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He served the longest sentence ever to be imposed in Scotland: life with a minimum of 37 years.

But serial killer and rapist Angus Sinclair, convicted of Edinburgh's notorious World's End murders, is now dead, aged 73.

As reported by Glasgow Live, it's been confirmed that the murderer died overnight at HMP Glenochil in Alloa, Clackmannanshire.

Sinclair spent more than half his life behind bars for killing four girls, as well as for a string of sex attacks on young children.

He also served another concurrent life tariff for the murder of Glasgow teenager Mary Gallacher.

But it does not end there, because he was also believed to have murdered at least another four women in a gruesome sex killing spree over just a few months in 1977.

Sinclair was a Glaswegian. He grew up in the St George's Cross area and attended Lovell Street Primary, followed by St George's Junior Secondary School.

(Image: Crown Office)

His life of crime began at 13 when he stole from the offertory box of a Glasgow church in 1959, but the 12 months' probation he was given did not deflect him.

The same year he was admonished on a housebreaking charge. Two years later came the first intimation of his twisted and violent lust when he was put on three years' probation for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl.

Just seven months into that, he killed for the first time, raping and strangling another eight-year-old, Catherine Reehill, in the Sinclair family home.

He flung the child's body down a stairwell and told her mother it had been a tragic accident. Now 16, Sinclair confessed to culpable homicide and was sentenced to ten years.

Prophetically, the judge described him as “callous, cunning and wicked”.

After his release Sinclair was next convicted of illegally possessing a .22 revolver. Two years later, in 1982, he was given a life sentence for a string of sexual assaults and rapes of boys and girls between the ages of eight and 11.

His method was to wait in landings and closes before grabbing his victim at knifepoint.

It would be years later before it emerged that he had already killed several times.

Mary Gallacher, then 17 in November 1978, was found dead, stripped from the waist down, on waste ground near Barnhill station. She had left her home in Springburn to visit a friend on the other side of the line.

The killer had strangled her with the leg of her trousers, before raping her and slitting her throat.

He might well have got away with it - he did for almost 20 years. In 1997, a cold case review into the murder was set up and new forensic breakthroughs, common today, nailed him.

Using hundreds of thousands of profiles contained on the National DNA Database it linked semen on a pubic hair taken from Gallacher's body, and preserved, to Sinclair, who had not featured in the original inquiry. He was convicted and given a life sentence in 2001.

In 2004, three Scottish police forces came together in another initiative to launch Operation Trinity, a review of a spate of unsolved murders in 1997.

The inquiry was led by the former deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, Tom Wood, who said there was a "pretty compelling" case that Angus Sinclair had killed many times.

Forensic scientists who examined six cases concluded that Sinclair had killed Helen Scott, Christine Eadie – the two 17-year-old Edinburgh victims raped and murdered after leaving the World's End pub – and also Frances Barker, Hilda McAuley, Agnes Cooney and Anna Kenny.

(Image: Lothian and Borders Police)

All the dead women were found in countryside bound and gagged. All had gone missing after a night out at a dance hall or pub and all had died extremely violently.

Scientists from the University of Glasgow examined more than 1,000 other murders in Scotland between 1968 and 2004 and concluded that the six crimes bore a "unique signature" and that "Angus Sinclair and Gordon Hamilton (his co-accused in the World's End murders) are responsible for all the linked crimes".

Sinclair was put in the frame for the murder of Anna Kenny, a 20-year-old Glasgow brewery worker who disappeared in August 1977 after leaving the Hurdy Gurdy bar in the city. She was raped and strangled, her remains found 20 months later in remote Skipness, Argyll.

Hilda McAuley, 36, was raped, beaten and found dumped on wasteland in Langbank, Renfrewshire in October.

Agnes Cooney, 23, disappeared in December following a visit to the Clada social club in Govanhill. She was tortured, stabbed 26 times and left on moorland at Caldercruik near Airdrie.

The two, like Kenny, had been taken after a night out. The stark similarity in all the cases was that they had been raped and their hands and feet bound.

In the most famous Sinclair case, Edinburgh was the setting for murder. On the night of October 15, Christine Eadie and Helen Scott were seen leaving the World's End Pub in the Old Town at closing time, the final stop on a Saturday night pub crawl.

The following day, Christine's naked body was discovered in Gosford Bay, East Lothian, by hill walkers. Helen's body was found unclothed six miles away from Christine's, in a corn-stubble field. Both girls had been beaten, gagged, tied, raped and strangled. No attempt had been made to conceal their bodies.

At the time, and despite a high-profile investigation and the sifting of over 500 suspects, police were unable to identify the killer and in May 1978 the investigation was scaled down.

Fast forward to 1997 when, as a result of the cold case review and the development of DNA profiling, a sample was partially matched to over 200 on the National DNA Database. Sinclair's was one of them. His mouth was swabbed and as a result he was charged.

However, the Crown case collapsed at trial when Sinclair's defence counsel successful argued that no evidence had been presented to prove that any sexual encounter was non-consensual.

The judge upheld the argument, finding that there was no case to answer. It might have rested there but for the change to the law as a direct result of the case.

The Double Jeopardy Act was passed by the Scottish parliament – ending the rule that you couldn't be tried twice for murder – and making provision for the circumstances in which someone could be be tried again.

Sinclair was, and in October 2014 was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 37 years.

But there was still another murder in which strong suspicion fell on Sinclair.

Thomas Ross Young had been convicted of the killing of bakery worker Frances Barber, abducted by a kerb crawler near her home in Maryhill Road in June 1977. Since then, after 30 years in prison and to his death, Ross maintained his innocence.

At the time of Barker's murder, Young was a natural suspect, a violent sexual inadequate who admitted using prostitutes.

Barker's battered, strangled corpse was discovered in a wood in Glenboig, Lanarkshire.

And although Young protested his innocence throughout his trial, it took the jury at the High Court in Glasgow only an hour to return a guilty verdict on October 26, 1977.

In 2005, an FBI profiler, asked by Strathclyde police to look at the series of murders concluded that one man was responsible for all of them, because of the similarities in the murders and the way they were constructed.

Crucially, several of the women had been killed after Young had been jailed.

This evidence had been gathered as part of the failed initial prosecution of Sinclair, who was now inside for World's End killings.

It clearly implicated him in all the murders, including that of Barker, who lived only 40 yards from Sinclair's house, and suggested Young was innocent.

Nonetheless, in what was a posthumous appeal as Young had died, the appeal court judge upheld his conviction.

Sinclair, who has spent more than 50 years in prison, will have to live to at least 106 years old before he will even be eligible for parole. He's reported to be a husk of a man now inside Glenochil prison.

There will certainly be no regrets at the passing of one of the world's most evil and perverted killers.

First published in June, 2016.

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