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

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.

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.

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