The Hunt for Bible John (2021): Season 1, Episode 1 - Episode #1.1 - full transcript
This programme contains some scenes
which some viewers may find upsetting
They say time's a healer.
But it never does heal.
It's still a vivid memory.
Helen was just
a really, really
happy-go-lucky girl.
Absolutely music-mad, dancing-mad.
We used to go to a lot of dancing,
especially when I was in the army.
I used to be so proud
when I walked anywhere with her.
I knew that other fellas
was looking and thinking
"Cor, he's a lucky chap."
And I was a lucky chap.
I certainly wasn't keen on
her going dancing,
which obviously would have been
with other men.
But then her mum assured me
that it was a regular thing
when they were in Glasgow.
And so I accepted
what her mum had said...
..and allowed her to go.
But she didn't come home.
NEWS ARCHIVE: It's been Scotland's
most enduring murder mystery.
Three women were killed
after meeting a man
at this Glasgow dancehall.
He quoted the scriptures
leading to his nickname.
The notorious serial killer
Bible John.
They had him quoting
all this Bible carry-on.
I think he was a bit of a fanatic
with something against women.
I mean, this was somebody
patrolling dancehalls
and picking up victims at random
and killing them.
Hangs over Glasgow,
the Bible John story.
If we had an identity for this guy,
if it's one guy,
we could then parcel it up
and put it away.
It's the same with Jack the Ripper,
or certain American serial killings.
They live long in the public memory
for a reason, and that's because
they feel that they're part of
the fabric of the social
and economic reality of that time.
It is a dark force
with a label on it,
and the label is Bible John.
MUSIC: Nobody Knows The Trouble
I've Seen by Lonnie Donegan
# Nobody knows
# The trouble I've seen
# Nobody knows my sorrow... #
Well, when I came back
to Glasgow in 1960,
we were still living with
the residue of bombsites.
The whole thing was
absolutely shambolic.
It was a very dismal city.
We had nothing.
What we had, we saved.
NEWSREEL:
For the past hundred years or so,
about half the population of Glasgow
has lived in districts like these.
There is no bathroom,
no hot water supply.
On one side of the court, babbling
like some putrid mountain spring,
there is a drain.
What is it? I mean,
what's going in there?
The toilet.
What's it like to live here?
What do you think about it?
Awful.
# Oh, yes, Lord... #
Dear God, Scotland was very dreary,
and Glasgow was.
You can understand why people
would go to the dancehalls
to get some kind of...
glitter in their lives.
# Singing glory, hallelujah... #
I was working in Wills
when I was 15. Day shift.
I would be home for
five o'clock, get my tea,
and then I'd have my bath
and started getting ready.
When you went to the dancing,
you went spectacular.
You were the bee's knees.
You used to have a wee sort of
a shampoo and set
on the Friday morning in work.
We didn't know we were
going to pubs at that time.
We used to go into
one another's houses and sit
and you'd have a wee carry-out,
a wee...
A wee drink!
And then go to the dance.
Back in the '60s,
people didn't go home,
have their tea, sit down,
watch TV.
The pre-eminent way of
entertainment
was lovely going for
a night at the dancing.
And in fact, Glasgow was a city that
was known to be dancing daft.
One, two, one, two, three...
MUSIC: Let's Dance
by Chris Montez
Everybody wanted to go dancing.
# Hey, baby,
won't you to take a chance... #
The ballrooms were like nothing.
These beautiful floors,
which actually were sprung,
so when you danced,
you got a lot of feedback
from the floor. It was magnificent.
It just used to make you feel good
because you were going up
to dance and have a laugh.
That was it.
Just a laugh and looking pretty.
It was so innocent and...
..nice.
# Hey baby, if you're all alone... #
MUSIC FADES
All of that kind of changed
after Bible John.
He frightened a city.
When we arrived here,
the body hadn't been moved.
It was in a lane,
so we was told at that time
by the bosses,
you know, go and
have a look and see.
I was a CID man,
and I've been to many murders
with the body still there.
And most of them
I can recall quite vividly.
You know, you don't
forget these things.
They're always with you.
You know, even when
you've left the police,
as I have a long, long time ago,
you don't forget these things.
So the body is stuck in your mind,
you know,
here's a young girl
that's been killed.
So right away, what it does do is,
it gives you fire in your belly.
You're going to help solve this.
You want to catch
the guy that's did this.
At a murder,
when there's a body found,
if it's not cleared up within
a maximum, I'd say, of 40 hours,
you're really struggling.
People forget things.
The locus where
the crime happened changes.
So you've got to get
off your mark quickly.
Our job was to go to houses,
you know, and ask people
if they'd heard anything,
seen anything, etc.
The first thing you'd want to know
was where she was staying,
what sort of life she was leading,
who her friends
and possibly her enemies were.
The only thing that came from that
was a lady heard a scream...
..at a certain time, it would be
just round about midnight,
and she heard a scream.
But that was the only thing
that came from that.
It all takes time.
Plus the fact that you've got
newspaper reporters wanting stories,
want to know what the latest is.
I think the Evening Citizen
did four editions in a day.
The first was on the streets
at 11 o'clock in the morning,
and that's where I came in
quite often,
because I was the early
shift reporter in first.
Got the cream of the stories,
because I was in first!
AS calling Victor One.
Victor One, would you attend
in Harbour Street?
We had a speaker on the newsdesk,
which was manned by a funny little
fella who is known as the Duke.
Why, I don't know.
He used to listen in to
the police blower,
and he knew all the codes
the police used,
so he would say,
"Oh, we've got a murder,"
and that set the reporters off.
In the mornings, you went out
in one of the radio cars
and you were in constant radio touch
with the office
and you went from
incident to incident,
to robberies, to fires,
to murders, you name it.
You dug around, spoke to
as many people as possible.
Then you had to phone the office.
And at that time,
see when a murder happened?
They used to put out
a special paper.
You know, the paper man
would come round the sheet
and he would shout "special".
NEWS REPORT:
The naked body of a young woman
was found today in a lane
in residential Langside, Glasgow.
Special editions...
If you had the lead story,
there was a very good chance of
getting a byline on it.
A lot of it was instinct,
gut feeling.
NEWSREEL: Detectives from
Southern Division
and the Flying Squad made
door-to-door inquiries
on the block bounded by
Carmichael Lane.
You would know,
this story's going to run,
this story's going to catch the eye.
Pat Docker was a nurse.
Her body was found in a lane.
She was naked.
These things stick in your mind.
That was my era,
and I remember that.
I remember reading it in the papers.
The headline -
Murder Tecs Wait For Whisper.
"A whisper could give detectives
the lead they need in their hunt
"for the killer of nurse
Mrs Patricia Docker."
I started my academic career
as a historian
and one of the things
that caught my imagination
when I was doing my PhD
was how important newspapers were
and how murder is presented
for public consumption,
because that's how ordinary people
actually understand it.
And that's how I came
across the Bible John murders.
Mrs Patricia Docker,
"her naked body is found".
It's this emphasis on her nudity.
Nobody's telling you,
she was a good woman,
she was a popular woman,
she was well-liked,
she was good at her job.
Once again, the naked body,
the naked woman. And...
..she deserves more than that.
NEWS REPORT:
Hunt goes on for nurse's clothing.
The hunt went on today for
clothing belonging to murder victim
Mrs Patricia Docker,
found naked in a lane
in Langside, Glasgow 11 days ago,
just a few hundred yards from where
her four-year-old son was sleeping.
The whereabouts of
her orange mini dress,
teddy bear fur duffel coat
and underwear
have remained a mystery in spite of
intensive police inquiries.
We went and we were visiting
all the different houses round about
and speaking to different people.
That information gets
fed back to the incident room
and the incident room
then decides, you know,
which way you're going from there.
I would say 85, 90% of murders
are committed
by some relation or friend.
If the perpetrator of the crime
is not connected in any way
with the person, he's just murdered,
it's very difficult.
Once the body was removed,
it goes away.
Pathologists will tell you
what the cause of death is.
It came back that the cause of death
was strangulation.
It transpired the girl was married
and her husband was in the RAF.
Well, the police were able to
rule the husband out very quickly,
I believe in the first 48 hours.
There was no way
from the time when he was officially
recorded as being seen
And the time
when his wife was killed.
The logistics were simply not there.
It turns the attention
back onto Glasgow,
onto somebody within
the local community,
as being the likely murderer.
There were really no clues
that might have suggested
who it might have been.
Pat Docker did work
in Mearnskirk Hospital as a nurse
and had a very
respectable background.
She was a regular attender
at the Majestic Dancehall,
but apparently in the way there,
she changed her mind
and that night,
decided to go to Barrowland.
Patricia Docker's appearance
at the Barrowland
went almost completely unrecorded.
These are the days before CCTV.
You know, you paid
your ticket at the door
and disappeared into the crowd.
The Barrowland
was this huge dancehall
with a reputation for great bands,
brilliant dancers, jivers, you know,
and a working class Mecca
for people who'd worked hard
all week and had their pay packet
on a Friday night, went to
the Barrowland and spent it.
In the Barrowland, down the stair
was what you called the jive corner.
There was... and I used to
love watching them
Oh, it was smashing!
somebody would bring in
a wee bottle of vodka.
in the handbag. Sit up and
just catch up with the week.
The lassies all stood
in a kind of a crowd.
You know, you'd your own wee...
You stood in a crowd and the guy
would just come up and say,
"You want to dance?" You know?
You either said aye or no, you know?
And that was it.
Girls, you know,
they were impressed if you
could dance the waltz
or the quickstep or the paso doble.
You know, I wasn't so great as a
dancer, but I could dance a wee bit.
It would get towards the end
of the evening and the last dance.
The MC would say, "Right, boys and
girls, it's lumber time,"
Which meant, you know, this is the
time to,
to make your play, lads.
If you were lucky enough to meet
somebody
with a date for the next night,
you know.
If you were lucky!
Very often it was completely
innocent,
but of course, other people went,
men went,
took off their wedding rings
in the toilet,
and set to catch a bit of skirt
for the evening.
Initially, Patricia Docker
told her mum and dad
who she was staying with, that
she was going to the Majestic,
which was a kind
of upper class clientele.
But it was then found that she
had probably done that
because she didn't want to say
to her parents
that she was going to Barrowland.
Pat Docker had a four-year-old son.
She was back living with her
parents.
Going out socialising, the way she
was going out socialising
was a problem.
And the event on at the Barrowland
that particular day
was an over 25s event.
A Thursday night was the night
you would go slightly clandestinely
to the Barrowland,
over 25s night, where people would
go, many of whom were married.
So they were there, but not there.
There was a kind of a cloak
of invisibility
on a Thursday night at the
Barrowland.
The men especially often
didn't use their own names.
They would dance with these women.
They would be married, the men,
some of the women would be married.
They didn't want to be identified.
So there was a lot of "Johns" in the
Barrowland on a Thursday night
in the 1960s.
The Barrowland Ballroom had
a reputation.
It's telling...
..that...
..her parents did not know
she'd gone there.
The journey between dance hall
and the site of her murder
is almost completely empty
of detail.
Investigating officers at the time
were taken aback by how few people
were able to identify her movements
that night.
It seems that Pat Docker had just
made this person in the dance hall
that night and decided to go home or
to go out away from Barrowland.
A one-off meeting that turned bad.
The poor girl was naked.
No handbag.
And...
..there was a sanitary pad...
..lying beside her.
I think at that time,
the thoughts were it was just a guy
who'd not had his evil way,
and, you know, just gone over the
top and killed her.
You know, I mean, these things
did happen.
The murder of Pat Docker...
..is one of those murders
that's reported minimally,
because there isn't really seen
as anything respectable...
..in the way of the sensationalism
to report.
She had been beaten up.
But domestic violence,
any kind of violence, was far from
uncommon
in late 1960s Glasgow,
so that in itself is not shocking,
startling.
It's almost expected.
So the newspapers have no interest
in pushing it,
and the police have got quite enough
on their hands
to keep them occupied with
other things.
NEWS REPORT: Both the Glasgow Herald
and the Scotsman lead on reactions
to a report prepared for
the Department of the Environment,
which names Glasgow and Clydeside
as the most deprived area in
Britain.
The Herald's headline asks of
Glasgow, is it still no mean city?
That area, that little triangle of
the East End of Glasgow,
the area around Barrowland dance
hall, was notorious
as a place of theft, criminality,
drunkenness.
There's a sense of violence
just simmering there.
This scuffle outside a dance hall
wouldn't rate a local headline.
Even a stabbing might not get
more than a few lines down column
in the Glasgow papers, because in
this city of violence,
ordinary stabbing is hardly
news any more.
Glasgow, at that time, had a level
of violence
second only to Chicago and New York.
NEWS REPORT: On Saturday and Sunday
nights, the casualty department
it's said look like slaughter
houses.
That image of No Mean City,
the title of a famous slasher novel
about the gangs of Glasgow
and about the glamour of violence,
and the flashing of flick knives
and so on,
that's stuck in Glasgow.
Right into the period of the
late '60s Glasgow was still
trying to deal with this bad
image of itself
as a violent city, full of poverty
and drink.
NEWS REPORT: It's easier to buy a
drink in the middle of Glasgow
than in any other city in Britain.
There are more than 1,000 pubs
here, and most of them
are concentrated around the centre
of the city, where you only
have to walk a few yards
from one bar to the next.
I think that desperate poverty,
the very poor housing conditions,
the mass unemployment made drink
a kind of escape for people.
The pubs have closed and for a hard
pressed, undermanned police force,
Glasgow's normal Saturday
night begins.
Most of the members of the police
force at that time
were big Highlanders.
We used to say they came down to
Glasgow to get boots on their feet,
and of course, the neds, as we
called them,
they didn't have much regard
for the police,
to be honest with you.
You did see running street fights.
See, when the Orange walk was
on, that was bad.
There was some bloody battles, right
enough, definitely was, aye.
But we also had, of course,
the genuine terrorism
of the street gangs.
He's officially described as simply
attacked in Dumbarton Road.
In fact, he's been badly
stabbed in the right shoulder.
Many of my colleagues, including
myself,
were hurt in the course of your
duties,
because you were dealing with gangs,
but you had to go to hospital
because of your injuries.
So it was as bad as that.
With the Glasgow force seriously
undermanned, there are times
when only two uniformed policemen
control an area
with a population the size of Perth.
There was not a huge amount of trust
between the local communities...
..in the poorer working-class areas
of Glasgow
and the official police.
And if the culture of the community
engenders silence,
then you're stuck,
and the police undoubtedly
were stuck.
Detective Superintendent
Elphinstone Dalglish said,
"It is up to the public to help
us find this killer.
"They must come forward and tell
all they know
"that might be of relevance."
I personally, if I was in charge
of a murder inquiry,
wanted to solve it.
But the problem is...
..there's no clues, there's no
fingerprints,
no witnesses.
All we want is for people
to tell us what they know.
There may have been people at that
dance who shouldn't
have been there, yet they may have
seen something.
You can't shock a policeman.
This is much more serious than the
right or wrongs
of being at a dance.
People didn't want to be questioned,
didn't want to be identified.
They were frightened that their own
wives and families would find out
that they'd been consorting
with other women,
and having drinks in a dance hall,
you know, when they should have been
somewhere else.
So, in a sense, it was a great field
of opportunity
for an opportunistic killer.
For somebody like Pat Docker,
enjoying herself in a way that was
not seen as seemly or proper.
And what happened to her.
It would have been seen at the time
as being partially her fault.
Eventually, they found her handbag
in the Cart,
and I think a wee bit of a watch,
or something like that.
That was all they had.
And that case just, they ploughed
on, but it just disappeared again
into the mists of time without a
suspect or anything.
The plug got pulled on that one
because there was other murders
in Govan.
They had three murders going
at that time.
You know, two were a couple,
you know, an elderly couple.
And there was a lady found
down a railway embankment.
She'd been raped and strangled.
So there were murders all the time
in Glasgow at the time.
It sounds terrible.
Sounds like Wild West,
but it's true.
I couldn't tell you now...
..sadly.
Even guess how many murders
I've covered.
I couldn't begin to tell you.
I've been covering them
since I was 20.
Till I was 58.
As you age, your aspect
in life changes.
I mean, when I was 20, a murder...
"Oh boy!" You're out the door,
pen in hand, running.
"Where am I going? What am I doing?"
Nowaday you think, "Oh, God,
not again, what's happened here?"
A murder is... It's vile.
I mean, it's the end of a life.
And there's always a sadness
for a victim.
I was four years old when this
happened, and as such, mercifully,
I have no memory at all
of the events
leading up to or directly
after the tragedy.
I can't remember the grief
I must have gone through.
I admit I find it difficult
to think about it,
even though disconnected
in time and relationship.
But there is no-one left alive
that I know of who knew her.
Indeed, I would have liked to have
known more about her myself.
My father passed three years ago,
and he was the last person I know of
who knew her.
She was an only child
and her parents died not long
after she did.
I can only imagine that the tragedy
hastened that.
It is very sad indeed that all
the history and memories
of a person disappear so.
All I was told was that she was
an excellent mother to me
for the brief time we shared.
"Is no-one safe?
"Murder is the ultimate in crime,
"and Glasgow's recent figures
can give comfort to none.
"Police still seek the killer of
25-year-old Patricia Docker
"and Glasgow magistrates report
a shocking rise
"in crimes of violence in Glasgow
"out of all proportion
to its population."
The Daily Record's interest
in crime was such
that every night a reporter was
assigned to go out in an office car
and go round the police stations
and report on minor crimes
and go to the scenes of crimes.
And your by-line was "Pat Roller".
Which was "patroller".
But in Glasgow, not all the people
put that together
and you would get out of the car
at a scene of some kind of crime
and the kids would come up and say,
"Is that you, Pat? Is that you?"
Pat Roller was a famous individual
in Glasgow,
but there were about half a dozen
Pat Rollers,
each one assigned
on different nights to go out.
The newspapers run an ink and drink.
It just seemed to be
par for the course,
go into the pub and talk to somebody
or go into the pub
and talk to each other.
The number of people that will
talk to you in a pub
that wouldn't talk to you elsewhere.
A really successful crime reporter -
and there were many in Glasgow...
You couldn't do that job without
being well-known to all the cops.
Some of the guys got to know
senior detectives well enough
to go out and play golf with them.
I was very fortunate.
I had a very, very...I could say
happy relationship with the police.
I totally trusted them.
And in life, they trusted me.
The detectives of the time,
they were household names themselves
because they figured
in the paper reports.
One of the things that you
really have to do
is to get in touch
with the criminal element.
They obviously are the ones
that know what's been going on.
You need to know the shit
from the pure.
You've got to know, if it's going
to get in the paper.
And you must get the facts.
It was almost kind of like
a criminal soap opera
with three people in the cast.
The reporters, the detectives
and the bad guys.
NEWSREEL: Glasgow's reputation
for mindless violence
doesn't match the violence of such
inhuman living conditions.
As far as I was concerned,
the poverty in Glasgow
was much greater and the condition
of the city was an absolute mess.
NEWSREEL: Street after street
of tenements like these,
most of them without bathrooms
or separate lavatories.
Families of half a dozen and more
packed into a single room.
Just not good enough
by the standards of our day.
When I worked for
the Evening Citizen,
I did a whole series of stories
about the conditions
that people were living in.
And you would not have
believed them.
On one occasion I went to a house,
a woman opened the door and said,
"Come in and see this."
And she had no windows in the house.
The window frames had rotted
so much, the windows had fallen out.
She was a single mother.
Her and her little son
stayed in that house.
That's how they lived.
It must have been perishing
in the Glasgow winter.
The middle class family will not
tolerate these conditions
for even as long as a weekend,
and rightly so.
# There's a crack up in the ceiling
# And the kitchen sink is leaking
# Out of work and got no money
# A Sunday joint
of bread and honey #.
The tenements weren't
badly built,
but the cramped conditions
made them slums of necessity.
You walked in this wee entrance
and we stayed in that side,
the left side,
and another family
stayed in the right.
And it was like a deathtrap.
And there was a certain bed -
that was my mum and step-dad's bed.
And then there was a couch,
and you pulled that down.
I slept with my own brother, sister.
And then in the morning,
that settee went back up
and it was just a couch.
And the lassie above me,
her mother had ten in her family
and it was nearly all daughters.
And we used to all sit
on the stairs,
and my God, the place was mingin'.
Money was very tight and there was
no such thing as Social Security
as what there is nowadays.
# What are we living for? #
The 1960s have no meaning here.
In these streets,
you're back in the '30s.
It seems to have passed it by.
I thought Liverpool was bad, but
I've never seen anything like this.
It's the worst place I've been.
As a reporter, I got absolutely
incensed at these conditions.
And, I suppose, how people lived...
..had something to do with the
city's great love of dancing.
The dancing was our life.
It was just a way of getting out of
the doom and gloom.
My auntie Mima was a lovely woman.
She and my mum would go to the
dancing near enough every weekend
to get out and meet up with friends.
They just loved the atmosphere.
One night my mum and dad
were arguing.
My dad was saying he didn't want her
to go to the Barrowland.
And so for the first time she never
went to dancing with Auntie Mima.
That was the night that my auntie
was murdered.
"Detectives were last night hunting
the killer of a woman
"who took a midnight stroll
to murder.
"From the bright Saturday night
lights in one of Scotland's
"biggest dance halls,
"mother-of-three Mima McDonald
left to walk home."
Jemima was found in Bridgeton,
Glasgow,
which was a particularly rundown
part of the East End of the city.
"More than 30 hours later,
her partly clothed body was found
"in a derelict tenement
just 20 yards from her own home.
"She had been beaten and strangled."
Her body was found in a back court
and it was just utter degradation,
with rubbish and rubble
and all the rest of it.
"All day on Sunday, children in
Mackeith Street, Bridgeton, played,
"running in and out of the house
where the body was found."
And the rumour was going round that
kids had spotted this body.
It was disregarded for a while.
Then the rumour grew and grew
and grew.
Mima's sister lived nearby
and she got to hear of the rumours.
And she was really worried because
her sister hadn't returned home
and she went to the scene.
And lo and behold, she found her.
Must have been horrific for when she
found her sister lying there.
It was a picture of what life
was like in the Glasgow of that era.
The area had been written off,
if not the inhabitants.
And it was very sad that children
sort of stumbled
on a scene like this.
This is something where the police
get called in
after the community
has found Jemima.
Obviously, the first thing you want
to do is preserve the locus.
That's got to be done.
But if you've got a body
in a back court, you know,
you've got a different
scenario entirely.
They'd actually moved the body.
Contaminated the scene.
Because they wanted to try
to help.
"What can we do? Is she dead?"
And to her sister...
How tragic and appalling for her.
I was only ten years old and life
was turned upside down.
It's haunted me my whole life,
all the bad things that have
happened from that day.
My mum started to drink heavy,
which was all new to the family,
but that's how it went on for years.
She blamed herself and said
it should be her that's dead.
Not Mima.
We went to visit her in hospital,
and I knew then how sick
my mum had become.
I feel so angry and cheated
out of life because of one man.
I've been so afraid for 50 years.
Always looking behind me.
Jemima McDonald, found murdered in
a broken down tenement in Bridgeton
by children playing a few doors down
from the quite broken down property
that she lived in.
These were working class people
living in difficult circumstances,
out for one night of fun,
ending up dead,
part of the broken down system that
they were living at the centre of.
BELLS TOLL
"City murder squad quiz dancers.
"Detectives hunting the killer of
32-year-old Glasgow mother-of-three
"Jemima McDonald were today
interviewing dancers
"who had been at the Barrowland
Ballroom at the weekend
"and who may have been the last
people to see her alive."
Police also during the time
concentrated a lot of the time on
undercover work
in the Ballroom itself.
I went along and we tried to mix
with the dancers
and the people there.
And we would dance with different
ladies and speak to them
to see if any of them had
had any bad experiences
and try and get information
that way.
You can spot them a mile away,
plainclothes police.
But outside the Barrowland
you would see some actual police.
But inside, och, you can spot them
a mile away.
You know who they are.
I wasn't a dancer and someone
asked me if I'd dance
and I said,
"Well, I'm not a dancer."
"Ach, get up and just shake
your bum about."
So I got up and I took two steps.
I was getting really proud
of myself.
She goes, "Ah, you're rubbish,
right enough, you cannae dance."
And dumped me in the middle
of the floor on the way!
The police were all over the place.
They must have interviewed hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds.
"An important witness
has come forward
"and gave us very useful
information."
There seems to be a fairly
reliable evidence
that she met up with a young man
and that they had drinks together
before going off to the Barrowland
for the evening.
Certainly, she'd been
at the Barrowland
two or three times in that week.
So she was next door and a kind
of regular,
so maybe had the killer
spotted her before
and picked her out
as a potential victim?
Her...
..clothes were torn
and she'd been beaten.
She'd been strangled
with her own stockings.
And...
..she'd been raped.
"Murders may be linked.
"There are certain similarities
between the murders
"of Miss Mima McDonald
and Mrs Patricia Docker,
"the auxiliary nurse who was
murdered in Glasgow last year."
After the second murder, I mean,
in my own mind,
it was the work of the same guy.
I've got to say it.
I mean, the circumstances
were all quite similar.
They'd been to the Barrowland
Ballroom, both of them.
They'd, both of them, been
sexually assaulted.
The crime scene was contaminated
by the time that the police arrived.
The thing that was missing
was her handbag.
To me, it was more than coincidence
that there were two killers,
sadistic killers of women
knocking about.
And I thought, really, at the time,
it was the same man
that had committed the two.
I think the police privately
would say that,
but publicly would...would deny it,
as they did.
By the time we moved on to two,
two murders and the police verified
the link, the possible link...
..it was beginning to get to a point
where people were thinking
about it seriously and worried
about it.
Oh, it upset people,
right enough, you know?
And it was making you scared.
You know, you were just hoping
that he was going to get caught.
This is where the first publication
of the possible suspect was found.
"Find this man."
"Find this man is
murder squad plea.
"Police want to interview this man
"in their bid to find the killer
of Mrs Mima McDonald."
The previous Saturday evening, Mima
was seen leaving Barrowland Ballroom
with a tall, well-dressed man.
"For the first time in Scotland,
"they asked newspapers to publish
an artist's impression.
"The drawing has been put together
by a witness
"who twice saw the man
with Ms McDonald."
Mr Dalgleish, this is the first time
an artist's impression
has been used in Scotland.
I understand that.
Why was it necessary in this case?
Well, we feel that it gives a sort
of realism
and raises the photograph
from mere words
into something resembling
a living person.
He looked as if he blended in
with everybody,
cos all the lads wore suits
and ties and lovely, shiny shoes
and had short back hair.
Not like today's scruffies.
Any person who sees this artist's
impression in the press
or on television and who feels
that they can usefully assist
the police in identifying this man
is urged to come forward forthwith
with any information
that they may have.
People just got on with life.
The police were looking for him
so, therefore, you didn't take
any notice of it.
You just said, "Well, it'll never
happen to me,
"hope it never happens to me,"
just things like that.
You just had to get on with it, aye.
Police information room.
One four one, police constable,
marine division.
I have a report of a body found
in Earl Street, Scotstoun.
Fine. We'll get you assistance
there as soon as we can.
Thank you.
The situation changed dramatically
when there was a third murder.
That's really when it all blew up.
You know, everything went
into overdrive.
Tango Five, would you attend
at Earl Street in Scotstoun?
A report of a body found.
Tango Five, will attend. Out.
In a city that was quite
famous for homicides,
you know, these were sinister
and were linked by this man
who seemed to be on the rampage.
When you get someone
out of the blue murdering,
possibly for pleasure, if you like,
it's very difficult when you get
something like that.
Go ahead, Tango Five. Over.
We have the body of a woman here.
Possible murder.
Could you have the CID
attend immediately? Tango Five over.
Roger, Tango Five.
I met Helen in 1962,
and I was completely smitten
by her straight away.
Well, I mean, I didn't think
I had any chance
when I first saw her, but we got
married in Reading.
My mum and dad were really,
really pleased, you know,
and found what a nice girl she was,
and that I was very lucky
to have found her.
We used to go to a lot of dancing,
especially when I was in the Army.
They used to actually
have dances there.
You know, it was just a happy time.
Just being with the two boys that
we had, you know, was great fun.
I was in the Army and Helen had gone
to her mother's in Glasgow
with my two boys because
I'd been moved from Germany.
And after a week, I went up
to Glasgow
and that's where things
suddenly went terribly wrong.
I certainly wasn't keen on her
going dancing,
which obviously would have been
with other men,
but was assured by her mum
that this was something
they really enjoyed doing,
there was nothing in it,
nothing to worry about,
and so I accepted what her mum
had said...
..and allowed her to go.
MUSIC: Hurdy Gurdy Man
by Donovan
At that time, Glasgow wasn't really
that nice a place to be.
There was a lot of thuggery
and goodness knows what up there.
So when Helen was going out
with her sister, Jeannie,
I thought, "Well, I don't want to
risk them coming home on the bus"
because even on the buses
there was always trouble,
so I actually gave her a £5 note
to come home by taxi.
And it's the worst £5
I've ever spent.
It's just a feeling you can't
describe. Can never describe it,
the hurt, the heartache
for me and my family.
Third time round, I do remember
the murder of Helen.
I was out very early in the morning
and went to a lane behind
some tenements
in Scotstoun, I think it was. Yeah.
I... I couldn't believe my eyes.
None of the reporters who were there
could believe what they were
looking at
because there must have
been 100 policemen
packed into that little lane,
listening to the boss
doling out jobs and whatnot.
By that time, I can only imagine
that the police were
in a blind panic
because they had had three and...
..from what we know since,
they were almost identical murders.
In the morning, when I woke up,
she still wasn't home
and I went into the front bedroom
and looked out of the window
and I saw a police van.
Don't ask me why, but I knew
then that something was wrong.
And so I went down.
And as I'm walking towards
the police caravan,
I heard people saying, "Oh, there's
a girl and she's been murdered."
And I got to the caravan
and spoke to a policeman,
and he obviously went out the back
to where Helen was lying
and the chief police officer,
Inspector Beattie, came out
and said to me, "What was your
wife wearing, son?"
And I said, "Her fur ocelot coat,
a black dress."
And it was then he told me, "I'm
sorry, but she has been murdered."
And that was the first I knew.
A black labrador dog being taken
for an early morning walk
by his owner found the body
of Helen Puttock
in this backcourt at 95 Earl Street.
She had been beaten and strangled.
She was lying face downwards
at an angle to a wall,
her clothes badly displaced.
There were signs that at one stage
she might have tried to escape
from her attacker, run up that
embankment and been dragged back.
It was only really after the third
murder that everybody did realise
it's a serial killer that's
on the loose.
We'd never experienced anything
like that, you know, mass murderers,
except for Peter Manuel, which was a
completely different sort of murder.
He was a house breaker who,
you know, shot his victims
as they slept and all the rest
of it.
But, I mean, this was somebody
patrolling dance halls
and picking up victims at random
and killing them,
and it became a major,
major story.
"Mother-of-two and attractive
brunette Mrs Helen Puttock
"was found dead today in
a grass-covered backcourt.
" 'We cannot rule out a link between
this death
"and that of Jemima McDonald at
Bridgeton three months ago,'
"said Detective Chief Super
Elphinstone Dalgleish."
People were, by that time, beginning
to get quite upset about it all,
and women became terrified
of leaving a dance hall with a man.
I wouldn't go myself to meet my pals
in the dancing.
We met up and we came home together,
shared a taxi.
So, to a certain extent,
there was a loss of innocence,
and this man, Bible John, played
a big part in it.
It was the third of the killings,
the killing of Helen Puttock from
Scotstoun, that really brought,
if you like, this invisible man
really into focus.
The big thing was
third one there was a witness.
ARCHIVE: A description was issued of
the man who had taken Helen Puttock.
He may speak of having
had a strict upbringing
with a severe parental attitude
towards drink.
He's quite well-spoken with
a Glasgow accent.
The suspect was five foot ten.
He smoked Embassy cigarettes.
His teeth were described,
the suit he wore.
Everything was known about this guy.
He may speak of having had a strict
religious upbringing
and make reference to the Bible.
It is thought that his Christian
name may be John.
And that started the most
extensive manhunt
conducted by Scottish police
in modern times.
The press, I think,
sent the investigators off
on a wild goose chase.
Let us pray.
We're suddenly raiding every church
and every Sunday service in the land
looking for some, you know,
gibbering religious fanatic.
Was the killer a serviceman
who'd been abroad? Perhaps.
He could have been a seaman.
Then there was a story
he could have been a monk.
I think a lot of people would have
found it really quite frightening
because they were being faced with a
really very unusual type of
individual that they possibly didn't
even know existed at this point.
Is it really the case that the man
that you are searching for could
strike again?
There's a possibility he may, yes.
which some viewers may find upsetting
They say time's a healer.
But it never does heal.
It's still a vivid memory.
Helen was just
a really, really
happy-go-lucky girl.
Absolutely music-mad, dancing-mad.
We used to go to a lot of dancing,
especially when I was in the army.
I used to be so proud
when I walked anywhere with her.
I knew that other fellas
was looking and thinking
"Cor, he's a lucky chap."
And I was a lucky chap.
I certainly wasn't keen on
her going dancing,
which obviously would have been
with other men.
But then her mum assured me
that it was a regular thing
when they were in Glasgow.
And so I accepted
what her mum had said...
..and allowed her to go.
But she didn't come home.
NEWS ARCHIVE: It's been Scotland's
most enduring murder mystery.
Three women were killed
after meeting a man
at this Glasgow dancehall.
He quoted the scriptures
leading to his nickname.
The notorious serial killer
Bible John.
They had him quoting
all this Bible carry-on.
I think he was a bit of a fanatic
with something against women.
I mean, this was somebody
patrolling dancehalls
and picking up victims at random
and killing them.
Hangs over Glasgow,
the Bible John story.
If we had an identity for this guy,
if it's one guy,
we could then parcel it up
and put it away.
It's the same with Jack the Ripper,
or certain American serial killings.
They live long in the public memory
for a reason, and that's because
they feel that they're part of
the fabric of the social
and economic reality of that time.
It is a dark force
with a label on it,
and the label is Bible John.
MUSIC: Nobody Knows The Trouble
I've Seen by Lonnie Donegan
# Nobody knows
# The trouble I've seen
# Nobody knows my sorrow... #
Well, when I came back
to Glasgow in 1960,
we were still living with
the residue of bombsites.
The whole thing was
absolutely shambolic.
It was a very dismal city.
We had nothing.
What we had, we saved.
NEWSREEL:
For the past hundred years or so,
about half the population of Glasgow
has lived in districts like these.
There is no bathroom,
no hot water supply.
On one side of the court, babbling
like some putrid mountain spring,
there is a drain.
What is it? I mean,
what's going in there?
The toilet.
What's it like to live here?
What do you think about it?
Awful.
# Oh, yes, Lord... #
Dear God, Scotland was very dreary,
and Glasgow was.
You can understand why people
would go to the dancehalls
to get some kind of...
glitter in their lives.
# Singing glory, hallelujah... #
I was working in Wills
when I was 15. Day shift.
I would be home for
five o'clock, get my tea,
and then I'd have my bath
and started getting ready.
When you went to the dancing,
you went spectacular.
You were the bee's knees.
You used to have a wee sort of
a shampoo and set
on the Friday morning in work.
We didn't know we were
going to pubs at that time.
We used to go into
one another's houses and sit
and you'd have a wee carry-out,
a wee...
A wee drink!
And then go to the dance.
Back in the '60s,
people didn't go home,
have their tea, sit down,
watch TV.
The pre-eminent way of
entertainment
was lovely going for
a night at the dancing.
And in fact, Glasgow was a city that
was known to be dancing daft.
One, two, one, two, three...
MUSIC: Let's Dance
by Chris Montez
Everybody wanted to go dancing.
# Hey, baby,
won't you to take a chance... #
The ballrooms were like nothing.
These beautiful floors,
which actually were sprung,
so when you danced,
you got a lot of feedback
from the floor. It was magnificent.
It just used to make you feel good
because you were going up
to dance and have a laugh.
That was it.
Just a laugh and looking pretty.
It was so innocent and...
..nice.
# Hey baby, if you're all alone... #
MUSIC FADES
All of that kind of changed
after Bible John.
He frightened a city.
When we arrived here,
the body hadn't been moved.
It was in a lane,
so we was told at that time
by the bosses,
you know, go and
have a look and see.
I was a CID man,
and I've been to many murders
with the body still there.
And most of them
I can recall quite vividly.
You know, you don't
forget these things.
They're always with you.
You know, even when
you've left the police,
as I have a long, long time ago,
you don't forget these things.
So the body is stuck in your mind,
you know,
here's a young girl
that's been killed.
So right away, what it does do is,
it gives you fire in your belly.
You're going to help solve this.
You want to catch
the guy that's did this.
At a murder,
when there's a body found,
if it's not cleared up within
a maximum, I'd say, of 40 hours,
you're really struggling.
People forget things.
The locus where
the crime happened changes.
So you've got to get
off your mark quickly.
Our job was to go to houses,
you know, and ask people
if they'd heard anything,
seen anything, etc.
The first thing you'd want to know
was where she was staying,
what sort of life she was leading,
who her friends
and possibly her enemies were.
The only thing that came from that
was a lady heard a scream...
..at a certain time, it would be
just round about midnight,
and she heard a scream.
But that was the only thing
that came from that.
It all takes time.
Plus the fact that you've got
newspaper reporters wanting stories,
want to know what the latest is.
I think the Evening Citizen
did four editions in a day.
The first was on the streets
at 11 o'clock in the morning,
and that's where I came in
quite often,
because I was the early
shift reporter in first.
Got the cream of the stories,
because I was in first!
AS calling Victor One.
Victor One, would you attend
in Harbour Street?
We had a speaker on the newsdesk,
which was manned by a funny little
fella who is known as the Duke.
Why, I don't know.
He used to listen in to
the police blower,
and he knew all the codes
the police used,
so he would say,
"Oh, we've got a murder,"
and that set the reporters off.
In the mornings, you went out
in one of the radio cars
and you were in constant radio touch
with the office
and you went from
incident to incident,
to robberies, to fires,
to murders, you name it.
You dug around, spoke to
as many people as possible.
Then you had to phone the office.
And at that time,
see when a murder happened?
They used to put out
a special paper.
You know, the paper man
would come round the sheet
and he would shout "special".
NEWS REPORT:
The naked body of a young woman
was found today in a lane
in residential Langside, Glasgow.
Special editions...
If you had the lead story,
there was a very good chance of
getting a byline on it.
A lot of it was instinct,
gut feeling.
NEWSREEL: Detectives from
Southern Division
and the Flying Squad made
door-to-door inquiries
on the block bounded by
Carmichael Lane.
You would know,
this story's going to run,
this story's going to catch the eye.
Pat Docker was a nurse.
Her body was found in a lane.
She was naked.
These things stick in your mind.
That was my era,
and I remember that.
I remember reading it in the papers.
The headline -
Murder Tecs Wait For Whisper.
"A whisper could give detectives
the lead they need in their hunt
"for the killer of nurse
Mrs Patricia Docker."
I started my academic career
as a historian
and one of the things
that caught my imagination
when I was doing my PhD
was how important newspapers were
and how murder is presented
for public consumption,
because that's how ordinary people
actually understand it.
And that's how I came
across the Bible John murders.
Mrs Patricia Docker,
"her naked body is found".
It's this emphasis on her nudity.
Nobody's telling you,
she was a good woman,
she was a popular woman,
she was well-liked,
she was good at her job.
Once again, the naked body,
the naked woman. And...
..she deserves more than that.
NEWS REPORT:
Hunt goes on for nurse's clothing.
The hunt went on today for
clothing belonging to murder victim
Mrs Patricia Docker,
found naked in a lane
in Langside, Glasgow 11 days ago,
just a few hundred yards from where
her four-year-old son was sleeping.
The whereabouts of
her orange mini dress,
teddy bear fur duffel coat
and underwear
have remained a mystery in spite of
intensive police inquiries.
We went and we were visiting
all the different houses round about
and speaking to different people.
That information gets
fed back to the incident room
and the incident room
then decides, you know,
which way you're going from there.
I would say 85, 90% of murders
are committed
by some relation or friend.
If the perpetrator of the crime
is not connected in any way
with the person, he's just murdered,
it's very difficult.
Once the body was removed,
it goes away.
Pathologists will tell you
what the cause of death is.
It came back that the cause of death
was strangulation.
It transpired the girl was married
and her husband was in the RAF.
Well, the police were able to
rule the husband out very quickly,
I believe in the first 48 hours.
There was no way
from the time when he was officially
recorded as being seen
And the time
when his wife was killed.
The logistics were simply not there.
It turns the attention
back onto Glasgow,
onto somebody within
the local community,
as being the likely murderer.
There were really no clues
that might have suggested
who it might have been.
Pat Docker did work
in Mearnskirk Hospital as a nurse
and had a very
respectable background.
She was a regular attender
at the Majestic Dancehall,
but apparently in the way there,
she changed her mind
and that night,
decided to go to Barrowland.
Patricia Docker's appearance
at the Barrowland
went almost completely unrecorded.
These are the days before CCTV.
You know, you paid
your ticket at the door
and disappeared into the crowd.
The Barrowland
was this huge dancehall
with a reputation for great bands,
brilliant dancers, jivers, you know,
and a working class Mecca
for people who'd worked hard
all week and had their pay packet
on a Friday night, went to
the Barrowland and spent it.
In the Barrowland, down the stair
was what you called the jive corner.
There was... and I used to
love watching them
Oh, it was smashing!
somebody would bring in
a wee bottle of vodka.
in the handbag. Sit up and
just catch up with the week.
The lassies all stood
in a kind of a crowd.
You know, you'd your own wee...
You stood in a crowd and the guy
would just come up and say,
"You want to dance?" You know?
You either said aye or no, you know?
And that was it.
Girls, you know,
they were impressed if you
could dance the waltz
or the quickstep or the paso doble.
You know, I wasn't so great as a
dancer, but I could dance a wee bit.
It would get towards the end
of the evening and the last dance.
The MC would say, "Right, boys and
girls, it's lumber time,"
Which meant, you know, this is the
time to,
to make your play, lads.
If you were lucky enough to meet
somebody
with a date for the next night,
you know.
If you were lucky!
Very often it was completely
innocent,
but of course, other people went,
men went,
took off their wedding rings
in the toilet,
and set to catch a bit of skirt
for the evening.
Initially, Patricia Docker
told her mum and dad
who she was staying with, that
she was going to the Majestic,
which was a kind
of upper class clientele.
But it was then found that she
had probably done that
because she didn't want to say
to her parents
that she was going to Barrowland.
Pat Docker had a four-year-old son.
She was back living with her
parents.
Going out socialising, the way she
was going out socialising
was a problem.
And the event on at the Barrowland
that particular day
was an over 25s event.
A Thursday night was the night
you would go slightly clandestinely
to the Barrowland,
over 25s night, where people would
go, many of whom were married.
So they were there, but not there.
There was a kind of a cloak
of invisibility
on a Thursday night at the
Barrowland.
The men especially often
didn't use their own names.
They would dance with these women.
They would be married, the men,
some of the women would be married.
They didn't want to be identified.
So there was a lot of "Johns" in the
Barrowland on a Thursday night
in the 1960s.
The Barrowland Ballroom had
a reputation.
It's telling...
..that...
..her parents did not know
she'd gone there.
The journey between dance hall
and the site of her murder
is almost completely empty
of detail.
Investigating officers at the time
were taken aback by how few people
were able to identify her movements
that night.
It seems that Pat Docker had just
made this person in the dance hall
that night and decided to go home or
to go out away from Barrowland.
A one-off meeting that turned bad.
The poor girl was naked.
No handbag.
And...
..there was a sanitary pad...
..lying beside her.
I think at that time,
the thoughts were it was just a guy
who'd not had his evil way,
and, you know, just gone over the
top and killed her.
You know, I mean, these things
did happen.
The murder of Pat Docker...
..is one of those murders
that's reported minimally,
because there isn't really seen
as anything respectable...
..in the way of the sensationalism
to report.
She had been beaten up.
But domestic violence,
any kind of violence, was far from
uncommon
in late 1960s Glasgow,
so that in itself is not shocking,
startling.
It's almost expected.
So the newspapers have no interest
in pushing it,
and the police have got quite enough
on their hands
to keep them occupied with
other things.
NEWS REPORT: Both the Glasgow Herald
and the Scotsman lead on reactions
to a report prepared for
the Department of the Environment,
which names Glasgow and Clydeside
as the most deprived area in
Britain.
The Herald's headline asks of
Glasgow, is it still no mean city?
That area, that little triangle of
the East End of Glasgow,
the area around Barrowland dance
hall, was notorious
as a place of theft, criminality,
drunkenness.
There's a sense of violence
just simmering there.
This scuffle outside a dance hall
wouldn't rate a local headline.
Even a stabbing might not get
more than a few lines down column
in the Glasgow papers, because in
this city of violence,
ordinary stabbing is hardly
news any more.
Glasgow, at that time, had a level
of violence
second only to Chicago and New York.
NEWS REPORT: On Saturday and Sunday
nights, the casualty department
it's said look like slaughter
houses.
That image of No Mean City,
the title of a famous slasher novel
about the gangs of Glasgow
and about the glamour of violence,
and the flashing of flick knives
and so on,
that's stuck in Glasgow.
Right into the period of the
late '60s Glasgow was still
trying to deal with this bad
image of itself
as a violent city, full of poverty
and drink.
NEWS REPORT: It's easier to buy a
drink in the middle of Glasgow
than in any other city in Britain.
There are more than 1,000 pubs
here, and most of them
are concentrated around the centre
of the city, where you only
have to walk a few yards
from one bar to the next.
I think that desperate poverty,
the very poor housing conditions,
the mass unemployment made drink
a kind of escape for people.
The pubs have closed and for a hard
pressed, undermanned police force,
Glasgow's normal Saturday
night begins.
Most of the members of the police
force at that time
were big Highlanders.
We used to say they came down to
Glasgow to get boots on their feet,
and of course, the neds, as we
called them,
they didn't have much regard
for the police,
to be honest with you.
You did see running street fights.
See, when the Orange walk was
on, that was bad.
There was some bloody battles, right
enough, definitely was, aye.
But we also had, of course,
the genuine terrorism
of the street gangs.
He's officially described as simply
attacked in Dumbarton Road.
In fact, he's been badly
stabbed in the right shoulder.
Many of my colleagues, including
myself,
were hurt in the course of your
duties,
because you were dealing with gangs,
but you had to go to hospital
because of your injuries.
So it was as bad as that.
With the Glasgow force seriously
undermanned, there are times
when only two uniformed policemen
control an area
with a population the size of Perth.
There was not a huge amount of trust
between the local communities...
..in the poorer working-class areas
of Glasgow
and the official police.
And if the culture of the community
engenders silence,
then you're stuck,
and the police undoubtedly
were stuck.
Detective Superintendent
Elphinstone Dalglish said,
"It is up to the public to help
us find this killer.
"They must come forward and tell
all they know
"that might be of relevance."
I personally, if I was in charge
of a murder inquiry,
wanted to solve it.
But the problem is...
..there's no clues, there's no
fingerprints,
no witnesses.
All we want is for people
to tell us what they know.
There may have been people at that
dance who shouldn't
have been there, yet they may have
seen something.
You can't shock a policeman.
This is much more serious than the
right or wrongs
of being at a dance.
People didn't want to be questioned,
didn't want to be identified.
They were frightened that their own
wives and families would find out
that they'd been consorting
with other women,
and having drinks in a dance hall,
you know, when they should have been
somewhere else.
So, in a sense, it was a great field
of opportunity
for an opportunistic killer.
For somebody like Pat Docker,
enjoying herself in a way that was
not seen as seemly or proper.
And what happened to her.
It would have been seen at the time
as being partially her fault.
Eventually, they found her handbag
in the Cart,
and I think a wee bit of a watch,
or something like that.
That was all they had.
And that case just, they ploughed
on, but it just disappeared again
into the mists of time without a
suspect or anything.
The plug got pulled on that one
because there was other murders
in Govan.
They had three murders going
at that time.
You know, two were a couple,
you know, an elderly couple.
And there was a lady found
down a railway embankment.
She'd been raped and strangled.
So there were murders all the time
in Glasgow at the time.
It sounds terrible.
Sounds like Wild West,
but it's true.
I couldn't tell you now...
..sadly.
Even guess how many murders
I've covered.
I couldn't begin to tell you.
I've been covering them
since I was 20.
Till I was 58.
As you age, your aspect
in life changes.
I mean, when I was 20, a murder...
"Oh boy!" You're out the door,
pen in hand, running.
"Where am I going? What am I doing?"
Nowaday you think, "Oh, God,
not again, what's happened here?"
A murder is... It's vile.
I mean, it's the end of a life.
And there's always a sadness
for a victim.
I was four years old when this
happened, and as such, mercifully,
I have no memory at all
of the events
leading up to or directly
after the tragedy.
I can't remember the grief
I must have gone through.
I admit I find it difficult
to think about it,
even though disconnected
in time and relationship.
But there is no-one left alive
that I know of who knew her.
Indeed, I would have liked to have
known more about her myself.
My father passed three years ago,
and he was the last person I know of
who knew her.
She was an only child
and her parents died not long
after she did.
I can only imagine that the tragedy
hastened that.
It is very sad indeed that all
the history and memories
of a person disappear so.
All I was told was that she was
an excellent mother to me
for the brief time we shared.
"Is no-one safe?
"Murder is the ultimate in crime,
"and Glasgow's recent figures
can give comfort to none.
"Police still seek the killer of
25-year-old Patricia Docker
"and Glasgow magistrates report
a shocking rise
"in crimes of violence in Glasgow
"out of all proportion
to its population."
The Daily Record's interest
in crime was such
that every night a reporter was
assigned to go out in an office car
and go round the police stations
and report on minor crimes
and go to the scenes of crimes.
And your by-line was "Pat Roller".
Which was "patroller".
But in Glasgow, not all the people
put that together
and you would get out of the car
at a scene of some kind of crime
and the kids would come up and say,
"Is that you, Pat? Is that you?"
Pat Roller was a famous individual
in Glasgow,
but there were about half a dozen
Pat Rollers,
each one assigned
on different nights to go out.
The newspapers run an ink and drink.
It just seemed to be
par for the course,
go into the pub and talk to somebody
or go into the pub
and talk to each other.
The number of people that will
talk to you in a pub
that wouldn't talk to you elsewhere.
A really successful crime reporter -
and there were many in Glasgow...
You couldn't do that job without
being well-known to all the cops.
Some of the guys got to know
senior detectives well enough
to go out and play golf with them.
I was very fortunate.
I had a very, very...I could say
happy relationship with the police.
I totally trusted them.
And in life, they trusted me.
The detectives of the time,
they were household names themselves
because they figured
in the paper reports.
One of the things that you
really have to do
is to get in touch
with the criminal element.
They obviously are the ones
that know what's been going on.
You need to know the shit
from the pure.
You've got to know, if it's going
to get in the paper.
And you must get the facts.
It was almost kind of like
a criminal soap opera
with three people in the cast.
The reporters, the detectives
and the bad guys.
NEWSREEL: Glasgow's reputation
for mindless violence
doesn't match the violence of such
inhuman living conditions.
As far as I was concerned,
the poverty in Glasgow
was much greater and the condition
of the city was an absolute mess.
NEWSREEL: Street after street
of tenements like these,
most of them without bathrooms
or separate lavatories.
Families of half a dozen and more
packed into a single room.
Just not good enough
by the standards of our day.
When I worked for
the Evening Citizen,
I did a whole series of stories
about the conditions
that people were living in.
And you would not have
believed them.
On one occasion I went to a house,
a woman opened the door and said,
"Come in and see this."
And she had no windows in the house.
The window frames had rotted
so much, the windows had fallen out.
She was a single mother.
Her and her little son
stayed in that house.
That's how they lived.
It must have been perishing
in the Glasgow winter.
The middle class family will not
tolerate these conditions
for even as long as a weekend,
and rightly so.
# There's a crack up in the ceiling
# And the kitchen sink is leaking
# Out of work and got no money
# A Sunday joint
of bread and honey #.
The tenements weren't
badly built,
but the cramped conditions
made them slums of necessity.
You walked in this wee entrance
and we stayed in that side,
the left side,
and another family
stayed in the right.
And it was like a deathtrap.
And there was a certain bed -
that was my mum and step-dad's bed.
And then there was a couch,
and you pulled that down.
I slept with my own brother, sister.
And then in the morning,
that settee went back up
and it was just a couch.
And the lassie above me,
her mother had ten in her family
and it was nearly all daughters.
And we used to all sit
on the stairs,
and my God, the place was mingin'.
Money was very tight and there was
no such thing as Social Security
as what there is nowadays.
# What are we living for? #
The 1960s have no meaning here.
In these streets,
you're back in the '30s.
It seems to have passed it by.
I thought Liverpool was bad, but
I've never seen anything like this.
It's the worst place I've been.
As a reporter, I got absolutely
incensed at these conditions.
And, I suppose, how people lived...
..had something to do with the
city's great love of dancing.
The dancing was our life.
It was just a way of getting out of
the doom and gloom.
My auntie Mima was a lovely woman.
She and my mum would go to the
dancing near enough every weekend
to get out and meet up with friends.
They just loved the atmosphere.
One night my mum and dad
were arguing.
My dad was saying he didn't want her
to go to the Barrowland.
And so for the first time she never
went to dancing with Auntie Mima.
That was the night that my auntie
was murdered.
"Detectives were last night hunting
the killer of a woman
"who took a midnight stroll
to murder.
"From the bright Saturday night
lights in one of Scotland's
"biggest dance halls,
"mother-of-three Mima McDonald
left to walk home."
Jemima was found in Bridgeton,
Glasgow,
which was a particularly rundown
part of the East End of the city.
"More than 30 hours later,
her partly clothed body was found
"in a derelict tenement
just 20 yards from her own home.
"She had been beaten and strangled."
Her body was found in a back court
and it was just utter degradation,
with rubbish and rubble
and all the rest of it.
"All day on Sunday, children in
Mackeith Street, Bridgeton, played,
"running in and out of the house
where the body was found."
And the rumour was going round that
kids had spotted this body.
It was disregarded for a while.
Then the rumour grew and grew
and grew.
Mima's sister lived nearby
and she got to hear of the rumours.
And she was really worried because
her sister hadn't returned home
and she went to the scene.
And lo and behold, she found her.
Must have been horrific for when she
found her sister lying there.
It was a picture of what life
was like in the Glasgow of that era.
The area had been written off,
if not the inhabitants.
And it was very sad that children
sort of stumbled
on a scene like this.
This is something where the police
get called in
after the community
has found Jemima.
Obviously, the first thing you want
to do is preserve the locus.
That's got to be done.
But if you've got a body
in a back court, you know,
you've got a different
scenario entirely.
They'd actually moved the body.
Contaminated the scene.
Because they wanted to try
to help.
"What can we do? Is she dead?"
And to her sister...
How tragic and appalling for her.
I was only ten years old and life
was turned upside down.
It's haunted me my whole life,
all the bad things that have
happened from that day.
My mum started to drink heavy,
which was all new to the family,
but that's how it went on for years.
She blamed herself and said
it should be her that's dead.
Not Mima.
We went to visit her in hospital,
and I knew then how sick
my mum had become.
I feel so angry and cheated
out of life because of one man.
I've been so afraid for 50 years.
Always looking behind me.
Jemima McDonald, found murdered in
a broken down tenement in Bridgeton
by children playing a few doors down
from the quite broken down property
that she lived in.
These were working class people
living in difficult circumstances,
out for one night of fun,
ending up dead,
part of the broken down system that
they were living at the centre of.
BELLS TOLL
"City murder squad quiz dancers.
"Detectives hunting the killer of
32-year-old Glasgow mother-of-three
"Jemima McDonald were today
interviewing dancers
"who had been at the Barrowland
Ballroom at the weekend
"and who may have been the last
people to see her alive."
Police also during the time
concentrated a lot of the time on
undercover work
in the Ballroom itself.
I went along and we tried to mix
with the dancers
and the people there.
And we would dance with different
ladies and speak to them
to see if any of them had
had any bad experiences
and try and get information
that way.
You can spot them a mile away,
plainclothes police.
But outside the Barrowland
you would see some actual police.
But inside, och, you can spot them
a mile away.
You know who they are.
I wasn't a dancer and someone
asked me if I'd dance
and I said,
"Well, I'm not a dancer."
"Ach, get up and just shake
your bum about."
So I got up and I took two steps.
I was getting really proud
of myself.
She goes, "Ah, you're rubbish,
right enough, you cannae dance."
And dumped me in the middle
of the floor on the way!
The police were all over the place.
They must have interviewed hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds.
"An important witness
has come forward
"and gave us very useful
information."
There seems to be a fairly
reliable evidence
that she met up with a young man
and that they had drinks together
before going off to the Barrowland
for the evening.
Certainly, she'd been
at the Barrowland
two or three times in that week.
So she was next door and a kind
of regular,
so maybe had the killer
spotted her before
and picked her out
as a potential victim?
Her...
..clothes were torn
and she'd been beaten.
She'd been strangled
with her own stockings.
And...
..she'd been raped.
"Murders may be linked.
"There are certain similarities
between the murders
"of Miss Mima McDonald
and Mrs Patricia Docker,
"the auxiliary nurse who was
murdered in Glasgow last year."
After the second murder, I mean,
in my own mind,
it was the work of the same guy.
I've got to say it.
I mean, the circumstances
were all quite similar.
They'd been to the Barrowland
Ballroom, both of them.
They'd, both of them, been
sexually assaulted.
The crime scene was contaminated
by the time that the police arrived.
The thing that was missing
was her handbag.
To me, it was more than coincidence
that there were two killers,
sadistic killers of women
knocking about.
And I thought, really, at the time,
it was the same man
that had committed the two.
I think the police privately
would say that,
but publicly would...would deny it,
as they did.
By the time we moved on to two,
two murders and the police verified
the link, the possible link...
..it was beginning to get to a point
where people were thinking
about it seriously and worried
about it.
Oh, it upset people,
right enough, you know?
And it was making you scared.
You know, you were just hoping
that he was going to get caught.
This is where the first publication
of the possible suspect was found.
"Find this man."
"Find this man is
murder squad plea.
"Police want to interview this man
"in their bid to find the killer
of Mrs Mima McDonald."
The previous Saturday evening, Mima
was seen leaving Barrowland Ballroom
with a tall, well-dressed man.
"For the first time in Scotland,
"they asked newspapers to publish
an artist's impression.
"The drawing has been put together
by a witness
"who twice saw the man
with Ms McDonald."
Mr Dalgleish, this is the first time
an artist's impression
has been used in Scotland.
I understand that.
Why was it necessary in this case?
Well, we feel that it gives a sort
of realism
and raises the photograph
from mere words
into something resembling
a living person.
He looked as if he blended in
with everybody,
cos all the lads wore suits
and ties and lovely, shiny shoes
and had short back hair.
Not like today's scruffies.
Any person who sees this artist's
impression in the press
or on television and who feels
that they can usefully assist
the police in identifying this man
is urged to come forward forthwith
with any information
that they may have.
People just got on with life.
The police were looking for him
so, therefore, you didn't take
any notice of it.
You just said, "Well, it'll never
happen to me,
"hope it never happens to me,"
just things like that.
You just had to get on with it, aye.
Police information room.
One four one, police constable,
marine division.
I have a report of a body found
in Earl Street, Scotstoun.
Fine. We'll get you assistance
there as soon as we can.
Thank you.
The situation changed dramatically
when there was a third murder.
That's really when it all blew up.
You know, everything went
into overdrive.
Tango Five, would you attend
at Earl Street in Scotstoun?
A report of a body found.
Tango Five, will attend. Out.
In a city that was quite
famous for homicides,
you know, these were sinister
and were linked by this man
who seemed to be on the rampage.
When you get someone
out of the blue murdering,
possibly for pleasure, if you like,
it's very difficult when you get
something like that.
Go ahead, Tango Five. Over.
We have the body of a woman here.
Possible murder.
Could you have the CID
attend immediately? Tango Five over.
Roger, Tango Five.
I met Helen in 1962,
and I was completely smitten
by her straight away.
Well, I mean, I didn't think
I had any chance
when I first saw her, but we got
married in Reading.
My mum and dad were really,
really pleased, you know,
and found what a nice girl she was,
and that I was very lucky
to have found her.
We used to go to a lot of dancing,
especially when I was in the Army.
They used to actually
have dances there.
You know, it was just a happy time.
Just being with the two boys that
we had, you know, was great fun.
I was in the Army and Helen had gone
to her mother's in Glasgow
with my two boys because
I'd been moved from Germany.
And after a week, I went up
to Glasgow
and that's where things
suddenly went terribly wrong.
I certainly wasn't keen on her
going dancing,
which obviously would have been
with other men,
but was assured by her mum
that this was something
they really enjoyed doing,
there was nothing in it,
nothing to worry about,
and so I accepted what her mum
had said...
..and allowed her to go.
MUSIC: Hurdy Gurdy Man
by Donovan
At that time, Glasgow wasn't really
that nice a place to be.
There was a lot of thuggery
and goodness knows what up there.
So when Helen was going out
with her sister, Jeannie,
I thought, "Well, I don't want to
risk them coming home on the bus"
because even on the buses
there was always trouble,
so I actually gave her a £5 note
to come home by taxi.
And it's the worst £5
I've ever spent.
It's just a feeling you can't
describe. Can never describe it,
the hurt, the heartache
for me and my family.
Third time round, I do remember
the murder of Helen.
I was out very early in the morning
and went to a lane behind
some tenements
in Scotstoun, I think it was. Yeah.
I... I couldn't believe my eyes.
None of the reporters who were there
could believe what they were
looking at
because there must have
been 100 policemen
packed into that little lane,
listening to the boss
doling out jobs and whatnot.
By that time, I can only imagine
that the police were
in a blind panic
because they had had three and...
..from what we know since,
they were almost identical murders.
In the morning, when I woke up,
she still wasn't home
and I went into the front bedroom
and looked out of the window
and I saw a police van.
Don't ask me why, but I knew
then that something was wrong.
And so I went down.
And as I'm walking towards
the police caravan,
I heard people saying, "Oh, there's
a girl and she's been murdered."
And I got to the caravan
and spoke to a policeman,
and he obviously went out the back
to where Helen was lying
and the chief police officer,
Inspector Beattie, came out
and said to me, "What was your
wife wearing, son?"
And I said, "Her fur ocelot coat,
a black dress."
And it was then he told me, "I'm
sorry, but she has been murdered."
And that was the first I knew.
A black labrador dog being taken
for an early morning walk
by his owner found the body
of Helen Puttock
in this backcourt at 95 Earl Street.
She had been beaten and strangled.
She was lying face downwards
at an angle to a wall,
her clothes badly displaced.
There were signs that at one stage
she might have tried to escape
from her attacker, run up that
embankment and been dragged back.
It was only really after the third
murder that everybody did realise
it's a serial killer that's
on the loose.
We'd never experienced anything
like that, you know, mass murderers,
except for Peter Manuel, which was a
completely different sort of murder.
He was a house breaker who,
you know, shot his victims
as they slept and all the rest
of it.
But, I mean, this was somebody
patrolling dance halls
and picking up victims at random
and killing them,
and it became a major,
major story.
"Mother-of-two and attractive
brunette Mrs Helen Puttock
"was found dead today in
a grass-covered backcourt.
" 'We cannot rule out a link between
this death
"and that of Jemima McDonald at
Bridgeton three months ago,'
"said Detective Chief Super
Elphinstone Dalgleish."
People were, by that time, beginning
to get quite upset about it all,
and women became terrified
of leaving a dance hall with a man.
I wouldn't go myself to meet my pals
in the dancing.
We met up and we came home together,
shared a taxi.
So, to a certain extent,
there was a loss of innocence,
and this man, Bible John, played
a big part in it.
It was the third of the killings,
the killing of Helen Puttock from
Scotstoun, that really brought,
if you like, this invisible man
really into focus.
The big thing was
third one there was a witness.
ARCHIVE: A description was issued of
the man who had taken Helen Puttock.
He may speak of having
had a strict upbringing
with a severe parental attitude
towards drink.
He's quite well-spoken with
a Glasgow accent.
The suspect was five foot ten.
He smoked Embassy cigarettes.
His teeth were described,
the suit he wore.
Everything was known about this guy.
He may speak of having had a strict
religious upbringing
and make reference to the Bible.
It is thought that his Christian
name may be John.
And that started the most
extensive manhunt
conducted by Scottish police
in modern times.
The press, I think,
sent the investigators off
on a wild goose chase.
Let us pray.
We're suddenly raiding every church
and every Sunday service in the land
looking for some, you know,
gibbering religious fanatic.
Was the killer a serviceman
who'd been abroad? Perhaps.
He could have been a seaman.
Then there was a story
he could have been a monk.
I think a lot of people would have
found it really quite frightening
because they were being faced with a
really very unusual type of
individual that they possibly didn't
even know existed at this point.
Is it really the case that the man
that you are searching for could
strike again?
There's a possibility he may, yes.