by Ryan Green
Angus was not accustomed to starting fires—he was a city boy, through and through, and in his experience fire was something that existed only within the safe confines of a gas fireplace or an oven. He was not prepared for how quickly Eddie and the house would go up in flames and he had to run to escape unburnt. He fled the scene even as the distant sound of fire engines began to wail their way across Dumbarton.
Once again, anything resembling justice seemed to have passed Angus by. The police investigation into the death of Eddie Cotogno, a man that many on the force had secretly wanted out of the picture for a very long time, came to a standstill quite early on, and with no sobbing relatives willing to admit any kinship to him for long enough to spurn the police on, his death and life were forgotten.
Angus settled back into his life, doing decorating jobs, selling ice cream and molesting children until the 70s came to a quiet end. It was almost 1980 when the police showed up on his doorstep with a warrant for his arrest. Angus went quietly, saying nothing until he could ascertain just how much the police knew. He had learned his lessons well after his first trial. The key to surviving an interrogation was to know what was on the table before you said anything. Angus sat with his arms sullenly crossed and his mouth shut as the police railed at him. He sat in absolute silence for almost an hour until he was certain of what he was being arrested for, then he made a full confession. The man who had sold him the gun had been arrested and turned over his client list in exchange for a lenient sentence. The police retrieved the weapon from his recently refurbished campervan without giving anything else a second look and sent him off to jail for illegal possession of a firearm with barely a complaint from any of the parties involved. Angus was given a few minutes to calmly explain to his wife that he had made a mistake, Sarah accepted the apology at face value and tearfully promised to wait for his return. There were no real repercussions for Angus: his family had savings that would cover his six-month sentence, and while the number of reported rapes and molestations in Glasgow dropped, there was still enough baseline evil at work that his contributions were not noticed. His imprisonment couldn’t have been comfortable, but he was an adult with a penchant for violence now instead of a frightened child, and whatever reputation had preceded him last time was now long forgotten.
By the middle of 1980, Angus was back on the streets of Glasgow and back to his old tricks. He put down a £3000 deposit on one of the newly built houses in a new estate in South Nitshill and got back into his usual routines without missing a step. By June of 1982, he was starting to get sloppy as his old desires crept back up on him and the police showed no signs of even looking for him. He lured a girl into a close in the Govanhill estate but when she saw him coming in after her, she ran away screaming, realising what was happening from the stories that had been shared around the neighbourhood. Later the same day he managed to corner a seven-year-old girl in a swimsuit in another close in nearby Patrick. She did not get away unscathed but her sobbing report was added to the growing list of cases that the local police were linking together into a pattern.
Later that month a girl of just six years old was dragged into a close and raped in the Woodlands area of the city. Her testimony was added to the mounting evidence. She vividly remembered that the man who had pinned her face-down on the cold concrete floor had green paint splattered across his shoes. Another raped girl came forward with additional details months after her initial interview, in an art class she had caught a whiff of turpentine and started sobbing uncontrollably because that smell had clung to her attacker. Another victim corroborated the detail of the smell when she was given the opportunity, and the police realised that the odd outfit that the man had been described as wearing could have belonged to a painter or decorator. With that connecting evidence and a pool of offenders to winnow through the police began to retrace their steps, showing each victim photographs including the one taken during Angus’ last prison stay. All in all, twelve separate girls picked Angus out as their attacker.
When the police arrived on his doorstep this time they saw that he had a child in the house and informed Sarah of the crimes that he was being charged with. He had no opportunity to put a spin on events, no chance to twist things around so that he was the wounded party. Sarah knew him in that moment in a way that she had not known him throughout their entire marriage. Angus was led away in handcuffs for the second time in less than a year.
This time the interrogators were ready for Angus to stonewall them the way that he had in previous investigations, so they quickly laid out the details of every crime and started pressing him to present an alternate version of events if he was truly innocent. Time and practice had sharpened Angus’ wits and ability to lie on his feet. He outright denied every single crime and began fabricating excuse after excuse and alibi after alibi for as long as they were questioning him. He never tripped over his own lies and before long the police were as confused and angry as Angus was pretending to be. They took a break to get coffee and found that Sarah had arrived at the station. With few better ideas, they let her in to talk to Angus, although they left their recording equipment turned on. She settled into the seat opposite him and asked, ‘Did you do it?’
‘No. Of course not. How could you think…’
She cut him off. ‘How many of them? How many times did you do it?’
Angus fell into sullen silence. Sarah set her jaw. ‘You are going to admit what you’ve done. You’re not going to drag this family through a court case. You’re not going to drag all those kiddies into court to point at you and say you did it. Just admit it. Admit it you coward.’
Angus refused to meet her eyes, but he mumbled, ‘Alright.’
When the police returned to the room, Angus was suddenly a lot more forthcoming. ‘I was lying before. I did it. I did all of it. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve done it. I’ve done so many of them that I can’t remember all that I’ve done. If you can find out when and where, I’ll tell you if I did them or not. Is that fair?’
Angus Sinclair was convicted on three counts of rape and nine counts of sexual assault in 1982. Lord Cameron, the judge of his case, had to decide on his sentencing. He told Sinclair, ‘The penalty for rape is entirely discretionary and without limit. I have considered very carefully whether a limit should be placed on the extent of the penalty, and I have decided there is only one limit—namely your life.’
Life sentences for rape were rare in Scotland at the time, but due to the vile nature of Angus’ crimes and the sheer volume of offences that he had committed, it seemed like the only viable solution. It was only after the case was settled that the full details of Angus earlier murder and molestation charges came to light, ratifying the judge’s decision to remove him from society. Angus was sent to Peterhead prison, where his mother, sister and niece took several buses to come and visit him as often as they were allowed. Despite everything, they stood by their monster. Sarah never spoke to Angus again. Not even to file for divorce. Legally the two are still married.
Cold Cases
Angus settled back into prison life without much difficulty and the years began to roll by. His life was completely stagnant and unchanging, but outside the walls of Peterhead prison, the world was changing rapidly. With the passing years came new technologies and advances in crime detection, but the most important change in the world outside was that the police now knew about Angus. They understood his dark motivations and the depths of depravity that he would descend to if it would satisfy his urges. They began to backtrack through his history and tried to connect him with other crimes.
While Sarah would no longer speak to Angus, she was happy to speak to the police, and they took her on a long tour of various crime scenes that they suspected were the work of Angus. Each time, she was easily able to pinpoint the connection to Angus. Some women had been abducted within spitting distance of their family home at the time. Some children had been molested near to Angus’ usual haunts. Even this horrible experience gradu
ally became routine as the cold case team would come to collect Sarah and then drop her off again in tears. The police were then tasked with finding enough evidence beyond the circumstantial connections between Angus and the crime scenes—something that proved considerably more difficult.
DNA identification was still in its early days in the 80s and it was poorly understood. Angus, in particular, didn’t know what he was agreeing to when he volunteered his DNA sample for comparison to crime scenes as a means of getting the police to stop badgering him with questions. A single hair had been found on the body of his final victim, Mary Gallacher, and when it was run through the tests it came up as a perfect match for Angus. He was tried and convicted, while still denying everything, and murder was the final straw for his sister and niece. Maimie didn’t believe for an instant that her boy could have been capable of killing someone. Just as she hadn’t been able to believe that his first murder, back when he was a teenager, had been anything but an accident. She went on believing that he was innocent until her quiet death at home in 1987. Not long afterwards, Sarah left Scotland, never to return; all obligations to her husband, real or imagined, had long been fulfilled. Sentencing was slower this time, ending in an additional life sentence strapped on to the end of his existing one. Any faint possibility that Angus Sinclair would ever roam free again vanished permanently.
The World’s End murders still haunted the public consciousness, even decades after they had been committed. They were a stain on the record of the Scottish police, too, so when they believed that technology had advanced sufficiently, the cold case was reopened by a special team known as ‘Operation Trinity.’ Lester Knibb, the technician who had first examined the forensic evidence from the World’s End killings, made a long journey down to a lab in England with the materials that he had carefully preserved through all the years, and two sets of DNA were discovered on the clothing of the girls. The DNA of the men found on both of the girls was compared to swabs taken from the 500 subjects that were originally suspected of committing the crimes. There was no match found.
Still, the world refused to forget about Christine Eadie and Helen Scott. Their families were still demanding justice and interest in the case only seemed to build after decades of silence. With the DNA sample that the police had acquired from the bodies, they would be able to secure a conviction as soon as the perpetrator was found, and they had already eliminated 500 of the most likely perpetrators in one fell swoop. Information about the crime began to be circulated again and the timelines of known killers began getting compared to the date and location of their death. Still, nothing came up for years. The cold case team began to despair until the media intervened in an unexpected way. The long-running British show Crimewatch showed a reconstruction of the events that led to the deaths of the girls at the World’s End pub and hammered the date of the killings back into the mind of the public, and like magic, the phone began to ring. In the weeks following the broadcast, the police received over a hundred and thirty calls from witnesses to the events that were being described, along with a few outlying calls from people who had not realised the significance of what they had seen on that night until a narrative was presented to them. A man who had been out walking by Gosford Bay on the night of the murders had seen what he once thought was a works van being driven erratically. A works van that he now suspected might have been a campervan. More details emerged from the witness statements that finally helped to clarify the events of the night.
The timeline of the murders had been skewed because there were two separate pairs of girls in the World’s End that night, wearing similar outfits and fitting similar descriptions. A solid half of the original statements that had been taken from the patrons in attendance had been describing the actions of the wrong duo. When the correct girls were identified, the description of the men who were with them began to become much clearer. One detail in particular, the strange workman’s outfit that one of the supposed killers wore, rang an alarm bell in the back of the mind of one of the original investigators into the murder of Mary Gallacher. Angus Sinclair perfectly matched the description that witnesses were giving, and it was known that he had frequented the bars in Edinburgh at that time with his brother-in-law.
While these allegations were coming to light, the Lothian and Borders police reached out to the Forensic Science Service for help in identifying the unknown DNA sample that had been found on both of the girls. It produced a partial match with over 200 known offenders in the National DNA database.
Desperate to move forward, the cold case team pressed for conviction, retrieving Angus from his place in prison and charging him with the abduction, rape and murder of both girls. Two years later, in August of 2007, Angus finally stood trial for the World’s End murders.
Trial and Jeopardy
As with his molestation charges, the presiding judge in the case was Lord Clarke, a man already predisposed to assume the absolute worst about Angus and to hand down the harshest possible punishments that the law would allow. With no woman in his life to force him to be truthful, Angus pleaded not guilty to all charges and then proceeded to enter two special defences. One of them stated that any sexual activity between him and the girls had been entirely consensual and the second alleged that any harm that had come to the girls had been inflicted on them by Gordon Hamilton, his brother-in-law.
The police had long suspected that there was more than one assailant involved in the case. While both of the girls had been bound at their hands and feet, the knots used on the girls were different from each other. When his name was presented, the police scrambled to find Gordon Hamilton, only to discover that he had died six years prior to the case coming to fruition. They collected DNA samples from Sarah and all of his other relatives to try to produce a conclusive match.
The trial began, with the eyewitness testimony about a ‘works van’ near to Gosford Bay being linked to Angus by one of the police officers who had investigated him on the stand. He had owned a Toyota Hiace caravanette at the time of the murders, and it was suspected to be both the scene of the crime and the getaway vehicle as well as the connection to the eyewitness testimony. The police had hunted for this campervan frantically in the years leading up to the trial only to discover that it had been destroyed in the late 90s along with all of the evidence that it contained.
Forensic experts took the stand, confirming that there were semen samples retrieved from within the two victims and that they believed those samples matched Angus Sinclair’s profile and what they would have expected Gordon Hamilton’s profile to look like, were he still alive.
Shortly afterwards, Angus’ defence team put forward a submission that there was no case to answer. There was no evidence that the sexual contact he had with the two girls was not consensual and there was no evidence that he had been involved in any violent action against them. With no other evidence connecting Angus to the murders, the judge was forced to dismiss the charges.
In the aftermath of the trial, Angus’ other crimes were revealed to the general public and there was an uproar. The police and the population at large were utterly convinced of his guilt, but under the law of the land, once a trial was completed there was no mechanism to try someone on the same charges again. The laws of double jeopardy had been on the books since time immemorial, and they protected men like Angus from being dragged back into court over and over on flimsy evidence. In short, the laws existed to ensure that the judiciary had their act together before they started accusing people of crimes, not after the trial had already begun.
The fury expressed in the press showed no signs of dying down any time soon, and before long the Lord Advocate of the judiciary was called on to address the Scottish Parliament on the matter of the case. Elish Angiolini had grown up in an area of Glasgow not far from the one where Angus Sinclair had committed his first crimes and took the role of Lord Advocate only after years working to improve the Scottish legal system. She announced to parliament that she was unhappy with the
decision that Lord Clarke had made in this case. She firmly believed that the sparse evidence that was being presented by the court would have been enough to win over the jury in this case. This launched a political firefight between different members of the judiciary, with others accusing Angiolini of undermining public confidence in judges and others questioning whether decisions of the magnitude made by Lord Clarke should really fall to a single judge rather than a panel.
The end result of all of the noise being made was a complete overhaul of the Scottish legal system. Three separate amendments were made to criminal proceedings after all of the dust had settled.
The first change was that ‘bad character’ and similar evidence could now be entered into consideration in a trial, so a man standing accused of murder who was already a convicted murderer could be described as such without it being considered prejudicial to the case. This change opened up a legal can of worms that is still being untangled to this day, but it meant that prosecution of repeat offenders became much easier.
The second change was that a mechanism was put into place for decisions made by trial judges to be appealed if enough of their peers felt that it was made in error. Lord Clarke’s decision that there was insufficient evidence was cited as the main point of contention, but even so, this mechanism was not used to overturn that decision and bring Angus back to trial as it could only be applied to future cases once the law was passed.
The final change to the legal system did away with the concept of double jeopardy. There were high standards required to reopen a case: new and compelling evidence had to be produced by the police before the courts would undertake a second trial. With that new goal in mind, the cold case team dove back into their work.
They had discovered traces of DNA on the ligatures used to bind and choke the girls, but over the years it had badly degraded to the point that it was useless in the first trial. New technologies had been developed in the intervening years and a local biotech firm came forward to help piece the DNA profile from the two distinct sets of knots together. One of the profiles was a positive match for Angus Sinclair and the other matched with what they suspected was Gordon Hamilton, but the police still did not have a direct reference to prove it, so they turned to the cold case team for help and were amazed at the results.