The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  On the dance floor Jemima attracted attention. Other dancers noticed that she spent much of the evening dancing with a tall man in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore a blue suit. His red hair was cut short and his appearance was neat. Early the next morning, she was seen leaving the ballroom with him.

  The next morning, when Jemima did not come to pick up her kids as expected, Margaret grew worried. Later she overheard street children talking about something grisly they had discovered in a derelict building nearby. Fearing the worst, Margaret got the kids to direct her to the building. There she found her sister’s dead body.

  Jemima was fully clothed, but there were similarities to the Patricia Docker case. Both women had been strangled with their own pantyhose. Both had been found near their home. Jemima’s handbag was missing. Later the police found another similarity between the two cases. Both had been having their period when they were killed.

  A search of the area rendered no new clues and an attempt to question those who had been at the Barrowland that night also proved fruitless. Many of them were married and were out with people who were not their spouse, so were less than forthcoming. An appeal from the stage also drew a blank. A policewoman dressed in Jemima’s clothes retraced her final steps. But eventually the police released a sketch of the tall man Jemina had been seen leaving the Barrowland with. Jemima’s family offered a reward of £100, a first in the history of Scottish murder investigations. But this, too, proved futile.

  Despite all the publicity the murders were getting, it did not put people off going to the Barrowland. Twenty-nine-year-old Helen Puttock was hell bent on going there on the night of 30 October 1969. Her husband, who was going to stay at home with their two young boys, begged his wife to be careful. But Helen was not worried. She would not be alone. She was going with her sister Jean and said she was sure they would be safe together.

  Helen spent most of her evening dancing with a tall young man with red hair. When they left the Barrowland, the three of them took a cab home together. During the journey, the man said that his name was John, he played golf badly, but a cousin had recently hit a hole-in-one. Jean also remembered he mentioned that he had a sister. He said they had been raised in a strict religious household and he was still able to quote long passages of the Bible—hence his pseudonym.

  According to one account, John seemed upset by Jean’s presence. He wanted be alone with Helen. He also condemned the evil women who went to dancehalls like the Barrowland. Ignoring Jean for much of the ride, he did not even say goodbye when they dropped her off.

  The next morning Helen’s fully clothed body was found in the street by a man walking his dog. Again she had been strangled with her own nylons and her handbag was missing. She, too, was menstruating when she was murdered. As if to draw attention to the fact, the killer had removed her sanitary towel and tucked it under her armpit. And this time he had left two clues that might help identify him—a semen stain on her dress and a bite mark on her wrist.

  Thanks to Jean, the police now had an accurate description. The suspect was around six feet tall, of medium build. He had blue-grey eyes and light reddish hair, which he kept cut short. His watch had a military-style band and the teeth marks on the body confirmed that two teeth in the upper-right part of his mouth overlapped.

  A new artist’s impression of the suspect was circulated—this one in colour. It culled over 4,000 calls from people who thought they had seen or knew the man in the picture. Jean was called to the police station over 250 times to see suspects, but none of them turned out to be the man she and her sister had shared a taxi with. Men who bore a resemblance to the killer and had been eliminated from the enquiry were issued cards by the police, showing they had been questioned and cleared. One of them was used in a reconstruction of Helen’s last evening, with a policewoman playing Helen, that was aired on the BBC. Helen’s husband made an appeal to his wife’s killer to turn himself in and offered his life savings as a reward for information leading to his arrest.

  Over 50,000 statements were taken and over 100 policemen worked on the case, with younger officers in plain clothes mingling with the dancers in the Barrowland. Taxi drivers and bus crews received particular attention. One man said he had seen a young male with scratches on his face on the bus on 31 October. He had got off at a stop on Gray Street. Police combed the area, but found nothing.

  The suspect’s military wristwatch band and his short hair lead the police to believe that he might be a member of the armed forces—or even a policeman. Dentists were questioned about patients with overlapping teeth and golf clubs were asked about anyone who had recently scored a hole-in-one. A Dutch psychic called in by a local newspaper drew a map, but a search of the area drew a blank.

  Although psychological profiling had yet to be developed, in the mid-1970s, a Glasgow psychiatrist concluded that, although Bible John was sociable, he was prudish. He would read widely on subjects ranging from sorcery to the Nazis, and went to the cinema by himself. This did not help.

  Although only three murders have been officially ascribed to Bible John, he may have committed others. In 1977 another young woman who spent her last night in a Glasgow dancehall was found strangled and without her handbag. This sparked a renewed round of interest in Bible John.

  In 1983, a wealthy Glasgow man hired a private detective to find a childhood friend who he thought resembled Bible John. The man was found living in the Netherlands, but was cleared.

  Another man who had been cleared was identified only as John M. He had been a suspect in the investigation in the 1960s. He bore a close resemblance to the sketch that was circulated, but Jean had failed to identify him. Nevertheless, he continued to be a prime suspect until, in 1981, he committed suicide.

  In the 1960s, DNA fingerprinting was as yet undreamt of. But in 1996, DNA from the semen left on Helen Puttock’s clothes was compared to a sample taken from one of John M.’s siblings. The match was inconclusive. Nevertheless the police requested the exhumation of John M.’s body from a graveyard in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire.

  The resulting publicity led to the harassment of John M.’s family. But when the test were completed it was found that the DNA did not match. Nor did his teeth match the bite-mark on her wrist. Jean said that she always knew that John M. was not the killer and she had repeatedly told Strathclyde Police they had the wrong man. John M. was reburied and his family finally left to grieve in peace.

  But the investigation was still not over. In October 2000, Professor Ian Stephen, a leading criminal psychologist who is said to have inspired TV’s Cracker, passed the name of a new suspect on to the Lothian and Borders Police, asking them to forward it to Strathclyde. He said he obtained the new lead from an expatriate Scot living in the US who suspected a member of his extended family was Bible John. The suspect was the son of a policeman. He was married in the Glasgow area and lived in Lanarkshire with his wife and two children until he moved to England in 1970.

  According to the file Professor Stephen passed to the police, the suspect’s behaviour changed dramatically in the late 1960s when he increasingly went out alone at night and sometimes failed to return until the following day.

  Professor Stephen told the BBC: “I would like to think that his name has already been considered and ruled out but I am not hopeful. The police were looking for a stereotype, a known sex offender at the time. The profile appears to fit that of Bible John. While the information is circumstantial I think the police have got to have a serious look at it.”

  The Strathclyde Police said they would look at the new information.

  In December 2004, DNA taken from a Glasgow crime scene two years earlier was an 80 percent match to the semen found on Helen’s clothing. Samples are still being collected from a number of suspects in their 50s and 60s and, in May 2005, a spokesman for the police said: “Science will solve these killings. We have no doubt of that.”

  That October Strathclyde Police set up a new Unresolved Case Unit to re-examine
the evidence in the Bible John Killings. They are using new processes to identify traces of evidence that previously could not be found.

  “Now with the advent of DNA profiling, someone who’s just held something for a brief period, or held someone, you’re going to transfer your DNA,” said Dr Adrian Linacre, a lecturer in forensic science at Strathclyde University.

  Throughout it all, the Barrowland Ballroom had soldiered on and now proudly proclaims that it is “the best rock venue in Scotland”.

  Scotland—Glasgow’s Sex-Worker Slayings

  The night of Friday 27 February 1998 was one of the coldest nights of the winter in Glasgow. While it was freezing outside, it was warm inside Base 75, the prostitutes’ drop-in centre in Robertson Street. Other women remembered 27-year-old Margo Lafferty being there that night. She was trying on a new suit she’d bought. It was pale blue with a mini-skirt and a lacy top. The consensus was that suited her, though one of the girls said that Margo had put on weight. She was broadly liked. Some remember her as a kind girl, one who would lend another girl money if she needed to buy a pair of tights from the all-night garage down by the river, though others say she was violent.

  Base 75 closed at 11.30 p.m. and Margo went to work. Early on Saturday morning she was in one of the lanes that run off the main streets in the shopping and business area. There were security lights on the buildings, but prostitutes entertained their clients in the dark doorways there. That night, though, a monster was on the loose. In the morning Margo was found dead in a disused builders’ yard on West Street, then utilized as a car park. Her body was curled up in the foetal position, her blood soaking into the mud. She had suffered repeated blows to the head, which was then beaten against a wall. Then she had been strangled. She was naked. This was a telling detail. Margo was not a girl who undressed for her johns.

  In her stomach were the remains of her last hurried meal—cheap white bread, the orange segment she had gulped down, a cherry from a can of fruit cocktail. There was mud all over her skin as the killer had dragged her naked body through the puddles in the carpark. This was particularly distressing for her mother, who remembered Margo as a scrupulously clean girl.

  “When people hear the word ‘prostitute’ they think, ‘dirty midden’,” she said. “But Margo used to do my head in with her showers and baths. She’d have three or four a day. She was so very, very clean. When she had her own wee house you could have eaten a meal off the floor. She was very particular about herself and her environment.”

  Margo had six brothers, though her younger brother Billy had been killed in a road accident at the age of 18. He had been left brain-dead in a coma when they had to switch off the ventilator. Her father had died when she was just a toddler. After a night of drinking, he had choked to death in his sleep. His death left the family struggling and her mother would go without food so the children could eat. But they were a happy family and the house was always full of the children’s friends—there would be as many as 14 for Sunday lunch.

  The others remember Margo Lafferty as a carefree child, full of laughter and charming enough to wheedle sweets from the man on the ice-cream van when she had no money. As a young girl she had been soft-hearted, always ready to help a pal in trouble. Once she brought home a school friend who’d lost her mother. The girl stayed with the family for six years and whenever Margo got something the other girl got the same.

  Margo’s older brother Monty, who assumed the role of father figure, treated his little sister like a princess, always buying her frilly things. But she was a tomboy, who would wear her trousers right up to the school gate before changing into the uniform skirt she hated. She could play football better than most boys and captained a local team.

  “She was never ’feared of anybody or anything in her life,” her mother said. “She was the only one that would face up to Monty. The rest of them would never answer him back, but Margo would stand and confront him.”

  Curiously for a girl of her calling, she was not interested in boys. Local lads were crazy about her, but when they came on to her she would reject them.

  “I can’t be bothered with it, Ma,” she would tell her mother. “They’re too serious.”

  The family lived in Barlanark, then a run-down estate riddled with drugs. Margo started sniffing glue, then moved on to harder things.

  “She was a daring lassie,” said her mother. “She wasn’t scared to try anything once. If only she’d realized where it was going to end up.”

  As addiction took hold, her life became increasingly chaotic. She would spend the night out with one “friend” after another, selling her body to buy drugs. One minute she would be the life and soul of the party, the next she would crashed out on the sofa.

  One day, her mother came home to find Margo lying on her bedroom floor in a coma. Her face and lips were blue, and there was a syringe sticking out of her groin. Her mother pulled the needle out and slapped Margo’s face to get her breathing. It took a quarter of an hour to bring her round. When her mother explained what had happened, Margo called her a liar. Her mother said: “I’m sorry, Margo. I can’t take any more of this.”

  “Fine, Ma,” Margo replied and left.

  “I didn’t put her out of the house,” said her mother. “The lassie knew herself she couldn’t go on like that. It had got to the stage where you were ’feared to leave her in the house. You didn’t know what was going to be missing when you got back. I told her I would keep her, but I wasn’t knocking my pan in to keep her drug dealers.”

  She knew that Margo could look after herself. Although only five foot, she was tough, aggressive and knew how to use her fists. Many of the other girls on the streets would turn to her when they needed physical protection.

  “I’ve seen her taking the jacket off her back and giving it to an old woman in the street, but she had a bad temper,” said her mother. “You needed to watch her because she’d hit you as soon as look at you. She was very brave physically. Not that she went out looking for bother, but she wouldn’t run away from it either. That was why I told the police that Margo fought, that whoever had murdered Margo had been well and truly scarred. She would fight for every minute of her life and every second.”

  Indeed she fought ferociously with her killer, gouging the flesh of his face.

  Margo was the seventh prostitute to be murdered on the streets of Glasgow in six years. Another would follow. But hers was the only case where the police secured a conviction. Men accused in two other cases were acquitted. Suspects in another were released. And in four cases no arrests have been made. But, as we have seen, prostitute murders are notoriously difficult for the police. Between 35 and 40 remain unsolved in England and Wales each year.

  In Glasgow all the murdered women were drug addicts who had turned to prostitution to support their habit. Such women are often estranged from society and there is little pressure on the police to discover who was responsible for their fate. And by the nature of their calling, few admit knowing them.

  The killings began in 1991 when 23-year-old Diane McInally was found dead in Pollok Park, near the Burrell Collection, Glasgow’s famous art gallery. On 15 October, her body, clad only in a black mini-dress and stockings, was dumped under a bush. She came from the Gorbals, where drugs were bought and sold openly on the streets. It was thought that she was killed because she owed drugs money. Two men were arrested for her murder, but later released due to lack of evidence.

  In April 1993, 26-year-old mother-of-two Karen McGregor was found dead in the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. She had been battered around the face and head with a solid object, strangled and sexually assaulted with a foreign object.

  The police had an obvious suspect. Her husband, Charles McGregor, was arrested and charged with the murder. Two witnesses said that they had seen him beat his wife to death with a hammer, but retracted their statements in court. Another witness said they had seen Karen’s battered and bruised body, but grew fearful and ran off before observi
ng the situation further. A woman testified that she had seen McGregor in the cemetery, crouching over his wife’s grave and saying: “I’m sorry, Karen. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” And a fellow prostitute gave evidence that Karen was fed up giving all the money she had earned to her husband to feed his drug habit.

  However, when McGregor appeared in court, he did not look like a junkie. He wore a smart suit and overcoat, and had his hair neatly cut—looking every inch the thrusting young businessman. The jury were impressed and returned a verdict of “not proven”—a third option allowed by Scottish courts. He later died of a drug overdose.

  On a warm summer evening in June 1995 the body of Leona McGovern was found in a Glasgow car park. She had been stabbed seven times with a screwdriver, then strangled. The petite 22-year-old, barely five feet tall, had been sleeping rough. Two weeks before her death, her boyfriend died of an overdose.

  “He meant a lot to her,” said Detective Chief Inspector Nanette Pollock, who was leading the investigation. “When he died she really lost it.”

  Then Leona had found her best friend dead in bed.

  On the night she died she owed her dealer money and asked her brother to lend her £35, but he could not give it to her. About 7 p.m., a security guard said he saw a man stabbing something on the ground. At the time he thought it was a bag of garbage as he could not imagine witnessing a murder take place in the street in broad daylight—even in Glasgow.

  A man was arrested and charged with Leona’s murder—but, again, the jury returned a not-proven verdict. He claimed the murderer was another man who had been seen with Leona in the last two weeks of her life. He was not her boyfriend, just another homeless person she hung around with. Inspector Pollock thought their relationship entirely innocent.