Bible John Victims

Case background and investigation

Between February 1968 and October 1969, three women were murdered in Glasgow after spending the evening at the Barrowland Ballroom, a dance hall in the city's East End. According to reporting by The Telegraph (via Yahoo News) and STV, Patricia Docker was 25, Jemima MacDonald was 31 and Helen Puttock was 29. Police said the cases shared several features: each woman had been at the Barrowland, was strangled, and had her handbag taken.

Patricia Docker, an auxiliary nurse and mother of one, was found in a lane in the Battlefield area of the city's south side on February 23, 1968, having been killed the previous night, according to Wikipedia's account. Jemima MacDonald, a mother of three, left the Barrowland with a man shortly after midnight on August 17, 1969; her sister found her body in a derelict tenement on MacKeith Street the following Monday. Police circulated a composite image of the man she had been seen with, the first time such a drawing was published in a Scottish murder inquiry.

Helen Puttock was found on October 31, 1969, behind her home on Earl Street in Scotstoun. She and her sister, Jean Langford, had spent the previous evening at the Barrowland with two men who both called themselves John. One of them shared a taxi with the sisters, and Langford later told police he quoted from the Bible and spoke disapprovingly of adultery. Her description of him led the press to call the killer 'Bible John.' More than 100 detectives worked on the case and tens of thousands of statements were taken, but no one was charged.

In 1996, during a review of the case, the body of John Irvine McInnes, who had died in 1980, was exhumed so his DNA could be compared with evidence from Helen Puttock's clothing. STV reported that the result was inconclusive and that McInnes was formally cleared; Wikipedia reports that improved testing later ruled out a match. The convicted killer Peter Tobin was also examined by police and eliminated.

In October 2023, Police Scotland said it was assessing claims made in the BBC podcast 'Bible John: Creation of the Serial Killer,' including allegations about how the original inquiry was handled. A police spokesman said the murders of Helen Puttock, Jemima MacDonald and Patricia Docker remain unresolved and that any new information would be investigated. Some, including Puttock's husband, have questioned whether all three women were killed by the same man.