by Tom Wood
It became increasingly apparent that the picture we were forming in our minds of the 2004 version of Sinclair was of a completely different person to the one jailed twenty years earlier. He seemed somehow to have reinvented himself and it was as though he believed there was no connection between this trusted, organised key figure in the smooth running of Peterhead Prison’s kitchen and the sordid offender that had done so much harm to innocent children. For him to admit his guilt in these killings, it would mean he would have to give up this self-deception and confront the demons of his past. It didn’t seem likely but only time would tell. He would know that, one day in the not too far distant future, he would be speaking to us. Until that day arrived, it was not possible for us to predict what sort of reception we would get.
It was certain that, no matter what happened, we needed a clear and sophisticated strategy to make sure we got the best out of these eventual interviews. There would be no second chances. A key part of the success of the inquiry would be to carry out detailed profiling of Sinclair to allow the officers who would eventually be tasked with interviewing him to know their man. They needed to be able to build some sort of bridge to his thinking, to quickly establish a relationship which could allow them to get to the truth.
Perhaps unusually against this background of sexual crime, Sinclair’s wife stayed in some sort of contact with him – not to any great extent but, after a few years, she even began visiting him from time to time. Sarah and their son had, by this time, moved to the south of England so the journey to remote Peterhead would have been a long and difficult one.
Not long after his arrival at Peterhead Sinclair had sought entry to the prison’s sex offenders programmes to seek help in overcoming his offending behaviour. We found this particularly interesting because it was a classic example of split personality. On the one hand, Sinclair was a model prisoner, a trusty with the run of large parts of the jail including the administrative offices. The prison officers had faith in him and he, in turn, had never let them down. Yet, at the same time, there was a very different and dangerous persona in Sinclair. It was concluded that Sinclair was an extremely cold and callous person and still showed not a shred of remorse for his crimes. More worryingly still, he had not changed at all during his sentence. He was dangerous and manipulative.
So as one group of professionals were assessing Sinclair as devious and dangerous, others who worked with him day to day saw him in an entirely different light as a trusty, hard-working and reliable individual – a model prisoner in every way.
It was at this time when we first learned that Sinclair had spoken of being a victim of sexual abuse himself. This is interesting because, as is well known, there is often a link between being a victim of sexual abuse and a perpetrator of the same or similar types of crime. Whether this was true or not, we will never know but one facet of Sinclair’s character was clearly emerging – his devotion to his duties in the prison and his ability as a painter and decorator both pointed to a need for approval. He was a perfectionist because it was a route to self-worth and esteem. A complex character was emerging – one the one hand, he was violent man, a thief and a sexual predator who exercised power over women by extreme violence and, on the other, he was a perfectionist and a hard worker who sought approval and status by his labours. Angus Sinclair was two very different people but to what extent did he realise it? Was he in control of both sides of his character and where did the fault line lie?
The analysis of Sinclair was important but we had practicalities to consider. What was quite clear to us was the fact that, whilst he may well not have been a model husband by virtue of his affairs, he does not appear to have been committing sexual offences during the early years of his married life. In fact, until 1977, when he was having difficulties in his relationship with Sarah, he seems to have kept himself under reasonable control. But then, for some reason, the balance changed and there was an explosion of offending that culminated in the horrific catalogue of crimes he admitted to in 1982 and the World’s End murders that we were investigating. What the trigger was perhaps even Sinclair does not know. Was it the difficulties at home or were these domestic difficulties being caused by his descent into the depths of paedophilic offending? Was it simply an uncontrollable urge or that he had freedom and opportunity? It was clear that he had offended alone and with an accomplice. What were the factors that influenced that decision?
Whatever the answer to these questions are, one thing was clear – he was still dangerous and experts told us that an accurate assessment of his character was virtually impossible because of his ability to deceive. At times, he was less dangerous than others but he was never safe.
Through the 1990s, Sinclair remained in Peterhead Prison and, despite the view of the judge, Lord Cameron, in 1982 that he should remain in jail for the rest of his natural life, in the spring of 1997, the release process for Sinclair began again. As is routine, reports were compiled to allow decisions to be made and Sinclair, trying his best to appear open, gave some interesting accounts of his earlier behaviour. He said how his life, after his release from that first ten-year sentence for the killing of Catherine Reehill, revolved round home and work. He painted a picture of how he often put in very long hours at his painting jobs and inferred that his only relaxation was occasional fishing trips. He had few friends – particularly relevant for us later in our investigation was the fact that one of them was his wife’s brother, Gordon Hamilton. They spent a lot of time together, fishing and making occasional visits to various pubs.
The presentation of Sinclair prior to him being considered for release from the life sentence is perhaps the most telling of all. He would have to demonstrate that he was no longer a risk to society and of course one of the strong indicators of this would be whether or not he had come to realise the full enormity of his crimes and show that he was truly and demonstratively remorseful.
Peterhead Prison pioneered a programme for sex offenders which has won international respect. It aims to get offenders to confront their crimes and realise the dreadful effect they have had on their victims. Bear in mind that this unit in Peterhead is home to the majority of Scotland’s most serious and prolific convicted perpetrators of sex crimes. The time he spent on this programme would certainly be one of the main factors that the Parole Board, the body that would ultimately decide on his suitability for release, would have taken into consideration. His first application for parole was declined in 1999, with the board perhaps concluding that Sinclair’s lack of empathy towards his victims was an issue. They must also have feared there was still a risk of his reoffending or certainly that the risk of reoffending had not been totally eliminated.
The lack of victim empathy was demonstrated in the extreme by his clear belief that the little girls he targeted in those attacks in the late 1970s were somehow willing participants. One signature of his offending patterns then was that he would give money to those who he attacked and this clearly allowed him to square his conscience and, in his distorted thinking processes, to consider that both parties in the attacks gained something from the experience. Clearly this twisted thinking would have been uppermost in the Parole Board’s mind when they turned down his application. It is very common to fail at the first attempt with the Parole Board. The next time, with another year or so of exemplary reports, he would have a better chance.
That chance never came. Forensic science was advancing and Sinclair’s past was starting to catch up with him. For the first but not the last time, justice would reach out to Angus Sinclair from beyond the grave.
The brutal sexual murder of diminutive seventeen-year-old Mary Gallagher in Glasgow in November 1978 had been the subject of a major police inquiry with thousands of man hours devoted to attempting to track down her killer. Her body was found on waste ground near a railway station in the Springburn area of the city.
The case, while still open and under investigation, had long since been on a back burner after detectives concluded they had ex
plored every possible line of inquiry. Then, in the spring of 2000, officers received credible information, naming a specific individual as Mary’s killer. The person named by their informant was not Sinclair. The lead was positive and it came from a reliable source so the inquiry was reopened and a new investigation began into the named suspect, who had not featured in the original inquiry and who I will not name here for reasons that will become obvious.
The inquiry progressed some distance with information being gathered on their new suspect’s background and movements with the eventual aim of arresting him at some point in the near future and questioning him over the allegation. As part of that inquiry, old productions, that is to say evidence from the crime scene, were routinely sent for further forensic examination and DNA testing and, because of the very advances in that science that were to serve us so well later, a perfect DNA profile was obtained. It was clear there was no link between the preserved evidence from the Mary Gallagher crime scene and the new suspect. However, there was a perfect match with the DNA profile of someone already on the national database – Angus Robertson Sinclair. Officers quickly checked through their files and discovered that, in the huge database of suspects – thousands of names – he had not featured in the original inquiry.
Mary Gallagher’s body was found on waste ground. She had been walking across the waste ground with an eleven-year-old local boy. He had run off after their progress was halted by a man standing at the side of the road staring at them. Even though twenty-three years had intervened, that boy, now a man, was able to look across the High Court in Edinburgh from the witness box to the dock and identify Sinclair as the man he saw that day as he was walking with Mary. He said how, as a child, he had been terrified of the man’s staring eyes. ‘He had eyes like dark holes,’ he said.
The jury, or at least a majority of them, concluded that such was the terror of the eleven-year-old that he was still able to recall accurately the eyes even two decades later as he looked at the greying man with those penetrating eyes now behind gold-rimmed spectacles. The DNA match of course was more powerful still and Sinclair was again sentenced to life imprisonment.
So, by 2001, it was clear that there was more to Sinclair’s offending than had been thought. The horrific attacks on the children had been preceded by the murder of Mary Gallagher. The obvious question to ask was what other crimes could he have committed. There were several unsolved murders of young women in the 1970s and several had taken place in Sinclair’s area of Glasgow.
The Mary Gallagher trial judge, Lord Carloway, imposed a life sentence, saying he should stay in jail for the rest of his natural life for what he called a ‘callous, brutal and depraved act’.
When it happened, the murder of seventeen-year-old Mary had horrified Scotland and, as details of the killing of Mary Gallagher were recounted at the trial, the passage of time before her killer was brought to justice had done nothing to dilute that horror. She had been strangled with the leg of her trousers and then raped.
At this point, it is very pertinent to note that, if Strathclyde Police had not received the tip-off – incorrect though it turned out to be – that led to Sinclair’s conviction for this crime, he may well have been released in 2001 instead of standing trial for this crime. There is no indication that the Parole Board would have said he was fit to be freed but certainly the fact that the wheels were being put in motion to start the process that may have ended in his release is significant. His conviction in 2001 ensured that this would not now happen. The judge had made it clear. Sinclair had joined the club of three other killers in Scotland who would never be released from jail.
One other obvious question arises from the Gallagher case – had a false lead not caused the reopening of the case, would Sinclair have escaped justice for Mary’s murder? The answer is that for a time he may have but eventually the truth would have emerged. As a consequence of the World’s End and a number of other historical cases, police forces are now routinely examining all unsolved cases and subjecting surviving forensic samples to the latest scientific examination. The work of these ‘cold case’ units will surely bring resolution to some of the country’s most notorious unsolved cases in the years to come. Many offenders, including rapists and murderers, will find themselves facing justice many years after they thought they had got away with their crimes. The Mary Gallagher case would have been solved – not in 2001 but eventually.
As soon as Sinclair was convicted and the newspapers were no longer fettered by the contempt of court provisions, they began reporting a new development in the case of Sinclair. They were speculating that he may be responsible for three other murders of young women in the west of Scotland. They detailed the potential victims as twenty-three-year-old Agnes Cooney, thirty-six-year-old Hilda McAuley and twenty-year-old Anna Kenny who were all murdered in 1977. The fact of the matter was that, whilst Sinclair was a prime suspect for these killings, there was no evidence to connect him to them directly.
The furore in the aftermath of the 2001 trial eventually died down and the press speculation faded but it was not the end of interest in Sinclair and speculation as to the unsolved murders. Operation Trinity was to consider all these cases again in 2004 and did so in the most minute detail.
6
The Second Man
But we still hadn’t found the second man or rather the first man – the one whose DNA profile we had identified all these years before and who we had been searching for ever since. We had spent many hundreds of man hours and tens of thousands of pounds in targeted testing, elimination screening and database searches – all to no avail. It had been a frustrating and a puzzling exercise. Could it be that our man, the only profile we had identified for years, was a first offender? Was he dead? Or had he stopped offending before the practice of taking DNA samples from offenders had been established? We were desperate to find out and now that Angus Sinclair had been identified as one of the men present on Helen and Christine’s last night we knew we were closing in. We were sure that the unidentified man must be an associate of Sinclair. It was logical, the two men last seen with Helen and Christine in the World’s End were obviously together – friends out for the night – and, while we were not certain that one of them was Sinclair, there was a very good chance he was. In any case, for two men to have been involved in such a crime and to have kept silent for all those years, they must be close.
As in all searches, we started at the centre and worked outwards and Angus Sinclair was the centre. Using all the techniques available to us, old and new, we trawled every aspect of Sinclair’s life to solve the puzzle – criminal associates, friends, workmates and relatives. You might think this would have been a simple enough process but it involved looking back almost thirty years with no current information as Sinclair had been in prison since 1982. It was to be yet another difficult exercise.
When the man’s identity was finally confirmed, he turned out to be someone closer to Angus Sinclair than even we could have hoped or imagined. By a process of elimination, we were able to determine, through testing the Y chromosome from the original unidentified DNA sample from the World’s End killings, that it came from the same paternal line as the five brothers of Sarah Hamilton, Angus Sinclair’s wife. We eventually established for certain that none of the surviving brothers matched the World’s End profile exactly so there were now two possibilities. The man we were looking for was either another sibling of the brothers, the only missing brother Gordon Hamilton, or someone totally unconnected with them.
As so often in cases like this, it came down to a calculation of probabilities. The scientists had to work out what the chances were of the DNA profile recovered from the bodies of Helen and Christine not being that of Gordon Hamilton. In this instance, Dr Jonathan Whitaker, one of the country’s foremost DNA experts, was clear – the odds against it being Gordon Hamilton were at least thirty-eight million to one. That is to say, in the careful language of the scientist, there was an extremely strong possibility
that Gordon was the source of the sample.
We were now certain that Gordon Hamilton was the second man at the scene of the World’s End murders. By a process of elimination, Jonathan Whitaker had followed the familial line of the Hamiltons and concluded, beyond reasonable doubt, that the crime scene samples found in the World’s End case must have come from Gordon Hamilton, who had died in 1996.
So, after all those years, there it was – Angus Sinclair had been with his brother-in-law in Edinburgh that night in October 1977. After nearly thirty years, we were sure we had found the two men we were looking for.
To conclude the identification, all we had to do was trace a sample of Gordon’s DNA and check it against the crime scene sample – straightforward. Most people leave traces many years after their death, hospital samples, possessions they have touched and left with traces of their DNA, clothes they have worn or even family photographs they have handled during their lives. Depending on climatic conditions, DNA can survive for many years. We thought that, with a systematic approach, we could surely find some earthly trace of Gordon Hamilton – after all, at that time, he had only been dead for eight years. The most obvious option was exhumation of Gordon’s body – DNA remains detectable in the body for years especially in bone marrow – but this was quickly ruled out as Gordon had been cremated. Thus began a bizarre, complex and long-running inquiry within an inquiry to track down some remnant of Gordon Hamilton. The search was to intrigue us and frustrate us and it became a fixation for Allan Jones.
