by Tom Wood
The fact that Sinclair led such a secretive, compartmentalised life allowed him to commit serious offences and kill yet leave many of those closest to him clueless as to the extent of his crimes. When he went off for one of his weekend painting jobs, Sarah had no reason to believe he wasn’t doing what he said he was and working away as a painter and decorator. At worst, she may have suspected he was pursuing one of his many affairs but she would certainly have had no idea that he was carrying out the crimes that would be all over the newspapers in the days after he returned home.
Sarah or Sadie Hamilton was just nineteen when she met, fell in love with and married the man she knows as Gus. She was vaguely aware of the fact that Gus had been in jail before their marriage but she didn’t know why and, in fact, did not find out for some time after the wedding. When eventually she discovered the awful truth and confronted her husband with the details of what she had found out, he admitted he had, as he put it, ‘murdered a child’. For her part, Sarah found herself prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and make allowances for his young age at the time of the crime. The man she married must have managed to project a very different image from what one would expect of a child killer.
Despite making allowances for his earlier behaviour, Sarah quickly realised that Gus Sinclair was a nightmare of a husband. Serially unfaithful and occasionally violent, he’d get involved in theft, often executed with extreme violence, and he was totally unreliable. Sarah made that assessment based solely on the activities she knew about at the time or had cause to suspect.
It seemed clear to the team who had dealings with Sarah Sinclair that her life has very much been divided into two parts. She was born into straitened circumstances and raised in a dysfunctional family whose lives were largely dominated by petty crime and drink. She’d had a difficult childhood by any standard. From early on, however, Sarah seems to have been determined to put that behind her and strike out on a different course through life from the one that seemed preordained for her. The route she eventually took certainly diverged markedly from the one followed by the rest of her brothers and sisters.
As we have seen, it would appear that Angus Sinclair’s major personality traits include deviousness and the total lack of concern for the victims of his crimes. We were keen to learn how these characteristics manifested themselves to someone close to him, so who better to help us with this than his wife?
During his time of offending through the second half of 1977, she had not one iota of a suspicion that her husband might be guilty of the crimes that shocked the country and had everyone talking about them. Each of those killings in Scotland’s Central Belt generated immense publicity and none more so than the World’s End murders. Years later, all who knew him at that time who we were able to trace were certain that Sinclair showed no outward signs of any involvement in the crimes. He seemed perfectly normal and at one with himself. It was as though he must have been able to kill in the most bestial and depraved way and, by the time he was back home with his family, behave in what passed for a perfectly normal manner. The capacity to conceal what was going on from those closest to him may seem astounding but it is not uncommon in criminals who disassociate their crimes with the rest of their lives. They compartmentalise their lives as a defence mechanism and to normalise their existence.
From the Word’s End murders in the autumn of 1977 to the 1979 murder of Mary Gallagher and through to the sex attacks on children in the next decade, Sinclair had been murdering young women and then raping children. This meant that, in the Central Belt of Scotland between 1977 and June 1982, he had been committing these most brutal of crimes on a regular basis yet Sinclair was managing to appear perfectly normal to those around him. On top of this appalling list of sexual offences, there were also crimes of dishonesty and violence. Carrying on this kind of lifestyle required highly developed organisational skills – in fact the very sort of skills that would lead to his position of trust running the kitchens of Peterhead Prison in later life. In the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson famously embodied the split personality in his characters Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. For a prime example of the split personality in the twentieth century, Angus Robertson Sinclair fits the bill.
Sarah and Gus had many periods of separation, each one coming in the wake of her discovering his latest affair. Each time, he would talk his way back into the marital home with Sarah relenting because of a mixture of her feelings for him and a strong desire to do the best for their son.
At our headquarters even we, a fairly hardened group of detectives, wondered about this skill in appearing normal despite the horrors that he must have been carrying in his mind. How it could be possible for someone to behave in such a manner and show no outward signs? If you measure his crimes purely in terms of numbers, Sinclair is by no means the worst killer in recent British criminal history. However, the sheer concentration of offending is most unusual. The number of victims, women and children, whose lives he ended or left devastated and the grief and anguish inflicted on their friends and families can scarcely be imagined. That he was able to get away with it undetected for so long has to be a matter of concern for everyone.
Often crimes like the ones we were dealing with here are solved after a tip-off from a member of the offender’s circle after a slip-up by the perpetrator, a shared confidence to ease a troubled mind or a change of behaviour so out of character as to cause suspicion. The way Sinclair appears to have been able to shut details of his crimes from his mind and control his emotions meant he gave nothing away even to those closest to him.
The officers in my team were completely certain that, if Sarah Sinclair had had even a suspicion of what her Gus was doing on his weekends and evenings away, she would have had not the least hesitation in reporting him to the police. If only he had given her that suspicion, if only his guard had slipped even slightly, we were convinced she would have ended it there and then. Sad to say but Sinclair did not give Sarah that opportunity.
When Sinclair was arrested on 7 June 1982, accused of the series of child sex crimes, the effect on his wife was devastating. Their son was eleven at the time, an age when he would have been old enough have been aware of the general circumstances and enormity of what was going on.
The months between Sinclair’s arrest in June 1982 and his sentencing at the High Court in August of that year are the last time Sarah had any real interaction with her husband. It was during what would have been one of their last conversations that Sinclair uttered a sentence to Sarah that leads me to believe he may have many more crimes to answer for.
He was on remand to Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow awaiting trial, no doubt passing time reflecting on his likely defence. It is not in his devious nature to admit wrongdoing. Sarah had other ideas and we know that she told him in no uncertain terms that, if he was guilty of the child sex charges he was accused of, he should make a clean breast of it. She told Sinclair straight that she did not want to be dragged along with their son into what would undoubtedly be a horrific trial featuring days of little children giving the most distressing evidence. She also expressed to him her growing fear that he may be responsible for other crimes he had not so far been caught for. Sarah must have been worried, knowing what she did about his past, that he may even have killed other children.
In the visiting hall of Barlinnie, Gus was challenged and urged to admit his guilt to save his family and victims from the ordeal ahead. Somewhere in the words that followed Gus did exactly that, saying he was indeed guilty of the offences outlined in the charges. He then added that no one yet knew the scale or scope of his crimes. These references haunt all who have had dealings with Sinclair as well as the relatives of the many females that went missing during the years Sinclair was free to stalk the streets of central Scotland, never to be seen or heard of again. It is likely that we will never know the true extent of his crimes and how many victims, dead and alive, that he left in his wake during that time in the late 70s.
While
we carried out a detailed examination of all unsolved murders of women in Scotland, there is still the massive grey area of missing persons. It chills me to read words like ‘May have gone away with boyfriend’ or ‘Believed to have run away to London’ which often conclude missing persons reports – they constitute a guess, albeit an educated one, but nevertheless they represent a life being written off in a vague sentence and a haze of uncertainty.
The second of Sarah Sinclair’s tragedies is, of course, the fact that her brother Gordon was, for at least part of the time, her husband’s partner in crime. The strange thing about this partnership is that it would seem Sinclair and Gordon Hamilton did not appear to be particularly friendly or at least that was the impression they gave. They certainly did not have the close, protective relationship that one might expect joint perpetrators of such serious crimes to have. I suppose it could be that knowledge of the crimes they shared did as much to keep them apart as bring them together. It is extremely hard to imagine the relationship that could exist between two human beings involved in such dreadful crimes. Would they, when alone, go over the details of the World’s End killings, reliving the satisfaction they derived from the murders, or would they blank it from their minds and never discuss the events of that night? To rationalise in some way beyond the comprehension of most normal people such behaviour may have been the way they dealt with it. Whatever they did, neither gave an inkling to those closest to them.
Investigators always think it is in their favour when two people are involved in one crime. There are many ways this can be a distinct advantage. They may fall out and one turns so-called Queen’s evidence against the other in the hope of a lesser sentence. With two suspects, you have twice the chance of something being inadvertently given away during interview.
There is a basic human compulsion to talk about matters that may be weighing heavily on your mind but, as far as we could discover, neither Angus Sinclair nor Gordon Hamilton ever disclosed what took place between them. Hamilton, of course, took his secrets to the grave with him when he succumbed to the effects of his family’s curse of alcoholism in 1996.
Whilst we may never know the exact nature of the relationship between Gordon Hamilton and his brother-in-law, one thing is clear – there was bad feeling within the Hamilton family towards both of them. Gordon Hamilton was found by many to be pompous and overbearing. There was little contact between Gordon and his parents and siblings after he had left the family home. The family was aware that Gordon had married but beyond that they knew little about him. In fact, such was the distance between Gordon and the rest of the family that, even after Angus Sinclair’s arrest, they remained oblivious to many details of his life until our officers made them aware of what had been going on.
Before Gus was detained over the sex attacks on children, he and Gordon would occasionally spend weekends together. They’d say they were going fishing and, while they were away, they’d live in the caravanette Angus had bought – a vehicle that was to play such an important part in the Word’s End murders. We learned that, despite these lengthy trips away, Angus never brought home any fish – at the time, this would have seemed insignificant but, in hindsight, it was suspicious. These were sensitive issues and, during the early part of Operation Trinity, we were not able to tell Sarah Sinclair of the scope of our inquiries or where they were heading.
Gordon’s partnership with Sinclair posed us a further problem. It was simply that Sinclair had the best kind of co-accused – a dead one. We felt certain he would at best try to minimise his part in the crimes. We believed that even he would find it hard to explain the presence of his DNA – especially in the locations it was found in the World’s End case – but, despite this, he and his lawyers were certain to try. He would blame Gordon Hamilton for everything he could and cast himself as the minor assistant. Gordon would always be a convenient scapegoat.
It would be some way down the prosecution process before his legal advisers would have total disclosure of the evidence of the case in order for that sort of tactic to be deployed. This possibility underlined the need for the interviews we would conduct with Sinclair to be the most carefully planned and executed encounters that would leave nothing to chance, no holes to be wriggled through at a later date. It was unlikely that Sinclair would say much when being questioned but we had to establish enough for him to show the falseness of potential defences that would be certain to be conjured up at any future trial. In the event, we never got the chance.
We did not think that Sinclair would try to blame Gordon Hamilton right away. For a start, he wouldn’t know that we knew about Gordon until the evidence was disclosed and he would certainly not wish to voluntarily lead us to an area in which he may have thought himself vulnerable. We were even uncertain as to whether Sinclair knew that Gordon was dead. More importantly, Sinclair could not have been unaware of the extent of our evidence – especially the DNA profiles.
As we gave thought to these matters, I expect our suspect did as well. Sinclair had a good understanding of DNA technology – after all, it was what had brought him to justice for the Mary Gallagher killing at the very time he thought he was heading for parole and freedom. He must have spent many hours in his Peterhead cell wondering and worrying about what other forensic productions may be lying in laboratories and police storage cupboards waiting to be discovered and bring about the next stage in his downfall. With increasingly sophisticated DNA analysis and cold case reviews taking place across the country, many offenders who had thought they have got away with their crimes may well have cause to think again.
This is where our contact with Sinclair’s family became invaluable. For them, having to put so much energy into trying to recall the minute details of the life of a man they had long wanted to forget about must have been frustrating and difficult. For Sarah, there was an additional problem impacting on her life. As any mother would be, she was desperate to protect her son who, by this time, was a young man.
Over many hours of interviews, from the moment her husband was arrested in 1982 right up to and especially during the preparation of the World’s End case, Sarah did all she could to help us. As various matters took on a new urgency or importance, she would be reinterviewed again and she’d always do her very best to recall details of often apparently insignificant events that, twenty-five years on, were now important to us. Details of cars owned by Gus and how long he had driven them for were hard to recall but the information was vital to us. These recall sessions would be even more difficult for her as she had clearly put such a lot of energy into putting her life in Scotland behind her and building a new world far removed from the tough areas of Glasgow where she was brought up and spent so much of her tortured married life with Gus.
One of the other key relationships in Angus Sinclair’s life was with Sarah’s younger brother. He had lived with them for a while and we learned that during that time he had been involved with Angus in a variety of crimes.
This Hamilton brother was forty-eight years old when we tracked him down to a bedsit in London. We first spoke to him at the time it had become clear from the DNA evidence that the second World’s End killer was certainly a member of the Hamilton family – maybe himself and, if not him, certainly one of his brothers. We were still gathering DNA samples from the surviving siblings so there was always going to be the chance that this man was Sinclair’s partner in crime. In fact, when he realised how serious the crimes in our inquiries actually were, he was open and candid in a way we might not have expected from someone of his background. It soon became clear that he was indeed a partner in crime with Sinclair but not the crimes we were most interested in. During the time he was staying with his sister Sarah and brother-in-law Gus, the young man had become deeply involved with Sinclair and his violent robberies.
Sinclair had managed to get his young brother-in-law a job with the painting company he worked for in Glasgow and we learned how quite often he and Gus would return at night to office premises where they h
ad been painting by day and steal. These robberies went on undetected for some time. Then Sinclair and the younger Hamilton moved on to till snatches; bursting into a shop or garage and under the threat of violence, or more often with real violence, making off with the contents of the cash register.
As we had learned from the description of the Moodiesburn rent man robbery, the level of violence used was extreme and we discovered that Sinclair’s favoured tactic was to take a hammer to the head of his victim without threat or warning. Another particularly horrific example of this occurred in Cumbernauld near Glasgow when Sinclair had attacked a car salesman’s daughter who was carrying a relatively large sum of money. Sinclair had lashed out at the terrified woman with the hammer but fled with no money. After they made their escape, Sinclair lost his temper with his accomplice, accusing him of bungling the attack and losing the proceeds.
In another raid on a garage, following information Sinclair had gathered from a prostitute, overwhelming violence was used. Then there was a brutal attack on a man selected at random as he emerged from a pub in Glasgow. In the dark, Sinclair pounced on the man and beat him with the hammer before stealing from his victim seemingly as an afterthought. It was quite clear that Gus was a gratuitously violent man.
But, for all the younger Hamilton appeared to be trying to help and, in doing so, he knew he was incriminating himself in serious offences, the officers who spoke to him felt he was not being entirely frank. There was definitely a suspicion he was holding back: in fact, by checking the stories of other family members, it was quite clear there were areas he was not prepared – or perhaps not able – to go into. I say he may not have been able to tell as much as he might have been because years of alcohol-related illness had taken their toll on his mental faculties. However, it was hard to determine what had been lost from his memory and what was being hidden away at the back of his mind. One thing was sure, though – the DNA evidence from the World’s End eventually proved he was not the second man. He was closely related to the second man but it wasn’t him.