Classic Scottish Murder Stories (23 page)

Inveigh as he might against adulterous women, it was precisely on a Thursday night that he made two of his catches. Patricia Docker, aged 25, was in fact separated, a nursing auxiliary at Mearnskirk Hospital, and she went to the dancing on Thursday, February 22nd 1968. Helen Puttock, aged 29, was certainly married, and she left her husband baby-sitting when she went with her sister to the Barrowland on Thursday October 30th 1969. The victim in the middle, Jemima Mcdonald, aged 32, was a single mother of three children, and she did go to the Thursday nights, but actually encountered Bible John on Saturday night, August 16th 1969.

All three young women, brunettes, dressed in the 60s finery of short dresses, with elaborate make-up and hairstyles, were described as vivacious and attractive, but, meaning no unkindness, they did not have film-star good looks and Bible John steered clear of conspicuous blonde bombshells. Presenting himself as of NCO-type, with pinned-on inappropriate good manners, such as pulling out a chair for his dancing partner as if they were at a tea-dance and not a whirling, jiving, bacchic scene, he was (to use an anachronism) a toff to them, and an exciting catch. They were not prostitutes, but ordinary Glasgow girls leading hard lives, just getting by, full of spirit.

Bible John could easily have picked up prostitutes on the streets or in the bars if that had been his fancy, but he was not like Jack the Ripper with a ‘down on whores', although we have a right to postulate that he did not like women. He did not seem to be a married man and he never, incidentally, mentioned a mother during his personal revelations although there seemed to be a sister, which detail he retracted. Perhaps he avoided prostitutes because, unlike Jack the Ripper, he was intent on full sexual congress. His design was rape, if necessary, followed
by strangulation with a ligature such as the victim's tights or one of her stockings. There was something about the lively, flirtatious girls dancing their cares away at the Barrowland that appealed to him, and he went back for more.

On how many occasions, not always successful, he prowled the ballroom, leaning nonchalantly against a pillar and watching the action, we simply do not know. With his now famous red or sandy hair, cut unfashionably short, especially for a man of his age – somewhere between 25 and 35 – together with a decent suit and half-boots so unfashionable that passing ‘hard lads' twitted him as he left with his prey on his arm, he was reckless that he stood out from the crowd and quite confident that his semi-professional style would secure a compliant girl. The
modus operandi
was politely to escort her nearly to her home, a guardian in such dangerous times, and then lure her or persuade her to invite him to a nearby dark corner for some sexual favours. Screams were heard only once.

It is a very curious fact that all three victims were menstruating at the time when they were killed. To a woman, that seems extra cruel, but that concept would have no reality to Bible John in his madness. It is difficult not to equate his expressed opinions on women with the Mosaic law (Leviticus 15.19) that a menstruating woman is ‘unclean'. Bible John did not ‘preach' at the two girls in the taxi, nor ‘spout' long extracts from the Bible, but as he mumbled evasively while trying to preserve a front of normality, he did show familiarity with the text of the Bible. In particular he seemed to refer to a woman being stoned, and to Moses in the bulrushes, and he seemed to have a preoccupation with childhood deprivation and foster homes.

Sophisticated crime-writers like to say that it was a mere coincidence that all three women were in the same physical condition, but it is one of those things that are not proveable, and common-sense does seem to indicate that it is relevant. It is, however, ridiculous to suggest that Bible John with his feral
instincts could sense when that was so. Whether or not a Glasgow girl in the swinging sixties would offer that information when it became obvious that some sexual contact might be in view is a different matter. Not that she would necessarily have rejected his advances for that reason, anyway. It must be a valid possibility that he eliminated them because of their condition – that it was a trigger. By this reasoning, on other occasions he could have satisfied himself without committing any crime and spared the girl. The trouble with this thinking is that reports by women of having safely entertained a man met at the Barrowland who resembled the description provided by Jeannie Williams did not come up.

Nor did another stranger, ‘Castlemilk John' emerge from the thickets to help Jeannie Williams with the 300 or so identification parades which she so willingly attended. He had been her dancing partner on that last evening and she thought that he was a married man. They had all made up an impromptu foursome and the two men had ample opportunity for conversation, although he was not in the taxi at the end. He told Jeannie that he was a slater or builder from Castlemilk. We may charitably hope that as he read the newspaper over the family breakfast table he reasoned that he did not have anything substantial to add to the search for Bible John, who vanished as mysteriously as Jack the Ripper. There was supposed to have been a last sighting of him at about 2.00am on the following Friday morning, when a dishevelled man with a dirty jacket and a red mark on his cheek was spotted on a night service bus plying along Dumbarton Road, but it has not been made at all clear why he should have been the one.

No-one could have anything but admiration for the intensity and dedication of the investigation under Detective Superintendent Joe Beattie. It is impossible to think of a clue – and there were many promising leads – which he did not pursue to infinity. As in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, it is now thought that the team was overwhelmed by the cumbersome
card-indexes and files which were to be superseded by computer technology. If Bible John had been so disordered in his mind that he had continued to frequent the Barrowland, where it was joked that the police had a formation dance team on the floor, of course he would have been caught. Other unsolved murders in Scotland which followed in 1977 were mooted, but with not much conviction, as his handiwork. Since, notionally, the Barrowland was a vital feature of his insanity and, unhindered, he would have carried on with his work into double figures, it might be that when he was, as it were, locked out of the core of his fantasy, the impulse died. Perhaps.

Because Joe Beattie did not succeed, he was criticised for relying so heavily on his chief eye-witness but there is no doubt that Jeannie Williams had scrutinised Helen's partner as closely as if she had almost had a premonition. (And she certainly felt misgivings in the taxi when he was morose and clearly could not wait to get rid of her.) There was the promising matter of his dentition. She observed that his two (middle?) front teeth overlapped slightly and that one tooth, number 4 or 5 in dental terms, was missing on the right upper jaw. Several hundred Glasgow dentists were circulated and over 5,300 men thrown up by this enquiry were interviewed and eliminated. Perhaps a young man with such a gap in his teeth had not been to the dentist for some time, although someone must have extracted the missing tooth. Serial killers do not like being hurt.

The red or sandy hair cut quite short and rounded at the back seemed like a gift at first and Glasgow hairdressers and barbers – some 450 of them – were questioned in vain. If Bible John had been wearing some kind of false hair, one feels that Jeannie would have spotted it. The author is open to correction, but believes that a man in the 1960s would have had difficulty in obtaining a product which would dye his hair a convincing shade of red or sandy that could be washed out after the dance. It is well known that young men of this hair colouring were collared in the streets by members of the public during the very
open investigation. If Bible John chose to stay in Glasgow and lie low, the red hair must have been a problem to him because anyone who knew him, if only the assistant at the corner-shop where he bought staples of food, would immediately have been suspicious if he had suddenly changed his hair colour. For one thing, hair dyeing was much more unusual then than it is now.

Bible John said in the taxi that he worked in a laboratory, knew the public houses in Yoker, and mentioned that he had plenty of money, but all of this material was regarded from the first as a deliberate lie, and none of it helped. His choice of a laboratory as a respectable job is interesting – it is not the first avocation which would occur to most men out to cut a dash. Perhaps he had some bubbling phials of chemicals in his home or digs and experimented with poisons – that would be a typical serial killer's hobby. He was a non-smoker, which helped in a negative way when ticking off points in assessing a suspect. Hundreds of men were eliminated: Jeanie Williams was the final arbiter.

There were some especially tantalising hidden clues in the case. What was the nature of the badge on Bible John's lapel which he kept fingering and putting his thumb over as if he were trying to conceal it from Jeannie and Castlemilk John? It did not matter if Helen Puttock saw it. It appeared that Bible John had not realised that Helen was ‘with' Jeannie until it was too late and he had already worked on his prey. The other two victims had been on their own and were happy to leave with him. This may have been the cause of some of his bad behaviour at the cigarette machine and in the taxi before he dropped Jeannie off; he was milling over his mistake and facing up to the fact that this time there were two good eye-witnesses and that his turn at the Barrowland was over. Jeannie just thought that he was angry with her for being in the way. Strangely, she, Jeannie, did not want him to know where she lived, and stopped the taxi accordingly, but Helen was driven on oblivious to her doom. It was after midnight, they were all tired, it was dark in
the taxi, whiskies had been taken earlier in the evening at the Trader's Tavern, Helen had made her choice and judgement had gone. There were signs of a deadly struggle and a chase where Helen had tried to climb a railway embankment. Those who knew her said that she would have put up a fight and used her long finger-nails.

The presumably assumed name of Helen's partner, which Jeannie only half heard and did not take in properly – John Templeton or Sempleson or Emerson – might have had some significance. In the cloakroom, Helen told Jeannie some detail about her partner, something about where he lived or worked, but she could not remember what it was although she racked her memory for years. Hypnosis might have been able to retrieve it, but the Crown Office in Edinburgh vetoed the plan which was already in place, with Jeannie willing and Dr Raymond Antebi of Duke Street Hospital, Glasgow, prepared to give it a go.

There was a curious incident just after the scene over the faulty cigarette machine, when Jeannie saw that Helen's John was saying something to her which she did not seem to believe because she was shaking her head (or was it a frank proposition?). Then he produced some card or paper, pink, perhaps, from his pocket, and Helen's attitude changed from a kind of playful incredulity to surprised acceptance. Jeannie tried to get a look at it, but he slipped it back in his pocket, saying, ‘You know what happens to nosy folk' and tapping the side of his nose in a vulgar gesture. Like the badge, the nature of the card is anyone's guess but it is the change in Helen's attitude which is telling. All the girls who frequented the Barrowland carried in their minds – but it was fading now – the knowledge that two of their number had been murdered in that and the previous year and to some, limited it seems, extent, they were on their guard.

Neither sister, obviously, recognised any likeness between Helen's partner, as he appeared at the dancing and in the taxi,
and the black and white line-drawing prepared after the second murder by an artist, Lennox Paterson, of the Glasgow School of Art, which had been shown on television and reproduced in newspapers. There had been no eye-witnesses to the encounter between Bible John and his first victim, Patricia Docker, but two witnesses had been found in the Jemima McDonald case. A boy thought that he had seen her sitting in a public house with a man, while a girl thought that she had seen her sitting on a sofa in the Barrowland with a man who was good looking, and some of whose features she could describe in the most general sense.

When, however, Jeannie arrived on one of her first visits to the Marine Police Office to be interviewed by Joe Beattie, she saw that first drawing on the wall of the office and said immediately, ‘That's like him.' She was taken to see Lennox Paterson and from her impressions he did the famous colour painting, which he later refined, and which was in its turn widely circulated. To the author, this ‘portrait' has always had the look of the young John Ruskin, Victorian writer and thinker, and that is strange, because Ruskin, too, had peculiar ideas about women, finding their bodies repellent, and being unable to consummate his marriage. But the face of the killer, refined, as it were, by a freak of nature, is only a mask. The mind inside the 60-year-old (or so) face now, years later, its hair grey or metallic-dyed, still feels no remorse, no desire to confess.

The police should have known that John Irvine McInnes was not the one, when he boasted and laughed in his village of Stonehouse about having been pulled in to identification parades, and was happy to be known locally as Bible John! It is not entirely clear to an outsider why an early suspect eliminated by Joe Beattie, not identified by Jeannie Williams, should have been elevated into a prime suspect in 1995. DS Beattie had retired in 1976, and genetic profiling had been developed in the 1990s. It was thought in the city that a political agenda lay
behind the decision to use DNA testing in an attempt to close the Bible John case for all time. If a resounding success could be achieved, then, so the thinking went, a spanking new national DNA databank might be set up at Strathclyde. A stain on Helen Puttock's clothing had been preserved and it was found to yield DNA. We do not know if the stain was the sole such specimen, but that is the implication. There was then a wide logical jump to apply the matching technique to a suspect, for Joe Beattie's investigation had eliminated all those first suspected. The old data was put on computer and the name of Mclnnes apparently kept coming up, and so a new enquiry concentrated on him, fuelled perhaps by old hunches and suspicions. Jeannie Williams, who had passed him over, when now shown his Scots Guards photograph, pointed out that his ‘jug ears' were absolutely wrong. She could not look at him again in the flesh, because he had committed suicide at the age of 41 on April 29th, 1980. Circumstantial evidence included his strict upbringing by parents of the Plymouth Brethren sect, his red hair, and the fact that he was at the Barrowland on the night of the Helen Puttock killing. He had not confessed.