by David Leslie
From among this miscellany, it is evident that Patricia met someone who took a particular interest in her, one that must have been reciprocated sufficiently to persuade her to allow this new partner to accompany her home. It was a journey that would take both across the city, either by taxi or in his car, but one Pat would never complete. Early the following morning, a workman discovered her near-naked body in a doorway just a few yards from her home. She had been battered, raped and strangled.
Police concentrated their efforts to find the killer on the two ballrooms, but especially the Barrowland because it was from there that the young victim had almost certainly left with her murderer. Using an age-old formula that fails more often than it works, detectives questioning the dancers gave little away. To the questions ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘What happened?’, the police gave the standard riposte: ‘We’ll ask the questions, you just supply the answers.’ The thinking behind this was that by holding back information, the culprit might let slip something relevant to the crime that only the killer could have known. It is a flawed theory, one that rarely, if ever, works, leading to outrageous suppositions that can only mislead and sidetrack. The more facts given to a public generally eager to assist, the more likely they are to focus their memories, and the higher the chances of someone remembering an important, if not crucial, piece of evidence. Astonishingly, it would be nearer to two years before vital information was made public.
And so, as the weeks dragged by without an arrest, snippets of gossip began leaking out. One was that Patricia had been garrotted with her own stockings; another that her handbag had disappeared. Some said one of her dancing partners had been overheard boasting about a relation who had achieved a hole-in-one at golf, while others whispered that she had been seen with a tall, slim man who seemed to drop into their conversation odd words or expressions more akin to those leaving the lips of a priest or minister. But who was to know that if such phrases had been uttered, they had been spoken to Patricia Docker? ‘Could he be a Bible basher?’ some asked, while others wondered if he was a policeman.
As to his identity and description, plenty of suggestions, and even actual names, were offered. Much would later be made of the name John. It is a common forename, likewise the expression ‘picked up a John’, which probably emanates from the days of visits by American servicemen. But did Patricia’s partner actually offer the name, or was it overheard during a conversation between the couple? Was it simply given by a reluctant witness in an effort to get rid of persistent police questioning? Even now, no one can say. The name John would have appeared on lists of potential suspects certainly, along with names such as Jimmy, Jock, David, Iain, and so on.
The only sure thing was that no matter what forename or surname was put forward as a possible witness, or even killer, during interviews, in each case the detectives would painstakingly visit those individuals, listen to their story and then check it out, though each time a reliable alibi was forthcoming.
There were even some male, and a few female, customers from both dance halls who were positively eager to save the murder team the trouble of tracking them down, turning up at the local police station desperate to give full rundowns on where they had been and with whom. These were husbands and wives, anxious their spouses should not open the door in answer to a policeman’s knock and discover some story about a girls night out or a visit to the greyhound track with the rest of the boys had been a lie, and that their partner had in reality been whooping it up at the dancing with a ‘fancy man’, or the proverbial bit on the side. Again, though, the outcome was the same: a bland, unhelpful statement that gave no clues to solving the murder.
Some would comment on perverse similarities between the cases of the dead nurse and that of missing Pat McAdam just the previous year. Both girls shared the same Christian name, both had been to the Barrowland Ballroom and, assuming the younger of the two had, as most believed, been murdered, then each had been killed in the month of February.
At the time of the nurse’s murder, Thomas Ross Young, the Glasgow lorry driver who had admitted having Miss McAdam in his cab, was in prison, jailed in 1967 in Shropshire for 18 months for rape.
There were other topics also being discussed, one highly relevant to the murder. Just 27 months earlier, in November 1965, hanging had been all but abolished, though at the time of the Patricia Docker tragedy a number of hard-line politicians wanted the death penalty to remain for some offences, including cases where murder had been committed during a theft. Whoever had slain Patricia Docker had also surely stolen her handbag and that would have made her killer eligible to swing.
Indeed, law or no law, such was the public fury at the callous way the life of the young nurse had been taken there were many who vowed that if the killer were caught, then even in prison his, or more unlikely her, demise would be just a matter of time.
Hannah herself appears to have been undeterred by the fate of Patricia Docker; it certainly did not put her off visiting the Barrowland. By the autumn of 1968, although the murder investigation, having drawn a blank, had been scaled down, the lingering memory of the nightmare was still one that haunted many dancers. And it was about to become an unwanted stain on Hannah’s mind.
Patricia’s death had caused revulsion elsewhere in the country but only in Glasgow was there a true sense of loss. To the city’s people, this was a personal assault because Pat had lived and worked with them, and it is certain many had used the same corner shops as she, bought dresses at the same department stores and used the same hairdresser’s. Often people would be heard telling their friends, ‘I knew her face.’
Geography can be a great calmer of emotion; distance soothes and dissolves passions. In Edinburgh, people would have read about the trauma, sympathised with Patricia’s family, shrugged their shoulders, wondered what else could be expected of wild, outlandish Glasgow and gone about their business. It was hardly a subject to be talked about by two eight year olds, as they made their way to school each day. To Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, the world was still full of innocence and fun, and the murder of the nurse would in all probability never even have crossed their minds. Yet they would become indelibly linked to it.
FOUR
THE BROTHEL
By April, Patricia Docker’s murder was two months old. It had not been wholly forgotten but, recent though it was, the tragic event was fading from the city’s collective consciousness, and fading fast. The fact was there were, after all, other topics about which to converse.
Up on the walls of the Barrowland, like dance halls elsewhere in the city, were pinned stark police posters, asking for anyone who might have information about Patricia’s last movements to come forward. But it was a faint hope. At that time, a murder that was not solved in the early days tended to drag on, perhaps without ever being unravelled. Today, no killer can feel safe, even many years after the event, thanks to the analysis of deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA – and Hannah’s story will demonstrate why.
Claims by scientists that they had found ‘the secret of life’ were made in a Cambridge pub by Francis Crick and colleagues in 1953, though it was not actually until 1966, two years before Patricia’s death, that boffins claimed to have cracked the biological code that allowed sweeping advances to be made in DNA – though such a crime-shattering breakthrough would have meant nothing to Hannah Martin.
Now 18 years old, Hannah was becoming ever more conscious of her body – although not evidently aware of the attractions it held for the opposite sex. She was not a suspicious or wary young woman, versed in the need to look out for danger or evil, even when neither was apparent. Friends would say she retained a childlike innocence regarding sexual matters, which was odd for one so streetwise in life’s material temptations. More cruelly, her detractors would describe her as simply lacking common sense, which was actually far from the truth. If there was a fault, it was that she was too trusting.
Perhaps this was down to the fact that she had never been particularl
y close to her mother, Jessie – certainly her preference lay with her dad, Malcolm – but at this time she was meeting all the uncertainties that faced her, both physically and mentally, alone. Jessie, long plagued by heart troubles, had died in 1966 at just 41 years old, meeting her Maker never knowing how close her younger daughter had come to beating her into His presence.
Whatever the reality – be it naivety, stupidity or just a sense of wanton adventurism – Hannah would go off to the dancing on her own. In fairness, each time she left home now to catch the Glasgow bus, Malcolm would remind his daughter, ‘Now, Hannah, be careful. Think about the girl who was killed. Don’t take chances and don’t walk the streets on your own.’ The bulk of his advice would go unheeded, so maybe he fell into the trap of complacency; he had become so used to hearing Hannah announce she was off to the Barrowland and might not be home at night that he had been lulled into a false sense of security, knowing where she was headed and that she would find a bed for the night on Landressy Street. Had he been aware of what had gone before, such a morally strict man might not have slept so soundly while his daughter was out.
Many of the friskier or more passionate of the couples leaving the Barrowland Ballroom, among them those content with a one-night stand that might consist of mere exploration or full discovery, would head for Glasgow Green, just a few yards away. This huge park, bordered on the south by the meandering River Clyde and on the north by Bridgeton and the Calton, offered privacy beneath spreading trees or in the shadows of the walls of the People’s Palace, a giant glass-and-brick structure now largely used as a museum.
The Green had eavesdropped on the frolics of young and old for centuries. One guide to the city proclaims:
Probably the most important leisure activity associated with the Green is the Glasgow Fair, which was established in the twelfth century and from the early 1800s held on the Green near the present High Court building. The fair originally included sales of horses, cattle and the hiring of servants. In the nineteenth century, it began to attract amusements, such as theatres, circuses and drinking booths. The area has long been associated with the people’s struggle for reforms and justice. As at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park, the Green became the place to listen to religious and political speakers debating such causes as electoral reform, trade union rights and women’s suffrage. Public executions took place on the Green up until 1865. The women of the east end of the city used the area, including the local wash house and drying green, for washing and bleaching linen. St Mungo baptised Christian converts in the sixth century.
Lovemaking might not be included in the list of officially accepted activities, but it was certainly a prolifically practised one, and still is. Forty years ago, most of the women to be found there were giving their love for free to boyfriends, husbands – not necessarily their own – or in the course of a one-night stand, usually regretted the following morning. Occasionally, a prostitute picked up in the city centre’s red-light area around Blythswood Square might be persuaded to take a taxi ride to perform at the Green. These days, it is Glasgow’s alternative red-light zone, as hookers feel safer there following a series of murders of sex-for-sale women picked up in the city. The resulting police patrols, supplemented by those of council-employed rangers, might not have put a total stop to high jinks on the damp grass but have seriously curtailed the fun, free or otherwise.
And, of course, Glasgow Green has been no stranger to violence. ‘King’ Billy Fullerton, the Protestants’ champion of the 1930s and ’40s, used to dish out early morning hammerings on the Green to challengers, after pacing his bedroom floor throughout the night to work up concentration for the battle ahead. At six in the morning, his pals would call to collect him and march to the battleground to watch King Billy demolish opponents in fist-only fights, then shake hands with them when it was over. When one of his daughters was only 15, she was attacked during a fight at the Barrowland and stabbed in the head. It was said that when police discovered the victim’s identity, they refused to hunt the culprit. Eastender Billy, loved and respected to the last, died just a few years before Patricia was murdered.
Hannah’s self-determined celibacy would have meant it unlikely she would be seen among the consummating and non-consummating couples, either already busily engaged or heading in the direction of the Green. At this time, she avoided the dark tenement blocks of Risk Street and The Dwellings, which held such frightening memories, and looked for a route that would take her through the rows of Georgian mansions overlooking the area, buildings once so magnificent, home to the tobacco barons who made their millions plying between America’s eastern seaboard and the Clyde. By the late 1960s, many of the buildings had sadly gone, too big to heat and maintain; others had been divided up into flats, but their days, too, were numbered. Today the only remaining edifice is the Monteith Hotel, a superbly grandiose structure that retains its aura of superiority.
Whichever route Hannah chose, almost certainly her entry into Landressy Street would have taken her past a building on Main Street that could well have played an infamous but overlooked role in the Bible John story. It housed a business run by a recognised but mostly despised professional man whose nefarious activities had enabled him to buy up other properties in the east end, one of which was a brothel tucked away in a tenement in Dennistoun, a mile away from his base. The existence of this establishment and the name of the brothel keeper were familiar to the police, though, for reasons best known to themselves, they refused to order the owner to close it down. This baffled those living nearby, who constantly and bitterly complained at the brothel’s continued operation. A base such as this for a house of carnality could only attract the kind of people ordinary families regarded as ‘perverts’.
Landressy Street, the vertical of an inverted ‘L’ shape, with McKeith Street as its foot, then largely consisted of ground-floor shops with tenements above, in which lived hundreds of working-class families. The majority of the buildings have now disappeared, but there was a strong community spirit in evidence at the time. Many adults had been born there, as had their own parents, and although many were moving out to settle and start afresh in burgeoning schemes, such as Castlemilk to the south, most had grown up there and gone to school together. Kids played in the streets outside, kicking a ball against the doors of the backyards belonging to the shops, often to the annoyance of storekeepers who were convinced they were about to be burgled; menfolk drank in the same bars in which their fathers had supped and then staggered home drunk on Friday nights; women met in the same corner stores to gossip and complain about the lethargy of the local council in bettering their living conditions or moving them elsewhere. A tragedy for one affected them all. Jemima McDonald, who lived on McKeith Street with her three children, would be testimony to that.
The brothel did not merely attract men during the day, either. Its location gave it an added advantage and at night prostitutes who used it as a base would frequently head to the Barrowland on the lookout for customers, taking the view that if they failed to attract business then there was always the consolation of a dance or two. But those who did ‘lumber a John’ would invariably take their client back to the Dennistoun base, where there was at least a bed. This arrangement meant both a continuous late-night flow of prostitutes and punters and, worse, from the point of view of those unfortunate enough to have to live amid this prurience, the never-ending arrival in the streets of men directed there for the sole purpose of seeking sexual gratification. It was not unknown for an innocent family to have their door rattled by a semi-drunk asking for the brothel, or for decent women to be stopped in the streets and asked if they were ‘looking for business’.
There were, naturally, other brothels in the city that would from time to time be raided and closed. In one particularly infamous episode, the female proprietor, or madam, discovering her premises had been kept under surveillance for several days – during which time male customers had been stopped and made to identify themselves then as
ked if they had handed over money for sexual services – insisted when arrested that the payment was for nothing else but bowls of home-made soup handed out to the men to restore their energy. She ran nothing more than a café, she said, where the waitresses offered a little extra to diners. Her story failed to convince a sheriff, who fined her, but the following day soup was once again being dispensed as though nothing untoward had transpired.
Customers who had visited the Dennistoun brothel once would occasionally, when they again felt the need for the services of the women, simply knock without making a previous appointment and hope one of the girls was available. But such unexpected calls were discouraged. The preferred arrangement was that punters would first visit the business on Main Street to ascertain which, if any, prostitutes were on offer. A telephone call would then be made to the brothel to forewarn them that a customer had requested the services of either a particular female or any woman. If supply met demand, the male would be directed on his way. If not, he might be asked to return to the business in half an hour, by which time a prostitute would almost certainly have been contacted and asked to make her way to Dennistoun. Time, after all, was money.