by Tom Wood
Once it became apparent that Gordon’s mortal remains were beyond our reach, our next obvious choice was his possessions – a wristwatch perhaps or a piece of jewellery, a cigarette lighter, a wallet, any article that had been his and that we could prove he had handled frequently and left behind. We drew a complete blank – Gordon had left nothing. Neither his wife nor his family had any keepsake that had belonged to Gordon. We then decided to follow the medical route. Gordon had had regular illnesses especially towards the end of his life so perhaps the local hospital had a blood sample or maybe samples had been retained from his post-mortem examination. We could find nothing. It was as if all traces of Gordon Hamilton had been erased – as if he had never existed.
By this time the search for a trace of Gordon Hamilton was becoming a personal challenge for the team and in particular Allan Jones. It will be already apparent that Allan doesn’t give up easily and he wasn’t about to now. We had obviously been doing extensive background checks into Gordon’s life ever since his DNA had identified him as one of the killers. We knew he was a strange man, arrogant and bombastic, opinionated, abrasive on occasions yet withdrawn, private and reclusive in other areas of his life. He had been a difficult man to assess – even his brothers and sisters could not paint a vivid picture of him. We even had difficulties getting a photograph of him until we eventually got hold of a faded family snap from his sister’s photograph album.
However, we did know something about his work. He had been good with his hands and, from time to time, he did little jobs for friends and relatives – just basic electrical work and painting and decorating. As a last resort, Allan Jones and his team pursued this line of inquiry with vigour. We learned that he had carried out some electrical work in a house in Glasgow some years before he died. He had wired some bedroom lights for a friend and this had entailed leading electrical cable behind a bedroom wall. This could be just the break we needed. If Gordon had handled the cables and the cables had been sealed behind the wall since that time, it was possible that he had left traces of his DNA.
Allan and his team found the house, got permission from the owners and recovered what we thought might be the cabling but to no avail – no DNA traces could be found. The hunt continued when we learned that Gordon had done some home decorating for a relative in Glasgow. We knew for sure that he had wallpapered a room in a flat in the centre of Glasgow and that he had put a polystyrene coving round the edge of the ceiling at the same time. There was little chance of recovering anything from the wallpaper or paint but we thought that he must have handled the coving strips while putting them in place so perhaps somewhere on the coving there was a vestige of Gordon Hamilton.
In what was a last resort, Allan and his team found the house, deftly retrieved the coving, preserved it carefully and sent it to the Wetherby lab. Swabs were taken and to our delight traces of DNA were found. The sample was tiny but it was enough to make a match with the profile from the World’s End sample. At last we had found Gordon Hamilton.
It all sounds fairly simple, even mundane, when written down. That conclusion, though, was the end product of scientific endeavour going back to the day Helen and Christine’s bodies were found. At various times, it involved work at the very cutting edge of science. The truth hiding in those samples had been elusive. Witnessing how DNA technology has evolved and helped us, just as it has the entire criminal detection process the world over, was one of the more fascinating parts of Operation Trinity.
But we still had much to do. We had identified Gordon Hamilton as one of our suspects but we knew little of him. He was long dead and although he was known to the authorities it was for minor scrapes with the law. We quickly learned that his relationship with alcohol had killed him prematurely but apart from that we knew almost nothing. Importantly we had no firm evidence of the links between Gordon and Angus Sinclair and, evidentially, this was very important.
If we were to prove that a social relationship between Sinclair and his brother-in-law existed, we would need to conduct lengthy and often difficult interviews with surviving members of Gordon’s family of ten brothers and sisters. Foremost amongst those was Gordon’s sister Sarah, Angus Sinclair’s wife. She, more than any of her siblings, knew the details of Sinclair’s relationships with members of her family. It should be put on record that her help to our inquiry was unstinting and invaluable and allowed us to progress further and faster than we would have without her assistance.
By any definition of the word it is fair to say that the Hamiltons were a troubled family. The children appeared to have been brought up in terror of their domineering and sometimes violent father, and several of them went through adult life the victims of chronic alcoholism that led to the premature death of several, both male and female. Other siblings were persistent offenders and, as such, not the natural allies of the police.
We now know much more about the genetic inheritance of addictive personalities – the predisposition to become addicted to either alcohol or drugs or both. If one of your parents is addicted you have four times the chance of becoming addicted yourself; if both your parents are addicts you are eight times more likely. The Hamiltons are a tragic example of a family stricken and almost destroyed by addiction – in their case to alcohol.
It is to the credit of surviving members of this family, most of whom had difficult relationships with alcohol, crime or both, that, in the main, they did their best to help us. Despite clearly incriminating himself in the process, one of Sarah’s younger brothers volunteered details of the crimes of violence and theft he committed with Angus; these offences were to form an important part of the investigation. He perhaps did not tell us the complete truth about his relationship with Sinclair but he was frank enough to give us some key pointers.
When Operation Trinity was in its early stages we were in the position of being certain that the DNA profile belonged to a member of the Hamilton family but not which one it was. At that time, Gordon Hamilton did not jump out of the family profile as being the most likely candidate for Sinclair’s accomplice in killing. According to all who knew him, Sinclair was most friendly with another of Sarah’s brothers, who was some six years younger than Sarah. Sarah and her surviving brothers and sisters seemed pretty clear that Gordon and Angus were on little better than nodding terms. The younger brother was by far the best prospect but the chance of him being the second killer was soon eliminated when he provided us with a swab for DNA testing. When the results came back, his DNA clearly did not fit the profile of Sinclair’s accomplice and he was ruled out as a suspect.
In trying to build an overall picture of Sinclair’s involvement in his wife’s family, we attempted to establish just how much the Hamiltons, individually or collectively, knew of his past. Sarah, for instance, knew that he had been in jail but was adamant she did not know anything of the details behind her husband’s imprisonment other than perhaps having an inkling about the general type of the offence.
Sarah first got to know the man who was to cause her so much pain and anguish in the years to come in Edinburgh in the late summer of 1969. She was a student nurse and was introduced to Sinclair by a friend of hers who was actually already in a relationship with him. Not long after that, Sinclair and the friend split up and he took up with Sarah. When Sarah and Angus eventually married, her parents were not at the Edinburgh registry office ceremony. She is certain that, in the months after the marriage, when her new husband met his parents-in-law, he got on well with them, but it seems clear Sarah was ever mindful of the trouble she knew would ensue if her father found out about his past jail term, no matter what the nature of the offence had been. This fear was based on Sarah’s sketchy knowledge of Sinclair’s crimes. One can only imagine the likely reaction of her father if he ever found out the whole truth about his son-in-law – that he was a convicted child killer.
The complicated family relationships of the Hamilton clan were extremely important to us because of the DNA clues that were going to lead to the
solution of the World’s End killings. It is fair to say Angus Sinclair polarised the Hamilton family. There were those who detested him and went to any length to ensure they had no dealings with him at all. Sarah’s brother Thomas, for example, completely forbade his wife to accept lifts with Sinclair even though she was very friendly with Sarah. To Thomas, Sinclair was a ‘nonce’, prison slang for a sex offender, and, although he had no precise knowledge of his crime, he wanted his family, particularly his wife, to have as little to do with him as possible. However, Sinclair got on very well with another sister-in-law, and it seemed as if they had a close relationship. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of emotion and involvement was Gordon. On the face of it, the relationship between Gordon and Angus Sinclair appeared to be little more than a nodding acquaintance – just as other members of the family had described – but, as we were to slowly discover, Gordon was a man with another side to him, a hidden side which was to draw him into a friendship with Sinclair through their shared interests of the darkest kind.
Then there was the younger brother, who had been closest to Sinclair. His lifelong addictions to alcohol and crime have left him in a sorry state – we knew he was suffering from severe medical problems and living alone in London. However, when we tracked him down to the bedsit in the west of the capital where he was living, he was very helpful, especially after the severity and nature of the crimes under investigation were made known to him. Without hesitation, he outlined the kinds of crimes he and Sinclair carried out and he told us about one particularly brutal offence which would become an important part of the jigsaw puzzle. I cannot stress too much the need for the corroboration of scientific evidence. In Scots law, a single source of information is not enough – it has to be backed up by a second corroborative source in all crimes from the most minor to the most serious. The younger Hamilton told us of a crime, no doubt long forgotten by all except the victims, that gave us a real insight into Sinclair’s method of operation, his pattern of offending, and would, we felt sure, tell a lot about the man in the dock. The fact that, by revealing details of this event, he incriminated himself in a serious offence is an indication of how far he was prepared to go to help us.
Heaven knows what John and Elizabeth Black (their names have been changed to protect their identity) must have thought at first when police came knocking on their door apparently fired by an new determination to solve the crime that had been committed against them nearly thirty years before. The horrific nature of what happened to the couple in their then home in the Moodiesburn area of Lanarkshire near Glasgow meant they would not have forgotten the details of what occurred one awful day in April 1976 – even if they thought the police had.
Elizabeth had left her council-owned home in a typical tenement-style block of six flats in Bridgeburn Drive to go to her work in a nearby miners’ club. It was Friday morning and the day the rent was due to be paid. Her husband John had stayed in bed after a late shift at the factory where he worked, leaving their daughter in charge of the rent money. She wasn’t well that morning and had stayed off school. Her mother had told the seven-year-old exactly what to do when the rent man arrived at his regular time later that morning – nothing could go wrong.
The young girl was watching television when there was a knock on the front door at about 10 a.m. Having no reasons to think that it could be anyone other than the rent man, the little girl opened the door without a second thought only to be greeted by a terrifying sight. Before her stood two men with stockings over their faces – one was carrying a knife, the other a hammer. The taller of the two men dragged the hysterical youngster up the hallway of the house, holding his knife to her throat, whilst the second man burst into her parents’ bedroom and threatened a, by now, wide awake John Black with a hammer.
Both were roughly bundled into the living room of the house and made to lie face down on the floor. Quickly the intruders bound the father and daughter’s arms and feet with Sellotape and both were gagged using the same material. They were then left alone as Sinclair and Hamilton waited for the rent man in another room in the house. Sure enough, before long, there was a knock at the door and the shout of ‘Rent man!’ Mr Black could hear a violent struggle as the rent man was overpowered. Mr Black clearly heard the attackers demanding the keys to the safe rent collectors kept in their vehicles. Then silence.
A short time passed and the taller man came back into the living room and thrust a bundle of notes towards Mr Black saying, ‘This is for your troubles – sorry about the inconvenience.’
As the attackers fled with the rent money, John Black was able to break free from his bonds and help his daughter. Then he found the rent collector bound and sitting in a chair in the kitchen. He was bleeding profusely from a head wound and blood was spattered across the floor. Obviously the unfortunate man had been the victim of a level of violence that was far in excess of what most criminals would have thought necessary to inflict.
By telling us this incriminating story in the detail that he did, Sinclair’s brother-in-law left himself open to prosecution. However, the Crown Office decided that, in the circumstances and due to the long passage of time, it would not be in the public interest to put him in the dock for this offence, grave as it had been.
The incident was important to us because of the insight it gave into Sinclair’s character. It showed his ruthless use of a level of violence that was completely disproportionate to what might have been necessary for the crime he was committing. Sinclair had taken a hammer to the rent collector to subdue him and roughly bound and gagged John Black and his daughter just because he’d had the desire to do so.
Ironically, another man was arrested for the attack. Not long after the incident happened, he was picked out at an identification parade and subsequently put on trial. Thankfully, however, he was acquitted because he had a cast-iron alibi.
Although his brother-in-law spoke about many of the other offences he had committed with Sinclair, it was the robbery of the Moodiesburn rent man that he covered in the most detail. Just as important as Sinclair’s appetite for violence was Hamilton’s account of his capacity to remain unaffected by the use of such extreme brutality. Having terrified a father and his seven-year-old daughter and committed a vicious attack on the rent collector, Sinclair appeared back where he should have been, minutes later – on his painting job. He was perfectly calm and controlled, giving nothing away.
Sinclair had been working alongside his brother-in-law just round the corner from the flat when he happened to pick up two bits of information that led to him forming a plan to rob the rent man. He was told you could set your watch by the movements of the rent collector and then, in a different context, he learned that John Black would be at home and in bed after his night shift. Sinclair and Hamilton had put down their brushes, left the job and then, after Sinclair had carried out the violent attack, the pair returned. Sinclair was so unaffected by what he’d done that, to their workmates, it must have seemed for all the world as if they had just popped out for a sandwich.
This information gave us a fascinating insight to the mind and working methods of Angus Sinclair – methods and behaviours that spanned the range of his offending, criminal and sexual, over all his years of freedom.
But we still had much to learn about Gordon Hamilton and his bizarre connections with some of the other crimes we were investigating.
7
Family Ties
Sarah Sinclair has had to bear three great misfortunes in her life. None of them were of her own making but, despite all her troubles, she has always maintained her dignity and tried her best to help us where she could. Above all, she has needed to protect the new life she has created for herself after separating from Sinclair and the nightmare of the old one. Spouses and families of notorious criminals are in a hellish position. At first there is a natural denial on their part, fostered by an instinct for self-preservation and the knowledge that the conviction of a family member can also bring disaster to all th
ose they are closest to. Sometimes there is complicity that stops short of actual participation but is dangerous nonetheless. The desire for self-preservation can shield a relative’s eyes to the obvious and leave them unwilling to ask the most basic questions for fear of what the answer would bring. As young detectives, we were always told that alibis provided by wives and mothers were never to be weighed heavily. Throughout our contact with Sarah, she convinced us that she was trying her utmost to deal with a difficult situation as best she could.
Many will be surprised that this nurse, who now lives in the south of England and has had nothing to do with Sinclair for many years, remains married to him. The fact is that, while it is clear their marriage ended in all but name many years before, she has simply never got round to divorcing him. Just why a woman who has done so much to build a new life in a different part of the world would remain married to such a man puzzled my team for a considerable period of time – until they got to know Sarah during many hours of interviews.
From the outset of this inquiry, it was obvious that Sarah Sinclair would be a key to the successful outcome of our investigation. The many years that had passed since the commission of these crimes and the need to establish corroboration for all the evidence eventually to be laid before the court meant that we would have to go into minute detail examining every aspect of Sinclair’s past, and Sarah would be able to help us more than most other people that had walked through his life. From the outset, we realised the importance of keeping Sarah on our side. However, it was also clear that recalling the everyday details of her married life twenty-five or more years ago was going to be a very tough task. That those details were bound up in memories of what for anyone could only be described as a traumatic time would make the recall as painful as it was difficult. To her great credit and despite having to deal with what must have been conflicting emotions, Sarah devoted a great deal of time and energy to helping us right from the start and there’s no doubt that this must have been a draining commitment for her.