How a night out ended up costing two friends their lives
THEY were typical teenage girls on the cusp of adulthood and, all of a sudden, in a hurry to broaden their horizons. Of the two, Christine Eadie had grown up more quickly, recently moving into a flat with an older friend while her closest chum Helen Scott still lived in the family home with her Donny Osmond and David Cassidy posters on the bedroom wall.
Christine had worked for a year as a typist in a surveyor’s office but lately Helen, too, had landed a job in a kilt shop in Edinburgh’s Princes Street.
The girls were moving on in the world, earning their own money and, in part, their night out in mid-October 1977 was a celebration of that fact.
But neither one would make it home alive. Some time after leaving the World’s End pub on the Royal Mile – the last stop in a crawl of six or seven bars – the two 17-yearolds were raped, beaten and murdered. Then they were discarded like rag dolls at separate locations in East Lothian.
For Helen, nights out drinking were by no means a regular occurrence. That much was clear from her father Morain’s advice. He told her to phone home if she found herself in any difficulties and he would come out in the car to collect her.
At 11pm that Saturday the phone at the family home in Fairmilehead did ring. But when Helen’s mother Margaret went to pick it up there was nobody on the line. Was that Helen? Her family have never known.
It is clear, however, that hours before she was murdered, Helen tried to call Allan Dixon, the boy she had been seeing lately. He was a waiter at a Berwickshire hotel. She had last seen him at the Coldstream Civic Week when she stayed with his family in the town.
By the time she reached the World’s End on the night of October 15, Helen had almost certainly had more alcohol than she was used to. There are, however, indications she had stopped drinking some time earlier in the evening. Christine was the more used to parties and, probably, to the effects of alcohol. But it was she who was seen to fall as she left the pub, catching the attention of policeman John Rafferty.
Drink may well have clouded their judgment as they debated whether to accept a lift. But the cruel reality is the two friends died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were innocents in an environment which happened to be visited that night by unspeakable evil.
The two girls had known each other for years, attending Edinburgh’s Firrhill High School together. While Christine spent much of her formative years staying with her grandparents in Colinton Mains – her mother lived a few miles away in Musselburgh, East Lothian – Helen’s upbringing was more conventional.
Her brother Kevin, who was just 11 when she died, remembered her as a quiet tomboy with a small circle of close friends. He said: ‘Her report card probably said she should try harder, but she wasn’t greatly interested in academics. She left school at 16 and had hoped to work with children. She loved children.’
It was only after her death the family discovered a cache of presents which Helen had bought in October with her first month’s salary.
Her brother recalled: ‘ That shows how kind she was. She spent her first wages on our Christmas presents.’
Since Helen had made the effort, Kevin thought the f amily should, too. He persuaded his parents to mark the occasion by opening the presents she had bought.
Police knew at an early stage of their investigation that Helen had been a virgin until the night of her death.
Christine, always the more outgoing, had had boyfriends before.
Police described her as more of a risk taker – a vivacious teenager with an active social life and a wide circle of friends. She had her introspective side, however, and kept extensive diaries throughout her teens.
It was Christine, too, who wore the more adventurous fashions. On the night she died she was wearing one of her favourite outfits, a denim jumpsuit, black ankle boots and a coat with a fur collar. Helen chose the rather less dressy combination of jeans, jersey, shirt, clogs and a recently bought long black coat.
DURING their ‘girly nights in’ the topics covered were hardly surprising: clothes, make-up, pop music and, inevitably, boys. But it was men some years the girls’ senior who would bring horror to their teenage lives before abruptly ending them.
Days after his daughter’s body was found, Morain Scott said: ‘I can’t put into words the heartbreak we have gone through.
‘My girl went off to work as happy as a lark on Saturday morning. She was going out with her chums right after work.
‘I still can’t believe that it’s my little girl and her chum who are dead.’
Nobody knows whether 32-year-old Angus Sinclair and his 22-year-old brother-in-law Gordon Hamilton approached the girls in the World’s End pub that night or swooped outside as the friends were leaving.
All that is known is, in climbing into Sinclair’s camper van, the teenagers had stumbled drunk into a world of evil and depravity from which there would be no escape. In the bleak hours that followed, two monsters laid waste to their prey. The girls died horribly.