The World's End

by Tom Wood

  By the time Operation Trinity was up and running, Sinclair had been held in the unit for the detention and treatment of sex offenders at Peterhead Prison on Scotland’s north-east coast for some years. The wing of the bleak-looking granite building dedicated to this work is universally known as the ‘Beastie Block’. Because of this, most ordinary inmates find Peterhead objectionable and they also dislike its remote location because visitors from the Central Belt of Scotland have to spend many hours by car or public transport to get there. It isn’t easy for somebody from Glasgow to visit a Peterhead inmate using public transport. The train journey takes at least two and a half hours and then there’s a further hour on the bus from Aberdeen – although it does drop people off right outside the gates of the prison. Eight hours of travel from Glasgow and back and a two-hour visit makes for a long day.

  Strangely, however, our initial soundings of staff at Peterhead suggested that Sinclair rather liked it there. In fact, it seemed he was something of a model prisoner. One official at the jail, no doubt with tongue in cheek, went as far as to say Sinclair was ‘as reliable as some of the staff’.

  It seems that quite early on in his stay at the jail he was given trusted inmate status and allowed to work in the kitchen. Within a relatively short space of time, he had earned the respect of the jail authorities and had more or less taken charge of the kitchen where he maintained a strict regime amongst his fellow inmate workers. He was given responsibility for ordering food and other supplies and in this he showed his characteristic organisational skills and appetite for hard work.

  It is well known that sex offenders can often be subjected to a hard time in jail from other inmates. One of the virtues of the Peterhead unit from the inmates’ point of view is that all prisoners have similar offending backgrounds and, as such, there is a much reduced chance of the kind of abuse or physical attacks they might face in a mainstream jail.

  Sinclair, by all accounts, had adapted well to jail life. He was so confident of his own position in the jail pecking order that he was known to hand out ferocious reprimands to trusty workers in ‘his’ kitchen if they failed to match his exacting standards.

  The picture we were getting of the 2004 Angus Robertson Sinclair was very different from the one that had inevitably been formed from even a casual reading of his criminal record. The older Sinclair took pride in his work and was, in many ways, a model inmate. It was as though he had somehow managed in his own mind to divorce himself from the reality of his background. The merciless sexual predator, who, throughout a long offending career, had shown not one jot of remorse for his action or pity to his victims, appeared to have changed. He was now so trusted by the authorities in the jail and by his fellow inmates that he had a special place in the hierarchy. Inmates sought his advice and counsel and the judgements he made of their circumstances were characterised as firm but fair.

  It was against this background that, in consultation with the senior investigating officers of the forces involved investigating all the murders that came under the umbrella of Operation Trinity, we decided to go public with details of our operation. I hoped to stop unhelpful publicity that might result from a leak from a source not fully in the picture of what we were doing and even perhaps bring forward new witnesses to any of the individual cases.

  I had no intention of revealing the name of our prime suspect nor even confirming it to reporters but I was aware that some of the news outlets with well-connected crime reporters knew exactly who our suspect was. At a press conference at police headquarters in Edinburgh, I sat down, flanked by senior officers from the other forces involved, to give an overview of the operation minus many of the details the press wanted and we needed to protect at this stage. We said we were interested in the unsolved murders of seven young women. At the time of this conference, we were still considering the possible connection of Sinclair to two unsolved murders in Dundee although, when I sat down that day, there were increasing doubts that these killings were connected to our inquiries. Already the few potential links with the Dundee murders were beginning to look a little shaky but the inclusion of those cases in Trinity gave them new impetus and brought forward new lines of inquiry.

  The following morning’s papers were full of the story, naming Sinclair and giving extensive details on his background. Many experienced journalists in Scotland knew of the cases we were dealing with and there had been previous speculation concerning Sinclair in some quarters. As the case was not at this stage active, which is to say sub judice and protected by the Lord Advocate’s Guidelines and the Contempt of Court Act, the press could say virtually what they wanted without fear of the consequences. Few, if any, mentioned that first killing, that of Catherine Reehill, and we were pleased to see some other sensitive areas of the investigations had escaped the attention of reporters.

  As our background inquiries into Sinclair progressed, we uncovered a lot of the detailed information about that first fatal sex attack. Aspects of it were highly unusual and we would find them repeated in later crimes. He had spoken of his sexual activity prior to the killing of little Catherine. Most of it had been conducted in association with other boys. He and one particular friend had been in the habit of having sex with either of two girls who had made themselves available in return for cigarettes. Usually though it was Sinclair and his friend having sex with the same girl on the same night. He seemed to like to have a chum at hand. There was also a suggestion from Sinclair that one of his friends had warned him of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases. This obviously struck home for later he certainly seemed to have had a severe phobia about it – though not severe enough to prevent him continuing his behaviour.

  In the Reehill case, the Crown Office, the prosecuting authority, had decided they would not be able to prove premeditation in the killing of little Catherine and so Sinclair was charged with culpable homicide, the Scots law equivalent of manslaughter, and he pled guilty. Before sentence was passed in August 1961, the judge heard extracts of various reports, one passage of which is chilling in its accuracy as it predicted that no psychotherapy treatment would benefit such a sexual obsession and that young Sinclair would require constant supervision – failure to do this would result in continued sexual offending should he be given the slightest opportunity. These thoughts were prophetic indeed and, as we read them, they echoed down the years.

  The judge, Lord Mackintosh, branded the teenager ‘callous, cunning and wicked’ and ordered that he be detained for ten years.

  Reading the stark warnings contained in reports of over forty years ago and knowing what happened during the intervening period were sobering in the extreme. We could never say we had not been warned.

  Despite being still only sixteen years old it was clear that, at the time, the authorities had no appropriate place to keep him and he was eventually held in the adult jail in Aberdeen for the first three years of his sentence. Who knows what lessons the young Sinclair was taught by older inmates and how this experience influenced his future behaviour? His time there may have even been the final building block in the creation of Sinclair and the public menace he was to become. During his stay in Aberdeen, he worked at joinery and net-making and had a spell in the cookhouse. Those monitoring his progress noticed how he formed firm friendships with older men, recidivists, and displayed a ‘thinly veiled disregard for authority or guidance’ – a dangerous omen of what was to come. Again, with hindsight, it seems wholly inappropriate that he was sent to an adult prison – young people of the age Sinclair was then should obviously not be in jail with adult prisoners. These days they would not be in an adult jail except in the most exceptional of circumstances and, if they were, the authorities would ensure they were closely monitored and held for as short a time as possible.

  Sinclair stayed in Aberdeen until the mid 60s when he was transferred to Edinburgh with a view to his eventual release. One constant throughout this period of incarceration was a series of regular visits from his mother, Mary, and siste
r. It seems that they had rather fallen out with Sinclair’s brother, who had obviously helped the detectives investigating Catherine Reehill’s killing. Sinclair’s mother and sister made the long trip to Aberdeen at least once a month to maintain contact.

  After three years in Edinburgh prison, Sinclair was put on to the ‘Training for Freedom’ programme, a scheme designed to ease the passage from life in prison to life back in the community. During this time, Sinclair was allowed periods of home leave and he would stay with his mother at her new house in Bellfield Street in the east end of Glasgow.

  There are no official records of the decision-making processes that led to his eventual release but it is clear that, when he walked free from jail in 1968, a very dangerous man was being allowed back on to the streets. It is worth reflecting on the facts that are known about his release from custody because they raise serious issues that still confront us today and are yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

  All those involved with Sinclair at this time gave the same bleak assessment of his character. He was judged to be a liar who posed a risk for the foreseeable future. As he served that first custodial sentence, it became apparent that he had shallow emotions and no remorse for his crime. This was apparently seen by some as normal because of his age and the length of time he’d been behind bars. In retrospect, it seems more like an excuse rather than a reason and I would question these factors as a satisfactory explanation for someone’s apparent inability to see anything wrong with killing a seven-year-old girl during a violent sexual assault.

  Rather than prioritising his emotions and the likelihood of him reoffending, those holding the key to his cell seem to have been more concerned about his ability to find work on the outside and perhaps their pragmatism is understandable. After all, here was a young man who had already come under negative influences so they must have deemed it best to get him out of that environment sooner rather than later – and he had developed skills. In the jail in Aberdeen, prisoners could work for a well-established business that made fishing nets for the city’s trawler fleet. Sinclair had worked in the net workshop for some time and had become adept at knot tying. This was something that would be of great interest to us later in the investigation.

  Overall, it is clear he managed to keep out of serious trouble though senior prison officers concluded this was largely due to his cunning and his ability to avoid getting caught and to work the system. During his first experience of jail, he had already adapted well to the loss of freedom. His future spells behind bars would see him continue in the same way and become the adaptable model prisoner.

  Edinburgh prison in those days ran one of Scotland’s main ‘Training for Freedom’ programmes and many prisoners heading for release spent time at Saughton, as it’s known, learning a trade that could give them a chance to go into the outside world and earn a living. Sinclair took a painting and decorating course and obtained City & Guilds qualifications. Under the TFF programme, he would leave prison each morning to work on the outside and return to his cell at night. His first job was with an Edinburgh city-centre firm of painters and decorators and so, with supreme irony, Angus Sinclair was first introduced to Edinburgh via the criminal justice system. He got to know the town while training for freedom – who knows how the future may have turned out had he been released from another prison? The law of unintended consequences can surely never have had a more catastrophic outcome.

  The dire warnings of all those years before were obviously beginning to fade from memory and the main problem facing Sinclair, by now twenty-two years old, as far as the authorities were concerned, was to get him into sustainable employment. The thinking behind this drive was simply that a man with an income is less likely to reoffend than one who has no stable home and job. It is as true today as it was then. However, although it is generally true, it is less relevant for some offenders than it is for others. In fact, it would later be revealed that after his release, in the very first weeks out of jail, he had sex with a girl he knew to be only fifteen, fully aware that it was against the law.

  The painting company that Sinclair worked for while he was training for freedom offered him a full-time job on his release and so he began work proper. He became friendly with other decorators employed by the firm. One in particular was a man who lived just off the High Street in Edinburgh – a few yards from the World’s End – and Sinclair visited him at his home as their friendship blossomed.

  Sinclair was under a supervision order for three years after his release. During the time he was being supervised, he was in regular contact with probation officers and we discovered he’d had a number of girlfriends. Some of these women were traced and interviewed. They told us how Sinclair had bought a small van and he used to take some of them for runs in it throughout Edinburgh and into the neighbouring county of East Lothian, past the spots where Helen and Christine’s bodies would be found years later.

  Eventually Sinclair entered into a more stable relationship with a nice girl, a student nurse he had met in Edinburgh. Just a month after his twenty-fifth birthday, he married the girl. She was called Sadie Hamilton but everyone knew her as Sarah. Eighteen months later, Sinclair became a father when Sarah gave birth to a son. The couple had, by this time, left Edinburgh and moved back to Glasgow, home city to both of them. They set up home in Nitshill. It was a good start – a steady job, a child and their own house – but married life for Mr and Mrs Sinclair was anything but smooth. The five-foot-two painter and decorator soon started a string of affairs during their early married life – at least six. This led to periods of separation and, during one of them, he moved in with another woman. Despite this, Sarah felt they had a fairly normal married life.

  She knew he had been in jail but was not fully aware of the nature of his crimes until many years later. She certainly had no knowledge of the fact that her husband, whilst supposedly out with friends or on fishing trips, had become a violent predatory criminal engaged in a frenzy of offending in the late 1970s.

  When he eventually made his next court appearance, this time at Scotland’s highest criminal court, the High Court in Edinburgh, in the summer of 1982, Sinclair admitted eleven charges of rape and indecency involving eleven girls, ranging in age from six to fourteen, but denied assaulting a boy of nine. His rape victims were aged just eight, ten and fourteen. The other girls had all been subjected to terrifying ordeals, over a considerable length of time, that must have left them in a state of shock which I imagine will live with them still. The simple recitation of these facts cannot begin to give even the slightest indication of the suffering Sinclair caused to these unfortunate children and their families.

  Each offence was similar. The girls were attacked in the entrances or closes of tenement blocks, either the one they lived in or one near their home. Each time he deployed the same methods. He enticed the girls into these often dark and deserted passageways by stopping them in the street and asking for directions or asking them to run an errand for him in exchange for money – exactly the same ruse as he had used in the killing of Catherine Reehill.

  Reading all of this years later, it once again highlights a fundamental flaw in our criminal justice system. It is this – we can have someone clearly marked out as a high-risk individual who has been subjected to all sorts of reports, examinations and assessments, most of which offer dire predictions as to his likely future behaviour, and, despite it all, he is freed into the community to commit the very acts all those who had contact with him knew he was capable of and indeed likely to perpetrate. Nowhere was there the procedure to intercede or prevent what was for so many people a plainly foreseeable result.

  During Operation Trinity, we would question why he had switched from the adult victims of 1977 to children but, regardless of the age of the victims, he was an offender who worked to an established modus operandi – he was a creature of habit, organisation and remorseless resolve. The alleged offence against the boy didn’t fit his usual pattern but, because he admitted the oth
er charges, it was allowed to remain on file. We will never know for sure but, even if it was Sinclair who attacked the boy, he would have been unlikely to admit it. In the twisted logic of some sex offenders, there is a world of difference between sex attacks on females of any age and boys. It may simply have been a matter of preserving his own self-image – his honour.

  Before his arrest, these attacks on children had been widely reported in the local press but investigating officers had not publicly linked them. The widespread press coverage given to his court appearance meant that few inmates of Glasgow’s Barlinnie Jail would have been unaware of his crimes when he joined their ranks on 30 August 1982. The judge at Sinclair’s trial, Lord John Cameron, was famous for his tough, no-nonsense approach to criminals and he had been one of the last judges in Scotland to pass the death penalty. He sentenced Sinclair to life, recommending he serve at least fifteen years but adding the rider that, in Sinclair’s case, he thought life should mean exactly that.

  Being jailed as an adult paedophile offender was a tough lesson for the diminutive Sinclair. Despite his constant workouts in the jail gym and a near obsession with fitness routines, he had been given a thorough beating by fellow prisoners on at least two occasions within weeks of his arrival in prison just after he was sentenced. After that, he was content to remain a protected prisoner under the rules designed to save sex offenders from inmates’ jail justice. Even at Peterhead Prison’s sex offenders unit, where he was by the time Operation Trinity had started, Sinclair’s fear of retribution from other prisoners remained with him. It was known that he did not relish a move back to the relatively unprotected environment of the general prison population.

  As we progressed with the inquiry, we did sometimes reflect that this fear of being put back into the mainstream might work in our favour. The time would inevitably come when Sinclair would have to be formally questioned. This would be a lengthy process lasting for several days and may require Sinclair to be moved to a prison more convenient for this purpose. We hoped, somewhere at the back of our minds, that he would be so keen to stay within his comfort zone at Peterhead that he may decide to make a clean breast of it all and give us a full voluntary confession. He had, on some occasions, been quite forthcoming in the past and been able to admit his guilt but only when it was clear there was a compelling case against him and it was in his interests to do so. Any confession he made had been as a pragmatic response to a hopeless situation – when he thought he had a chance, he admitted nothing.