot on in his assessment. The question is, how many times did Sinclair kill? According to FBI criminal profiling expert Mark Safarik, asked by detectives to scrutinise all six 1977 murders, the same killer was behind every one.
He said of Sinclair: ‘People like this are psychopaths, which allows them to kill someone and, half an hour later, be eating a ham sandwich as if nothing had happened.
‘They don’t have empathy for their victims. There’s no remorse.
‘In prison, they are model prisoners. They find religion, they manipulate. They know how to survive. They wear a mask of sanity.’
After the DNA breakthrough in the World’s End case in 2004, police had hoped to charge Sinclair with the unsolved Glasgow murders, too. But they found almost all the evidence had either been lost or was unusable due to ‘degradation’.
Sinclair stood trial for the World’s End murders in 2007 – but the case collapsed.
Yesterday, thanks to a change in the double jeopardy law, that wrong was righted. Hope fades, however, for the families of at least three other murdered women still seeking justice after all these years.