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Inspecting Detectives

The Long Shadow of the World's End

Episode 1

Duration: 28 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC Radio OrkneyLatest broadcast: on BBC Radio Scotland Highlands and Islands

Detective Superintendent Allan Jones worked on the investigation into the murders of Helen Scott and Christine Eadie for most of his career. Almost four decades later he was with their families when a judge sentenced Angus Sinclair to 37 years imprisonment in 2014.

The murder of these two 17 year olds has cast a long shadow over Edinburgh. Edi remembers the atmosphere in the city after the girls' deaths. She hasn't stepped inside the pub since.

The subsequent investigation ran from 1977 to 2014 touching the lives of detectives, forensic scientists and journalists. Edi Stark hears their remarkable story.

Allan Jones was still a teenager and had only recently joined the force when he was first briefed on the case by Edinburgh detectives in the late seventies.

It was a case that drew him back numerous times over the coming years and it was Jones who was in charge when a forensic breakthrough when it, eventually, came in 2004.

In the first of this threee part programme Edi Stark paints a picture of an investigation behind one of the most significant criminal cases in Scottish legal history.

She speaks to Kevin Scott, Helen's brother, who tells us about what he remembers of that weekend in 1977. We meet Douglas Kerr who was one of the first detectives to investigate the case and Lester Knibb, only a young forensic scientist in the late seventies who would go one to play a major part in the securing Sinclair's conviction. Show less

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