Angelika Kluk was a 23-year-old Polish woman studying in Glasgow who was missing, feared dead. The story began: ‘The odd-job man wanted over the disappearance of Polish student Angelika Kluk is a convicted child rapist. The man who called himself Pat McLaughlin is really named Peter Tobin.’ As I looked at the grainy photo of the odd-job man wanted by police, it was one of those moments when a face is familiar but the crucial details of who, when and where remain just out of reach of your memory. Then the penny dropped. Tobin was my window cleaner. The jolt of realisation was almost physical in its force and my mind began to race. When he came to my door that Sunday morning, I was 31 and living with my girlfriend. What could have happened had I not been there when he came calling? Was Tobin hoping to find my girlfriend home alone and, if so, what was his intent?
The thoughts of what might have been were chilling, and that was before the discovery that Tobin was not only a rapist but a serial killer, convicted of three murders and suspected of many more. His first known victim was 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton, from Bathgate, West Lothian, who was last seen in February 1991. The second was Dinah McNicol, aged 18, of Tillingham in Essex, who disappeared in August 1991.
Two years later, Tobin attacked two 14-year-old girls at his flat in Havant, Hampshire. Holding them at knifepoint, he forced them to drink alcohol, stabbed one and raped them, all while his six-year-old son was at home. He fled with his son and left the gas on with the intent that an explosion would hide his tracks, but one of the girls awoke and raised the alarm. For this atrocity, Tobin was jailed for 14 years but was out after 10 and crept back to Paisley, the home town of William ‘Basil’ Burns. What is it about malevolent creeps from that town coming to my front door?
Itinerant Tobin worked as a handyman and used up to 40 aliases during a life spent preying on young women while drifting around central Scotland and southern England. The discovery that he routinely feigned illness made perfect sense, as I had seen his accomplished play-acting first hand.
Tobin’s reign of horror ended in September 2006 with the rape and murder of Kluk, whose body was hidden beneath the floor of a Catholic church in Glasgow’s Anderston district, less than two miles from my own home. It was his first of three convictions for murder.
Once convicted, almost immediately the question began to be asked of Tobin: was he the notorious Bible John? Over a 20-month period in the late 1960s, three women were killed after nights out at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom. The first was Patricia Docker, 25, who was found strangled in February 1968. The following August, 32-year-old mother of three Jemima McDonald was found dead, having being strangled with her own stockings. Finally, Helen Puttock, 29, was raped, then strangled with her tights in October 1969. Helen had been out with her sister Jean and they had shared a taxi home with a polite and well-spoken man who said his name was John. During the journey, the man quoted from the Bible, spawning the nickname which generated countless headlines and gripped the public, whose fascination remains undimmed almost half a century later.
Slurring, saloon-bar detectives perched on stools in dingy dives will tell anyone daft enough to listen that that they know who Bible John really was. Buy them a pint and they’ll tell you: my neighbour’s postman’s uncle’s butcher . . . that kind of thing. Whether the killer even quoted from the Bible or simply referred to it is subject to dispute as, like so much of the saga, it is often hard to discern where facts blend into hearsay, assumption and legend.
Criminologist Professor David Wilson spent three years researching the unsolved murders for his 2010 book The Lost British Serial Killer, in which he concluded that Tobin was Bible John. In a press interview, Wilson said, ‘I didn’t set out to prove Tobin was Bible John, but I would stake my professional reputation on it.’
I was intrigued by the increasing body of evidence and opinion which supported this theory. Tobin had moved away from Glasgow in late 1969, the year of the final murder, after marrying his first wife, whom he met at the Barrowland. Tobin was known to be driven to violence by the menstrual cycle, and all three of Bible John’s victims were menstruating at the time they were murdered. In addition, Tobin purports to have Catholic beliefs.
I spent hours leafing through hundreds of yellowing, musty and fragile press cuttings from the time of the murders as well as modern, digitised archives. Something was missing from this vast reservoir of claims, counterclaims and conspiracy theories. Not once over 41 years could I find evidence of any journalist haven spoken with Helen’s sister Jean. The press cuttings could not even agree on what her surname was.
Having been dropped off by her sister and the killer, Jean was the only surviving witness to have seen Bible John, as the taxi driver was long dead. It was her recollection of the shared journey with Bible John which provided detectives with everything they knew about him and generated Scotland’s first police photofit, which bears an uncanny similarity to a young Tobin. If anyone could come close to answering whether Tobin was Bible John, it was Jean. The unsettling memory of Tobin as my window cleaner fuelled my determination to find out. I decided to track down Jean, which was easier said than done – not least due to her having had four surnames in her life, the first being Gowans when she was born in 1936.
Once I established her name was now Jean McLachlan, I set about trying to find her, but that too was not as straightforward as one would expect. David Wilson had no leads, having been told by the police that she may have emigrated to New Zealand. I finally tracked down a relative who said that Jean was living in Ayrshire, but I had run out of time to make the trip for that week’s edition as it was late on a Friday afternoon. The relative explained that Jean was very unwell but that I could get in touch the following week to see if she might speak to me, to answer that one big question about Tobin.
As it turned out, next week was too late. I never got to ask Jean the question as she died of cancer just two days later on Sunday, 12 September 2010, at the age of 74, taking her answer to the grave. It may have been that even if I had reached her sooner, she would have been reluctant to conjure up ghosts from the past.
During my research I had come across Jean’s son, who had plenty to say about Bible John and the police investigation led by detective Joe Beattie. Sitting in his flat in Maryhill less than two weeks after his mum’s death, he dropped what appeared to be a bombshell revelation. Asked if Jean had ever suggested that Tobin was the man in the taxi that fateful night, he said, ‘She told me that it was Tobin a fortnight ago today, which was five days before she died. She said that’s him. She was a hundred-per-cent sure he was the man in the taxi with her sister. I asked her – I said, “Is it Tobin?” She said, “Yes, it was him.” I hate Tobin for what he’s put my family through. I even wanted to get arrested so that I could go to [HMP] Saughton and do him in.’
Unfortunately, like so much else to do with Bible John, Jean’s son’s extraordinary and unequivocal admission was not as clear and simple as it first appeared. He was highly emotional and his story became tangled in contradictions and repetition as he segued from burning rage to tortured pain and back again. I sought out other family members to see if they could corroborate his claims, but they cautioned me against taking what he said at face value. Like so many journalists, I had set out to establish hard facts about Bible John, only to be led into a hall of mirrors where nothing was quite as it seemed.
The resulting story, headlined ‘BIBLE JOHN: THE END’, told how Jean’s death meant that any slim chance of a successful prosecution had died with her. I contacted victim Helen Puttock’s husband, George who said, ‘Now Jean has gone and more time passes, it will never be solved. Jeanie always swore that she would never forget the face of Helen’s killer and I believed her.’
The only other person left who can answer the question is obviously Tobin himself. But such grotesque monsters usually enjoy the power of holding on to the darkest secrets about their crimes which they then use to taunt and torment families who have suffered more than can be imagined.
/> Tobin will fester in prison until the day he dies, as will Angus Sinclair, another serial killer who got away with murder for far too long and who refuses to disclose details of his crimes.
Sinclair has been convicted of killing four women, but the true number is suspected of being six, possibly more. He was 16 when he killed for the first time. Catherine Reehill, a seven-year-old neighbour in Glasgow, was lured away, raped and strangled. For reasons best known to the judge, Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison, serving only six, despite a psychiatrist’s report prepared after the 1961 murder warning: ‘I do not think that any form of psychotherapy is likely to benefit his condition and he will constitute a danger from now onwards. He is obsessed by sex, and given the minimum of opportunity, he will repeat these offences.’
And repeat them he did. In 1977 he was thought to have murdered six women in a seven-month period, followed by another in 1978. The 1977 victims were Frances Barker, 37; Hilda McAuley, 36; Agnes Cooney, 23; and Anna Kenny, 20, all from Glasgow, as well as Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both 17, from Edinburgh. The next year he sexually assaulted and murdered 17-year-old Mary Gallacher in Glasgow.
In 1982 he was convicted and jailed for rape and sexual attacks against 11 children aged six to 14. It was not until 2000 that a review of the Gallacher case resulted in his conviction for her murder the following year. Then, in 2014, he was convicted of killing Eadie and Scott, in what is known as the World’s End murders (after the pub of that name in which the girls had been drinking on the night of their murder). This conviction for double murder confirmed his status as a serial killer amidst much crowing and backslapping by police and prosecutors, but they had absolutely nothing to be proud of.
Not only had Scotland’s worst serial killer got away with it for far too long, causing immeasurable devastation to countless people, but an initial World’s End prosecution in 2007 had been botched, resulting in Sinclair’s farcical acquittal. The only good thing to come out of that debacle was a change in the law giving the Crown the right to prosecute someone for a crime of which they have already been acquitted. Neatly, Sinclair was the first to feel the effects of double jeopardy, which enabled his 2014 retrial.
When I took a phone call from a long-standing and trusted contact just after Sinclair’s eventual World’s End conviction, what he told me made my blood run cold. Peter McLeod was a bright, honest and capable detective in an era when those traits often seemed less important than being in with the right people and when playing fast and loose with evidence was commonplace. McLeod is the kind of man who will stand up and be counted – who will speak out over an injustice, no matter how difficult that might be.
In 2001 he was working in the Strathclyde Police Force Intelligence Bureau, and Sinclair was yet to stand trial for the Gallacher murder. McLeod had pored over reams of intelligence from a series of unsolved murders in the Strathclyde Police area. On the basis of his painstaking analysis, he then wrote and submitted an internal memo in which Sinclair was named for the first time as the suspect in the murders of Kenny, McAuley and Cooney.
His memo, dated February 2001, urged senior officers to send the case to a specialist unit in England which analyses sex killings across the UK. But there was no appetite from above to accede to his request. Quite the opposite: there was a naked hostility towards the recommendation. One senior officer made it clear that McLeod should back down. Not long after that, McLeod left the intelligence unit and the following year learned that his memo had been buried and his suggestions ignored. Why would the police do this? Why would they aggressively shun an explosive memo, based on hard evidence and written by a trusted and respected detective which alleged that Sinclair was a serial killer? There could, in McLeod’s eyes, be only one shocking conclusion, and that was a police cover-up.
A lorry driver called Thomas Young had already been found guilty of the 1977 killing of Frances Barker – a crime now widely accepted to have been committed by Sinclair. Young had served 37 years behind bars when he died in 2014, still protesting his innocence. McLeod delivered to me the following damning assessment: ‘I think it’s very likely that they [senior police officers] were aware that the conviction of Thomas Young was totally unsound. They couldn’t risk it being looked at in detail because it would show up the fact that it was so similar to the others. They knew about Young and they were trying to put hurdles in the way. These people did everything they could to stop this being properly investigated.’
McLeod’s memo had been too hot to handle. To probe deeper into the three other murders would only risk unwelcome scrutiny of the Young conviction – the kind of attention that trashes the reputation of police officers, possibly even putting them in jail. Even worse than the suspicion that Young was fitted up for murder were the extraordinary consequences of doing so. Barker had been the first of the six victims in the 1977 killing spree. The quick arrest and prosecution of Young would almost certainly have emboldened Sinclair.
Picture the scene – a shocked young Sinclair smiling gleefully at news reports of another man being swiftly dispatched to prison for a murder he had committed. If it is true that Sinclair did kill Barker – and there is no serious suggestion to the contrary – then the alleged police fit-up of Young could have served as a giant green light for Sinclair. As McLeod put it: ‘By arresting Young, the police could have given Sinclair the confidence to keep on killing. They effectively gave him a licence to kill.’
In the face of some stiff competition, this story was perhaps the most shocking of any of the thousands I have written in almost 25 years. Yet not a single newspaper or broadcaster thought it worthy of attention, to the undoubted delight of Scotland’s worst serial killer and relief of a few retired CID men.
22
‘UNMASKED’
‘UNMASKED’ – like all the best headlines, needs no explaining, and journalists will never get tired of using it.
One of my first sorties into organised crime followed the murder of Tony McGovern, whose face appeared under the headline ‘UNMASKED’ alongside an account of his unlikely rich and famous friends and feud with Jamie ‘The Iceman’ Stevenson.
Linked directly with McGovern was the lawless world of gangster-run security firms which were on the brink of exploding into a decade of violence, corruption and abuse of public money – something akin to 1920s Chicago, according to one judge.
There was a constant supply of organised criminals who rose up more quickly than they could be unmasked – for every one exposed, two others appeared to take his place, like the Greek myth of the Hydra, a monstrous serpent which regenerates two new heads for each one chopped off.
In 2000 I unmasked Robert Wright and Les Brown, the drug-smugglers whose contacts included the Russian Mafia in Estonia and domestic drug-dealer Justin McAlroy, whose murder exposed murky connections between Labour and gangland.
That same year I exposed the drug-dealing Hamilton family of Stewarton, Ayrshire, who had links with outlawed terrorist groups the UVF and Red Hand Commandos. Their importation of Loyalist terror tactics into an ordinary Scottish community, targeting decent people with knives and guns, should have brought widespread outrage but, such is its fickle nature, most of the media paid no heed.
In 2003 it was the turn of north Glasgow crime gangs – the Daniels and Lyons – to be unmasked, although no one could have foreseen that their spat over stolen cocaine would evolve into Scotland’s dirtiest and deadliest underworld war, which rages to this day.
Then Russell Stirton and his criminal fortune were dragged into the spotlight, which led me to his associate Barry Hughes. The unmasking of Hughes mutated into his PR game of distortedly presenting himself as celebrity rather than criminal.
In the same year, VAT fraudster Michael Voudouri, alongside his Edinburgh drug-dealing friend George ‘Dode’ Buchanan, came to my attention. Voudouri, who stole unknown millions of pounds from taxpayers, provided years of entertainment with his flamboyance. There was the outrageous spending of his loo
t on hiring celebrities for personal appearances and flying on private jets; there was his self-harming gloat on BBC’s Panorama show about beating a Proceeds of Crime prosecution, and his dramatic flight from justice to northern Cyprus to, temporarily, avoid a prison sentence. That his family had publicly announced their intended flit on Facebook caused some embarrassment for the police and Crown Office. To Voudouri’s spluttering astonishment, we tracked him down to his Cypriot lair by matching family Facebook photos of his distinctively shaped swimming pool to the satellite view of it on Google Maps. Not long after that, he swapped the Cypriot sunshine for a Scottish prison cell.
In 2005 I unmasked two key members of the Lyons gang, whose occupancy of Chirnsyde youth club was then still stubbornly supported by the police, the Labour Party and Glasgow City Council. We told how Steven Lyons and Ross Monaghan walked free from court on multiple nightclub stabbing charges after witnesses refused to speak up. The cocky pair scarpered from the High Court in Glasgow to evade my photographer colleague. We gave chase but they got away – which we put right the next day by finding a hidden vantage point from which to capture their photos. A decade would pass before I next set eyes on Lyons.
I then unmasked Annette Daniel and Jean McGovern, whose crime-clan surnames were already familiar to our readers. The duo led one of the largest organised shoplifting gangs in the UK but had never come to public attention. Since exposing the scale and sophistication of their highly organised network, they have rarely been out of the press and their faces have become known to every retail-worker in the land.
Unlike some who fall into the trap of taking sides, I was even-handed in my treatment of the Lyons and the Daniels. In 2008 I unmasked the highly dangerous Daniel mob enforcer Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll, then aged 27. That first story told how he was suspected of stealing a British army Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun, supplied by rogue soldiers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Paul McBride QC later told me he secured Carroll a very favourable plea deal with a Crown prosecutor who mistakenly thought Carroll was merely a ‘daft wee boy’ despite being branded ‘public enemy No. 1’ due to his exceptional violence.
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