The World's End

by Tom Wood

  There was a clear suggestion she may have been alive for a considerable period of time in between her disappearance from Glasgow city centre in the early hours of Saturday morning and the time she was killed. Had she been kept somewhere for that twenty-four to thirty-six hours and, if so, where?

  Again there was an extensive police inquiry into the killing. It must have seemed fairly obvious to detectives in those days that, if it had been Agnes trying to hitch a lift on or near the M8, in all likelihood, a man had picked her up and he was the one who had killed her. No one came forward to say they had seen her getting into a car and there were no significant sightings at the time of the vehicle that must have been used to dump her body in this relatively remote spot. For our inquiry in 2004, the profile was very similar to the rest. Again none of the original evidential productions or samples from the initial inquiry had survived the passage of time so we were going to have to go back through this investigation with a fine-tooth comb. Armed with our most recent information, we would have to reinterview surviving witnesses to see if we could add to the knowledge gathered at the time of the original inquiry.

  Key amongst our lines of inquiry was the sighting of a newish white van being driven in the vicinity of the deposition site on the Saturday night. Like so many people in major inquiries, the witness had not thought his information important which is why he had delayed in coming forward. By the time he had contacted police, the case of Agnes Cooney was receiving considerable press coverage and even at that stage it was being linked by reporters to the earlier killings and particularly the World’s End murders. The press were beginning to notice the similarities and coming to their own conclusions.

  Back then, of course, the white van was just one of many different vehicles people had reported seeing in various places and so it would have been treated accordingly. But, for us, it was extremely important because, when Agnes died, we knew that the vehicle Sinclair was driving was a white Toyota caravanette and it was new.

  Yet another of the significant developments came to Operation Trinity as a result of the publicity surrounding our inquiries and the speculation that we were interested in Sinclair. On 31 October 1977, a nine-year-old girl was the victim of a sex assault near her home in Glasgow. The attack had been reported to the police when it happened but no culprit was ever identified. In 2001, after Sinclair’s conviction for the murder of Mary Gallagher, the victim, a woman I will call ‘Joan’, again contacted the police, saying she believed Sinclair was the man who attacked her all those years ago. This case was very important. The attack on Joan, at the end of October 1977, was not only a very serious crime, it also marked a change in offending behaviour.

  When we first identified Sinclair as one of the individuals involved in the World’s End murders and learned of his later convictions for offences against much younger girls, the crimes for which he was first sentenced to life imprisonment, we wondered why he had changed victim types – what had motivated the change from adult to child victims. The attack on Joan may have been the transitional crime. Horrific though the experience must have been, in hindsight, Joan was fortunate to survive.

  It is clear Sinclair’s offending took on a whole new direction after this time although quite why is rather difficult to speculate on. However, it is certain that, during 1977–8, he was driven to murder women. Helen Scott, Christine Eadie and Mary Gallagher – and there may have been others – were all approached late on a Friday or Saturday night, in or after leaving licensed premises, before being abducted and killed. Plus the way they were all killed bore distinctive similarities. But the attack on Joan heralded an intense period of offending against children and these new victims put him into a very different category of offender. The change from being a rapist and murderer of women to becoming a violent child sex attacker happened very suddenly.

  So what brought it about? In the absence of hard evidence, we can only speculate. Things were changing in Sinclair’s life which may have brought about the alteration in his offending pattern. In the face of the publicity about a white van in the weeks after Agnes Cooney’s murder, he sold the white caravanette which had been an essential factor in the World’s End cases. Worried that eventually the police might identify it, he may have felt it was getting too hot. Whatever he was thinking, the vehicle was certainly sold on very soon after Agnes’s death.

  With the loss of his transport, he might have decided to turn his attention to children because they would have been easier to subdue and control and he would not have needed his van to hold them in. It is sometimes the simplest of things that bring about major events. Sinclair’s change in behaviour may have been merely about the loss of his caravanette.

  The tenement close where Joan was attacked was just 200 yards from Sinclair’s home at Daisy Street and not far from either the Cladda Club or the Plaza Ballroom. It was right in the centre of Sinclair’s territory. And the case bore many familiar hallmarks. The little girl had been wandering the streets of her home district, waiting for her father to come home and let her into their tenement flat. He was a heavy drinker and Joan often spent hours hanging around waiting for him to roll home from the pub. That day in October 1977, a man had approached her and asked for help in finding a family called Thomson. Ever happy to help, the little girl took on the task and tried two nearby families of that name but discovered neither was expecting a visitor. She returned to the man she later identified as Sinclair with this information. He then asked her to go to another street with him and, once there, he sent her into an unlit tenement close again in search of the mythical Thomson family who, he said, probably lived on the top floor. She climbed the stairs and, on discovering no one of that name there, began walking back down the dark stair to be met by her attacker on the second floor. There he grabbed her, pinned her to the wall and threatened her with a knife. He then subjected the girl to a terrifying ordeal. Afraid her assailant would kill her, she was crying as quietly as she could and, as the attack continued, she was biting the sleeve of her anorak to stop herself from screaming out loud.

  After a while, she heard the front door of the close, two floors below, open. Her attacker jumped up and rearranged his clothing. He then ordered the petrified girl to go to the top landing and not tell anyone what had happened. The man who had entered the close found Joan crying. With her clothing in disarray, it was obvious she had been attacked by the man who had just passed him on the stairs a couple of floors below. He banged on the door of a flat and then ran off to try to catch her attacker but to no avail.

  No one was ever charged with this attack. Joan told officers in 2001 that she had gone to an identification parade but had been too frightened to pick out her attacker, if indeed he had even been in the line-up.

  Another consequence of this awful experience was that Joan was taken into care on the night of the attack when police found her father drunk and incapable of looking after her. She spent the rest of her childhood in the care of the local council.

  Again no productions from this case had survived – and, this time, even the paperwork had disappeared over the years. When Joan came forward after seeing Sinclair’s case in the papers, she was able to give a very full recollection of what had happened and even picked Sinclair’s picture out of a large collection of photographs she was shown.

  Given the terror of the attack and the tragic family consequences that followed, it says much for this young woman’s character that, despite the passage of time, many of the details of that dreadful day were still firmly in her mind, including one that was of special interest to us. She recalled her attacker’s trousers had flecks of paint on them.

  Reading this case in 2004, the similarities hit us like a sledgehammer. The circumstances and the modus operandi were identical to those of another case we were very familiar with. If you change the names and the dates, you could have been reading the Catherine Reehill case from 1961. The crimes were almost identical with only one important difference – Joan survived.

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nbsp; During the long hours of interviews with Sinclair into various aspects of the case being built up against him, he said little and revealed nothing. When questioned in December 2004 about the attack on Joan, Sinclair was read the girl’s account of what had happened to her and, as usual, he gave not the slightest flicker of a reaction to that graphic document. Uniquely, in this instance, he did break from his usual ‘no comment’ stance to concede what had happened to the little girl had been ‘quite horrendous’. Cool, detached and cynical? Or could this have been the good Angus Sinclair passing judgement on the bad one?

  11

  Confronting the Suspect

  Every single detail of Operation Trinity was important in its own way. Each order, each inquiry, each review of evidence became another block in the process of building a strong case aimed at bringing justice in these historic cases after a quarter of a century of frustration. Apart from the DNA evidence, no other part of this investigation was potentially more important than the interviews we would conduct with Sinclair.

  We had come a long way since my early days in the CID, when it was often a case of accusation and denial until, hopefully, the suspect gave up. Some of the old detectives were masters at winning the psychological battle with suspects. Their techniques differed – some would show the interviewee empathy, others would use the classic good-cop-bad-cop routine and, in the distant past, it might have been the case of resorting to physical intimidation and brute force. They all worked with some people in some circumstances but, even if the suspect did crack or better still sign a confession in a police notebook, it would usually be retracted on advice of a lawyer and the subsequent court appearance descended into a series of accusations of fabrication and denial. Before the 60s, it was usually straightforward and the court simply accepted the officer’s version as a witness of stature and credibility – end of story. But it started to change after the corruption inquiries in the Metropolitan area in the 1960s. The credibility of the police was never quite the same again and later revelations from the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad and many others did nothing to help. These cases of malpractice, corner-cutting and ‘fitting-up’ were self-inflicted wounds and all were hugely damaging to the entire police service – trust was gone.

  In Scotland, mainly because of our unique rules of corroboration, major problems were avoided and there were fewer scandals. Nonetheless, the world had changed and it soon became the case that admissions in Scottish criminal cases were viewed with suspicion, times of detention were restricted and we all had to get a little more professional. It became important that any admission contained specialist knowledge – in other words, something that only the culprit could know such as the location of the body, the stolen goods or the weapon. In such circumstances, the specialist knowledge and the consequent recovery of the evidence were usually persuasive enough to give the confession some credibility.

  There were, of course, ways round this as there are with most safeguards but, for the most part, the tightening of the rules, while despised by some old cops, was good for everyone. It offered protection for the innocent suspect who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, forced the police officer to prepare more thoroughly and not simply depend on a verbal admission, and it also protected younger officers from the pressure of older colleagues to ‘get a result’.

  Had Angus Sinclair been arrested for the World’s End killings in the 1970s, the interviews would have been thorough but crude by comparison to the techniques of the twenty-first century. Nowadays, for serious cases, interviews are at least tape-recorded and more often videoed as well. They are the subject of intense preparation and nothing is left to chance. In Sinclair’s case, as in other major inquiries, the police are governed by very strict rules of interview, the breaking of which can render any material gathered inadmissible and worthless. This could not be allowed to happen in our case. Sinclair’s long experience of the criminal justice system meant he would be very unlikely to be overawed or intimidated by the process. The fact that we had to go public on the investigation many months before seeing him for the first time also meant the element of surprise was gone and he had plenty of time to think things over and prepare for our eventual arrival.

  The exceptional circumstances we were dealing with in Sinclair’s case meant we needed an exceptional approach to these crucial interviews that, given the number of crimes we were investigating, would stretch over many sessions. He would be questioned about the murders, of course, but also about the robberies and assaults we pulled from the files. A huge planning process was put into establishing a strategy, selecting interviewing officers, training them for the different responses they might get from Sinclair, gathering and collating what are known as interview aids, maps, photographs, sketches to help jog the memory and of course demonstrate the degree of care that has gone into our inquiry.

  Early on in Operation Trinity, we turned for help once more to the National Crime and Operations Faculty and got the help of a top criminal psychologist. We had to make sure we were going to get the maximum benefit from the time-limited sessions spent interviewing Sinclair. It wouldn’t be right to name the psychologist who helped us but she was one of the best – hugely experienced in the field, she had a long track record of success in dealing with Britain’s most dangerous criminals. She was able to form opinions of Sinclair from videoed interviews conducted in 2000 when he had been questioned over the murder of Mary Gallagher. After she’d reviewed each interview the police had conducted with him back then, she made observations and offered guidance on tactics and further plans of action.

  We first met Angus Sinclair in a videoed meeting in October of 2004 at Peterhead Prison. The aim of the initial interview was to introduce him to the investigation, give him details of how we saw it progressing over the future weeks and explain to him what his involvement would be. This may seem rather odd to those not acquainted with modern police procedures – a little too polite perhaps. In fact, this approach was suggested as a method of overcoming one of Sinclair’s personality traits – one that might stand in the way of successful questioning. Broadly speaking, our psychologist observed that, in the past, Sinclair had been able to take some control of police interviews. He used his self-discipline and contempt for the entire process to intimidate interviewing officers and dominate the exchanges. He also used all sorts of tricks to exasperate interviewing officers to the point where they lost any chance of obtaining meaningful progress. We saw how Sinclair used his eyes very effectively to turn the direction of the interview. He would stare at interviewers in such a way as to make them feel uncomfortable. The inexperienced or unprepared interlocutor would soon find himself on the defensive. The questioning process of a suspect is a fascinating drama of human interaction and role-play which, if entered into by either side with unjustified confidence, can lead to disaster. Take, for example, the cocky criminal who thinks he can easily outsmart the police – often you find his tongue gets the better of him and he contradicts himself or makes unintentional admissions as his guard fails. Once that happens, the game is up. Thankfully, most criminals are not very bright or well prepared and often the stress of the event gets to them.

  However, the hardened offender who has had years to mull over his story and perfect his replies is a different challenge altogether. Add to that the time lag, Sinclair’s controlling personality and his all too obvious ability to deceive and it’s easy to appreciate just how difficult we believed the challenge ahead of us was going to be.

  One important part of the plan was to select the right officers to carry out the interviews. Many factors had to be taken into consideration. It was important that the interviewers were experienced but we felt too much experience might work against us. They could not be so set in their ways that they would decline any advice about overcoming the particular difficulties presented by Sinclair. Nor could they be too senior. In TV police dramas, it’s usually the senior detective who confronts the suspect but this is one area where fact and fi
ction are miles apart. It’s a myth. It would have been ridiculous for me or one of the senior officers from the squad to carry out the interview. For one thing, too senior an officer gives an impression of status or importance to the suspect. To an egotist like Sinclair, this would have been a gift and a mistake for us. But there was another, more practical reason for my non-involvement. The truth was that my interviewing skills were rusty and my techniques well out of date. The other senior officers were more recently practised but still not as proficient as middle-ranking operational detectives whose experience was current and techniques bang up to date. In all major case interviews, it is experience, skill and suitability that count, not rank or seniority.

  Despite the weight of the forensic evidence that we had, the interview with Sinclair was of the utmost importance and, after careful consideration and lengthy discussions with Ian Thomas and Eddie McCusker, we picked one officer from Strathclyde and one from Lothian and Borders. We felt they offered the necessary experience and the ability to represent us best. Detective Sergeants Calum Young and Jim Shanley may not at first have welcomed their selection as interviewing officers – after all, it was a huge responsibility with a lot resting on the outcome. Naturally they gave no indication one way or the other but they certainly knew that the whole squad was relying on them. The simple truth was that, in the near thirty years of the inquiry, the thousands of jobs undertaken and the hundreds of detectives who had gone before, they were the first to be able to look the World’s End suspect in the eye – it would be both a great opportunity and a weighty responsibility. They may have been apprehensive but we were certain we had picked the correct lead interviewers. Both officers had good reputations and the right skills for the job.

  It was unlikely that the sheer power and eloquence of the interview would bring about a change of heart in the suspect to the extent that he would make a full and frank confession, but it certainly was the case that any future prosecution would, in all probability, rely heavily on the videotapes of the interviews to allow the jury perhaps their only chance of hearing Sinclair’s story in his own words and form a judgement on it. In a case like this, the accused very often decides, on legal advice, not to give evidence in court. They know how fatally damaging a good cross-examination can be. Instead, they rely on their counsel saying to the jury something like, ‘There is no need for my client to go into the witness box as the prosecution have failed miserably to make a case.’ While we were not to know it at the time, this is exactly what happened in the 2007 trial. Thankfully, given the opportunity, the members of a jury, who often have little legal knowledge but plenty of common sense, usually see this tactic for what it is – a device to keep the accused person from being tested or revealing his guilt in front of their eyes.