The World's End

by Tom Wood

  In our reviews of the cases being re-examined by Operation Trinity, it was clear that Sinclair had, at no time, featured contemporaneously in any of the earlier Glasgow killings or the World’s End case and nor was any reason uncovered to suggest that he should have. By that I mean we did not find any statement or piece of evidence that linked him directly or indirectly to the murders.

  In cold case investigations, it is every detective’s nightmare that the culprit’s identity appeared in the early investigation system – that he or she was there all the time and the clues were missed. Finding that a killer was actually questioned but had managed to deceive the interviewers and was therefore eliminated from an investigation is something everyone dreads. Most police officers who have worked on long-running inquiries will know what I mean. As an investigation drags on without a solution, doubts start to creep in. There is an old maxim in murder inquiries that says that the solution usually lies in the first five hundred statements – in other words, with those who are most closely connected to the case. Given that murder is usually domestic or by the hand of an associate, this is often true so, in the dark of the night, you can begin to doubt, to question. Did I miss something? Has he got past me?

  Over the years, I’ve kept in contact with a number of retired officers who had worked on the World’s End inquiry. As Operation Trinity began, they knew we had a culprit in our sights but they weren’t really interested in the name. They only had one question – had he appeared in the system of earlier investigations? When I was able to tell them that he hadn’t, the relief on their faces was apparent. After all those years, their professional pride was still such that they didn’t want to be the ones who had slipped up.

  Returning to the present, despite the new science, we still had challenges in the World’s End case for we had yet to prove the association between Sinclair and Hamilton as well as establish their links to the World’s End pub and East Lothian.

  The other priorities in investigating all five of the murders were common to all the cases. We had to prove the suspect’s knowledge of both the abduction and disposal sites and also show there had been access to vehicles that could have been used for the disposals. In addition, we would have to reinterview all the significant witnesses who were still alive and traceable and, finally, we had to interview our suspect.

  This last objective, the questioning of Sinclair, would be a major exercise in itself, requiring detailed planning and careful execution. That would come at the end of the plans I have outlined and it would be made more difficult by the fact that Sinclair was already a prisoner and, as such, entitled to all the protection of a man who was not at liberty and therefore not best able to defend himself. You can argue the rights and wrongs of this but the facts remain – the rules and regulations, the laws, and the strict codes of practice established to protect the innocent also unfortunately protect the guilty.

  In 2004, we felt that, overall, the five murders we were dealing with bore such striking similarities that, when viewed as a whole against a background of the circumstances of other unsolved murders of women in Scotland, they were unique. Often a killer will leave some telltale sign, a signature that is theirs alone, or perhaps follow a similar pattern of criminal behaviour. This is simply a factor of human behaviour. We all, knowingly and unknowingly, develop patterns of behaviour, some learned in childhood, some adopted and adapted as we learn from life’s experience. It’s often said that the best way to predict an individual’s future behaviour is to explore their past. This is as true of criminal behaviour as of any other. In these cases, the points of comparison between each murder were significant and bear examination.

  Each victim – Helen Scott, Christine Eadie, Anna Kenny, Matilda McAuley and Agnes Cooney – was abducted within an hour either way of midnight on a Friday or Saturday during the second half of 1977. Each victim had been socialising and had been drinking sufficiently for their guard to be lowered. Each victim was taken without a single witness seeing the moment of abduction – a clear sign of careful planning and organisation, especially as they occurred in areas with lots of people going about on busy weekend nights.

  Each body was disposed of in a similar way. They were all dumped near quiet roads, out of sight of any nearby highway. This allowed the person getting rid of the body to be certain they would not be seen and they were then able to make a speedy escape. Even the deposition site of Christine Eadie, near the coast road from Edinburgh to East Lothian, had good sight lines in the hours of darkness to ensure the disposal of the body would not be seen by a passing car. Each girl was tied up – usually both hands and feet but in one case it was just her feet – and most of the ligatures were made using items of their own clothing.

  The similarities go on but, as the cases of Anna, Matilda and Agnes remain open, it would be wrong to go into any more detail here or to reveal details of the evidence we gathered. It is just possible that a prosecution may yet be brought in these cases. Suffice to say that, from our standpoint, it all looked pretty compelling – these crimes looked to have been committed by the same person but, to prove it, we needed to place these cases in context and compare them with all the other murders of women in Scotland over the period to test their uniqueness.

  We were dealing with five murders in six months. Through DNA evidence, we knew, beyond any doubt, that Sinclair was involved in two of them. We also had assorted other crimes woven in between the weekend murders that Sinclair was also suspected of. To prove just how out of the ordinary these murder cases were, Operation Trinity embarked on the biggest survey of murders of women in Scotland ever undertaken.

  It was all very well to look at the circumstances and say that, superficially, there are strong links between the five murders and conclude they are the work of the same killer. However, we had to show, beyond all reasonable doubt, that these killings were unique. In the end, we failed but, in the process, a hugely important database had been developed. It was useful for both our own research and future investigations.

  It was not only essential to look at the unsolved murders of women but also to examine all unlawful killings of females to try to show just how singular the five murders were. We needed to look in some detail at every single murder of a female in Scotland and, from the details of these killings, compile a database. As ever with the Police Service, the enterprise needed a name and so ‘Operation Scothom’ came into being. As the database was being designed and built up, the Trinity management team were only too aware of how vital the task facing us was. The decision was taken to make the starting point of our examination some years before Sinclair came on the scene and take it right up to the time for which latest records were available. So four decades of death were studied in exhaustive depth between the years 1968 and 2003. There was only one rule for membership of this wretched club – the person needed to have been female, dead and have her had death attributed to murder.

  As with any enterprise of this nature, it was crucially important to go into it with a highly systematic approach to ensure the results that came out of the other end were true reflections of the facts. Furthermore, it was imperative for the operation to be geared in such a way that all aspects of every murder could be identified and compared with every other killing. We could not fall victims to self-delusion or go looking for the result we wanted to make the pieces fit. Our finished product would have to stand scrutiny for we could be sure that, if the results of this work were ever to be put before a jury, it was extremely likely that they would be vigorously challenged. The world, and particularly the legal profession, is amply populated by those whose mission is to find fault so whatever we did had to be substantial enough to withstand all scrutiny.

  In this piece of work this was particularly true. As with every aspect of any criminal investigation, we needed to be constantly aware that, one day, a defence lawyer would be going through our work with an eye to discovering inconsistencies, omissions or prejudice that undermined the conclusions. One flaw or one
error would render the exercise worthless. We sometimes forget that the defence advocate or solicitor in a criminal case is only responsible for preparing and delivering the best possible case for the defendant. They are not concerned with justice.

  Many prominent defence lawyers have made the discovery of procedural irregularities, human errors or simple mistakes their stock-in-trade. We had to make sure our database was bulletproof. The man given the task to lead this effort was the able and highly experienced Detective Inspector Derek Robertson of Strathclyde Police. He would need all his skill in the coming months.

  Much of this work was carried out by officers from the eight police forces of Scotland who were not connected to our investigation. It was essential that the operation was kept as straightforward as possible so we devised a form to be completed for every murder that would ensure each case was looked at in a similar way and the details logged into the computer in exactly the same way so that accurate comparisons could be made.

  It surprised most of us that, during this period of time, a total of 1,038 women were murdered in Scotland. This figure does not include those who died aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.

  The task was another major undertaking for the whole of the Scottish Police Service in this inquiry and individual officers in each of the eight areas were responsible for co-ordinating their force’s contribution to the database. It sounds easy but in fact it was a complex job to trace and examine all the files and records, some of which were nearly forty years old.

  More than any other crime, murder is the one that has the biggest effect on the community where it happens. Each case, by definition the illegal taking of life, is a devastating blow for those most closely connected to it. Whilst murder rightly holds this place as the most abhorrent of crimes, it is fair to say that the different categories have vastly different impacts. The murder of a child stays in the public’s mind for a long time whereas the murder of a criminal or a vagrant living rough on the streets rather less so. I highlight this only to demonstrate just how difficult it is to uncover details of every one of those one thousand plus murders stretching back so far in time. We were not just looking at unsolved killings but at all the murders reported in Scotland. The wide time parameters of the exercise meant that many of the cases we were examining had been investigated, prosecuted, the case closed and the perpetrator already freed from jail or in some cases dead. Details of many of these murders were hard to track down. To be a worthwhile tool in the prosecution of Sinclair, however, the database had to be a complete examination of every case so each one had to be traced and eventually they all were. The Scothom database was a hugely important piece of work but, like many important things in life, it was difficult to achieve. It was also to throw up a problem that we had not expected.

  Traceability and accountability were obviously vital for this operation. The exercise was based in Cathcart police station in Glasgow to where the responsible officers in each of Scotland’s police forces reported. They were briefed to examine these records in minute detail and to extract all the significant factors surrounding each case. They would only have been aware in the most general terms of the importance of their endeavours but we went to great lengths to ensure they all realised just how crucial the task in hand was. There could be no room for error, corner-cutting or lack of attention to detail.

  The database that was constructed as a result of this painstaking work would, we believed, be of considerable use to police forces in the future. Researchers and criminologists would also be able to consult the findings for academic purposes.

  In addition to this research, the pathologists connected to the Scottish police forces went through a similar operation under the guidance of two of the country’s senior practitioners from the University of Glasgow. The university lab had detailed knowledge of our case and had already been of immense help.

  All the Operation Trinity murders we were examining bore a similar signature in the method of killing and how the bodies were left but the Scothom database threw up something else. It showed there was the possibility of a sixth killing fitting the pattern. Once a murder is ‘solved’, it tends to slip from the collective memory of the criminal justice system and the press – file closed. So it was no surprise that the name of Frances Barker meant little to us when we were first told about the striking similarities between her killing and the five murders being examined by us. The only difference was that, in the Barker case, a culprit had been identified, prosecuted and imprisoned for life.

  Apart from the murder of Frances Barker and the other five murders, the results from Scothom were exactly what we had expected them to be. As has already been noted, all our victims had been gagged with an item of their own clothing. In the thirty-seven-year period we examined, only three other female murder victims had been gagged but none of them with items of clothing and all three killings had taken place inside buildings of one sort or another. In short, apart from the gag, they bore no similarities to our five cases, rendering the link so tenuous as to be irrelevant.

  So what did the murder of Frances Barker mean to our inquiry? Firstly, the circumstances of her death and body disposal were so similar to those of the World’s End murders that her name was immediately added to the list of deaths we were interested in. However, we had to begin a new inquiry into her murder to discover which of four possibilities had come about. I say four because, whatever had happened in this case, that was the sum of the different potential circumstances that had occurred. To spell it out, there was a limited number of options as to what had happened:

  a)

  Frances Barker had been murdered by Sinclair and there had been a miscarriage of justice;

  b)

  Frances Barker had been murdered by Sinclair acting together with the man already convicted of the crime;

  c)

  Sinclair had been schooled in murder by the man convicted of Frances Barker’s death;

  d)

  the man convicted of Frances Barker’s murder happened to use the same MO as Sinclair.

  It was clear from the very first time the case came to the attention of senior officers that, no matter which of these four possibilities had occurred, the case of Frances Barker was going to be problematic for our inquiry. In those early days of our knowing of this murder, I think we all rather hoped option b) or c) would present itself as the eventual outcome. It would be some time before a conclusion could be reached though and a very thorough, painstaking investigation was undertaken.

  The date of Frances Barker’s death, 11 June 1977, would have made her the first victim of the six months of murder. She was thirty-seven and lived alone in a flat in the Maryhill district of Glasgow, having moved out of the family home in the city centre. Frances had worked for a baker in Glasgow for more than four years prior to her death and the company was, in fact, the landlord of her new flat.

  The night she met her death she had, like all the other victims, been out socialising and had had a fair amount to drink. I think it would be fair to say that, by the time her sister and other family members she had been with that night helped her into a taxi to go home, she was a little worse for wear.

  The taxi driver who dropped her off that night remembered clearly watching his fare as she made a somewhat precarious way towards the door of her close, in Glasgow’s Maryhill Road. The cabbie did not actually see Frances go into the close because it was a busy Glasgow Friday night and another fare climbed aboard the taxi as soon as Frances got out and the taxi was off.

  After her murder the police discovered that it was unlikely she would have been able to gain entry to the close that night. She had mistakenly taken the wrong coat from the pub where they had been earlier that night and her house keys had been left in her own coat in that pub.

  Her colleagues at the bakery were no doubt concerned when Frances didn’t appear for work the following Monday and, indeed, for the rest of that week but their concern did not cause them to take an
y action until the Friday – a full week since they had last seen her. They contacted Frances’s parents and, later that day, bakery workers and Frances’s brother Tom went to the flat in Maryhill Road and forced their way in. There was no trace of her and no sign of a disturbance or of anything being out of place.

  A full sixteen days later, a man working on his family’s farm near Glenboig in Lanarkshire found the badly decomposed remains of a woman lying in a copse next to a farm road. He immediately ran home to get his father and the pair returned a short time later to confirm what the young man had feared – that he had found a body. The police were called and, along with the police surgeon, a careful examination of the scene was made. In what was to become a depressingly familiar pattern over the next few months of 1977, the victim was found to be bound hand and foot, her legs tied together with part of her tights, her arms restrained by her scarf. Her underwear had been used as a gag and this was kept in place by the rest of her tights. Branches and leaves had been scattered over the body to hide it. The area where the body was dumped was similar to the other disposal sites – hidden from view. It was June and the concealment had been made easier by the rich foliage on surrounding trees and bushes.

  The post-mortem carried out at the time suggested that Frances had been strangled with some force. There was no evidence of sexual assault but the body was badly decomposed.