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Big Wullie · Joined: 25 Apr 2007 Posts: 1149 Location: Glasgow

Seems some can get disclosure if they promise not to disclose it for any other purpose other than preparing an appeal.

Lockerbie, Dixon and Beck (Me) to name but a few are still being denied this right.
In my case my MSP Bill Kidd is being told by Crown they will not disclose the statements and ID Parade Reports because they identify "Living People" ? How do they know after 27 years ?
I cannot wait to see the Privy Council Decision in Brendan Dixon's case.

Man cleared of World’s End killings is chief suspect in another murder.

Serial sex killer Angus Sinclair has been linked to the murder of a young woman for which another man has already served 30 years in prison.

The double killer - who was cleared last year of the notorious World's End murders - is alleged by the defence to be the chief suspect in the murder of bakery worker Frances Barker. The body of the 37-year-old was found in undergrowth on a farm track near Glenboig, Lanarkshire, more than two weeks after she was last seen alive in June 1977. Thomas Ross Young was jailed for the murder 30 years ago.

Yesterday, the High Court in Edinburgh gave Young's team permission to examine police paperwork which they hope will help their case.

advertisementHowever, defence QC David Burns had to promise to keep the documents secret, because they contain information about other unsolved murders.

A judge at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh was told by the defence that Young's conviction was a mistake.

Last November the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates possible miscarriages of justice, announced they were backing Young's appeal.

Yesterday's brief hearing was to discuss preparations for the case to be heard by three appeal judges at some future date, which is still to be fixed.

Papers shown to judge Lord Nimmo Smith claimed new evidence was available which would have had "a material bearing" on the jury's guilty verdict.

It is claimed the new evidence is to the effect that the crime may have been committed, not by Young, but by Sinclair - currently a prisoner in Peterhead - or Gordon Hamilton, who is now dead.

Last September, Sinclair, 62, was cleared of the so-called World's End murders.

Sinclair had denied raping and murdering Christine Eadie and her friend Helen Scott, both 17, in East Lothian in October 1977.

The charges alleged that at the time Sinclair was acting along with his now-dead brother-in-law, Gordon Hamilton, who was then 22.

The two men were said to have lured or forced the girls into a vehicle after they left a girls' night out in the World's End pub in Edinburgh's Royal Mile, driven them away, attacked, raped and strangled them.

The two-week trial at the High Court in Edinburgh heard their bodies were found in East Lothian with their hands tied behind their backs and ligatures round their necks.

The trial collapsed when judge Lord Clarke ruled there was not enough evidence to convict Sinclair - who is already serving life for two killings and a number of other sex attacks. Pathologists have now looked at the deaths of six women killed during a seven month period in 1977 - including Frances Barker, Christine Eadie and Helen Scott.

They found possible links between the murders, based on the way they were tied up and killed.

The FBI's Behavioural Analysis Unit at Quantico, Virginia, was asked by Strathclyde Police to look at the spate of killings and concluded that the same person was responsible for all six homicides. Young's lawyers also say that between 1968 and 2004 there were 1038 female murder victims in Scotland. But apart from the six supposedly linked killings there are no others which match.

"A re-investigation by Strathclyde Police came to the conclusion - and it must be the case - that all six murders were committed by one or more persons, and that one person could be identified as the perpetrator of one of the murders," said Mr Burns.

"That is not Young who was in prison at the time of the later five murders."

Mr Burns also promised the court that the documents he wanted to see would not be shown to anyone except Young and his lawyers and would be used only to help prepare his appeal.