Has true crime writer finally identified Bible John?

Anyone who’s old enough, remembers what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

If you’re Scottish and of a certain age, you will remember the first time you ever heard the name Bible John.

No two words are capable of striking visceral, Pavlovian fear in a young mind, than the soubriquet assigned to the man who briefly stalked a Glasgow dancehall in the late 1960s to make bloodied corpses of three, bright young women who had their whole lives ahead of them.

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Who is Bible John? Glasgow murders and BBC podcast explained

Even the name contains a terrifying simplicity, combining the pervasive notion of everyman with a scriptural reference in a country where religion is associated with conflict, proscription, and punishment.

If a man called John was responsible for such apparently random acts of savagery, he could be your neighbour, your friend’s father, or the man who drove the school bus, and not even God could save you, was the message inculcated in the fragile minds of a generation of children. Only in Scotland could a serial killer be used as a form of parental control.

Almost 60 years on, the aquiline, feminine features of the 1969 artist's impression of the killer who was never identified remain a grim and haunting presence, its narrow, inscrutable eyes continuing to stare out at us, enigmatically, like Scotland’s Mona Lisa.

The names of his victims – Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock – are inextricably linked by their final, individual moments of agency, locked together in history by three fateful decisions to engage with a plausible stranger in a nightclub.

From the moment police decided that the killings were the work of the same actor, the nation followed every turn of the story with rapt fascination, like episodes in a true crime documentary.

The women were beaten and strangled and left naked or partially clothed in public areas after apparently meeting the same man at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow’s east end.

The women had been dancing at the Barrowlands Ballroom (Image: free)

The killer was dubbed Bible John after witnesses recounted him quoting passages from the bible and condemning adultery while in the company of his final victim.

New theories, developments, witnesses, evidence and suspects have emerged over the years, all processed through the machine of evidential testing with the same bleak, inevitable conclusion. Despite a very natural human desire by investigators to identify a culprit, the computer always said no.

That was then and, while we’re told Bible John continues to exert a fascinated grip on the national psyche, the person doing the telling is usually a journalist with a new line on the story or an author with a book to sell.

This week it was revealed that police are investigating claims made by Australian true crime writer Jill Bavin-Mizzi, who has “identified” the killer as Glasgow printer John Templeton, who died in 2015, for her new book.

Despite police interviewing Templeton in 1969, following the murder of Helen Puttock, and ruling out his involvement, Ms Bavin-Mizzi remains convinced she has her man, claiming: “I'm 100% convinced John Templeton is Bible John. The circumstantial evidence is so weighty it would be a mathematical impossibility for it not to be Templeton."

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Will we ever discover the real identity of Bible John?

Far be it from me to doubt Ms Bavin-Mizzi’s sincerity but, as someone who’s new to the Bible John beat, she may soon find that her calculations are out.

Police and some of Scotland’s finest investigative journalists have applied their skills over decades to the case and, while there have been some near misses, all have come up short.

While the Bible John murders undoubtedly remain of interest to many people of a certain age, they don’t hold the same fascination for younger generations.

The only people for whom the murders might continue to have an irresistible hold, in whose shadows Bible John continues to lurk, haunting their dreams and playing on their fears, are likely to be aged 60 and over.

As the years have passed, additions of anything genuinely meaningful to what we know about the Bible John murders have become fewer and further between.

There are some notable exceptions, principle among them Audrey Gillan’s fascinating and thoughtful podcast series for the BBC Bible John: Creation of a serial killer, released last year.

Unlike the ten-a-penny tabloid page leads that are the journalistic currency of the Bible John story, Gillan’s work had scale and depth, exploring, not only the detail of the case, but it’s cultural significance over seven decades.

Her aim was not to identify a killer but to explore the hidden eddies and currents of the Bible John phenomenon and, in that sense, it was more a work of art than a journalistic exercise.

Not that it was short of revelations, including how the original police investigation was hampered by the social and cultural prejudices of investigators who viewed the victims as sexually promiscuous and, by implication, as partial agents of their fate.

Police and nurses in the 'lane of death,' in Glasgow, during the Bible John murders (Image: free)

My only misgiving concerned the effort required to get some of the victims’ friends and family to talk about the case, leaving an impression for me that they felt uncomfortable about reliving painful history.

It’s easy to see why the Bible John case has endured. There is no murder like an unsolved murder and, when you throw into the mix, the image of three women, two of whom were married, out on the randan in the socially conservative context of Scotland at the time, there is plenty to cogitate, theorise, and moralise over.

The smokey, dubious glamour of a Glasgow dancehall in the 1960s is not an image that my children can easily relate to, and the case is increasingly fading from public consciousness.

The only way Bible John might ever be identified is through, yet undiscovered advances in DNA technology, not through the endeavours of true crime writers with a notebook and a hunch.

I’d like to imagine I’d remember forever what I was doing when I heard that Bible John had been charged with the murders of Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, but I’m not holding my breath.