The World's End

Now, we had experienced homicide and many of us had seen a fair bit. But the brutality, the violence shown to these girls, the deposition site. the way that all evidence had been removed. This was a cold and calculated, brutal killing of these two young girls. When a serious crime is committed in a small town, A handful of detectives are charged with solving the case. I'm Yardley, and I'm fascinated by these stories. So I invited my friends, Detectives Dan and Dave,

to help me gather the best true crime cases from around the country and have the men and women who investigated them tell us how it happened. I'm Dan. And I'm Dave. We're identical twins from Small Town USA. Dave investigated sex crimes and crimes against children. He's now a patrol sergeant at his police department. Dan investigated violent crimes. He's now retired.

Together, we have more than two decades experience and have worked hundreds of cases. We've altered names, places, relationships, and certain details in these cases to maintain the privacy of the victims and their families. So we ask you to join us in protecting their true identities as well as the locations of these crimes out of respect for everyone involved. Thank you.

Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan. Good morning. Good morning. So nice to see you. Great to be here. And we have Detective Dave. Happy to be back with the team. Oh, it's so good. We have the A-team today. And Small Town Fam. Oh, my God.

I really can hardly contain my excitement. I am so thrilled to welcome a new guest to the podcast, but they're not even in the United States. We've gone all the way across to Europe to get. retired Deputy Chief Constable Tom, who is in Scotland. That's right. Good morning, Tom. Good morning. Well, good evening. Yes, evening for you.

We're all on Zoom, of course. And so, as I always say, as we record during a pandemic, you might hear cats wandering through dogs, garbage trucks, you know, the usual life. Police helicopters a lot, too, here in Los Angeles. Yes. So, Tom, without further ado, I'm just going to let you take it away. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to join you today at Scotland.

For those of you who don't know, it is a small country, 5 million inhabitants, and most of the country is the Wild Highlands, the most beautiful part of the world. Two and a half million of our population are spread between the two big cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, in the central belt of the lowlands. Glasgow's an industrial city, shipbuilding, iron and steel and coal and all that.

And Edinburgh is very much a city of academia, the law, tourism and the arts. And between Edinburgh and Glasgow, as I say, about half the population of Scotland. Now we are... generally a quiet, law-abiding country. In the east of Scotland, in the 70s, and still today, we have an average of about 12 to 15 murders. homicides a year. That's all. And most of these are domestics. So while we had experienced and very able detectives, it's fair to say that they were not major case experienced.

As anybody who knows anything about homicide investigation knows, that it is a skill, it is a craft that you pick up and you learn. But the more you're exposed to it, then the better you become. Now, for some reason which I still don't understand, in the 1970s and 80s, Scotland, quiet, conservative Scotland, was visited by three separate... serial killers. Three men who predated on young women and girls for sexual motives. And...

That, of course, is highly improbable. When you look at the statistics and when you look at the probabilities, you come to the conclusion that they must have been linked or they must have known each other or they must be operating together. They were not. They were all... None of them was connected and they all operated independently over the periods 77, 76 through to about 85, 86. And this caused us the most...

inordinate problem investigating and coming to terms with these serial killings. Between them, they accounted for something like 25 victims. So it was a time of great challenge. Now saying that... Most people carry through their police service their 30 years or their 35 years, in my case, without ever having the experience of a major case. And I consider myself fortunate that...

Not that these cases took place, but that since they did take place, I was involved in the investigation of all three of them. And I want to talk today about perhaps... the most dangerous of these serial killers, and his victims in Edinburgh. And this is a crime which is well known as the world's end murders.

On the 15th of October 1977, it's not long, it's within the lifespan of many people who will be listening to this program, but in terms of forensic science, in terms of investigative procedures, It might as well be in the Dark Ages. 15th of October 1977, two young girls, Helen and Christine, 17 years old. And let me just say now that these were girls, they were not women.

They were not worldly wise. They were not mature. They had just left school. And when we approached this investigation, we very much looked at them as child murders. Two young girls, Helen and Christine, set out for a Saturday night on the town. Now, they had been friends from nursery school. They were inseparable. They often went to each other's houses. Their families knew each other.

They were truly bosom buddies. They had just started work. They had just got their first salaries. One of them was a secretarial worker. The other was a shop worker. And they went out in the town. Helen, wearing her brand new... Very expensive, very stylish Burberry raincoat. Legal drinking age in Scotland at that time was 18 years old. But if you were 17...

Like the girls, then it was the sport to dress up to the nines and go out and about and see if you could pass muster as an 18-year-old and see whether you could get into a pub and get a drink. And that's exactly what Helen and Christine did on the night of Saturday, the 15th of October. The social norm was that you went out, you met your friends, trying to see where the party was after the 10 o'clock closing, because it was very strict 10 o'clock pub closing at that time in Scotland.

Eventually, after a couple of nights out and a couple of drinks, they had managed to get a half pint of beer in a couple of the pubs and they had been told to leave another couple of pubs, but they eventually got... to the World's End pub in the High Street in Edinburgh. Now, the High Street is the ancient medieval centre of Edinburgh. It's very much the tourist heart of the city.

And the World's End pub is a very old pub. And the reason it's called the World's End is because it's situated right on the boundary of what they called the Flodden Wall. Now, the Flodden Wall was a wall that was built around the city to protect it. from English invasion back in the 16th century. Longson's been pulled down in ruins, but the boundary of the Flodden Wall was where civilisation ended. In other words, once you left...

the security of the walled city, you were on your own. It was the end of the civilised world and that was what gave the pub its name. So they went into the World's End pub around about half past nine. I remember 10 o'clock closing. There was a big crowd of them by that time. They had gathered pals and friends on the way, and they were all in the World's End pub, and people were coming and going. It's not a pub that attracts locals as much as people that are passing through.

And it's very close to Edinburgh Castle, which at that time was the home of a fairly large military garrison. A lot of soldiers barracked at Edinburgh Castle. During the hour they were in the World's End pub, their pals noticed that the two girls, Helen and Christine, got into conversation with two strangers, people who they didn't recognise, not part of the set they had gone there with.

And there were obviously an animated conversation with these strangers and weren't drunk, but had had two or three drinks. 10.30 came and it was time to leave. And they were all deciding whether they were to go on to somebody's house to a party or what they were going to do. And Helen and Christine said they were making their own way home. They weren't going on with their pals. And they were seen at 10.30 leaving.

the World's End pub, in company, loose company, not arm in arm, but in the company of these two men that they had met in the pub, who were strangers. They were seen coming out of the pub. are turning right down into one of the dark streets of Edinburgh Old Town, and they were never seen alive again. Now, they didn't come home that night, but...

Neither of the sets of parents thought that was suspicious because each thought that they were staying with the other one. And so it wasn't until the following morning, mid-morning, the following morning... that the parents of Helen and Christine started to get alarmed.

And they started phoning round the various pals. Where are the girls? Have they been at a party? Where are they? Still didn't think it was all that suspicious because, as I say, they had sometimes stayed at a friend's house overnight.

About that same time, early lunchtime on Sunday this is the 16th of October a couple were walking their dog along a beautiful stretch of beach. coastline in East Lothian, which is about 20 miles east of Edinburgh. And this is a part of the country which is famous for its golf courses. It is really quite beautiful.

Two people, a couple, were walking their dog along the tide line at Aberlady Bay when they saw what they thought was a tailor's dummy lying on the tide line. As they got closer, they realised that... wasn't a tailor's dummy, it was the body of a girl, and this turned out to be the body of Christine. Lying on her back, bound and gagged with her own clothes, and naked.

Of course, no mobile phones, so with a great presence of mind, one of the couples stands and keeps guard on the body and the other makes their way as best they can back to find the public telephone and telephone the police. The local police arrived, and just about the same time as the local police arrived, from about 20 miles away, a local farmer phones in and sends that he has found.

A body. And this is the body of Helen, who is lying in the middle of a field, supine, on her back, naked, bound and gagged, with her own clothes, but lying...

on her brand new Burberry coat. Now, in 1977, the police forces of Scotland had just been reformed. Prior to 1975, there'd been about 24 police forces in Scotland, ridiculously small police organisations, without the capability of carrying out major inquiries. But in 1975, there'd been amalgamations.

And that part of Scotland, our part of Scotland East, was now policed by Lothian and Borders Police, which included Edinburgh, East Lothian, Mid Lothian, West Lothian. And it was a fair-sized force, 3,500 officers. and 1,500 support staff in 1977. What qualifies as support staff? Scientists, clerical staff, office workers, unsworn officers, non-sworn officers in your parlance.

But the systems within the force were not quite yet brought together. It takes a long time to amalgamate police organisations. years sometimes. And two years after amalgamation, you still had quite different systems operating in different parts of the force. Now, the girls had gone missing from the city of Edinburgh, which had one system. And they were found in East Lothian, which had another system. And so this immediately was a problem. However, we had our first bit of good luck.

One of the first people to attend at the scene was a young biologist called Lester Nibb. Lester Nibb was a young man in his 20s at that time, a South African, and he was part of our... crime response team. Ever since the 1930s and the famous Ruxton case, there had been an investment, a steady investment in forensic science and particularly crime scene management within the East of Scotland.

What's the Ruxton case? So that's the case of Buck Ruxton, who was a doctor. He was married, he had a couple children, and he had a live-in maid, servant, female. And one night, Dr. Buck Ruxton... killed his wife, and killed his live-in servant. And this happened in the mid-1930s in England. Yeah. And it really modernized the way that investigators looked at a crime scene.

Really worldwide. That's right. And I learned all about the Buck Ruxton case because I read Tom's book. Our Tom? This Tom right here? Our Tom right here. He wrote a book about it. Yeah, it's true. I did. And it's great. Awesome. Okay. And so Lester Nib attended at the scene and carried out a highly professional crime scene recovery. When you look at it now, even look through a modern lens, it was very, very well done.

Now, that may seem like... a so what statement. But actually, in the 1970s, the way that we dealt with and the way that we managed and the way that we looked after forensic samples wasn't always the best. It really wasn't. Now, I was a... a young sergeant at that time, and I was working in the CID administrative office. I was just into the CID at that time and you had to do your penance by working on the desk, as it were.

I actually know what CID stands for because I watch a lot of British true crime. For our listeners, CID stands for Criminal Investigation Department, and they're basically the plainclothes detectives in the UK. Correct. I came on to duty at lunchtime. on the 16th of October. And there was an atmosphere, there was a feeling within the whole of the CID block, the detective division, that this was something different.

Now, we had experienced homicide, and many of us had seen a fair bit. But the brutality, the violence shown to these girls, the deposition site... the way that all evidence had been removed. This was a cold and calculated brutal killing of these two young girls. And we were looking at perpetrators because we were sure there were two.

perpetrators. It would have been very difficult for one person to subdue both these girls who are both strong, fit young women. We were sure we were looking at perpetrators who had done this before and would do it again. There was also a very strong sense that these were our girls. This was an outrage which we could not let stand. Now death was by strangulation.

using their own clothes, and they had both been sexually assaulted. And the coat that I've mentioned before immediately became significant. Remember, this was a new coat. and it was a very high-quality garment. And we found that there was a large stain on the lining where Helen's body had been lying. And this stain looked... to us to be a drainage stain. And when we tested it, we got a positive response for semen. Now that was all we could do at that time. That was all our technology.

allowed us to do. But I remember speaking to Lester Nibb and he was convinced that what we had in that coat was the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone. And he saw that although... This quote could tell us very little at the time, that one day it would give us the answer, if only we were smart enough to ask the right question.

So very often in long, long investigations and cold cases, the actual inquiry is put to bed for a while, the net's reinvigorated, et cetera, et cetera. This was never the world's end murders. were never put to bed. The investigation was continuously investigated for 37 years. And importantly, Lester Nibb and the forensic staff... at our laboratory made it their business to keep careful control of that coat.

How did you all store that kind of biological evidence back then? Because in the United States, it was pretty haphazard. Sometimes it was stored in, it would be an attic, like hot, not... temperature controlled and could be a disaster for biological evidence like that. Well, it was pretty haphazard in Scotland too. You're absolutely right. At that time, it was pretty haphazard. Sometimes forensic evidence was stored in the detective's bottom drawer.

In an old plastic bag. Yes. Yeah. That's right. That's right. It seems incredible now that that happened, but it did. Anyway, luckily, because of the legacy... that we had going back to the 1930s to the famous Ruxton case, which I've already spoken about. We had a very good crime lab and we had good refrigeration. And because of Leicester Nib, it was kept in optimal.

conditions. There's one or two really important people in this investigation and the first one was Leicester Nebb. All credit to him because he saw the future. He made it his personal business to control that coat and not let it out of his control for way over 30 years. If you wanted to ask questions about the coat or about the forensic...

You had to get through Lester Nib. He was not going to be moved. And he was right. You know, there's a lot of talk now about marvellous new forensic science and all the things that it can bring. The truth of the matter is... that marvellous new forensic science is absolutely no good to you at all unless you have looked after the productions correctly at the time. And part of that is not just about seizing.

and maintaining these productions, it's also about the audit trail. What's an audit trail? That's like chain of custody in the United States. Oh, I see. Yeah, you've got to have a meticulous record. of where these garments have been at every juncture. Because the first thing a defence lawyer is going to do is going to suggest that there's been contamination and if they can break that chain...

then that weakens the case considerably. So we set up two incident rooms, one in East Lothian where the bodies had been found and the other in Edinburgh. because the girls had been last seen alive with these two men in the World's End pub. At that time, we didn't have a computerised index system, so we ran a card index system.

Now, the card index system which we used was not greatly improved on the card index system which had been used in the original Jack the Ripper case in 1888. I have seen the index cards. from that case. And, okay, there are superficial differences, but you're still dealing with thousands and thousands of handwritten cards, with all that that means for

misfiling and human error. Potentially, it is absolutely immense. You're also subject or at the mercy of whichever detective or officer takes that information down. what they deem to be important or relevant to the case. Some detectives are better than others at documenting what they hear and... Some are better than others at driving down a line of questions to get answers to things that maybe a source of information just kind of dismisses as inconsequential or not relevant at all.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And of course, in these days, when you were forming a major incident team, you just took who was available. Sometimes they weren't the best people. There wasn't the dedicated training and there wasn't the dedicated staffing. of incident rooms. The big problem is and you'll know this yourself that once a suspect gets past the first interview it's very difficult to go back. How come?

There are various reasons for that. One of them is the suspect is now kind of comfortable lying to you. And absent new evidence that you can confront them on, it's kind of difficult to get over that hurdle. They also now sort of have an idea of what your trajectory is, yes? True. Okay. And so the whole system was incredibly open to error.

There was huge publicity, absolutely massive publicity, because there was a sense that this was a death of innocence, as it were. These sort of things didn't happen in Edinburgh. And the local newspapers were absolutely wild on it. But they were also hugely supportive. And one of the reasons why they were hugely supportive... was the conduct of the families of Helen and Christine. Helen's father, Maureen Scott, is the second big character in this story. He, at all times...

over the course of the 37-year investigation, was completely supportive of the police, even though there were times when he shouldn't have been. He was. We in turn kept him... apace with everything that was going on in the investigation, for better or for worse.

That's fairly risky for police. You've got to really trust this father that he's not going to leak things, that he's not going to impact the investigation. That's quite a leap of faith that you guys gave him, and I'm guessing it's largely due to his demeanor and the way he carried himself. Yeah, I mean, clearly we didn't give him chapter and verse of all the ins and outs of the technical parts of the investigation as it went forward.

but we always made sure that he was not surprised, that he was not ambushed by the press. And that was just a matter of respect, and you're absolutely right. That is a judgment based on his character and his demeanour. We were very, very fortunate to have someone of the calibre of Maureen Scott there. Anyway, thousands of leads came in, thousands of false leads.

Remember that back there we had no technology, we had no CCTV, we had no mobile phone signals. We couldn't even find out from the telephone company who had phoned in and out of the payphone in the pub.

All of these things now which you take for granted, we had none of them. At the same time, we began to become aware of a number of other murders which had taken place within about the same time frame. through in Glasgow, which is just 40 miles from us. These were the murders of three girls, Anna Kenny, Hilda Macaulay and Agnes Cooney. Now, the similarity was this, that they had all...

been abducted or disappeared at the weekend. They had all been found strangled in remote locations. Were these other girls, Anna, Hilda... And Agnes also strangled with their own clothes? Yes, with their own clothes, and one of them had been strangled with a piece of her handbag strap. So yes, with their own possessions. And there was a great feeling... within our own squad that all of these cases were linked. In 1980, there was a major conference between the heads of the CID.

to actually ascertain and decide whether these cases were linked and therefore whether they should be investigated together. And they decided not to link these investigations. Now... In hindsight, that was a mistake, but I can understand why they took that decision, because they were terrified of having a card index system which was simply too unwieldy to operate. We already had thousands and thousands of card indexes in our two incident rooms.

If we'd added all of them as well, then the room for error would have been magnified by several times. And so what we agreed to do was remain in close liaison with each other's forces, but not link the investigations. Did anybody... in the public say these murders are similar? Was there enough information out in the press, for instance, that these girls had been strangled with their own clothes, that people said, well, it happened in Glasgow and it happened in Edinburgh?

Do you think that these are connected or did the public not know that much information? No, the public knew and there was a fair press speculation that these murders were linked. So the inquiry never closed. We kept getting little bits and pieces coming in. A lot of it were spiteful calls. We'd get the usual clairvoyance and all of these folk. We got people trying to dob other people in with prisoners and things like that.

But really, nothing much came until about 10 years later, when we started to see the development of DNA. Now, all of this time, Lester Nib is guarding this coat. and is watching for developments in forensic science. He's still convinced that the solution lies in development of forensic science, and he's going to be there to capitalise on it. So he's guarding that quote with his very life.

In the first phase of DNA, you needed bucket samples. It was very destructive. So samples that you sent away for analysis, they were destroyed in the process. So you had to be very, very careful. When we started to send away samples for this coat, we used to send away tiny, tiny little bits of it, literally just, you know, a few millimetres long, send them away to preserve the main part.

of the evidence. And in the late 1990s, about 96, 97, but this time I was the assistant chief in charge of operations, we got our first real breakthrough. We got... a profile from the court, a single male profile from the court. And... At that time, we had a fair database, a DNA database that was being built up, both in the United States and on our side and in Australia. So we were fairly confident.

that once we put this profile onto the database, we would get hit. Because we believed that whoever had committed these crimes was not a single offender, was not a sole offender. I remember distinctly, I said to one of the heads of CID, we've got him just waiting for the phone call. I was absolutely confident that we'd be vindicated. And we got absolutely nothing. Nothing.

We checked every database across the world. Nothing. And, of course, that started to make us wonder, what's happening here? Could this have been a first offender? Or... Even worse than that, was he dead? And here comes into the scene the third key player in this, Alan Jones. He was a detective inspector at that time.

He had joined after the murders, so he wasn't an officer at the time where the two girls went missing, but he took responsibility for it. Now, Alan Jones is an incredible guy, a complete enthusiast. Alan Jones will not take no for an answer. If Alan asked a scientist for a view on something and they told him it couldn't be done, he would ask the question in a different way. Or he'd go and ask another scientist.

He was absolutely indefatigable. He was another one who took personal possession of this investigation. He got to know Helen's father and he was determined that he was not going to let him down. And so Alan Jones kept digging and digging and digging to try and find out more about this profile. Also, we still believe there had to be two men involved. So how come there was only one profile?

Alan came to the conclusion that actually police labs are not the be-all and end-all in terms of... forensic knowledge, that there was quite a lot of forensic knowledge, particularly in relation to DNA, out in the private sector, in small commercial companies. So he started going to forensic science trade fairs. And he had a small presentation about the World's End murders and what he would go down, he would go round and he would pester people at these trade fairs and say...

come and have a look at this, see what you can do for me. And, of course, nine times out of ten, they couldn't help him. That didn't bother him. He just went on and on and on and on. Alan Jones didn't bother about whether they were forensic. DNA companies he would speak to anybody who was advancing the science of DNA and eventually he got a very small company who said well we think we have a new technique

Let us look. And we gave him another small sample of the precious coat. They managed to pick out the individual bits from it. I've often described it as being like... taking a bowl of broth and picking out the individual vegetables from that broth. What we came up with was two male samples and a female sample. Now, the woman was Helen.

It was her coat. The other sample was the one that we'd been searching for for the last five years and that we hadn't had any kind of hit on. But there was a second male sample. And when we checked that on the database... Straight away, we're going to hit. Angus Sinclair.

Angus Sinclair is born in 1945 in Glasgow. And the first time he comes to attention is when he is 15 years old, where he carries out quite a well-organised murder. of a young girl called Catherine Rehill. Catherine Rehill is eight years old. She is a neighbour of his. He's 15, remember. He tempts her into the house, he assaults her, he strangles her, and then he throws her body down into the stairwell to try and disguise the murder. He makes the mistake of...

wanting to be there to control the scene. So he's the person that phones the police. He's the person that wants to help and all the rest of it. So eventually he's convicted. But because he is a minor, he's 15 years old. He's not convicted of murder, he's convicted of culpable homicide. Because he is a minor, he does not have a conviction as such, but a finding of guilt under the Scottish juvenile justice system.

The third big mistake about that murder was that Angus Sinclair is put into the adult prison system. So he's 15 years old, has already committed... a very well-organised, sexually motivated murder, very, very strange for a 15-year-old. He's then put into the adult prison system where he is hardened as a criminal. So by the time he comes out...

Eight years later, he is fully equipped. He is completely impervious to any kind of interview. He is smart. He lives his life in compartments. He is a robber. He is a fraudster. He is a pornographer. He is a sexual predator. And he's also a very good painter and decorator. He manages to combine all of these things by living... in these discrete compartments. Now, Angus Sinclair got out of prison in 1968 and he meets and marries an Edinburgh girl.

And they settle down and he is reasonably quiet till about 1975. And then his marriage breaks up. And that's when the trouble starts. By that time, he is quite a successful painter and decorator. He has got a bit of money about him and he buys a brand new Toyota camper van. And that is the mechanism by which... He goes on his murderous spree in 1976 through 1978. By the time we identify him... Identify him for Helen and Christine's murders? Yeah.

Angus Sinclair is back in prison. He has been convicted in 1980 of a series of sexual assaults against young girls. Very, very serious sexual assaults. He's given a life sentence. Now, when he was arrested for these attacks in 1980, was enough done to dig into his background and to circulate his description and his modus operandi.

And the answer to that question is probably, no, there wasn't enough done. In fairness, they were a different kind of offence with a different category of victims. But even so... I would like to think if that happened now, that there would be a much, much more focused look about someone who is arrested for offences like that. Is it the same agency that arrests him for the sexual assaults that's investigating these murders?

Yes, it's the same agency in Glasgow, but there's no connection made. Are the victims of the sexual assaults in Glasgow the same ages as Helen and Christine? No, his victims are... Much younger, eight, nine years old. So like the original murder victim. Precisely so. What you see is Angus Sinclair starting to offend.

against very young girls in the murder of Catherine Weehill. Well, he's young himself. And then he graduates to murdering older girls and women because some of the Glasgow victims, Anna Kenny, they were in their 20s. And then he comes back to where he started. And his last offences are committed against young girls again. Because by this time, he doesn't have his camper van, his ability to abduct.

So Mr. Sinclair is changing his tactics a bit. He's having to adapt. Makes him a little more dangerous. Right. So then we find out that Angus Sinclair has been subsequently convicted of another murder. a murder on 1978 of a girl called Mary Gallagher. Now, he is caught for this in 2002 through a historic DNA investigation and he's convicted of that and...

There is no circulation about that offence ever throughout Scotland. That was another error. The significant thing about Mary Gallacher is that she's about four foot ten and she is childlike. But she's actually not a child, right? She is, in fact, a young woman. She's like 17 or 18, as I recall, because I looked it up. Yes, and we look at...

In minute detail, every movement of Angus Robertson Sinclair during these critical years, 1976, through to the time he is arrested for the sexual assaults on the little girls.

That, of course, is quite difficult to do because all these associates are gone or their memories have faded. The other thing we had to do, of course, was finally track down this. principal DNA profile, which we'd been looking for since 1998. Remember that Angus Sinclair was the secondary sample. We still had the primary sample to look for.

But having Angus Sinclair in the frame, what we started to do was look at him and work out. So who are his associates? Who are his co-offenders? Who are in his immediate circle? And look at the familial root of DNA, the Y chromosome investigation. When we get a hit, the second man who was there when Helen and Christine were murdered was a brother.

of Angus Sinclair's wife. So, in other words, he was with his brother-in-law. It was a very troubled family. Some of them were dead. Some of them were in jail. By a process of elimination, eventually, we... that he was with Gordon Hamilton. Now, Gordon Hamilton was dead, and Angus Sinclair didn't know that, and so we thought that would be of some advantage.

But Gordon Hamilton had been a chronic alcoholic and had died in 1996. Did he die of alcohol poisoning? He died of health conditions associated with alcoholism. So... We had to try and find something remaining of Gordon Hamilton to make sure that this was the DNA sample. Now, Gordon Hamilton had been cremated, so there was no remains to exhume.

He hadn't left anything behind him. He hadn't left a watch. He hadn't left personal possessions, jewellery, anything which would retain his DNA. And eventually, same Alan Jones, the man I've spoken about already, He discovered that Gordon Hamilton used to do some DIY work, and one of his things was he used to put up coving. I don't know if you know what I mean, but the edges round the ceiling are ornate decoration. Oh, yes.

Moulding, we call it here. Yeah, moulding. That's right, mouldings. OK. So he managed to find out where he had been carrying out his work and he got along to the house. and managed to remove apart the moulding, the coving, and he found traces, low-copy number traces, of Gordon Hamilton behind in the sealed sort of time capsule.

behind the coving and by that means we managed to identify certainly gordon hamilton alan jones you give him a project you do not want to be on the target end of any alan jones project do you You really don't. You really don't. No, you don't. There's just no way this guy gives up. I love it. Yeah, no, no. The other big help we got at this time was from a group of people who

are new in the scene, really, and they were forensic investigators. Now, the difference between a forensic investigator and a forensic scientist is this, that if you take a sample along to a forensic scientist and say... Tell me what you know about that. They'll come back and you'll say, that's blood, that's semen, that's whatever. You take it along to a forensic investigator, they'll say, that's blood and that's semen and...

Here's a number of ways that this could have come about. Here are some boundaries for you to look at. We were lucky in the UK in that because of the IRA bombing campaign, in the 1960s through the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of people who developed that forensic investigative skill, mainly to do with explosives and bombs, but of course it carries across. And I have to say, we were greatly assisted by that new type of forensic investigators. So moving forward...

We had no alternative but to interview Angus Sinclair. And of course, he being a prisoner, he just sat and stared at the wall. He'd obviously been studying anti-interrogation techniques because he sat and he said absolutely nothing. Angus Sinclair by this time had become a trustee within the prison he was in.

Sinclair ran the kitchens in the prison in Aberdeen. And when I phoned up the prison governor to explain to him that we were going to come to interview Angus Sinclair, blah, blah, blah, the governor said to me, oh, I said, I hope you don't take him away. It's really useful and he runs the kitchens and he's great. So that's the kind of guy he was. He had adapted to the situation he was in and still managed to exercise power.

Now, going back to the Glasgow cases, just if I can for a minute, we were convinced that he'd killed Anna Kenny, Hilda Macaulay, Agnes Cooney. But unfortunately, the police in that part of the world had not been as good at preserving forensic evidence as... Lester Nib had been. In fact, they had lost the forensic evidence. It had not been stored properly. It had been put in a bottom drawer somewhere. And at some stage, somebody had thrown it out. So we had no forensic evidence at all.

brutal. The card index system that you had going on in Glasgow, were you able to cross-reference Mr. Sinclair? No, he wasn't in our system and he wasn't in the Glasgow card system, but we did manage to put together I thought a fairly compelling case to show the absolutely uniqueness of these crimes and that they were all linked by that uniqueness. And to do that, what we did was we brought together...

It's still running just now, called the Scottish Homicide Database, where we looked at all the women murdered in Scotland since 1960. Whether these murders had been solved or whether they were unsolved... We analysed every one. And there was a unique profile linking the Kenny, Cooney, Macaulay murders and the World's End murders. They were all exactly the same. And they're the only ones who were the same. And incidentally...

When we built this database, we were absolutely horrified by the number of women who had lost their life in Scotland over that period of time, mostly to domestic murder. And as one of the spin-offs of this, it made us think long and hard again about the whole issue of domestic murder and domestic violence. We'd all know that it had gone on, but it sort of...

ran underneath the surface. You know, we have a saying in Scotland, it's I been. In other words, it's always been. It really raised our attention to it. So yes, there was good circumstantial evidence.

Right. So you've got MO matching here, but you don't have a DNA link to Angus and Gordon, to all five murders. Would you say that that lack of physical evidence affected the way Angus Sinclair was tried? Sure. Disappointingly, they decided not to proceed with the Glasgow cases because they felt that there was no evidence, no forensic evidence, and they felt that they might weaken the case for the world's end.

And we just had to accept it. So in 2007, Angus Sinclair appeared in the High Court of Edinburgh, charged with the murders of Helen and Christine. And? The prosecutor decided, and we were very worried about this at the time, the prosecutor decided to just go on the main DNA evidence. Here is a girl that's been murdered. Here is your DNA.

You are guilty. End of story. And we were worried because by this time, using the forensic investigators, we had built up a whole lot of other circumstantial evidence. For instance, the knots. that the girls had been tied up with. These knots, again, due to the good officers of Leicester Nib, had been kept intact, had never been opened. And when we did open them...

We found it was a time capsule of low copy number DNA. Because if you take tights or other material like that and you pull them very hard, then you leave part of your skin on these tights. One of the girls had been tied with granny knots and the other with reef knots. We found out that Angus Sinclair, while he was a young man in prison, had been trained to make fishing nets as part of the employment in prison.

and had naturally used reef knots all the time. So again, that was all evidence. None of that was used by the prosecution because they believed that they had DNA and DNA was enough. And of course... On the day of the trial, as we feared, the first thing that the defence got up and did was said, yes, my client did have sex with these girls, but it was consensual.

Now, this was horrific, not just for the families of the girls, because, I mean, you know, when you looked at Sinclair, for a start, Sinclair was old enough to be their father. But secondly... The nature of these girls, they were children. The thought that they would have had consensual sex with somebody like Angus Sinclair was just, was ludicrous. But legally, it weakened the case.

Well, the failure for the prosecutor to anticipate that line of defense is fairly disappointing as well. Fairly disappointing doesn't cover it. If, like me, you had been with Alan Jones that night, fairly disappointing, doesn't go anywhere near it. Oh, boy. Open the bottle of scotch before I lose my mind. Yes. Anyway, the failure of the 2007 case. Caused up. Outrage. Wait, by failure, are you saying that Sinclair, he was acquitted? Yes, unfortunately. I can't believe it.

This is a failure by the prosecutor. He's relying just solely on this DNA evidence, not bringing in the knots the girls were tied with. That's a huge mistake. So even though DNA, your DNA... matches nobody else's is one in a trillion unless you're an identical twin. You need more than that in really big cases because it can be explained. It can be explained. I mean, Angus Sinclair is full of it.

There's no way he had consensual sex, but just by bringing it up, if a defense attorney brings that up, hey, he had consensual sex. He's not denying that he had contact with these women. Correct. That's disgusting. So the press were all over it. Even the politicians were aghast. But this time, they knew the kind of person that Angus Sinclair was. They knew about the victims. And there was a very strong sense.

that this had been a miscarriage of justice. How did Marine take the 2007 acquittal? With enormous forbearance and dignity. We actually have a brief soundbite of Maureen Scott, who is Helen's father, and he spoke to the media after the trial ended. This audio comes courtesy of BBC Scotland. What's going to explain how I feel? 30 years of trying to get a conclusion. I promised Emily twice that I would stick by this.

and get somebody brought and get justice, which, honestly, I don't think I've had today. At least, had it gone to a jury, one can accept probably their decision. He was a key to building the public treasure for a retrial because it's all very well some... disenchanted cop like me standing up and saying, this is terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, what else? You know, I would say that, wouldn't I? But to have the dignified father of one of these girls stand up and...

Very, very clearly, State has huge disappointment in the justice system. It was far, far more effective than any kind of official line.

I wrote a book about it in 2007 to try to add a little fuel to the fire. And eventually, and all credit to the politicians, the Justice Secretary and the Scottish Parliament and the Lord Advocate, they introduced a bill in Parliament to change the law. Because at that time, somebody could not be... tried twice for the same crime. There was a clause called the double jeopardy clause, and that was changed. Here in the United States, we still have a double jeopardy law.

And it's part of the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution, which is probably why it hasn't been ever altered. And our double jeopardy law is... really the reason why a lot of prosecutors hesitate sometimes to bring charges against people and go to trial because maybe the case has some big holes in it and they don't want to jeopardize a conviction. Because they only get one shot. You only get one shot.

That is interesting. Yes. And Angus Sinclair was brought back to court again in 2013. And this time, circumstantial case was put together. bringing new DNA evidence and bringing out all the evidence which should have been led in the first case and this time the jury convicted him and he was sentenced to the longest prison sentence ever passed in Scotland. of 37 years, that being the exact time period between the trial and the date of the murders. What's the name of your book in 2007?

I wrote two books about this. The name of the book in 2007 was The World's End, A 30-Year Quest for Justice. And then the second book was called The World's End, The Final Verdict. And that was published in 2013. So, Tom, in 2007, they put this case on and Angus is not convicted. But does he go back to prison because he's already...

Doing a sentence for something else? Yes, he's already serving two life sentences. One for the original attacks on the young girls back in 1980, and the second for the murder of Mary Gallacher in 1978. And about how old is he in 2007? So in 2007, he's in his 50s. The funny thing is, though, that just before we started to look at him for the World's End murders, he was about to apply for parole.

Oh, shit. Yes, indeed. He wouldn't have got parole the first time, but he might well have got parole the second time because, as I've said, he made himself a model prisoner. Highly manipulative individual. What was his background? He came from a fairly rough family, but there was nothing to suggest anything that could lead. I mean, for instance, there was nothing to suggest that he was abused himself as a child. But...

He was brought up in an environment where violence was normalised and where the attitudes to women particularly were very, very negative. It was a culture. in post-war parts of industrial Scotland. And that is the only thing that links the three serial killers who visited us in the 1970s and 80s together.

They never met. They were not friends. They were not co-accused. There was no connection between them, except that they were all born within six months of each other. They were all born in rundown.

poor industrial parts of Scotland where violence was normalised and where attitudes to women were toxic. So, to wrap it up, Angus Sinclair. People said to me, you must have been incredibly happy and cheerful when it was all wrapped up. And I wasn't at all, because when you look at it, what you're left with is a sense of waste. What a waste of these young girls. And you start to think, I wonder what these girls might have achieved in their lives. They might have been mothers and grandmothers.

They might have gone on to have good professions. They might have made significant contributions. Who knows? All that potential snuffed out in just a moment of wickedness. And that's the only word I could use to describe it. It's wickedness. And when you look at their families, their families were decimated by these cases. I mean, Christine's family never recovered. Her mother died young.

Helen's mother died young. Helen's father, Moraine, he carried on to see the trial through. I felt great for him because, in a sense... He had done his duty and he'd closed that chapter. He promised his wife on her deathbed that he would see it through and he would find justice for the daughter, and he did. It's justice for the girls.

That's what I've always wanted. I promised my late wife I would fight till the end of my days. And it'll be closure, I hope, for some of my family. It'll never be closure for me. because I saw Helen that night when she was brought up from East Lothian and I'll never forget, as long as I lived, what I saw that day, what they had done to my beautiful daughter.

Ugh, it just, it rips your guts out. And now we also have a bit of audio of the judge castigating Angus after the trial, telling him basically what a monster he is. And this audio is also courtesy of the BBC Scotland. details of which have now been revealed, shows that you are a dangerous predator who is capable of sinking to the depths of depravity. I sentenced you to life imprisonment to run from today.

And I fixed the punishment part at 37 years. Does the same prosecutor from 2007 who only relied on the DNA evidence against Angus, does that? Same prosecutor retry Angus in 2013? No, no, no, no, no. The second trial is led by the Lord Advocate himself. That's a bit like your Attorney General actually stepping into the court to lead the prosecution. Very, very, very seldom done.

But the law dad himself, who was a first-class guy who had done a lot to see it through and to get the double jeopardy law passed, he himself went into court. I was there every day, every minute of every day, and I've got to say, did a wonderful job. of building this incredibly complex circumstantial case. You know, in the United States, we have jury trials and then we have bench trials too. And it's the defendant's choice on whether or not he wants a jury trial or a bench trial.

What were his trials like? Well, they were jury trials. There is no choice here in solemn procedure. It's always jury trials, especially for a charge like murder. So the first trial, of course, was cut short. But I was sitting in the court and I often think you can get the measure of a jury just by watching their facial expressions.

I remember in the 2007 trial, there were two middle-aged women sitting in the front of the jury bench. They have 15 man or women juries in Scotland, and there is a majority verdict. You can come to majority. And I remember these two ladies that were sitting in the front. And when Sinclair's defence agent said that he had had consensual sex with these girls, these women just weren't buying that at all. You could tell by their face. They thought, no way. And they were...

shocked when the trial collapsed. In the second trial, the jury were clearly taking it all in. And as I say, it was a first-class, absolutely first-class prosecution. Did Angus get on the stand and testify in his own defence? He did. He did. He did, he did. I mean, he had nothing to lose in fairness. He would see the way that the wind was blowing and so why not throw the dice? And his defence was more or less that...

Yes, he'd met the girls in the pub and he'd gone with them and he'd had sex, but then he'd just dumped them in the countryside and somebody must have come along and killed them. But, I mean, the problem with that was...

The forensic evidence was pretty clear because of the alcohol content in their bodies that they had died within an hour of their last consumption of an alcoholic drink. So that was completely blown out of the water. But his demeanour... while giving evidence was he'd been in prison too long because he couldn't see that he was coming across as completely cold and callous because he described the girls as being...

disposable items. And so he didn't do himself any good at all. As things got harder and harder and the questions got harder and harder from him, so his voice became lower and lower. Did Angus confirm that Gordon was part of it? No, no. What Angus tried to do, of course, was Angus tried to blame Gordon. That's the best kind of co-accused to have is a dead one.

Right. So it must have been him. But of course, his DNA was all over it as well. And going back to the beginning of this, did Angus and Gordon match the description of the two gentlemen that... Helen and Christy were seen talking to at the World's End pub. Yes, they did. And funnily enough, you guys won't be old enough to remember the original photo fits. What's a photo fit?

A photo fit is kind of like an artist's impression. But in the old system, it was like a scrapbook. So you had, you know, six different kinds of hair. Have you ever seen a potato man, you know, building... Putting ears and a nose. Well, it was a bit like that. Mr. Potato Head. Yes. They were very, very unreliable. Very poor quality. And somebody once described him as being an exact likeness of someone who doesn't exist.

And they could be tremendously distractive because you ended up looking for the person in the photo fit, not the description. So we were always very, very wary about photo fits. But actually, the photo fit of Angus Sinclair was pretty much spot on. for the way he looked when he was arrested three years later in 1980. You couldn't take any satisfaction really, but when I think back on it now, I'm very proud of the way that my old force stuck to it.

They really did. And there were some star performers there, you know, Lester Nebb and latterly Alan Jones, who you just absolutely represent the very, very best of people that you've worked with. And... In the end, we managed to deliver justice. And it's funny, even now, when I'm introduced to people and they say, oh, you're the guy that did the world's end murder. And I say, that's right. And they'll say...

I was so pleased that that was solved because it was almost like a cloud hanging over that generation of people. People who had nothing to do with it. People who were... In their teens at that time, they did notice the difference because, of course, the whole pattern of behaviour changed. They were grounded. They weren't let out, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of other people just said that there was this real...

feeling of collective guilt about these girls. And they were really pleased that it had been solved. And the other thing, of course, the good thing that came from it is that forensic science was taken forward. And the law was changed. And we were one of the only countries left in Western Europe that hadn't done away with the double jeopardy law. And it was because of traditions of Scots law and all the rest of it. And we like to talk about...

our fine history and our traditions, sometimes these are a handicap and not an advantage. And so the law was improved. How do you feel about the conviction now? Well, I can't take much comfort from the whole episode other than the fact that we got the job done, saw it through, and that the case resulted in something positive. When you've been involved in as many homicides and murders as I have, you know it's very, very seldom that anything positive comes from any of it, quite frankly.

But the tantalising question for me is this. In 1977, we had forensic materials which were worthless at the time, but which in... 20 and 30 years became hugely valuable, right? So what have we got now today at crime scenes, which is worthless? but which in 20 and 30 years might be valuable. So I think that's the tantalising question that comes from these old cold cases. Based on what happened in the past...

How can we prepare ourselves for the future? Just a fascinating journey to hear you speak about it personally. We're always curious to know from our detectives, how does the job impact you?

being a father or a husband, where do you put those experiences inside you? Well, you try to leave it at the door. You try to hang up your professional coat at the door. But of course, you never completely can. For many, many years, I have a notepad and pen lying beside my bed on the bedside table because I'll have a thought.

And if I don't write it down, it'll stay with me and I can't get back to sleep. And of course, it affects you. And the triumphs and disasters and the disappointments, they all impact you. terribly. But somebody said to me, you know, did you feel elated? Did you go out for a party after he was convicted in 2013? And I have to say, I didn't. And neither did Alan Jones. What we both felt...

and we both said it afterwards, we felt like we had taken off a very heavy coat. It's our responsibility had been lifted from us. And by that time, I had... I retired from the police, left the police, although I was still involved in law enforcement issues. I'd actually retired from the police in 2005. So by 2013, I was well away from the police service.

but yet had never left the police because I had never left that investigation. That was still my investigation. I was responsible for it. And so I only left the police eight years after I retired. You didn't get paid though, did you? Now you come to mention it. And had you always wanted to be a police officer when you were...

Growing up, how did that happen? Well, my father was a police officer, but I didn't always want to be a police officer. I wanted to join the Royal Navy. But at the time I was coming up to... apply to join the Royal Navy. It was during one of the big defence cutbacks that we had. So there were no ships. So I drifted into the police service and found I liked it.

And as soon as I could, I made my way into the detective division where I served for most of my time. And I have to say that I would not have chosen anything else. It was a privilege. It was a privilege to be involved in these cases. There are many, many dark sides to it. But, you know, when you're standing in the mortuary looking at...

somebody whose life has just been taken, is a very real responsibility because, you know, if there's ever going to be justice done, you're going to have to do it. Nobody else is going to do it. You're going to have to do it. The funny thing about it was that... By the time the case was concluded, all the leading detectives who had started the case were dead. And most of the people who were leading the case at the end had not been born when the crimes had been committed.

And yet, they still felt that personal ownership of it. Carrying that kind of weight for 37 years, I can imagine. When a detective who's either retiring or moving on to another assignment, that handoff of that case is like handing someone a baby. It was like that. And you'll understand this too, that... When Angus Sinclair was identified, I must have had 20 calls from retired detectives saying, I don't want to know who it is and I don't want to know any of the details.

but just reassure me that I didn't go by him, that I didn't miss him. Is it a mistake that I have made? And once I was able to reassure them, no, he was not in the database. Nobody had made a mistake here. You could hear the relief in their voice. Absolutely. And there was a very nice photograph taken of Helen and Christine about a month before they died, sitting...

together as pals, somebody taking it at a party. And we had copies of that photograph in every one of the squad rooms over 30 years. We never forgot about these girls. They were our girls. They were Helen and Christine. And we never referred to them as Scott and Edie. And within the police service, we never spoke about the World's End murders. That was an affectation of the press we talked about.

Helen and Christine. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your dedication and thank you for joining us, sir. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Special thanks to BBC Scotland for providing the audio clips for this episode. Small town fam, I am thrilled to tell you that retired Deputy Chief Constable Tom will be back with us again later this season with another case. And so will another Scottish detective, retired detective.

to Roddy. So there is heaps to look forward to. Thank you so much for joining us today. We'll see you next time. Small Town Dicks is produced by Gary Scott and Yardley Smith and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. This episode was edited by Logan Heftel, Gary Scott, and me, Yardley Smith. Our associate producers are Aaron Gaynor and The Real Nick Smitty. Our music is composed by John Forrest.

Our editors extraordinaire are Logan Heftel and Soren Bajan. And our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, visit us on our website at smalltowndicks.com. Small Town Dicks would like to thank Speech Docs for providing transcripts of this podcast. You can find these transcripts

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