TRIUMPH FOR SCIENCE AND OLD-SCHOOL POLICE WORK

THE World’s End was a totemic case, whose emotive epithet has courted press and public attention for almost 40 years. Some cases are like that; they stay with you, they get under your skin and they never leave you. They haunt you and come to define what you worked for, every setback only increasing your determination to solve the crime. Every officer who worked on the World’s End case, myself included, felt that way.

When the first call came through, I was a young detective sergeant. It was a quiet Sunday backshift until we received a report of a missing person, Helen Scott, who had failed to return home after a night out.

About the same time, a report came in that the body of a young woman had been found on a beach. As the afternoon unfolded and a second body was found, a real shock ran through the office.

Soon it was established the girl on the beach wasn’t Helen, but her friend Christine, with whom she had been out drinking. We had ten to 12 murders a year, most of them domestics. Stranger killings were not unknown, but they were unusual.

Double homicides were extraordinary. The impact was immediate. Many officers were recalled to duty, including the whole of the investigation branch and forensic science. You could just see this was something different.

The case caught the public mood. There were no mobile phones in these days, so kids were not allowed out late. There was real public fear.

Within 24 hours, investigators had a rough idea of what had happened that night after speaking to the girls’ friends – but months later, we still only had that rough idea.

Absolutely critically, the early part of the inquiry made a first-class job of the scenes of crime and the preservation of evidence. They hadn’t missed anything. Without computerisation, it was all catalogued using the old card system. Without that, the case would never have been solved.

We had none of the technological aids modern inquiries consider routine. We couldn’t trace what calls were made on the pub payphone, there was no CCTV and no information from local cash machines.

After a year, we ran out of leads. Traditional policing methods did not resolve the World’s End case at the time – we didn’t come close. But it’s hard to see what else we could have done. We followed the leads we had. Most importantly, we carefully stored and retained all the relevant documents and forensic evidence so other investigators, 37 years later, could capitalise on them.

The case was never closed. In 1981, I was a detective inspector and became involved in the follow-up World’s End inquiries.

The previous year, CID heads had held a conference to discuss links between the World’s End murders and some unsolved Glasgow cases around the same time – but there wasn’t enough to connect them.

At that time, Sinclair was not a suspect or even on the database of the World’s End case or any of the others. He was relatively unknown and had no apparent connection with the World’s End or East Lothian.

His only serious prior offence had been the juvenile killing of Catherine Reehill in 1961. After his release, his next serious conviction was in 1982 for a series of rapes and assaults.

In 2001, after he was convicted for the 1978 murder of 17-year-old Mary Gallacher, an opportunity was perhaps missed to investigate his past.

It was only in 2004 that we began to understand the pattern of Sinclair’s killings. A review of all 1,038 homicides of women in Scotland between 1968 and 2003 found six of them matched Sinclair’s method.

They were the World’s End cases along with four Glasgow murders – those of Anna Kenny, Hilda McAulay, Agnes Cooney and Frances Barker. The Crown was invited to charge Sinclair with three of the Glasgow cases but key evidence had been lost so no charges resulted. Has Angus Sinclair escaped justice for other serious offences? I am sure of it, but we will never know for certain just how many.

The World’s End murders were only resolved when advances in forensic science meant vital evidence could be extracted from materials which were of no evidential value in the 1970s.

By the time I was Deputy Chief Constable, my role had changed. A new generation of detectives had taken up the torch – we had to ensure they had the funding needed.

IREMEMBER the despair after Sinclair was finally placed in the dock in 2007, only for that first trial to end in disaster. I had retired by then and there was a very real prospect he would cheat justice. But having failed Helen and Christine, the justice system took responsibility, changed the law and put matters right.

It may be of little consolation to Helen and Christine’s families, but the long investigations into their deaths, along with the legal trials and tribulations down the years, have helped change the law and left our justice system fairer and better.

In the future, other victims, their families and we as a society will benefit – and that is a positive legacy from this tragic tale. We can perhaps take some comfort from that.

Tom Wood is a former Deputy Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police and author of The World’s End: The Final Verdict.