On the night of Saturday, October 15, 1977, Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both 17, ended an evening out in Edinburgh at the World's End pub on the Royal Mile. They were last seen leaving with two men. The next day both girls were found dead in East Lothian, several miles apart. For almost 30 years no one was charged. When a man finally stood trial in 2007, the judge stopped the case at the end of the prosecution evidence and acquitted him.
That man was Angus Robertson Sinclair, a Glasgow-born offender who had already killed a seven-year-old girl as a teenager, had been serving a life sentence for offences against children since 1982, and in 2001 had been convicted of the 1978 murder of another 17-year-old, Mary Gallacher. In 2011 the Scottish Parliament passed a law that allowed an acquittal to be set aside where new and compelling evidence emerged. In 2014 Sinclair became the first person in Scotland retried under it. A jury at the High Court sitting in Livingston convicted him of raping and murdering both girls, and the judge set a minimum term of 37 years, the longest a Scottish court had imposed. He died in prison in 2019, aged 73, without ever admitting the crimes.
Sinclair was born in Glasgow on June 7, 1945, according to the date of birth recorded by the High Court of Justiciary. A 2007 Scotsman profile described him as the youngest of three children, raised by his parents in a council home, in what it called a fairly typical working-class upbringing. His first recorded offense, at 13, was the theft of a church collection box.
In January 1961, at 15, he was convicted at Glasgow Sheriff Court of lewd and libidinous practices against a young girl and put on probation for three years, the Scotsman reported. Later the same year he killed a child.
Catherine Reehill was seven. She was visiting relatives in Woodlands when she was sent on an errand to nearby shops, and she did not come home. Her cousin told STV News in 2020 that Catherine "just loved life" and that the two girls, who looked alike, were friends as well as cousins.
Sinclair, then 16, strangled her. He was charged with murder, and prosecutors accepted his plea to culpable homicide. On August 25, 1961, at the High Court in Edinburgh, he was sentenced to 10 years' detention. The sentencing judge, Lord Mackintosh, called him "callous, cunning and wicked," the Scotsman reported in 2007. He was released in 1968 or 1969, according to the trial judge's report quoted by the appeal court in 2016. Most accounts say he served six years; the 2007 Scotsman profile said seven. Catherine's cousin told STV that her family greeted his release with dismay and feared he would kill again.
Sources disagree on Catherine's age. The High Court record and most later press reports give seven; the 2007 Scotsman profile gave eight. A 2015 Scotsman report spelled her surname Greenhill, which no other source used.
After his release Sinclair met his wife in Edinburgh, the Scotsman reported, and the couple had a son in 1973. Her brother, Gordon Hamilton, born on March 1, 1955, lived with them for a time. Hamilton had no criminal record, and neither man was on police databases or had any known local link that would have brought him to the notice of Edinburgh detectives, according to Tom Wood, the former deputy chief constable who helped lead the inquiry. Hamilton died in 1996.
In January 1980 Sinclair was convicted of firearms offenses, a matter noted in the trial judge's report of 2014; the 2007 Scotsman profile dated that conviction to 1979 and gave the sentence as nine months.
Christine Eadie was born on February 21, 1960, and Helen Anne Scott on July 5, 1960. Both had recently left Firhill High School in Edinburgh and started work, Christine in an office and Helen as a shop assistant. When Lord Matthews sentenced Sinclair in 2014 he described Helen as shy and retiring and Christine as more outgoing. Helen wanted to be a children's nurse, the court heard; the evidence did not show what Christine had planned for her future. Both, the judge said, had looked forward to many more such evenings with friends and family.
On October 15, 1977, Helen met a school friend for a drink at a hotel on Princes Street. They later met Christine and her flatmate, and the group moved from pub to pub through the evening, arriving at the World's End, on the corner of the High Street and St Mary's Street, shortly before 10 p.m. The school friend told the 2014 trial that the girls had had a drink in each pub and were tipsy rather than drunk. The World's End was crowded. When she and Christine's flatmate came back from the toilets, two men were sitting with Christine and Helen. The friend was invited to a party and went; the girls stayed. She left at about 10:45 p.m.
Christine and Helen were last seen leaving the pub at about 11:20 p.m., walking with two men. On October 16, two walkers found Christine's body near Aberlady, East Lothian. Helen's body was found a few hours later near Haddington. Both had been strangled; Sinclair was convicted in 2014 of raping and murdering them. Police identified them within 24 hours.
Lothian and Borders Police issued descriptions of the two men and later a photofit. Over the years the inquiry took witness statements from more than 20,000 people in Britain and Europe. Detectives interviewed Scottish trawler crews in Plymouth and questioned Peter Sutcliffe. Anonymous calls and letters came in, including a 1981 letter naming two men, but none moved the case forward. In 1994 a man reported seeing two men near Aberlady in the early hours of October 16, 1977. Sinclair's name did not feature in the investigation at any of these stages.
Forensic scientists kept the girls' clothing. In 1988 samples from Helen's raincoat were sent to a laboratory, but DNA profiling was too new to produce a result. In 1998, according to the Edinburgh Evening News, scientists working for Strathclyde Police obtained a male profile from the coat; police then tested about 400 men, including many with records of sexual or violent offenses, and every result was negative. Detective Superintendent Allan Jones later said the negative results at least narrowed the field. That same year, the Toyota Hiace caravanette that Sinclair had owned in 1977 was scrapped in Musselburgh. He had sold it in February 1978.
Retesting of the coat later showed DNA from two men, but there was no database match. In April 2004 scientists tested another part of the same stain on Helen's coat and found a match to Sinclair, with odds of a billion to one against the DNA coming from anyone else. Hamilton, by then dead, was linked through the DNA of his relatives and through traces found in material removed from a Glasgow flat he had decorated. Detectives also traced the upholstery of Sinclair's van, from old photographs, to a conversion company in Devon; fibers from Helen's coat matched it.
The same year police began a new operation reviewing seven unsolved killings of young women, including the World's End case. The Sunday Post reported in 2019 that this review linked Sinclair to four killings in Glasgow as well as to the deaths of Christine and Helen.
Mary Gallacher was 17 and lived in Glasgow. In 1978 she was on her way to meet a friend when she was attacked near a railway line. She was strangled and stabbed. The case went unsolved for more than 20 years.
By then Sinclair had been in prison for nearly two decades. On August 31, 1982, at the High Court in Edinburgh, he was convicted of three charges of rape, seven of lewd and libidinous practices involving young children, and one of breach of the peace, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Press reports describe the victims as children aged six to 14, attacked between 1978 and 1982; most reports describe them as girls, while the Sunday Post in 2019 described them as girls and boys. He was serving that sentence at Peterhead Prison when he was linked to the Gallacher killing, the Scotsman reported.
Advances in DNA work on a hair recovered in the Gallacher case linked Sinclair to her killing, the Scotsman reported. On June 4, 2001, a jury at the High Court in Glasgow convicted him of her murder. He received a second life sentence with a punishment part of 15 years. The judge at that trial was Lord Carloway, who later sat on the appeal bench that considered whether Sinclair could be tried again for the World's End murders; the court rejected Sinclair's request that he step aside.
The 2004 match on Helen's coat made Sinclair a suspect in the World's End case for the first time. He had never been a suspect before his arrest for the Gallacher murder, the Edinburgh Evening News reported. In 2001, after consulting cold-case specialists from England, detectives extracted DNA from clothing recovered from the scenes; the Scotsman reported in 2007 that one profile fully matched Hamilton and another partly matched Sinclair.
Sinclair appeared on petition on March 31, 2005, charged with raping and murdering both girls. The indictment, served in 2006, alleged that he had acted together with Gordon Hamilton, his brother-in-law, who had died 10 years earlier and could not be prosecuted. Tom Wood, who had led the inquiry, retired in 2005.
Sinclair went on trial at the High Court in Edinburgh in August 2007, before Lord Clarke. The Crown relied on two main strands of evidence: the DNA in the stain on Helen's coat, which scientists said was Sinclair's with odds of a billion to one, and more than 50 fibers on the coat that matched the upholstery of his Toyota Hiace caravanette. The prosecution did not lead the low-level DNA evidence from the clothing used in the killings, the Crown Office later said.
At the close of the prosecution case the defense made a submission of no case to answer. Lord Clarke considered it over a weekend and, on September 10, 2007, upheld it and acquitted Sinclair. The jury never considered a verdict. "There was no forensic evidence to link the accused to the items used to kill the girls," the judge said. He said he was not satisfied that the evidence the Crown relied on could overcome "that absence of crucial evidence." The Crown Office noted that there was no right of appeal against an acquittal by a judge.
Lothian and Borders Police said they were disappointed. Tom Wood said he was bitterly disappointed for the families. The independent MSP Margo MacDonald said only about a fifth of the Crown's evidence had been led and asked whether there would be an inquiry; the justice spokespeople of Labour and the Conservatives also questioned the outcome. The Scotsman reported that officers privately blamed the prosecution.
With the trial over, Sinclair's criminal record could be reported. The Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, made a statement to the Scottish Parliament in which she said that if the Crown had had a right of appeal against a ruling of no case to answer, she would have used it in this case, the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland recorded. Her statement set out the Crown's view that the judge had been wrong. It led to a public dispute between Angiolini and Scotland's senior judge, the Lord President, Lord Hamilton, over whether the case should have gone to the jury, the Scotsman reported. In an editorial on September 24, 2007, the Scotsman described Lord Clarke's reasoning as careful and coherent but backed the Lord Advocate's right to say it was mistaken, and noted that even a successful reference to the appeal court would leave the acquittal in place. The Law Society Journal printed a contrary view, warning against changing the law in reaction to a single case.
The Scottish Parliament then passed the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011. Among other grounds, section 4 allows the High Court to set aside an acquittal where new evidence has emerged. The Act came into force in November 2011, and the justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, referred to the World's End case when it did, the Scotsman reported. Under the test, the new evidence must not have been available at the first trial, and could not have been with reasonable diligence; it must substantially strengthen the case against the accused; and it must be highly likely that a reasonable jury, properly directed, would have convicted on the new evidence together with the old.
In March 2012 the Crown Office asked Lothian and Borders Police to reinvestigate the case. Tom Wood called it a very good day for the justice system in Scotland, and Helen's father, then 81, said he had never given up hope. By December 2012 the Lord Advocate had applied to the High Court to set aside Sinclair's acquittal, the first application under the new law. Helen's father described it as the first step on the ladder toward justice for the girls.
The new evidence came largely from DNA work carried out by the forensic company Cellmark in 2011 and 2012. Scientists used Crime-Lite, a light source that could show where material had been deposited on a garment and reveal traces invisible in ordinary light; it was the first use of the technique in a Scottish criminal case. The work produced a full DNA profile of Sinclair and further traces of Hamilton on clothing used in the killings, which the Crown argued had been left while those items were being used in the killings. At the first trial the judge had treated the evidence as neutral on whether Sinclair took part in the violence. The Crown argued it no longer was. "Without Crime-Lite, there would have been no trial two," Frank Mulholland, the Lord Advocate who prosecuted the retrial, said later. Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Flannigan likened the new findings to "a smoking gun."
On March 27, 2014, three judges of the High Court, Lord Justice Clerk Carloway, Lady Dorrian and Lord Bracadale, granted the application. The court held that the new evidence substantially strengthened the case and that it was highly likely a properly instructed jury would convict. It rejected defense arguments that a fresh trial could use only the evidence led in 2007 plus the new material, and that publicity made a fair trial impossible, noting that most of the coverage was old and that the trial need not be held in Edinburgh. It also found the Crown had acted promptly, the crimes were very serious, and a new trial was in the interests of justice. Sinclair was indicted again in May 2014.
The retrial opened on October 13, 2014, at the High Court sitting in Livingston, before Lord Matthews. Sinclair, 69, appeared from custody and pleaded not guilty. Frank Mulholland prosecuted in person; Ian Duguid QC appeared for the defense.
Sinclair lodged special defenses, among them incrimination, blaming Gordon Hamilton, and alibi, saying he had been fishing on the shore of the Firth of Forth. In an account read to the jury from a defense report, he said that Hamilton had driven him back to East Lothian and that the girls were alive and unharmed when he left them.
On the third day the girls' school friend described the evening in the pubs and the two men she had seen with Christine and Helen. She said she had picked Sinclair out of a set of 12 police photographs in 2004; under cross-examination she accepted that she may have been concerned at the time that she was recognizing him from newspapers. A police officer described how the streets emptied within minutes of closing time and said Sinclair's clothes had been out of fashion.
The Cellmark scientist Geraldine Davidson gave evidence over several days. She said DNA analysis of an item of Helen's clothing found at the scene gave extremely strong support for both Sinclair and Hamilton having contributed DNA to it, and that the pattern of DNA on the item did not fit the defense account. She also gave evidence about the full profile obtained from Christine's clothing. A forensic specialist told the jury that his analysis pointed to two people being involved.
Helen's father, then 84, gave evidence, as did her sisters, Christine's mother and Helen's boyfriend. Helen's mother had died in 1989; her father told the court that she had never recovered from their daughter's death. Over the years, the Scotsman wrote, he had studied the faces of men he passed in the street.
In his charge to the jury Lord Matthews said it was not disputed that the girls had been murdered, and that both counsel had urged the jurors to find that Hamilton was involved; the real issue was whether he had acted alone. The jury of nine women and six men was out for less than two and a half hours. On November 14, 2014, it unanimously convicted Sinclair of raping and murdering both girls, acting together with Hamilton. The jurors had not been told of his previous convictions.
When the verdict was in, the Lord Advocate placed Sinclair's record before the court: the 1961, 1982 and 2001 convictions. Defense counsel said nothing about his personal circumstances.
Lord Matthews spoke first of the two girls and the lives they had expected to lead. He said that unless Sinclair's conscience one day moved him to tell the truth, no one but he would know exactly what part he and Hamilton had played. He praised the girls' families, whose evidence, he said, no one in court could have failed to be moved by, and who had waited patiently for justice while the authorities worked to achieve it. "As for you," he told Sinclair, "you have displayed not one ounce of remorse for these terrible deeds." He called him "a dangerous predator who is capable of sinking to the depths of depravity," and said the words available to describe Hamilton and Sinclair seemed inadequate.
Life imprisonment was the only sentence open to him. He said the idea of parole sat uneasily with the crimes but that he was required to fix a punishment part, the period that must pass before a prisoner can ask the Parole Board for release. He sentenced Sinclair to life on both charges together and fixed the punishment part at 37 years, the longest then imposed by a Scottish court. The Yorkshire Post reported that the Lord Advocate had told the court the two men ended the girls' lives "like something that was wiped off a shoe."
Sinclair was granted legal aid to appeal against both conviction and sentence. The Scotsman reported in May 2015 that the first trial had cost 530,932 pounds in legal aid, with a further 108,592 pounds paid to his solicitors for opposing the Crown's application for a new prosecution. A judge allowed the appeal to proceed, but in August 2015 Sinclair dropped his challenge to the conviction. He had intended to argue that the trial was unfair because of the particular nature of the case, and Scottish Legal News noted that the appeal could have tested how the new double jeopardy law worked in practice.
The sentence appeal was heard by Lady Paton, Lady Clark of Calton and Lord Malcolm, with Ian Duguid QC and McCall QC for Sinclair and the Lord Advocate for the Crown. The defense argued that 37 years was excessive: that the figure appeared to mirror the 37 years since the murders, which was irrelevant; that the judge had not looked at comparable cases; that the 1982 and 2001 convictions, for crimes committed after 1977, should not have counted against him; and that the judge should have considered what a court in 1977 might have recommended.
On March 24, 2016, the court refused the appeal in an opinion delivered by Lady Paton, reported as [2016] HCJAC 24. It found that the trial judge had settled on a punishment part in the high 30s because of the gravity of the crimes and that the match with the time since the murders was a coincidence. It described the crimes as showing "an immeasurable capacity for evil, depravity, and sadism," treated the 1961 culpable homicide as a major aggravating factor, and held that the judge had been entitled to take the 1982 and 2001 convictions into account under the common law. No statute or precedent set a fixed upper limit, and a judge did not have to speculate about what a court would have done in 1977. The 37-year term stood.
Sinclair had been in custody continuously since 1982. By the time of the World's End verdict he had spent more than half his life in prison. He died at HMP Glenochil, near Alloa in Clackmannanshire.
His health declined over about 18 months before his death, with a series of strokes and transient ischemic attacks. In his final year he needed help to wash and dress, he fell more often and ate and drank less, and a do-not-resuscitate notice was in place. For his last five days he was confined to bed and cared for by prison medical and nursing staff. He was last seen alive in his cell at about 1:40 a.m. on March 11, 2019. Nursing staff checked on him at 3:50 a.m. and found that he was not breathing, and he was pronounced dead about half an hour later. He was 73. The Scottish Prison Service confirmed the death the same day and said it had been reported to the procurator fiscal.
Because he died in custody, a fatal accident inquiry was mandatory. It was held at Stirling Sheriff Court and reported in March 2020. The certified causes of death were bronchopneumonia, ischemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease. No criticism was made of the care he received from the Scottish Prison Service or the NHS. His next of kin knew of the inquiry and chose not to take part.
In reports of his death, Frank Mulholland was quoted as saying the thousands of police officers who had worked on the World's End case had never stopped trying to bring the girls' killers to justice.
Sinclair was convicted of four killings: one culpable homicide and three murders. Police and former detectives have linked him to others, but he was never charged with any of them, and he admitted none. Those cases are attributions, not findings of any court.
A 2004 police review of unsolved murders linked him, alongside the World's End case, to the deaths of four women in Glasgow in 1977, according to the Sunday Post: Frances Barker, 37, Hilda McAuley, 36, Agnes Cooney, 23, and Anna Kenny, 20. Frances Barker died in June 1977. Another man, Thomas Ross Young, was convicted of her murder and died in prison; the former Strathclyde Police detective Peter Macleod has said he believes Sinclair was responsible. The killings of Hilda McAuley, Agnes Cooney and Anna Kenny remain unsolved. Macleod linked Sinclair to all three in a memo he wrote in 2001, and he told STV News in 2020 that senior officers showed little interest in it. He called Sinclair "Scotland's luckiest serial killer" and argued that police failures had left him free to kill. Macleod also named Sinclair as the main suspect in the killing of Margaret McLaughlin, 22, in Carluke, for which another man, George Beattie, was convicted. Police Scotland said in response that the cases of the two convicted men had been investigated by the former Strathclyde Police and had led to convictions, and asked anyone with new information to come forward.
Two other cases have been raised in the press. Helen Kane was killed in Edinburgh in 1970; Sinclair was questioned but never charged, STV reported, and her son urged him to tell the truth before he died. The Sunday Post reported in 2019 that cold-case detectives also believed Sinclair was responsible for the death of Eddie Cotogno in 1979. In 2007 the Scotsman reported that detectives believed he might be linked to the deaths of two women in Glasgow and one in Coatbridge.
In the Sunday Post's report on his death, a Police Scotland detective chief inspector, Dave Pinkney, said unresolved murder cases are never closed and the passage of time is no barrier to investigation. The Crown Office said it can prosecute only where there is sufficient credible, reliable and admissible evidence, and that any new evidence would be carefully considered.
The 2014 verdict found that Sinclair acted together with Hamilton, but Hamilton was never tried. He died in 1996, before either the Gallacher conviction or the first DNA match on Helen's coat. The evidence against him came from DNA, from his relatives' DNA and from traces in a Glasgow flat he had decorated, and both prosecution and defense invited the 2014 jury to find that he had taken part. As Lord Matthews told Sinclair at sentencing, the exact part each man played is known only to Sinclair, who never told it.
The World's End case is the first in Scotland in which an acquittal was set aside under the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011, and Sinclair's 37-year punishment part was described at sentencing and on appeal as the longest a Scottish court had imposed. Tom Wood said the case was solved not by one detective but by hundreds of officers over 30 years, and he credited careful forensic evidence gathering with making the later science possible. Wood has written a book about the case. The Crown's use of Crime-Lite was also its first use in a Scottish criminal case, and Mulholland pressed for its adoption in Scottish laboratories.
Catherine Reehill's cousin called in 2020 for a public inquiry into the handling of his case, though STV noted that many families prefer not to revisit the past.
Proven and final: the culpable homicide of Catherine Reehill (1961); the 1982 convictions for offences against children; the murder of Mary Gallacher (2001); the murders of Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, with other charges (2014, after the 2007 acquittal was set aside).
Never charged and never admitted: the deaths of Frances Barker (for which another man was convicted), Hilda McAuley, Agnes Cooney and Anna Kenny, linked to him by a 2004 police review and by former detectives; the deaths of Helen Kane (1970), Eddie Cotogno (1979) and Margaret McLaughlin (for which another man was convicted), raised by detectives and the press. Peter Macleod's estimate that Sinclair may have killed as many as 14 people is his own view.
Details that vary between sources: Catherine Reehill's age (seven in the court record and most reports, eight in the Scotsman in 2007) and surname (one 2015 report spells it Greenhill); time served for her death (six years in most reports, seven in the Scotsman in 2007; the court record says he was released in 1968 or 1969); the year of his firearms conviction (1979 or January 1980); the spelling of Mary Gallacher's surname (Gallacher in the press, Gallagher in the 2016 court opinion and in the 2007 Scotsman); whether the 1982 victims were all girls; the date the first male DNA profile was obtained from Helen's coat (1998 according to the Edinburgh Evening News; the Scotsman in 2007 described DNA work on knotted clothing in 2001); and the spelling of Hilda McAuley's surname (McAulay in the Sunday Post).
June 7, 1945: Angus Robertson Sinclair is born in Glasgow.
January 1961: convicted at Glasgow Sheriff Court of lewd and libidinous practices against a young girl; three years' probation.
1961: kills Catherine Reehill, 7, in Glasgow.
August 25, 1961: High Court, Edinburgh; plea to culpable homicide accepted; 10 years' detention.
1968 or 1969: released.
1973: his son is born.
October 15, 1977: Christine Eadie and Helen Scott leave the World's End pub with two men at about 11:20 p.m.
October 16, 1977: both girls are found dead in East Lothian.
February 1978: Sinclair sells his Toyota Hiace caravanette.
1978: Mary Gallacher, 17, is killed in Glasgow.
1979 or January 1980: firearms conviction.
August 31, 1982: High Court, Edinburgh; convicted of three rapes, seven charges of lewd and libidinous practices and one breach of the peace; life imprisonment.
1988: first attempt to obtain DNA from Helen's coat fails.
1996: Gordon Hamilton dies.
1998: a male DNA profile is obtained from Helen's coat; about 400 men are tested with negative results; the caravanette is scrapped.
2001: detectives extract DNA from clothing from the World's End scenes; Peter Macleod writes his memo linking Sinclair to other Glasgow killings.
June 4, 2001: convicted at the High Court in Glasgow of the murder of Mary Gallacher; life with a 15-year punishment part.
April 2004: DNA from Helen's coat is matched to Sinclair; a police review of seven unsolved killings begins.
March 31, 2005: appears on petition charged with the World's End murders.
2006: indicted.
August 2007: trial opens at the High Court in Edinburgh.
September 10, 2007: Lord Clarke upholds a submission of no case to answer; Sinclair is acquitted.
November 2011: the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011 comes into force.
2011 and 2012: Cellmark's new DNA work using Crime-Lite.
March 2012: the Crown Office asks police to reinvestigate.
December 2012: the Lord Advocate's application to set aside the acquittal is reported.
March 27, 2014: the High Court authorizes a new prosecution.
May 2014: Sinclair is indicted again.
October 13, 2014: retrial opens at the High Court sitting in Livingston.
November 14, 2014: convicted of both murders, with other charges; life with a 37-year punishment part.
August 2015: drops his appeal against conviction.
March 24, 2016: sentence appeal refused, [2016] HCJAC 24.
March 11, 2019: dies at HMP Glenochil, aged 73.
March 2020: fatal accident inquiry at Stirling Sheriff Court makes no criticism of his care.