by Tom Wood
Brought up in some of the toughest areas of Glasgow, Sinclair did not follow any established pattern. His first crimes were of a relatively minor nature and involved theft and housebreaking, albeit at a very young age – he was fourteen at his first court appearance. But, in the Glasgow of the late 50s when he would have been in his mid teens, these offences would not have been out of the ordinary amongst his peers. It would, however, not be long before the juvenile offender Sinclair would be back in court – as a teenage killer.
As I begin to describe the background of Sinclair and his criminal history, it will quickly become clear just what a very dangerous person he has always been. As I have already said, he shows a contempt towards his victims that is breathtaking. Worse than that, in a criminal career of serious offending stretching back almost forty-five years, he has never once, to the knowledge of officers who have carried out meticulous inquiries into his life, expressed the slightest remorse. This is not just my view and those of other police officers but the firm conclusion of every professional to have come across him in the criminal justice system since he was twelve years old. Eventually at the conclusion of our inquiries when he was confronted with his past he would have the chance to show remorse for what he had done but, during countless hours of detailed interviews with skilled officers who were thoroughly prepared for their task, there was not a glimmer of contrition. He had nothing to lose – he was serving two life sentences, he was fifty-nine years of age, he knew he was never going to be released – yet he never once showed a sign of cracking. Rather there was a stony-faced and steady resolve to play the game to the end and, in the finest tradition of the career criminal, admit absolutely nothing.
Sinclair was the youngest of three children born to a couple who lived in the Maryhill area of Glasgow. Mary and Angus Sinclair had a fourteen-year-old son and an eleven-year-old daughter by the time Angus Junior came along. When his third child was born, Angus Senior was suffering from increasingly severe bouts of an illness which was eventually diagnosed as leukaemia. He spent a lot of time at the family home in St Peter’s Street not far from the city centre. Although he was too ill to work, he was able to look after young Angus whilst mother Mary worked in a nearby tobacconist shop. Angus Senior died just four years after his youngest child was born and Mary Sinclair said she was naturally worried about how he would react to his dad’s death. To begin with, his life progressed normally and he went first to nursery and then to the local primary school in nearby Grove Street.
In the background of many sex offenders, there is often a history of them having being victims of sexual abuse before going on to be perpetrators. On the face of it, it’s counter-intuitive. You would think that, having been the victim of sex crime and being aware of the long-term solitary suffering that goes with it, the last thing someone would want to do is to carry it on and repeat the victimisation. Yet time and time again we find this is exactly what happens with victims becoming offenders and on and on, creating a pyramid of suffering. This was not the case with Sinclair. Although he alleged it, we found no evidence at all to suggest that he had been a victim. He had a tough upbringing but no tougher than thousands of others.
The Glasgow of his childhood was the Glasgow of No Mean City fame. It was also a time of upheaval in Scotland’s largest city as great social changes were taking place. Huge areas of the inner city were designated as slums and bulldozed with the residents decanted to estates on the outskirts as well as the new towns that were springing up across the Central Belt of Scotland. This was the Glasgow of gangs and violence where murder rates ran far ahead of the rest of the country and local crime lords sorted out their differences with knives and razors and then, increasingly, guns. It was during Sinclair’s teenage years that a period of peace was brought to parts of Glasgow by the unlikely figure of the singer Frankie Vaughan. He became involved with youth work in the east end of the city and ultimately brokered a deal between rival gangs and persuaded them to join in a weapons amnesty. Sinclair may not have been directly involved in this but it is important to describe this background to give an impression of the parts of the city in which he grew up. Glasgow was then a place where in some areas extreme violence was the currency of everyday life.
The eventual criminal trial would require us to have an exceptionally detailed knowledge of all aspects of Sinclair’s life. A simple recitation of his criminal record and any surviving probation reports would not even begin to fill the need we had. We had to find ways to bridge the time gap, to stretch back more than forty years and gather together comprehensive details of his life, friends and movements – every scrap of information that could be gleaned to give us clues to his behaviour. As we set off on this task, our investigation was in its early days and it was impossible to gauge the totality of exactly the sort of information we were looking for, but officers knew that any single seemingly unimportant snippet might take on immense significance as the inquiry progressed. This was especially relevant in our search to trace the second man – the elusive source of our original DNA sample.
The first areas to explore were of course his friends and family. There were also the weighty reports drawn up by professionals involved in his various court appearances. Most people connected to Sinclair over the years were well disposed towards us and prepared to do all they could to help clear up these very serious crimes. Lengthy statements were taken from surviving members of his immediate family. As we have already noted, his father died when he was just a young boy and, by this time, his mother was long dead too.
One striking feature of his childhood was the close relationship the young Sinclair formed with his sister’s daughter who, for her own protection, I will not name. It seems clear, as is often the case in these circumstances, that he had been led to believe that this girl was in fact his sister. Family members remember him being very affectionate towards her and when he was older using his pocket money to buy her quite generous gifts. His sister saw nothing untoward in this relationship. She recalled that at that time he seemed to be a happy and normal little boy. He would appear to have been generally well behaved in class at St George’s Road Junior Secondary School where he completed his formal education. There was certainly nothing to worry about in his school reports. Despite the fact that he’d been in trouble with the police from a young age, they recorded him being of average intelligence and well mannered.
It was also apparent from the recall of family members that Sinclair spent a period of time in some sort of residential care though no one can remember the details of why this should have happened and no official records could be found. It may have been connected to the moody and depressive behaviour witnessed by family and teachers after his father’s death. In those days, children were put into care for a variety of reasons which, unlike today, did not need to be explained or fully recorded. The stock phrase ‘beyond parental control’ covered a multitude of sins and often glossed over deep psychological problems. Perhaps the first clue to his future behaviour lay in that decision to take Angus into care – we will never know. What we do know is that his mother was becoming increasingly concerned.
Sinclair’s criminal career started in earnest in 1959, when he was fourteen. His string of petty offences – theft, housebreaking, breaches of probation – are all gateway crimes you could see on a thousand young boys’ records as they make the difficult transition through puberty in a bad neighbourhood and with the wrong crowd but it’s the kind of bad start that many boys survive. The vast majority recover from starting out on the wrong foot – they grow out of their criminal ways and go on to be decent, sometimes even prominent, citizens. As they mature and have their ways mended – usually by a girlfriend or wife – their names disappear from the criminal records, often before they reach the age of twenty.
Because of this perennial trend, the Scottish criminal justice system does all it can not to stigmatise young offenders. The Children’s Hearing System is criticised by many and it does have difficulty dealing with the
small group of very active offenders but overall, for the 90 per cent who do not reoffend, it is absolutely the correct response. There are of course exceptions – those who start in their teens and don’t stop, those who go on to be career criminals and leave in their wake dozens, even hundreds, of victims. Angus Sinclair was just such a man and it was at this very early age that the crimes of dishonesty which were a constant in his background were overtaken by the sex crimes that were to dominate his life and ensure his infamy.
In 1961 Sinclair appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court charged with the offence under Scots law of lewd and libidinous behaviour. This is one of the minor charges available for sex offences and it is usually applied when inappropriate behaviour that falls short of sexual assault has taken place. In what was to be a first sign of his character and nature, he denied the offence which involved an eight-year-old girl who lived just a few doors from Sinclair’s family home in St Peter’s Street. Despite his protestations, he was convicted again and his future hung in the balance.
The social consequences were also dramatic. His actions were the talk of the neighbourhood and he lost his job, his first on leaving school at fifteen.
While awaiting sentence, Sinclair spent a period in a remand home where the authorities began having their first detailed look at his character without, it seems, any great success. He was again given probation – this time for three years. The probation officers who supervised him found him an enigma. He played the game, worked with the system he knew he could not beat and he never, never admitted his guilt. It is not all that unusual for a pubescent boy to be obsessed with sex but few carry out their fixation to the extremes that Sinclair was to – especially at fifteen years of age.
That fixation with sex turned to utter tragedy just six months later, in July 1961, when he was arrested for the murder of a seven-year-old girl who lived in the same tenement block as his first child victim in St Peter’s Street. Not only was this killing carried out in the same place as the previous attack but it happened while he was still subject to the probation order for the first offence.
Reading contemporary reports of that case in my office in Livingston New Town over forty years later was a chilling experience. For someone so young to be capable of such a crime and then to deny it and calmly try to cover it up as he did showed that he was cool headed and detached beyond his years. With the benefit of hindsight I had that day, it was clear the killing of Catherine Reehill was an ominous sign of what was to come.
The newspapers of the day described what happened. Sinclair, still only fifteen, had been left alone in his home, a tenement flat in St Peter’s Street. He would have been secure in the knowledge that none of his family would be returning for at least three hours. It was a narrow window of opportunity but it was enough and it seems to me that what followed was the execution of a carefully thought-through plan that was carried out with the cold single-mindedness, determination and the disregard for his victim that was to become Sinclair’s signature in later crimes. The details of this crime were a first illustration of the modus operandi that would be used in later life. The events leading up to the death of the little girl on 1 July 1961 would be mirrored in crimes many years later. There was a carefully laid plan – gain the trust of the victim and then attack with overwhelming violence. Bear in mind that Maryhill in Glasgow in the 1960s was a close-knit and traditional community of working-class families who tended to spend their lives in and around the same areas. The families who lived in the tenements of St Peter’s Street would have been there for years and would have been on first-name terms with every one of their immediate neighbours and on nodding terms with just about everyone in the neighbourhood.
Minutes after being left alone, Sinclair went out of the house, approached seven-year-old Catherine Reehill and asked her to run an errand for him. He sent her to the corner shop to buy him some chocolate and instructed her to bring it to his flat. A willing little helper, she quickly ran there and back, only to have Sinclair force himself on her. He tried to have sex with her but she fought him off, banging her head so badly in the struggle that there was blood everywhere. The details of what happened next do not need to be repeated in graphic terms here – suffice to say that he strangled the little girl and raped her.
One of the most telling features of this attack was that, as Sinclair was carrying out his deadly attack, he was interrupted. There was a knock on the door of the flat and Sinclair, in the middle of his murderous assault, opened the front door wide. He appeared totally calm to his caller, a friend and neighbour of similar age, and, after agreeing to meet later that night, Sinclair closed the door and returned to killing. That kind of detachment is very telling. To be caught in the act of murder and be able to divorce yourself so coolly from what is going on as to appear completely normal is hard to do. One could hardly expect that of a hardened criminal let alone a boy of fifteen. This was no crime of passion, committed through a loss of reason – it was a cold-hearted plan, carried through with precision.
In his eventual explanation of the crime, Sinclair said that, when he realised Catherine was dead, he carried her body out of the flat and down the common stair. He left it dumped at the bottom of the stairwell. There was of course no evidence to prove his version that she died from an ‘accidental’ blow to the head during the struggle. She may equally well have been bludgeoned by Sinclair. Knowing his character, it is unlikely that Sinclair would have wanted his victim to survive to tell what had happened to her. He always tried very hard to escape blame.
The child’s crumpled corpse was found a short time later by a neighbour returning home and the alarm was raised. The position she had been left in made it appear as if the little girl had fallen down the steep stone stairs. Sinclair was one of the first on the scene and witnesses told how he was heard loudly demanding to know what had happened. The people who rushed to the stair brought by the neighbour’s screams could not have been expected to guess at the truth of what had actually happened. At first they just presumed little Catherine had fallen downstairs. Sinclair alone at that point knew how wrong the neighbours’ guesses actually were.
It was not long though before suspicion fell on him – perhaps because of his very recent past offences. He was detained by police and questioned several times during the following day. He denied all knowledge of what had happened to the little girl but detectives concluded that he was lying and he was charged with murder. Later that night, after speaking to his brother, who he had always respected, Sinclair made an admission of sorts. He told officers what had happened and why. He said he had lost control of his sexual urges, there had been a struggle and Catherine had banged her head.
Here was the first step up the ladder of offending and a steep one at that. He had, just months before, committed a sexually motivated offence against a young girl. In this latest crime, the offence was grave and the outcome tragic. Looking back all those years, one question stands out – had he already learned that leaving his victim alive would be a mistake? His explanation that Catherine had banged her head appears improbable – there seems to have been a clearly premeditated killing followed by an equally clear attempt to avoid its consequences yet retain some control by his presence at the scene. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of Catherine’s body, Sinclair visited his brother and attempted to establish an alibi. Looking back, it was clear to see that officers in July 1961 were dealing with quite a sophisticated pattern of offending from a very young man.
Whilst on remand, Sinclair would have been examined at length by psychiatrists. The reports that survived the years remain confidential – suffice to say that he remained detached and seemed not to accept the gravity of his deeds.
As we digested the reports into Sinclair piling up in the incident room and spoke to people who had had dealings with him over the years, it looked as though we were going to have a tough job getting through to him as we eventually hoped to do.
From the very first days after he was identifie
d by the DNA profile from the evidence from the World’s End crime scene, it was clear that, despite the passage of time and the fact that he was now in jail, Sinclair was not going to be an easy nut to crack.
Much of this early work had been carried out in secret but my experience of dealing with the press over the years left me convinced that we were not going to be able to maintain that secrecy for much longer. By that time ‘Operation Trinity’ was up and running, a large squad of officers was being assembled and I had been appointed Officer in Overall Command. As the inquiries grew more extensive and diverse, more officers from across Scotland became involved and a leak, either deliberate or accidental, would almost certainly occur. Inevitably we would have to go public on the investigation. It might be no bad thing for there was also the chance that some new information could come our way from the public following the widespread news coverage the inquiry would generate.
The downside would be that Sinclair would know what was happening and that, sooner or later, we would be knocking on his door. It would give him time to prepare himself – toughen himself mentally against what he knew was coming. It was our total determination that, when that day came, the officers interviewing him would know Sinclair as well as they knew their own families. They would know every aspect of his upbringing and offending. They would have a clear idea of his state of mind through detailed and painstaking study of all the various reports compiled over the years. They would also have a good idea of what he was like now. But what would the general demeanour of the man they would eventually confront be like?