True Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Theories Part VII

World's End Murders

The World's End Murders is the colloquial name given to the murder of two girls, Christine Eadie, 17, and Helen Scott, 17, in Edinburgh, in October 1977. The case is so named because both victims were last seen alive leaving The World's End pub in Edinburgh's Old Town. The only person to stand trial accused of the murders, Angus Robertson Sinclair, was acquitted in 2007 in controversial circumstances. Following the amendment of the law of double jeopardy, which would have prevented his retrial, Sinclair was retried in October 2014 and convicted of both murders on 14 November 2014. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 37 years, the longest sentence by a Scottish court, meaning he would have been 106 years old when he was eligible for a potential release on parole. He died at HM Prison Glenochil aged 73 on 11 March 2019. Coincidentally, he died on the same day the BBC's Crimewatch Roadshow program profiled the murders.

In addition to the murders of Eadie and Scott, Sinclair also pleaded guilty to the culpable homicide of his eight-year-old neighbor Catherine Reehill in Glasgow in 1961 when he was 16, and was given another life sentence in 2001 for the murder of 17-year-old Mary Gallacher on a footpath in Glasgow in 1978. He is believed to have also killed four other women between 1977 and 1978, all within a seven-month period of the murders of Eadie and Scott.

Background

On the night of 15 October 1977, Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both seventeen, were seen leaving The World's End pub, located at High Street on the Royal Mile, at closing time. The following day, Eadie's naked body was discovered in Gosford Bay, East Lothian, by hill walkers. Scott's body was found unclothed six miles away from Eadie's, in a corn-stubble field. Both girls had been beaten, gagged, tied up, raped and strangled. No attempt had been made to conceal their bodies.

In late 1977, Lothian and Borders Police conducted a high-profile criminal investigation, collating a list of over 500 suspects and taking over 13,000 statements from members of the public. Despite their efforts, they were unable to identify a culprit. The case commanded widespread attention in the Scottish media at the time, and a photo-booth picture of the two girls was used by police in their appeals for information.

At the time, the media reported that several witnesses had told police they had seen Helen Scott and Christine Eadie sitting near the public telephone in the bar, talking with two men. Neither of these men was traced nor presented themselves to the police. Speculation that the killings had been the work of two men was heightened when it was revealed that the knots used to tie the girls' hands behind their backs were of different types.

In May 1978, Lothian and Borders Police announced that they were scaling down the investigation.

Cold case review

In 1997, Lothian and Borders Police's cold case unit instructed further forensic work to be undertaken in the case, reflecting improvements in DNA profiling technology since the murders occurred. This resulted in the isolation of a DNA profile of a male, found on both girls. The DNA of the original 500 suspects was analyzed and compared to the new sample, but there was no match.

On 8 October 2003, following the broadcast of a reconstruction on the BBC's Crimewatch program, the incident team at Lothian and Borders Police received a phone call from a man who claimed he was walking near Gosford Bay on the night of the murders, and that he saw a suspicious vehicle. He said it was a works van and it was being driven erratically. The man did not come forward with this information during the initial investigation. It was revealed that immediately following the Crimewatch broadcast in 2003, police had received 130 calls from witnesses who had not previously made them known to the investigation.