Angus Robertson Sinclair was born in Glasgow in 1945. In 1961, at sixteen, he killed seven-year-old Catherine Reehill, a neighbour's child, and was convicted of culpable homicide and released after six years. In 1982 he was convicted of eleven rapes and sexual assaults on children aged six to fourteen and given life.
In 2001 DNA linked him to the 1978 murder of Mary Gallagher, a seventeen-year-old strangled in Glasgow, and he was convicted of it.
Those named in the record are Catherine Reehill, seven; Frances Barker, thirty-seven; Hilda McAuley, thirty-six; Agnes Cooney, twenty-three; Anna Kenny, twenty; Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both seventeen; and Mary Gallacher, seventeen.
The case he is known for is the World's End murders. On October 15, 1977, Helen Scott and Christine Eadie, both seventeen, left the World's End pub on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh with two men. Both were found the next day in East Lothian, raped, bound and strangled. It was one of the most notorious unsolved cases in Scotland for thirty years. Sinclair and his brother-in-law Gordon Hamilton were eventually identified by DNA; Hamilton had died in 1996.
Sinclair was tried in 2007 and the judge acquitted him partway through, ruling there was insufficient evidence to put to the jury, which caused a public outcry and a review of Scots criminal procedure. The Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 was passed in part because of it, and in 2014 he was retried, convicted, and given a minimum of thirty-seven years, the longest term ever imposed in Scotland. He was sixty-nine.
He was linked by circumstance to a number of other killings of young women in Scotland in the 1970s that remain unsolved. He died in Glenochil prison on March 11, 2019.