"Bible John", Glasgow murderer (1968-9). What have we learned?

 

Newspapers searched for Bible John all over the UK
using the composite drawing of the suspect from witnesses

Glasgow Evening Times, Feb 2018

Murders are usually done on known contacts, from anger or hatred, and are fairly spontaneous. 3 Queensland murders this year showed NO knowledge of the victims, endless months of preparation and visible record keeping on the Web. Plus the killers had guns!! Compare with 3 Scottish murders.

I]In Feb 1968 a naked 25-year-old nurse Patricia Docker was in a Glasgow garage. Her body, showing blunt force trauma to the face and head, was close to her home. She’d been strangl­ed and her handbag, watch and clothes were miss­ing. Dock­er, from nearby Renfrew­shire Hospital, had told her parents she’d spend the ev­en­ing dancing at a ballroom and when she did­ not re­turn home, her parents weren’t anx­ious. Yet her postmortem confirmed stran­g­ulation. Rigor mortis showed she’d died shortly after leaving Barr­owland Ballroom.

II]In Aug 1969 31-year-old Jemima MacDonald danced all evening in Barrowland Ballroom. She attended Bar­rowland while her sis­ter, Margaret O'Brien, took care of Jemima’s 3 ch­ild­ren. Mac­Don­­­ald was seen with a well-dressed tall man, aged 25-35. The well-spoken man had a Gl­aswegian accent and shar­ed brief bib­lic­al quot­at­ions with them

When her sister failed to return, O’Brien disc­overed her sister's bat­tered body in a dere­lict tenement. A postmortem found MacDon­ald had been rap­ed and badly beaten on the face, before she was st­r­angled with her stock­ings. Like Docker, she was menstruating when she died.

Eyewitnesses carefully described MacDonald's man, showing strong sim­il­arities between the Docker & MacDonald cases: both women were at Barrow­land Ballroom before their murder, were beaten and strangled to death, were menst­ruat­ing, and had handbags taken from the crime scene

III]In Oct 1969, 29-year-old Helen Puttock was found by a worker behind her flat garden in Glas­gow. She was naked, beaten on the face, raped and strangled with her stockings. Her handbag items had been scattered, and there was a deep bite into her thigh. As with the 2 prev­ious vict­ims, Helen had been men­st­ruat­ing at the time of her murd­er, sanit­ary pad under her arm.

Puttock and her sister Jean Langford had been to Barrowland Ballroom where they met two men named John, dancing until all four left for home. Jean’s John walked to George Square to board a bus, while the ot­hers hailed a taxi and chatted. At home, Langford left Puttock and her John inside the taxi. Langford later told police that her sister's John was a tee­totaller who quoted from the Old Testament. John referred to Barrowland as an adult­er­ous den of iniquity, saying he disapproved of married women dancing. Puttock’s John had been a slim, well dressed and tall man with overlapping front teeth, called John Templeton-or-Sem­pleson-or-Emerson.

Helen Puttock’s murder raised susp­icions that all 3 murders had been done by one man. Each victim had been a mother and had met her murd­erer at Bar­rowland Ball­room. Each had been escorted home by a man, raped and strangled, and each was menstruat­ing at time of death.

After finding Puttock’s body, a new composite drawing of the suspect was created. Lang­ford saw the earlier im­age cr­eat­ed after Je­mima Mac­Don­ald’s murder and saw an ex­cel­lent like­ness. 1970 was the first time Scottish police used the ph­o­tofit sys­t­em re murder suspects. 100+ det­ect­ives worked full-time on the case, 50,000 witness statements were taken, 5,000+ potent­ial susp­ects were questioned and Langford viewed 300+ id­entity par­ad­es. Off­ic­ers believ­ed the killer died, been gaoled for other crimes or locked in an asylum. Or he may have left Gl­as­gow.

victims L to R: Pat Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock

BBC Scotland

Detective Chief Inspector Les Brown spoke to a detective who’d tak­en a man to a hospital, after arresting him at Bar­r­ow­land Ballroom in 1968. Although the suspect John White had needed stitches in his head, he fled when his hand­cuffs opened. But after Detective Brown wrote of his sus­picions, the man arrived for a DNA sam­p­le. It was negative.

Well after the Bible John killings, some women claimed that they’d been sexually assaulted after leaving Barr­ow­land eg in Apr 1969 Hannah Martin had left the dance hall with a tall man. But during the drive home, the man's sex­ual aggression left Mart­in assaulted and raped. She gave birth to a daughter at Glas­gow Royal Maternity Hos­p­ital in Jan 1970. Was the daughter the one link to the real identity of Bible John?

Peter Tobin was convicted in May 2007 of the murder of Polish student Angelika Kluk who’d been rap­ed, beaten and stabbed to death; The fact that Tobin attacked Kluk so ferociously, hid her body then fled to Lon­don prior to his arrest suggested pre-planned work. Also note that Tobin's 3 former wives reported being impr­is­­oned, beaten and raped at his hands; each stated he’d been driven to extreme physical violence by menst­ruation. NB Tobin was a staunch Cat­holic; the alias that Bible John gave Jean Lang­ford and Helen Putt­ock in 1969 was like one of the pseudonyms often used by Tobin: John Semple

NB Tobin relocated from Glasgow to Brigh­ton in Aug 1969 after marry­ing his first wife, whom he had met at Bar­r­owland Ballroom in 1968. From Aug 1969 Tobin lived in Brighton for 20 years, and from the late 1980s he alternated between both cities. So detectives specul­ated that con­vic­t­ed serial killer Peter Tobin may have been Bible John, or not.

Criminologist David Wilson investigated Tobin's case for 3 years. He believed Tobin was Bib­le John dur­ing Tobin's trial for the 1991 murder of teenage Dinah Mc­Nic­ol, one of the bod­ies found in his Margate gard­en. The eviden­ce included strik­ing simil­arities be­tween trial testim­ony from a friend of Mc­Nicol's who had been with her on her last night and the con­vers­at­ion with Bib­le John Lang­ford had had that night.

The Police init­iated Operation Anagram in 2006 to trace Tobin’s move­ments over decades and to det­er­mine his pot­ential culpability in other crim­es. Not only was Tobin in Brighton when the final two Bible John mur­­ders occ­ur­red, but Tobin's DNA was check­ed again­st the semen sample for Bible John and failed to match.

Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow

Wiki

After 2002’s Bible John Murders Rev­iew, no further U.K murders were attributed to him, so the manhunt for this 1968 murderer remains open. Hopefully the Qld murders will be understood more quickly. Thank you to Bible John: Creation of a Serial Killer, BBC