World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 6 - Angus Sinclair - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Edinburgh, Scotland. October the 16th, 1977. The body of a 17-year-old girl was found in a deserted beach.
She'd been raped, bound, and gagged. Discovered in a field a few miles away was the body of a second teenage girl,
later identified as the first woman's friend. She, too, had been bound, raped, and murdered.
-It was the death of innocence within Edinburgh. It was the sort of thing that didn't happen here.
-The two young women had last been seen alive the previous day at The World's End pub on Edinburgh's famed Royal Mile.
-These two 17-year-old girls, one day they're there, and the next day they're not.
-Their dreadful murder prompted one of the biggest manhunts in Scotland's history.
It ended after almost four decades with a known pedophile and convicted child killer, a man called Angus Sinclair.
-Sinclair was known to the police. They knew he was a violent man, but they didn't connect the dots.
-The World's End murders were the actions of a callous, cunning, and wicked man.
They made Angus Sinclair one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Edinburgh, Scotland.
November the 14th, 2014. 37 years after the senseless murder of two teenagers, the perpetrator, 69-year-old Angus Robertson Sinclair,
was finally found guilty of committing the crime. -The legacy of the World's End murders, for me,
is that actually justice will catch up with you. If you are somebody who has committed a horrendous crime,
a violent crime in the past and there's been some physical evidence, then it's only a matter of time
before you're brought to justice. -Back in 1977, the press and the public were transfixed
with the awful mystery surrounding the deaths of 17-year-old girls Helen Scott and Christine Eadie
after a night in The World's End pub. -They effectively disappear off the face of the Earth.
No one knows what's happened to them. Their families report them missing. It is as if they have been whisked off the street.
-Helen's younger brother Kevin recalls those trying times for the family. -When Helen and Christine died, I was 11 at that point,
so young but old enough to know what was happening. My parents dealt with it sort of quietly and with dignity.
My father dealt with it slightly differently. I remember passing his bedroom one day, and I heard him crying.
That was something that he wouldn't have done right in front of me. -Former homicide detective Tom Wood was on duty the day
after the bodies of the two missing girls had been discovered. -We received information
that a dog walker down on the beach at Aberlady had found the body of a young girl
lying on the tide line at Aberlady Bay. We were pretty sure that we'd found Christine
from the description. And just an hour or so later, we got a call from a farmer just a couple of miles away to say
that he had found the body of a girl lying in the middle of one of his fields. And we went up there straightaway, of course,
and we found that that was the body of Helen. -Their bodies were found in two different locations,
Christine's in Gosford Bay and Helen's in a hamlet in Haddington, both less than 25 miles from the pub where they were last seen.
-They had both been killed in an identical way, and we were pretty certain from the outset
that what we were looking for here was someone, an experienced criminal, an experienced murderer.
Someone who had done this before and would do it again. -In the wake of the discovery,
the police assigned hundreds of officers to investigate the killings in and around Edinburgh.
The horrific deaths of the teenagers were reported by the press the following day.
The Scottish public were left terrified. -It was seen as a -- almost like a milestone --
the death of innocence within Edinburgh. It was the sort of thing that didn't happen here.
And there was a little shock. -Local journalist Marcello Mega was caught up in the hysteria
when he was a child. -I was nearly 12 years old when Helen and Christine were murdered,
and I remember following it on the news and in the newspapers over those days, and I remember it had quite a big impact in Edinburgh.
-Sinclair's heinous acts were not confined to the two young women he abducted from The World's End pub.
By 1977, the 32-year-old painter/decorator had already served time for the rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl,
and in time he would kidnap, rape, and kill again. -Angus Sinclair saw women and children as disposable objects,
essentially there for his own pleasure. He was a predator. He made that choice time and time and time again
to harm other people, and never felt bad about it. -This killer's story begins in 1945.
Angus Sinclair was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on June the 7th. The youngest of three children,
Angus was raised by his hard-working mother and father in a tenement block on St Peter's Street
in the St. George's Cross area of the city. -Sinclair was born in Glasgow in the post-war years.
And this was a time of real change and real upheaval for the city. There was a lot of poverty,
and there was quite a significant gang culture, so violence was part and parcel of everyday life
for many young men. -Angus had two older siblings, a brother and a sister, but this didn't stop him from being picked on.
-He was the runt of the litter, but he was also small. By the time he'd reached puberty,
he was constantly being bullied, knocked about, thrown about. -Tragically, Sinclair's father died
when he was just 4 years old. -I think that certainly increased his feeling of depression,
of being an outsider, of not being like everybody else. And he chose to identify with petty theft and petty crime
as his revolt against the world. -In 1959, when Sinclair was just a young teen, he committed his first offense.
-He was only 13 when he stole the offertory box at the local church. And that led to him having a criminal conviction.
-At the same time, he became preoccupied with sex. -Now, the early sexualization of young men
is a clue to problems later on. And we start to see this pattern in Angus Sinclair.
-By the age of 15, Sinclair's bad behavior escalated and became increasingly violent.
He viciously attacked an 8-year-old girl. -If there was a trigger to the career that he then went on to found, as a rapist and a murderer,
1961 was probably the moment in which it started, because later in the year, he committed the first serious attack,
on a neighbor, a young girl that lived nearby. -On July the 1st, Sinclair was home alone
when he decided to strike again. This time, the victim was a child who lived in a neighboring flat in the tenement block --
7-year-old Catherine. -He's 16 at the time. And there's quite a lot of respect amongst children
for older children, so he asks her to run an errand for him, and she goes out and she does it.
Now, when she comes back, he attacks her. -Sinclair took the girl up to his flat,
where he viciously assaulted her, then in the middle of his heinous act, he suddenly stopped.
-There's a knock at the door, and he just literally stops what he's doing and goes and answers the door and sends the neighbor away.
-Sinclair got rid of the visitor and went back to attacking the girl. He raped her, he killed her using a ligature from a bicycle,
inner bicycle tube. It's a vicious, premeditated, calculating, callous attack, on an utterly innocent young girl.
-The callous killer quickly came up with a plan to dispose of the child's body. -I think most 16-year-olds would panic.
But what he did was, he sorted out all of her clothing to try to hide the fact there had been a sexual attack.
He rolled her body down the stairs, and he left it there to be found, obviously hoping that it would look as though
she had fallen downstairs and injured herself. -Left at the bottom of the communal staircase
inside the tenement block, Catherine was quickly found by neighbors. By the following day, she was confirmed dead.
Neighbors reported Sinclair's strange behavior when Catherine was discovered. -Knowing that he left a dead body there
and went off and made a point of speaking to people, and he paid a visit to his older brother,
which was clearly an attempt to establish an alibi. He had been seen out and about, talking to people,
and appearing not to have a care in the world. -The police picked Sinclair up and questioned him.
Initially, he denied any involvement in the crime. But police enlisted the help of Angus' older brother.
The following evening, he began to talk. -Eventually, he confesses. His older brother persuades him that he should tell the truth,
and he confesses. And because of his youth, he's not convicted of murder. He's convicted of culpable homicide,
and he's sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment. -At his sentencing in Edinburgh's high court,
on the 25th of August, 1961, the judge, Lord Mackintosh, calls Sinclair "callous, cunning, and wicked."
-The assessment said that his lust for sex was so great that nothing would stop him from re-offending in the future,
and that he'd shown no remorse. -Even though Sinclair was just 16, the judge sent him to an adult prison to serve his sentence.
-He doesn't seen affected by the fact that he's just taken somebody else's life for the first time.
If anything, he's probably quite enjoying it. He knows that he's created this chaos.
-In my examination of sexual offenders, I have never found a pedophile who attacks young girls to be genuinely remorseful.
What they have is what I call "judicial remorse." That's the remorse that sets in
when you're facing a judicial officer. -In prison, the 16-year-old Angus Sinclair
was surrounded by older men and seasoned career criminals. Inside, he was not only schooled in crime,
he learned how to paint and decorate. After serving 7 years of a 10-year sentence,
Sinclair was released from prison. He began working in the decorating trade, but used it as a cover
for his passion for causing harm to others. -Typically, we found he was doing a painting job,
and during lunch hour, he goes out and does a very, very serious and violent assault
and robbery on somebody with a hammer. And he goes back in the afternoon to put on the second coat of paint.
-Edinburgh, Scotland, 1968, he moved into a flat in Hill Place in the heart of the city,
and a five-minute walk from The World's End pub. Sinclair had started his own painting-and-decorating business and settled down.
-It's common in many prisoners. Many people will develop some kind of skill and some kind of thing when they're inside
that they'll be able to use afterwards. He was a painter and decorator. So this enables him access to people's homes.
It allows him, you know, into people's private spaces. -In 1978, 25, Sinclair married a training nurse.
18 months later, they had a son, and all seemed normal with the young family. -He has a flat. He gets married.
So it looks like this veneer of respectability, this facade of normality. And you could look back and say,
"Well, hey, he's turning it around here." -It is very common for people who have paraphilias,
sexual psychopathologies to have almost two different selves -- the self that they manifest
when they're engaging in a predatory attack and a marriage and a family. And some of them, by the way, are good husbands.
Some of them are good fathers. None of these things tells us anything about the proclivity
to engage in sexual misconduct. -Despite the outward appearances, Sinclair was still lusting after his violent past,
and he begins to develop his double life. -What he's doing -- he's actually being quite instrumental.
He's taking care of his own needs. Because he wants dinner on the table, he wants a roof over his head,
and he wants to be able to go out in the evening on the weekend and do what he likes.
-Now part of a happy family, Sinclair met new people, and one of them he felt was a kindred spirit.
-His wife had a brother called Gordon Hamilton, who became Sinclair's partner in crime.
-He moved in with the couple, and Sinclair purchased a Toyota Hiace caravanette that they would use for weekends away together.
-They would go fishing together. But this relationship was incredibly toxic because both of these men had a particular view
of what women were there for, who women are, how they should behave. -Soon, Sinclair could
no longer contain his violent sexual urges. -He starts off very early on having young-child victims,
I suspect for no other reason than that's all he has access to, but he rapidly moves on to adolescent young-adult victims.
-Though it wasn't proved at the time, Sinclair and Hamilton would come to be suspected
of committing a series of crimes across Scotland in the 1970's. These included robbery and sexual assaults.
-Angus Sinclair's a thief. He's a robber. He's a painter and decorator. He's a family man.
And he's a sexual predator. And he keeps all of these activities discreetly within little boxes in his life.
Never the twain shall meet. Highly organized. He executes his plans well. -Then in 1977, the pair escalate their offending.
-What happens to most sexual predators is, from their perspective, the impulse to attack again
comes out of nowhere. It just bubbles up out of the depth of their evil soul. They begin to engage in hunting behavior.
-As the duo grew in confidence, it's believed they turned to murder. -There were three murders in and around the Glasgow area
in that same time period that we were convinced were committed by the same people,
and in particular, Angus Sinclair. -The first of these murders occurred in August 1977.
A 20-year-old woman called Anna was last seen having a drink in a Glasgow pub. -She was with a friend called Wilma,
and Wilma went on to marry Gordon Hamilton, Sinclair's partner in crime. She disappeared when she was looking for a cab.
Her body was finally found in a shallow grave, two years later, in Ayrshire, not far from where Sinclair had gone on his honeymoon.
-Two months later, another local woman from Glasgow disappeared in similar circumstances.
-In October, before -- two weeks before the World's End killing, Hilda, who was 36 and a divorced mother of 2,
disappeared from the Plaza Ballroom in Glasgow. -Both women went missing whilst on their way home after a night out.
When police discovered their bodies, both had been raped, strangled, and their hands and feet bound.
Just two weeks after the murders in Glasgow, the killers moved cities and targeted Edinburgh.
On October the 15th, 1977, two school friends, Helen Scott and Christine Eadie, were drinking at The World's End pub in the center of the city.
-These two young girls, Helen and Christine, they were children, really. They were firm friends.
They'd been brought up together. And they were inseparable. -We know that Helen and Christine's evening
was one that involved, you know, a pub crawl and lots of drinks with friends. They ended up in The World's End.
That was the last port of call. -Also in The World's End pub that night, sexual predator Angus Sinclair and Gordon Hamilton.
-Helen and Christine were approached by two men. We know from witnesses who were there that night,
and who were interviewed at the time, that they appeared to be, you know, quite happy, having a laugh.
-As part of his investigation, Detective Tom Wood gained a unique insight into the young women's personalities.
-Christine was very bubbly and could be quite feisty. Helen, on the other hand, was just a lovely, soft girl.
Just seemed very much the leader of the pair. She was slightly older by a few months.
They both came from very good families. The families loved and cared for them. They certainly didn't have any experience
of the kind of dangers that lay there for them. And they were innocents, really.
-Kevin Scott remembers the last time he saw his sister before she died. -Helen left school at 15, and then she went on
to get a job with a kilt maker's company, which is where she was working up until the day that she died.
Christine was working as a typist, I think, in an accountant's office. I believe she had done that for some time.
On the day in October, Helen was working. I remember her leaving the house that morning.
And her plans were to meet her friends straight from work, and then just go out for a few drinks in Edinburgh.
A normal Saturday. And nothing out of the ordinary. -Investigators would later interview everyone
who came in and out of the pub that night. -It took a long time to do, but we managed to really boil down
who most of the people were during that night. And they remembered distinctly Helen and Christine
falling into conversation with these two young men. They were smartly dressed, short-haired,
which was quite unusual at the time because the late-1970s were a time when young men frequently had long hair.
-Around closing time, Sinclair and Hamilton set their cruel plan into action. -Their friends last saw them leaving the pub
in the company of these two young men. I don't mean they went off as two couples.
They just left the pub together, walked out of the pub, down into Victoria Street.
-These two men are people that the locals didn't recognize, so they did appear to be strangers.
-At approximately 11:15 that night, the group of four was seen heading into the city.
-The best witness statement to indicate that they were together came from a police officer
who was on duty that night in the High Street, which is part of the Royal Mile, and it's where The World's End pub is based.
-In these days, we used to, quite routinely, make sure there was no problems as pubs spilled out onto the street.
So actually, there was a young constable there who saw them leaving. Helen was wearing a distinctive coat.
She had bought a very good quality Burberry coat with one of her first wages. -They were last seen leaving the pub,
on their way to a party with these two men. -Sinclair and Hamilton were about to commit
one of the most shockingly evil crimes in Scottish history. -Sinclair usually operated alone,
but he was also a social killer. And he would sometimes hunt like a specific animal, the wolf.
Wolves hunt in packs. Wolves have learned that if you move in packs, your chances of success in predation are greater,
and so he picked up Hamilton. -That night, the two women got into Sinclair's camper van,
and he and Hamilton drove them far away from the city. -It's pretty clear that Sinclair and Hamilton abducted the girls,
put them into the caravanette, which they'd gone fishing in, and drove them to remote locations.
And it's painful to say, they were abducted, raped, strangled. -Their bodies were discarded at different sites.
They had been bound with items of their own clothing. -Where the violent crimes took place remains a mystery.
All the investigators knew was that Sinclair and Hamilton drove to Gosford Bay, Aberlady, where they left Christine's body.
-Christine Eadie's body was found dumped on the foreshore. Her hands were tied behind her back.
-They then drove to the small hamlet of Haddington in East Lothian. -Helen's body was found some miles away,
six or seven miles away, near Coates Farm. Again, she was naked, but only from the waist down.
She had a new coat, which she was still wearing. Her hands also had been tied behind her back.
And Christine's belt was around her neck. She, too, had been strangled. She had been raped.
A footprint mark was found on her face, and handbag disappeared. -These two 17-year-old girls, one day they're there,
and the next day they're not. -Helen's parents knew something was very wrong when she didn't return from her night out with Christine.
-On Sunday morning, obviously Helen hadn't come home, and I remember my parents making a number of phone calls
to the girls that she had been out with that night, to see if she had happened to stay the night,
which she'd never done before. And when that became clear that that wasn't the case,
clearly my parents were very, very worried, so we went to a local police station
where they reported Helen missing. -Christine's body was found in the afternoon,
on October the 16th, 1977. -In about the middle of the day, we had received information that a dog walker down on the beach
at Aberlady had found the body of a young girl lying on the tide line at Aberlady Bay.
-That afternoon, Helen's family were told they had found Helen's body. -I honestly don't remember what was said,
but at that point, my father went away with the police officer to then go in and identify Helen's body.
But it was clear at that point it was Helen. -Kevin was 11 years old when his sister died.
-I remember the day after Helen was murdered and just sitting on the steps in the house
just looking at the front door, trying to get my head around the fact that she's,
you know, she's never gonna walk through that door again. Our family was broken for a period of time,
and I think that's natural. We still got on day to day and so on and so forth, but I don't recall any sort of family holidays thereafter,
or not for a very long period of time. -The police launched one of the largest manhunts
in Scottish history to find the killers. Crucial evidence was gathered from both the crime scenes
and taken to a new police forensics lab in Edinburgh for analysis. -We were only a year in
to actually establishing a laboratory. -Forensics scientist Lester Knibb was one of the lab's first employees.
He was there when the World's End case was brought in. -I was 25. I'd been working at Lothan & Borders Police in Edinburgh.
I was the third person into the lab, and there was a fourth, so there were chemists and biologists,
and I was the assistant biologist. -Lester Knibb analyzed deposits found on the bodies
of the two women and on the ropes used to tie them. He and the forensic team also paid special attention
to the brand-new coat Helen was wearing when she was attacked. -On the inside of the coat,
we found quite a large amount of seminal staining, consistent with sexual intercourse,
and this of course would have to come from an attacker, and so the main concentration was on that,
in terms of blood grouping. First of all, proving it was semen and finding spermatozoa
and then doing the blood-grouping tests that we had available. -Forensic testing was still in its infancy at the time,
but with such key evidence, scientists hoped that analysis could help pinpoint the killer.
-Now, blood grouping on these materials should be fairly straightforward when it's that fresh,
but it actually proved quite difficult to get good, clear results. Honestly, we had to kind of abandon those results.
We weren't able to get terribly clear results on that. -Scientists at the time could not help the police
find the culprits, now branded "The World's End killers" by the press. Lestor Knibb and the team at the lab held onto the samples
in the hope that future advancements in forensic technology would later solve the case.
-Relatively early, in 1978, the police kind of drew a close. We produced a report, an interim report,
to keep the police up to date with what we'd found. And effectively, all the exhibits were taken away
for storage by the police. -But just over a year after the World's End murders, Sinclair struck again.
On November the 19th, 1978, he was prowling near Barnhill Station in the suburbs of Glasgow.
There, he spotted a target -- a petite 17-year-old machinist called Mary Gallacher.
-Mary Gallacher was in her late teens, but the significant thing about Mary is that she was tiny.
She looked like a child. -Mary Gallacher was going to meet a friend over the other side of the railway tracks.
And her mother saw her set out. Her sister saw her set out, as well. -Mary was last seen leaving her home at 6:45 p.m.
-Sinclair threatened Mary with a knife. He demanded that she took her clothes off.
And he slit her throat with a knife. This was a really, really nasty attack. -It would take more than 20 years to prove
that Sinclair was Mary's killer. Meanwhile, he continued to commit a catalog of cruel offenses.
-One of the extraordinary things about Sinclair, it was known to the police he had a reputation as a mugger.
At one point, he got a handgun conviction. They knew he was a violent man, but they didn't connect the dots.
Sinclair was a man who got away with it for a very long time. -Between 1978 and 1982, a total of 11 children
reported being sexually assaulted by Sinclair. -Over a number of years, we think exclusively targeted children
because there aren't any unsolved rapes or rapes and murders of that time from about 1978 to 1982 that match his M.O.
-Sinclair would ask them to run an errand for him, and then when they returned, he would attack them.
-Sinclair used his job as a painter and decorator as cover for his despicable deeds.
In 1982, Sinclair was finally caught out. In June, Sinclair was in the woodlands area of Glasgow
where he assaulted a 6-year-old girl. But this time, the alert child was able to identify her attacker.
-One girl, a 6-year-old girl, who he carried out a really serious sexual assault on,
recognized the smell of turpentine on him. He was dressed as a painter, and flecks of paint were on his hair and shoes.
-Sinclair, now age 37, was arrested and subsequently stood trial at Edinburgh's high court.
On August the 31st, 1982, he was convicted of three charges of rape, seven charges of lewd and libidinous practices,
and a breach of the peace. -He was charged with sexual assaulting 14 children, and pleaded guilty to 11 of them,
and three of them were rapes, and that was enough to get him a life sentence. -He was sent to serve his time in Peterhead Prison
on Scotland's east coast, just north of Aberdeen. The convicted pedophile and killer was off the streets.
But he and his partner, Gordon Hamilton, had not yet been proven to be the World's End murderers.
It would take intelligent police work and a trailblazing breakthrough in forensic technology
to finally bring justice to serial killer Angus Sinclair. Glasgow, Scotland. 1997.
After several previously unsuccessful attempts to solve it, Strathclyde police force reopened the oldest
unsolved murder in their cold-case files -- that of Mary Gallacher. She'd been found dead in November of 1978,
19 years earlier. -The Mary Gallacher crime had been left unsolved. They lucked out and they found forensic samples
which had been kept from the Mary Gallacher killing. -The police ask their forensic lab
to re-analyze the crime-scene evidence from the victim using their new cutting-edge DNA technology.
The results were run through a database of DNA samples the lab had on file, and what was revealed was a shocking surprise.
-Sinclair, who had been in prison, had given a DNA sample whilst he was in prison,
and that DNA sample matched some semen that was found on Mary's pubic hair. So it was, without a doubt,
he was the offender in this case. -The evidence was clear, and Angus Sinclair was charged with her murder.
On June the 1st, 2001, he stood trial, just weeks before he was eligible to apply for parole.
With concrete proof that he was with Mary Gallacher the night she was killed, Sinclair came up with a cover story.
-Sinclair produces the excuse which is going to become his signature in the next decade.
He says, "The sex with Mary was entirely consensual." -But after 12 days on trial in Glasgow's high court,
the jury took just five hours to return a guilty verdict. Sinclair was once again convicted of murder
and was given another life sentence. His conviction was a victory for both Mary's family and the police.
But Sinclair and his former accomplice, brother-in-law Gordon Hamilton, had still not been tied to the World's End murders.
More than 30 years after the vicious double-murder of 17-year-old friends Helen and Christine
after a night out in Edinburgh, the police were still on the hunt for the killers.
-After a year of intense investigation, with the biggest murder team we ever put together in northern borders,
we literally ran out of clues. We ran out of anything useful to do. But we still had the forensic samples.
We still had Helen's coat. -Spurred by the conviction in the Mary Gallacher case,
based on DNA technology, in 2004 Tom Wood and his team reexamine the forensic evidence.
Their prime suspect was Angus Sinclair. -We sent samples of the coat for another analysis,
and this time, the scientist could tell us that there was not one DNA sample on this coat,
but there were two. So we sent the second sample away to be compared with the database,
and straightaway, within hours, we got back a hit. It was Angus Robertson Sinclair.
-Then the police tried to identify the second male whose DNA had been found on Helen's coat.
-Very quickly we found out that there was a familiar line running through the DNA sample
we had found which led back to the Hamilton family, so we knew that the person who had been with Angus Sinclair
at the time of the World's End murders was his brother-in-law. -To prove that Gordon Hamilton was the second male
and Sinclair's accomplice in the double-murder, the police needed a sample of his DNA,
but by 2004, Hamilton had been dead for over seven years. -He died in 1996. Now, it was incredibly unethical
because there was nothing left of Gordon Hamilton. He had been cremated. He hadn't been buried.
We couldn't exhume his body to take DNA samples. -Then detectives discover that Hamilton had decorated
a house in Glasgow's Dennistoun district. -We had eventually to track down a piece of handiwork he had done
and managed to retrieve old DNA samples from that. -The test came back conclusive --
Hamilton's DNA matched what was found on both victims. -And at that time, we stopped and we gathered ourselves
and gathered all the information and set up Operation Trinity. And I was appointed to lead Operation Trinity.
-In what was one of the largest criminal investigations in Scottish history, Tom Wood led a team of over 60 retired officers
from three police forces. In the monumental effort to solve the World's End murders,
Wood and his officers reviewed over 1,000 murders that took place across Scotland between 1968 and 2004.
-There were several murders in Glasgow that also bore a resemblance to the World's End murders.
They all had been committed within about six months during late 1977, early 1978.
Once we completed Operation Trinity, we put in a report to the Crown suggesting that Angus Sinclair be charged with the World's End murders.
-Due to lack of strong evidence, the prosecution decided not to pursue Sinclair for the Glasgow murders,
but focus instead on the murders of Helen and Christine. On August the 27th, 2007,
at the High Court of Judiciary in Edinburgh, Angus Sinclair finally stood trial for the World's End murders.
-The Crown decided to take a very, very simple approach to the case. They decided not to bother with all the supporting evidence,
the hairs and fibers, the knots, nothing like that. They decided just to go on the simple straightforward DNA.
Here's a girl that's been murdered. Here's her coat. On that coat is DNA. And the DNA belongs to Angus Sinclair.
End of story. -Sinclair and his lawyer saw a chance to deny the murder. -Eventually, in 2004,
the DNA evidence points conclusively to Sinclair as part of the World's End killings.
Sinclair stands trial, but comes up with what to him I'm sure seemed a perfect defense --
"Oh, yes, I am -- well, I mean, this DNA proves I had sex with Christine and Helen after The World's End,
but of course, it was entirely consensual, and when I left them with my brother-in-law Gordon,
they were alive and well and, as far as I was aware, in fine spirits. It was all Gordon's fault."
That was his defense. -Sinclair's testimony was enough to prove reasonable doubt.
-The judge decided that because of the suggestion of consensual sex, then the whole of the DNA evidence
which was being put forward by the Crown was no longer relevant. None of the supporting evidence had been included by the Crown,
and therefore, the case fell in 2007. -Without any other forensic evidence, Judge Lord Clarke threw the case out.
-It was one of the worst days of my life. I mean, I can remember it distinctly, yeah.
It was just this sense of total disbelief. -The families of Helen and Christine had been waiting 30 years for justice.
Helen Scott's father was there that day. -Absolutely shattered. Words can't explain how I feel.
30 years of trying to get a conclusion. -The decision also sent shock waves across Scotland.
-When the trial collapsed, a lot of journalists, politicians, and, significantly, the Lord Advocate themselves,
who's in charge of all prosecutions in Scotland, said, "Whoa, stop. Something about this isn't right."
And that started a pretty root-and-branch review of the justice system, particularly when it comes to double jeopardy.
-Scotland was one of the last countries in Western Europe to have a law that stated
you could not be tried for the same crime twice. It was overhauled in the wake of the 2007 trial.
-So, the law changed, and then Angus Sinclair was the first person to be retried
under the double-jeopardy legislation. -When the go-ahead for the second trial was given,
I came out of the court and I found my dad straightaway to tell him. It wasn't about celebrating.
None of this has ever been about celebrating. But what it did do was just give that opportunity
to bring this chapter to an end. -On the 13th of October, 2014, 69-year-old Angus Sinclair stood trial again
for the murders of two 17-year-old friends, Helen Scott and Christine Eadie. This time, the Crown prosecutors used all the latest
forensic technology to make their case. -The trial lasted weeks. I attended every day.
And this time, the Crown got it absolutely right. I mean, there was compelling evidence
from knots to soil samples to DNA to -- just a whole picture was put together. Exactly what should've happened in 2007 and didn't.
And the jury convicted him unanimously. There was no question whatsoever. -The judge, Lord Matthews,
gave Angus Sinclair 37 years in prison, the longest sentence in Scottish legal history.
-For me, it took 24 hours to sink in, and it was the following day where all of a sudden you just felt different, lighter.
It was so massively important. I was so pleased, for my dad as well, that we saw justice for Helen and Christine in his lifetime.
-Sinclair will be over 100 before he is considered for parole, therefore unlikely to ever be free again.
-A few days after the guilty verdict, I went to Helen's grave, and there was... I didn't count the number of roses,
but there could well have been upwards of 30, with a small card which said, "From our nation.
We will never forget." It was mind-blowing. -It took nearly 40 years to solve the mystery
of the World's End murders. And though his partner in crime in the brutal act died
before he could face justice, the sexual assault and callous killings of children and young women
makes Angus Sinclair one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

In 1977, Angus Sinclair kidnapped, raped and murdered two seventeen-year-old girls after meeting them in a pub in Glasgow, Scotland.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

The episode details the 1977 World's End murders and Angus Sinclair's eventual conviction in 2014 after decades of investigation.

Key points

The World's End Murders. The brutal killings of two teenage girls in Edinburgh shocked the nation.
Justice Delayed. After 37 years, Angus Sinclair was finally found guilty of the murders.
A Predator's Early Years. Angus Sinclair's violent tendencies began in childhood, leading to a life of crime.
Helen's Disappearance. Helen didn't return home after a night out, leading to a police report.
Discovery of Bodies. Christine's body was found, leading to the tragic news for Helen's family.
Forensic Breakthrough. New DNA technology linked Angus Sinclair to the murder of Mary Gallacher.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Angus Sinclair saw women and children as disposable objects, essentially there for his own pleasure.

Describing the mindset of the killer.

5:29WatchJul 29, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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