The World's End Murders by Tom Wood

For 37 years, the World’s End murders were a stain on Scotland’s collective conscience, the unsolved rapes and killings of two young women, seventeen years old and out one evening in Edinburgh’s Old Town for a bit of fun. There have been other unsolved crimes over the years but these two somehow struck a chord. When justice was finally dispensed in 2014 it felt, for the country, like a liberation. 

Tom Wood was heavily involved in the case in the middle and later years of the investigation, acting at one stage as the senior investigating officer. For Wood, and for many, if not all, the individuals involved in the investigation, there was always a feeling that the World’s End murders were special, and it was imperative that somehow, some time, the case must be resolved and the perpetrators held to account. 

The basic story will be familiar to anyone with a general awareness of recent Scottish history but Wood’s intimate knowledge of the case allows him to present a gripping and detailed recreation of the various stages of the investigation from the initial enquiry, through the various advances in DNA technology over the course of thirty years, to the breakthrough which finally, belatedly, secured a conviction. 

Wood paints a picture of police investigations in those early days which were characterised by dogged and dedicated individuals working together but hampered by a lack of technology. All information was manually recorded on index cards and filed in an enormous physical database. The chance of oversight – missing a single, vital piece of information among tens of thousands of records – was so high as to be almost an inevitability. 

The case went cold. Occasional advances offered the prospect of a breakthrough – for example, a prisoner in Saughton Jail reported that a cellmate had confessed to the murders – but these led nowhere and the investigation dragged on. Gradually, it was scaled down, though never closed. 

However, although those early detectives could not solve the case, they laid the groundwork for their successors, in future years, to profitably take up the mantle. That the case was eventually solved was as much down to those early detectives as it was to the advances in DNA which led to the final breakthrough. 

DNA was unknown in 1977. The idea that minute traces of evidence could reveal enough genetic information to identify, at odds of one in a billion, a single perpetrator, must have seemed like science-fiction. And yet the detectives in the World’s End case knew that, some time in the future, that is exactly what would happen. The World’s End murders would never have been solved if it hadn’t been for enlightened detectives who knew that scientific advances would come, and that therefore evidence had to be preserved in a pristine condition for examination when that day arrived. Every piece of evidence relating to the case was stored in secure and sterile conditions, which meant that when DNA did offer the chance of identifying the culprits, the raw materials existed in a shape which allowed them to be scientifically examined. It was a remarkable leap of faith by those officers and we owe them a debt of gratitude. 

All of this is relayed by Wood in fascinating detail. DNA was first used in the World’s End murders enquiry in 1988. It would be twenty-six years before it finally brought the truth. There was no single revelation, no immediate breakthrough. Rather, DNA technology advanced and the investigation advanced with it, gradually creating a more and more reliable DNA profile. Eventually, one name emerged. 

Angus Sinclair.

His name is now notorious but, even then, he was known to the officers in the case. He had recently stood trial for murder in Glasgow and had a prolific history of violent sexual crime, including abduction. 

By this time, Sinclair was in prison for a series of sexual assaults on women and girls. Far from any cliched image of a sexual predator, though, he projected the image of a model prisoner, trustworthy and hard-working. This must have presented particular difficulties for the detectives interviewing him – how to reconcile the fact that Sinclair was a violent sexual predator with the calm and seemingly pleasant man before them? Sinclair had a highly developed ability to deceive and dissemble. Those of us who have never been in such circumstances can never know what it must be like to undertake such interviews, and the skill of those who do, the psychological acuity they must require, cannot be underestimated. 

Tom Wood makes the interesting observation that, unlike what we see in TV dramas, senior detectives do not undertake such interviews and, indeed, are not best placed to do so. Lower ranking officers, with recent experience of interviewing and well-versed in the psychological techniques required, are much better placed to undertake high-pressure interviews such as that of Angus Sinclair. 

In addition to Sinclair, the police had always known that there was a second attacker. Again, DNA provided the vital clue to his identity and the way this was done is astonishing, so convoluted that if you read it in a crime novel you would shake your head at the improbability of it. Yet it happened. 

But the real villain of the piece is Sinclair. Tom Wood calls him the embodiment of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that duality of good and evil that has provoked so much analysis of the Scottish psyche for 130 years. 

This case clearly means a huge amount to Tom Wood. Once a policeman always a policeman, and there is no question that cases such as these, where the deaths of innocents go unpunished, must be very difficult to manage. Tom Wood’s approach throughout this book is impeccable: he seeks to determine the facts, of course, but he also looks to understand what went well in the investigation and where they fell short. He wants to understand Sinclair so he can consider what they could have done to stop him. It’s probably the case that we can never, ever understand the mind of someone as evil as Angus Sinclair but, in this forensic study of a crime, an investigation and a trial, Tom Wood comes as close as anyone. This is a highly personal and deeply impressive book. 

One of the final points that Tom Wood makes is perhaps the most compelling. “Families matter,” he says. He dedicates the book to Helen and Christine and the other victims of Sinclair, known and unknown, but he also dedicates it to “the families and friends who are left behind.” This understanding of the impact serious crime has on families and friends is something we have come to acknowledge in the near-fifty years since the World’s End murders took place, and the world is a better place for that.

The World's End Murders can be purchased here