by Tom Wood
An extensive police inquiry over a period of some weeks failed to find a single witness who had seen Frances after she left the taxi in the early hours of Saturday morning. She had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.
Reading the old files and cuttings, it seemed that detectives got an early break in the investigations and a man was arrested and subsequently convicted. That man is now dead and it is unlikely that we will ever know the truth of what happened to Frances.
Suffice to say that Maryhill, the area where Frances Barker went missing, was Sinclair’s home territory. He was brought up on the edge of the district and his mother still lived there at the time of the Barker killing. Our background inquiries into Sinclair suggested that, on the night of Frances’s abduction, Sinclair was probably staying with his mother in Maryhill Road as he was going through one of his frequent separations from Sarah.
The site where the body was found would also have been well known to Sinclair – it was near to the place where a friend used to repair Sinclair’s cars. To prove the connection, we had interviewed some other associates of Sinclair and they told us that, about the time of the killing, he had been talking about buying and renovating a rundown cottage close to where Frances’s body was found. These two strands of information made it abundantly clear that he had a detailed knowledge of the area.
When Frances Barker disappeared, Sinclair was driving a Toyota Carina car but, just a few days later, he got rid of it and bought the Toyota caravanette that was to be his weekend recreation vehicle. At the time of the World’s End killings, he still owned the caravanette and we know he used it to transport Helen Scott and Christine Eadie to East Lothian on what was to be their last journey.
9
The Death of Anna Kenny
The lack of forensic evidence in the Glasgow cases was a huge obstacle from the start. It was clear that, to stand any chance of a successful prosecution, we had to go to extraordinary lengths to establish connections between Sinclair and the scenes of crimes, the places where the women were last seen and where the bodies were found. From the original statements, we had to trace possible sightings of Sinclair or vehicles he may have driven at the time. In addition, we had to trawl through and meticulously record all the murders of women in Scotland over a near forty-year period to try to demonstrate the unique similarities of the five crimes.
Even with all this done to the very best of our abilities, we knew that the chances were slim. The burden of proof in the criminal court – beyond all reasonable doubt – is a tough standard, as it should be. In the end, Angus Sinclair only stood trial for the World’s End murders of Helen Scott and Christine Eadie.
The solution to the 1978 case of Mary Gallagher was brought about through an incorrect tip-off from a member of the public which was to lead to the re-examination of the evidence which, in turn, allowed Glasgow detectives to find an exact DNA match with Sinclair. The three other cases linked to Sinclair by the press in the aftermath of that conviction were not going to be so straightforward. Samples and productions from the crime scenes in the murders of the three women had, unfortunately, not survived the passage of time.
It is important to state clearly here the basis for including the account of these three unsolved murders in the narrative of the World’s End case. Angus Sinclair has not been charged in connection with the deaths of Anna Kenny, Matilda McAuley and Agnes Cooney. These crimes remain unsolved and neither I nor the team who worked with me on Operation Trinity would wish to jeopardise any future prosecution. The fact is, however, that we did reopen these cases and the team from Strathclyde Police led by Detective Superintendent Eddie McCusker thoroughly re-investigated them. The description of this process is relevant to this story but it is important to repeat that no one has been charged with these crimes and that no facts or evidence, not already in the public domain, will be discussed here.
I will make no further comment on the guilt or innocence of anyone in these cases – readers must judge for themselves.
From the start, the reinvestigation of the three cases, bound together by a raft of similarities, came up against a considerable obstacle – the lack of hard evidence.
Strathclyde officers had already reviewed the evidence they had in the cases of Anna Kenny, Matilda McAuley and Agnes Cooney and, shortly after Sinclair’s 2001 conviction for the Gallagher murder, they concluded that they could not present a prima facie case against anyone. Without the kind of forensic evidence that had been crucial in the Gallagher conviction, it would only have been possible to present a circumstantial case. There was a powerful set of circumstances but not powerful enough to put to a jury. So it was that Operation Trinity presented probably the last best chance of discovering exactly what happened to the three women and identifying the man, or men, responsible. To overcome the absence of forensic evidence, we were going to have to take a whole new approach to the cases which had already been subjected to extensive investigation and reinvestigation.
It is important to clarify one thing at this point. The 1970s investigations of these three cases were the best they could have been, given the time in which they occurred and the relatively primitive forensic science of the day. Each case was led by officers who were the foremost of their peers and our revisiting of the files turned up no glaring errors or omissions that left them unsolved for so long. These officers did the very best they could with what they had at the time.
The way forward was to establish all possible links and similarities between the three murders and then see whether they matched the circumstances of the World’s End case. Then, with analysis of the minute detail of every aspect of all the cases, we would try to establish evidential links between them all, to bind them together.
The chilling fact behind this endeavour was the knowledge that, if we could establish these links and prove that one man or a group of men were responsible for all the murders, it would mean that, in seven months in 1977, he or they had been on a sex killing spree unparalleled in British criminal history. If Sinclair was involved, these crimes would have been committed while, to the outside world, he was a hard-working painter and decorator, living with his wife and five-year-old son.
By this time in our inquiries, we were already in close consultation with the Crown Office in Edinburgh – the prosecuting authority for Scotland. The relationship between the police in Scotland, the investigators, and the Crown Office is an interesting one. All prosecutions in Scotland, with the exception of a tiny number of private prosecutions, are raised in the name of the Lord Advocate and his or her officers, the procurators fiscal. The fiscals prosecute in the lower courts while counsel known as advocates-depute prosecute in the higher courts. The relationship between the Crown Office, the Lord Advocate and his or her officers and the police is seen as odd and anachronistic by some observers. In fact, it is straightforward and seasoned over hundreds of years so that everyone knows their roles and responsibilities. It is sometimes seen as too close and cosy and others, from a different perspective, may claim it is an antagonistic relationship, with police and prosecutors appearing to be working to different agendas. In my experience, it is neither of these. The Crown Office rightly preserves its independence and its discretion over whether to prosecute. In a system of independent prosecution, this is the way of the world and, although there are sometimes differences of opinion, the lines of demarcation are clear.
The niceties of the prosecution system were not, however, in the forefront of our minds as we began to examine the three cases. The Strathclyde team was facing the huge task of unpacking three separate thirty-year-old murder investigations – and sometimes it was quite literally a matter of unpacking as dozens of boxes of old files had to be opened and their contents meticulously examined. These cases had, of course, all been reviewed before but there was no alternative to starting again – going back to the beginning and working slowly through all the evidence, applying the latest investigative techniques. The scale of the task was daunting but Eddi
e McCusker and his team set about it in a scrupulous and determined manner.
The case of the first of these victims to be killed, Anna Kenny from Glasgow, was first to be examined and it produced one of the most bizarre twists of any murder investigation I have ever been involved in.
Anna was just twenty when she met her death. She’d been on a night out with her best friend, Wilma Sutherland. It was just another ordinary tale of ordinary girls going about their everyday lives. Anna and Wilma seemed to do everything together. They had just started temporary but well-paid jobs on a brewery bottling line in Port Dundas in Glasgow. Previously they had worked together at a number of different jobs in and around Glasgow and had once left the city for work, again together, for jobs at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey, North Yorkshire.
So it was against this background of close friendship that they had arranged to meet up in the High Street of Glasgow, opposite the city’s Royal Infirmary, to go out and spend their first wages from the new jobs at the bottling plant. Although they were being paid more than they earned in previous jobs, they didn’t have a lot of cash that Friday night, 5 August 1977, but were determined to make the best of it.
A new pub called the Hurdy Gurdy had opened in the Townhead area of Glasgow. It was just the latest thing and the place to be seen for girls of Wilma and Anna’s age and so that was where they headed for. After a couple of wrong turnings along the way, the pair eventually arrived at the Hurdy Gurdy and so began just another Friday night. They stayed in the bar for the entire evening drinking a potent mixture of vodka and beer and chatting to various friends who passed through the pub at different stages of the evening. Towards the end of the night, they fell into the company of two young men who I will just call Willie and Joe. Willie had gone to the bar in the expectation of meeting up with a friend who, in the event, didn’t show up. He knew Joe and was happy to join him and the two girls, Wilma and Anna. It was a decision that would cause him a lot of heartache and trouble over the next few years. Joe was anxious to walk Wilma home but feared she wouldn’t go with him if it meant leaving Anna on her own. So it was that Wilma and Joe and Willie and Anna left the bar that night as couples.
Wilma stayed chatting and kissing Joe in a doorway for a while, having first seen that her by-now tipsy friend Anna was allright with Willie. Willie said that he and Anna kissed for a while but she made it clear that was it and she was going to go home. Willie was married with a newborn child at home and so he too thought it best to call it a night and head off as well. When he left her, Anna appeared to be trying to flag down a taxi. He had no way of knowing it but, when Willie caught that fleeting image of Anna, he was the last person known to see her alive.
Just as in the cases of the Edinburgh girls Helen and Christine, no abduction was seen, nothing happened on the night of Anna’s disappearance to raise the alarm and it was not until the following morning when Wilma went round to her friend’s house that Anna was found to be missing. Later that Saturday afternoon, Wilma, by now distraught with worry, alerted Anna’s family and she was reported missing. There was no quick solution to this mystery and the longer Anna was missing the more concerned the police and her family became. That said, there was still nothing to suggest for certain that her disappearance was sinister but the longer it went on, the more all concerned feared the worst.
The response of the police to reports of a missing person in the first twelve to twenty-four hours is crucial. I will discuss this further but it’s very often difficult to get it right. Every weekend across the country dozens of mainly young people go missing for a day or a night. Whether it’s a party that lasts overnight, a new friendship or a last-minute decision to take a trip, in the vast majority of cases, the missing person turns up safe and well.
As time went by, however, experience and instinct would suggest to the police that something untoward must have happened to the missing girl and the intensity of the investigation into the mystery that they began made it clear to us that Anna’s continued disappearance was taken very seriously.
This brings me back to the vexed question of missing persons, a subject which had concerned me for much of my police service. It is quite staggering just how many people go missing each year. It’s reckoned that, annually, 210,000 people are reported missing in the UK. Two thirds of them are young people and, of course, the vast majority are found or return home – usually within a few days. But a significant number are not traced, do not return home and are never heard of again. They simply disappear. I believe that, throughout the UK, we have not dealt with this problem seriously or systematically enough. It’s time for a re-examination of the way missing person cases are treated and I’ll tell you why.
Very early on in any missing person inquiry, the police service will make a value judgement on the case and decide the level of resource that is to be allocated. Let me illustrate this with extreme examples. If a child of tender years vanishes, within minutes of the report to police, a major operation swings into place. In fact, after the child abductions and murders by Robert Black, the van driver convicted of three such killings in the 1980s, the importance of a fast response was apparent and detailed plans were drawn up by all police forces as to how to respond to such cases. A strict protocol – ‘Operation Child Watch’ – was developed.
Now, if abduction is even suspected, within minutes of the police being alerted, major roads are under surveillance both by officers on the spot in cars and through all the technical means to hand. At the other extreme is the disappearance of a troublesome young person, with a history of running away, who is deemed old enough to look after themselves. In that case, a very different scenario unfolds. If the person is over sixteen, the age when they are entitled to go off somewhere without letting others know, then it’s likely that very little will be done immediately to trace them unless there is compelling evidence that there are suspicious circumstances. With this approach, much valuable time can be lost. If a week or so passes before a non-suspicious missing person inquiry is elevated and prioritised, then the most important time in any investigation is lost. And it’s not just time that’s lost. Delays mean that forensic opportunities, the recall of witnesses and – most important of all – the impetus are all gone.
At any given time, there are up to 150 cases throughout the UK where human remains have been found and lie unidentified. Charities do good work in trying to identify them and trace relatives but many are eventually cremated or buried in unmarked graves – the bleak testimony to lives that have simply fallen between the cracks of an inadequate system.
It can be difficult for the police for other reasons because there are a significant number of people who, for one reason or another, want to vanish. It may be personal, financial or family reasons that drive someone to disappear but, unless a crime has been committed, there is no reason for the police to be overly involved especially if it seems the individual just wanted to drop out of view. It is sometimes simply the case that the person’s life has just become too much for them and they feel a fresh start, unburdened by the baggage of their former existence, is the only way forward. And that’s fair enough – after all, in missing persons inquiries, like all other police activities, the resources to deal with all the problems presenting themselves to the force are finite and priorities need to be established. However, that does not get away from the fact that we often have no idea what the real circumstances of a missing person are and it is a simple fact that persistent runaways tend to mix with some of the less desirable people on the fringes of society who may well see the chance to commit crime with little fear of detection. You need only look at how long Fred and Rose West went about their business of abduction and murder without being discovered to see what I mean.
It is certain that, in the early days of the missing person’s inquiry into Anna’s disappearance, some suspicion would have fallen on the boy Willie – not least because of the fact that, in the light of his personal circumstances, he at first denied being with
Anna in the minutes before she vanished. Fortunately for him, it was clear from the files on the original investigation that detectives eventually eliminated him from their inquiries and determined that he had nothing to do with her disappearance, not least because his walk home that night had luckily been punctuated with meetings with friends who, when traced, could vouch for his movements. His alibi was complete though his activities that night may well have been the source of considerable domestic stress.
The priority given to this missing person’s inquiry was such that it was clearly feared, from early on in the investigation, that some terrible fate had befallen Anna. The difficulty of detecting the random killer is perfectly illustrated here. Whoever took Anna as she looked for a taxi that night was not seen and extensive inquiries and appeals for help from the public produced no leads. There was no car being driven in a suspicious manner; there were no unexplained sightings of rowing couples; no one saw a struggle; and there was no body, no scene of crime, no weapon, no forensics, no witnesses. Anna had simply vanished.
We had by this time tracked down and finally identified Gordon Hamilton as the man who had left the main samples of DNA at the World’s End scenes of crime. Long dead, his was the DNA that we had been trying to identify for years and that we had eventually identified by his familial links with the Hamilton family, Angus Sinclair’s in-laws.
As I’ve already said, Wilma Sutherland had been with Anna in the Hurdy Gurdy on the night she disappeared. When she realised Anna hadn’t been home after she’d last seen her in the company of the man she’d left the pub with, Wilma had searched in vain for her best friend. She had raised the alarm and reported Anna as a missing person and, along with family members, had been in the forefront of the hunt for Anna. So imagine our surprise when we discovered that Wilma had married Gordon Hamilton just over a year after Anna’s disappearance.