by David Leslie
On that occasion, they were looking forward to a night at the Cladda Social Club on Westmoreland Street, in the Govanhill area of Glasgow. These days, it is known as the Up ’n Down Club, but the fare is the same as it was that dreadful night: dancing and music, with a predominantly Irish flavour, and perhaps the chance to meet a young man. As midnight approached, Agnes left the club, evidently planning to hitch a lift back to her aunt’s. It is possible she succeeded; only the driver did not stop when he reached Coatbridge.
The next day, Agnes had not made it home. She never would. On the Sunday morning, a farmer discovered her fully clothed body at Caldercruix, five miles east of Coatbridge. She had been tied up before her killer had launched a frenzied knife attack. Pathologists announced after the post-mortem that they had found 26 knife wounds. There was no trace of her handbag.
The detection teams working in the various localities of the murders had little time or desire to celebrate the onset of a new year. They no doubt fervently made wishes that the killing spree was over; as 1978 went by, they might have begun quietly congratulating themselves that their wishes had been granted.
But with the finishing post – if not an arrest – in sight came news of another violent death. The victim was 17-year-old factory worker Mary Gallagher, who, like Helen Scott, had hopes of becoming a nurse. She had been taking a shortcut through side streets in Springburn, in Glasgow’s east end, to meet friends when the killer struck, dragging her into a tenement close, where she was stripped, raped, strangled with her own trousers, then stabbed and abandoned on nearby wasteland. Scientists who microscopically examined the scene for clues they hoped might lead them to the murderer found tiny semen stains on her body. The traces were carefully stored away. Locals were quizzed and known sex offenders taken in and questioned, but Mary’s killing joined a growing list of unsolved crimes.
Why was it, asked victims of house burglaries and minor violence, that police in Scotland seemed unable to catch petty villains, never mind mass murderers? Perhaps they ought to have sought guidance from officers in the United States, where David Berkowitz, the dreaded Son of Sam suburbs gunman, and Ted Bundy, who killed and gnawed on his victims’ bones, were safely behind bars.
Yet while discontent among the public rumbled on, the list would grow. Anna Kenny’s devoted family had never ceased in their search to find her or given up asking the police how their inquiries into her disappearance were progressing. Eighteen months after her final smile, as she cheerily waved goodbye to those she loved to enjoy a night of innocent fun, Anna’s body was found. Two shepherds discovered human remains at Skipness on Kintyre and dental records confirmed they belonged to Anna. Her killer had taken her 100 miles away. Had he murdered her there, or somewhere else? The body was so badly decomposed it was impossible to tell, but pathology tests indicated she had been tortured, sexually assaulted and strangled. She had been tied up, too. And her handbag was missing.
Ten despicable deaths, then, to investigate in almost exactly ten years from Patricia Docker’s killing in February 1968, through Jemima McDonald, Helen Puttock, Frances Barker, Hilda McAulay, Christine Eadie, Helen Scott, Agnes Cooney, Mary Gallagher and Anna Kenny. Only one investigation, into Frances’s death, could be claimed as solved, but even that was being disputed as a miscarriage of justice. Hannah Martin had narrowly escaped making the total add up to eleven. She surely had links to the first three; she would also have a role to play in the remaining six.
FIFTEEN
CONTINENTAL POSES
When she was eight years old, little Isobel – we’ll give her surname as Martin, in tribute to Hannah – would encounter the first signs of discord between the couple she knew as her mother and father. As is normal for all children, she and her siblings would raise their voices to one another from time to time in shows of temper, frustration or tired tantrums. So when they listened as their parents argued, sometimes hearing a swelling in the timbre of one or the other’s voice, they were not unduly distressed. They were still loved and fed, still had their same friends; there were presents for birthdays and handkerchiefs to wipe away the occasional tear. They reasoned these matters did not affect them, so gave them little if any regard. In innocence, children take everything for granted, forever expecting life to continue on an even keel, uncomplicated by the emotions that disrupt the lives of adults, who make the decisions that lead to change, sometimes subtle, sometimes calamitous. Isobel would not have realised her parents were beginning to fall out of love, but as time bore on she knew their disagreements were getting more serious.
Isobel’s parents were becoming unsettled. This was a time of much change in Scotland, where the dominance of labour-intensive industries was fast being forced to give way to the march of science. Men were being replaced by machines, with trade unions fighting against the flow and thus drowning.
In Isobel’s home, it was her father who seemed more inclined to take a ‘wait and see what the future brings’ policy, while her mother believed they should bow to inevitable change and move on to pastures new. She had seen friends move away, sometimes great distances, and even though these new environments had not always brought success she believed the family should follow.
For whatever reason, Isobel clearly remembers being told one Sunday morning – when the man she knew of, and still refers to with love, as ‘Dad’ was away at his work – that things were not as she had always assumed: that she had been adopted.
‘Adopted? What does that mean?’
‘It means somebody else was your mother.’
‘But you’re my mother.’
‘Yes, but you were born to somebody else who could not keep you.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she had no money and thought she couldn’t give you all the things she would have liked you to have.’
‘Who was she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because nobody told us.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Like you, I expect.’
‘Why did she give me to you?’
‘She didn’t know we would be your mother and father. Nobody told her where you would go or with whom. All she was told was that you would go and live with a family who would love you and look after you.’
‘Did she love me?’
‘I’m sure she did.’
‘Will I see her?’
‘Maybe, when you’re older.’
There were a hundred questions the little girl wanted to ask, but her mother probably felt she had already, by saying anything, said too much.
Isobel remembers her father coming home that day. ‘He had been against us moving somewhere else because he knew, for instance, how much we enjoyed our schools and how close we were to our friends. Mother was very restless, while he thought it was too much of a gamble to go where she wanted to be.
‘When he came home from work, she took him to one side and said she had told me I was adopted. He went off his nut, telling her she had no right and demanding to know why she had said it. She just said it was because she thought it was time for me to know, but his view was that it was too early, that it could have waited till I was older. But it didn’t matter anyway because now it was out and nothing was going to change the fact. It had just come right out of the blue. At the time, I couldn’t work out why my father was making such a big issue of it because, as far as I could see, they were still going to be my parents and nobody knew anything about the other woman.
‘In any case, I didn’t really understand what it was all about. It never really played a big part in my life. Things just went on, for a time anyway, as they had before. I was very happy and the subject wasn’t raised again or talked about. It seemed to me it would never be an issue.’
But it would.
While the trauma of the truth visited and left the mind of Isobel, two others with links to t
hat little corner of Glasgow life were discovering the cruelty of life’s realities. In Stonehouse, John McInnes, the man who poked fun at suggestions he might be Bible John, was finding how little solace a crowded dance floor and a busy bar could bring to a man beset by loneliness. His wife and their two children were gone and his trips to the Barrowland were now few and far between. In the early ’70s, he had been able to sense the gossip behind his back and had become paranoid, convinced each of his dancing partners was a police officer in drag. So his trips to the dance hall had gradually become fewer, leaving him morose and full of self-pity, his hand now more accustomed to holding a glass than the arm of a pretty partner.
Below the dance hall, on the floor of the Barras market, could be found the stall of Edward ‘Wee Eddie’ Cotogno, a man who, but for his appearance, might well have fitted the profile of the dance-land murderer. He had known Thomas Ross Young, by now languishing in jail with no hope of release. Wee Eddie had a variety of daytime jobs, including working as an optical technician and distillery security guard. But at weekends he would leave his Dumbarton home and head for Glasgow to set up his stall selling photographic equipment. It was a lucrative sideline, but his motive in being there was not only to make money; the equipment attracted amateur snappers, among them a fair proportion interested in photographing women in what some would politely describe as ‘Continental poses’, others hardcore pornography. These customers would be encouraged to persuade wives, girlfriends and even relatives to strip off at widower Cotogno’s sordid studio, a dingy attic flat in Dumbarton.
Local businessmen paid handsomely to be photographed with the women, sometimes even in the act of having sex, and Cotogno could double his money by charging the amateurs to click merrily as couples sported on a grimy mattress. One of the ‘models’ most often asked for was a girlfriend of a married friend. Her speciality was to appear fully dressed and to gradually undress while a fur coat protected her modesty. But that too would eventually be draped over the back of a chair.
Sometimes the amateurs would hang about Cotogno’s stall before heading off for a few drinks and then making for the Barrowland, where, with luck, they might score with a not-too-particular woman who would agree to meet up the following day to have a portrait taken.
One day in July 1979, Wee Eddie told a family member he had a meeting with an acquaintance. Hours afterwards a policeman on early morning beat duty spotted smoke coming from the flat. He managed to force his way in but would often wish he had not. Inside, lying on the mattress, now blood-soaked, lay Cotogno’s bludgeoned body. On top and around it were scores of photographs of a naked woman. The detectives would quickly track her down, but finding the killer, or killers, proved beyond them.
The murder would enter the files as one more unsolved crime. Had Eddie been a lawyer or politician, then the degree of effort made to discover who had taken his life might have been more noteworthy, but he was just a sad old pervert with nothing much to lose. The photographs, samples of Eddie’s hair and his clothes, including a sweat-soaked shirt, would be kept and stored away. His customers faced awkward knocks on their doors and difficult questions, but none had committed an offence and for a quarter of a century Eddie would be filed and forgotten.
SIXTEEN
THE GIRL WITH RED HAIR
Hannah was 28 when Isobel discovered she had been adopted. It was an age by which the majority of the friends with whom Hannah had grown up were married with families. Of course she too had a family, but one she could not talk of. Some of these friends were on their second spouse and now if they accompanied her on a girls’ night out, instead of asking the permission of their parents, had to consult husbands or boyfriends and arrange babysitters.
By 1978, however, the dance craze of years earlier, when Glasgow could offer 11 ballrooms – more even than London – and 64 other dance halls, had slowed from a quick to a slow foxtrot and now almost to a stop. Where once the girls had twirled around the floor, now they sat at home, feet up, watching others do it on television, and the hall owners realised there was more money to be made by laying on rock concerts and covering the dance floor with seats rather than French polish. Bums rather than boots now brought in the money.
Occasionally, a big-band leader would drop by with his entourage, but the days when strangers locked eyes across a crowded room and fell in love were largely in the past. Hannah was still being asked out, though the memory of being cruelly jilted remained bitter. How, she would continually ask herself, could she be sure the nightmare of 1969 would not happen a second time? She knew the answer, of course, and it lay in her own hands: it was never to become so involved that she could not walk away in an instant. Love ’em and leave ’em, she told herself. Maybe that was a recipe for a relationship built on distrust, but she already carried one torch that would not go out and did not want to fall in love and be hurt again.
It was years after the birth of Isobel before Hannah began a serious relationship. It was one for which her friends more than her had high hopes of a permanent match; nevertheless, as with previous liaisons, she set out to get as much from it as she could, in every sense. The man who began regularly knocking on the door of the Martin household was a divorcee, who we’ll call ‘Arthur’. They would become lovers, as would most of her boyfriends, but also good friends, often the key to genuine happiness.
‘Hannah never paid a lot of attention to what a man looked like, which was probably just as well,’ said her old friend. ‘Some of them would have struggled to get a rosette at Crufts dog show. If a man wanted to impress her, then he needed to show her a good time. Arthur got the message. They were forever out together – dinners, concerts, drinks – but she loved going to Shawfield, the greyhound racing stadium in the east end of Glasgow, because Arthur wanted to impress and in his book the way to do that was by showing off.
‘So he would give her lavish amounts of money with which to bet. If her gamble won, great; if not, then there was more cash where the last lot came from. This, frankly, was the attraction to Hannah: the money and the places he could take her. It was as near to buying affection as you could get and Hannah went along with it. She used him: used him to get money; used him to buy her clothes, to take her places she wanted to go. Maybe some might have criticised her for it, but after what others had put her through she was entitled to ask herself, “What do I want?” and then go for it.
‘She really liked this guy and let her hopes be built up, although she never loved him. But nothing happened and it just fizzled out. This time she might have been disappointed but she wasn’t heartbroken.’
At the time this affair was in its opening sequences, another was coming to a tragic end. John McInnes had been brought up in a strictly religious Brethren family in which his mother Elizabeth had made it plain to him and her other children, Hector and Netta, that sex and drink were the tools of the Devil. That he liked to drink and dance, idle time away in bars playing pub games, gamble, visit the occasional brothel and steal was totally at odds with how he had been raised. Yet while he was no angel, he would never lose the love of his family, whose forgiveness did them credit. Like Hannah’s mother, he had known the cutting grief of a baby’s death: he and Ella, a nurse when they married in 1964, had a son and daughter, but they had lost another child at birth and the memory hurt.
As in any village, there are those who will believe anything for no other reason than that it gives them something to talk about; so it was with his claims to be top of the list of police suspects in the Bible John investigation. ‘I am too clever for the police,’ he told one local. ‘They think I don’t know, but they follow me everywhere, hiding around corners and constantly checking up on where I go. I’ve waltzed with more cops than the star turn at a policeman’s ball. They used to hand out cards at the Barrowland to men they’d checked out and decided were in the clear which said, “I’m not Bible John”, but they wouldn’t give one to me.’
The truth was that had police a shred of evidence on which to tak
e McInnes into custody, they would have done so. No senior officer would risk his job and pension by letting a triple-murder suspect run free in the hope of tripping himself up. So his tales made him a local personality but, as time went by and he was still free, people began doubting his claims to be a suspect and his reputation as a minor celebrity faded. With no wife, no status and no prospects, depression took over. There were stories around Stonehouse that he had tried to kill himself.
Maybe they had been just that, stories, but what happened in 1980 was no gossip’s tale-telling. McInnes climbed into the attic of his mother’s house, slashed his arm and bled to death. He was 41. He was interred in the village cemetery alongside another family member, with room left in the tomb for his mother to eventually join him there. Maybe, like Hannah Martin, Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock, he had become a victim of Bible John.
John and Ella McInnes had divorced in 1972. Ten years later, as Scots servicemen put their lives on the line in the Falklands War, another marriage came to an end. Isobel’s parents had to break the news to her that they were splitting up. One parent moved out of the family home and the other remained, with Isobel. Often adults are more traumatised by the ending of a marriage than children, putting too much emphasis on the effect of a divorce on youngsters. Certainly Isobel seemed to be relatively unaffected.
‘I was very happy, even though a lot of things were going on around me that maybe the grown-ups thought would cause me upset. But the parent with whom I remained was as kind and loving as anyone could ask for. I was no different from any other schoolgirl, sometimes going out of my way to seek attention. But I don’t recall ever feeling I was missing out or wanting for anything because my mother and father no longer lived together, and the fact that I had been adopted was never raised or considered relevant. Frankly, even after my mother and father split up, I still looked on them both as my parents and there was no reason to do otherwise. Some of my friends had come from broken homes so being adopted didn’t make me a different person.’