The decade was coming to an end and Glasgow in the late 1960s wasn’t so much swinging as reeling. Enclaves of poverty, with multiple deprivation and shortened lifespans, dotted the city. It was the murder capital of the country, if not Western Europe. Gang feuds and knifings, chibbings, were commonplace, particularly at weekends with their graffiti like “Tongs Ya Bass” splattered on walls.

Bulldozers were also busy tearing down the teeming, over-packed and insanitary tenements, and carving a wound, the M8 motorway, through the heart of the city. Families were being displaced from communities, moving to peripheral estates or new towns.

Still, there was always the dancing, although even that was changing. Clubs were springing up with live groups, rock, rhythm and blues, while the traditional dance halls, like the Majestic and Barrowland, while they tried to cater for the new music, still had big bands and crooners, with musicians in uniform attempting to mimic the hits of the day.

There seemed, too, to be an age demarcation, as well as in dress and hairstyles. Few under-25s went to a dance hall, unless trying to pull an older partner, whereas anyone above the line would have looked extremely out of place, probably taken for a member of the drug squad, in a Glasgow club.

Into this civic and cultural maelstrom, on Thursday, February 22, 1968, at over-25s night at the Barrowland, strolled the serial sex killer who would become known as Bible John. More than half a century later we know little more about him. He was said to be around 5ft 10in, handsome and well dressed. He smoked Embassy cigarettes. His two front teeth were crossed.

On that cold night, up the stairs and onto the sprung maple wood floor, 25-year-old auxiliary nurse Patricia Docker would dance with him, leave with him and die at his hand. She was separated from her husband who was in the RAF and was quickly ruled out as a suspect. She was staying with her four-year-old son at her parents’ place in the southside.

Changed plans

SHE had told them she was going to the Majestic, where she went regularly, but for some reason ended up at the Barrowland. Perhaps she lied to them, as the “Magic Stick” was considered more upmarket, or she may have met him somewhere beforehand and was persuaded to change her plans.

Her naked body was discovered next morning in the lane behind her home in Carmichael Place in Langside. She had been raped, strangled and she has been menstruating. A sanitary pad was placed beside her and her handbag items thrown around, although the bag had been taken.

This pattern was repeated in the two further murders which convinced the police that one man was responsible for the killings.

Eighteen months after the Docker killing, on the night of Saturday, August 15, Jemima McDonald, a 32-year-old mother of three, headed for the Barrowland. She did not come back. Next day her sister Margaret heard rumours that children were seen leaving an old tenement building in Mackeith Street in Bridgeton and talking about “the body”.

By Monday morning she was so concerned that she visited the abandoned building 200 yards away, where she found Jemima’s battered body. She had been strangled with her own stockings, raped and beaten to death. She, again, had been having her period. But unlike Patricia Docker, Jemima was fully clothed when her body was found. Her handbag was again missing.

The crime scene had been hopelessly contaminated. However, witnesses later said they had seen her leaving the dance hall at midnight with a tall, slim young man with red hair.

The largest and longest manhunt in Scottish history was now under way. Plainclothes cops mingled with dancers at the Barrowland, somewhat unconvincingly, while house-to-house inquiries continued. Punters in shops and pubs were quizzed but nothing emerged.

Three months later, George Puttock, home from the army and looking after two his young boys, gave his wife, Helen, aged 29, £5 for a taxi home after reluctantly agreeing she could go dancing with her sister Jeannie Williams at the Barrowland. It was the last day of October 1969.

‘Castlemilk John’

THE two girls picked up two men, both claiming to be called John. One of them, “Castlemilk John”, walked to George Square to get a bus home, leaving the sisters, and the killer, to hail a taxi. Jeannie was dropped off in Knightswood.

Helen was found by a dog walker next day in the long grass behind her flat in Earl Street, Scotstoun.

She had again been raped and bludgeoned, then strangled. She, too, had been menstruating. There were signs that she had tried to fight off the attacker – her feet were stained with grass where she had tried to run up the railway embankment trying to escape. There was a semen stain on her tights, but as this was more than 20 years before DNA profiling they were put away with the rest of the collected evidence in a locker, for what would be decades.

Jeannie, however, was able to give a description of “Bible John” – his hair colouring, what he was wearing, that he had two crossed front teeth.

He seemed devoutly religious. He had called dance halls “dens of iniquity”, and asked if they knew the Biblical punishment for adulterous women – “stoning to death”.

Detective Superintendent Joe Beattie, leading the police inquiry, commissioned what was the first artist’s impression to be used in a crime inquiry, by the artist Lennox Paterson.

But while Jeannie said that it captured the killer perfectly, for some reason it didn’t show his open mouth and the giveaway teeth.

Beattie even kept a plastic replica of crooked teeth in a drawer.

Famous photofit

POLICE followed every lead and suggestion. There was a Dutch clairvoyant who was brought in but had no success. A psychiatrist, Robert Brittain, produced a profile in 1970 – predating the FBI – and then there was the first use of a photofit, which was widely distributed, leading to hundreds of hopeless tips and dozens of fruitless arrests and interviews.

In the late 1970s, in a pub on Duke Street in Glasgow, a man stared at me across the room and eventually came up. “You’re a reporter,” he said. “You were there when they arrested me as Bible John.” He did look pretty similar to the photofit.

Fast-forward to 1996 and a bright but bitterly cold early February morning. Breath is clouding at the mouth, feet are being stamped to keep the blood flowing, gloved hands wrapped together.

Exhumation

ACROSS the graveyard on a hill above Stonehouse in Lanarkshire, behind a police line, a polythene tent, crusted in ice, conceals what is going on. Only the sound of a pneumatic drill biting into the frozen earth reveals the exhumation of John Irvine McInnes, who killed himself 16 years before, and which, it is hoped, will finally confirm the identity of the serial killer through the DNA from Puttock’s tights.

It doesn’t. The pathology laboratory cannot get a full profile and the results are described as inconclusive. The reinvestigation fails.

Like the speculation over the identity of Jack the Ripper, other suspects came into the frame. Fred West, who was in Glasgow around the time, the serial killer and rapist Peter Tobin, and even the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, but none of their DNA profiles fits.

So, who was Bible John? Is it just possible that there were three separate sex killers with the same modus operandi? Almost certainly not. Was it coincidence the women were menstruating, but that triggered him into killing them? If so, were there other women he attacked but didn’t kill? And why did he stop? Did he die, go to prison, leave the country, or just somehow control himself?

We will almost certainly never know. There is no conclusion, no happy ending – the last page has not been turned on Bible John.

Which is why the mystery of Glasgow’s serial sex killer holds its allure and will continue to do so.