Bible John's Secret Daughter

by David Leslie

  ‘Another man whom she’d known for years saw her at a dance one night and put a note on her car windscreen then told her it was there. She rushed out and found his telephone number written on it. She became totally besotted with the guy, but he wasn’t looking for a relationship, just a woman for the night. It was the old story of him promising to meet her then not turning up.

  ‘None of us knew it at the time but she was ill, constantly moody, depressed, crabby as could be, and it was all made worse by her having no money. I found myself paying bills and settling other debts for her. What hope Hannah had was dying. It was as though her eyes could see only sadness; they had lost the ability to pick out joy. And she was pining for Healy. Someone told her he was being held at Shotts prison in Lanarkshire, just ten miles from her home. Day after day, Hannah would drive there, park in the big prison car park and just stare at the barbed wire and walls, knowing that he was somewhere behind them. They were the strangest vigils you could imagine but doing it made her feel closer to him.

  ‘Sometimes she would take me for a drive past the jail, stopping and pointing and telling me, “I think that’s where John is.” I’d ask, “Where is Mason?” and she would just say, “I don’t know and I don’t give a damn. Maybe he’s dead because I don’t believe he has the bottle to serve out his time and with a bit of luck one of the others will arrange for someone to get him.” She read in a newspaper that one of the hash smugglers had died of a heart attack in prison and she thought it must be Mason, but instead it turned out to be Paul Flynn, who had collapsed in the shower.

  ‘One day she said, “I wish we could get away for a wee while,” and so we arranged to stay in a caravan near Luss. We had no intention of going for nights out or drinking, it was just a trip away. It was around this time that it really became evident she was becoming ill. At night, she would talk and talk, as though she had so much to tell and wanted it all told before it was too late. It was a trip down memory lane for her because Luss had been one of the places where the family used to go in the car for Tea in the Grass. We’d go walking or out for a drive and everywhere seemed to have some significance, some story attached to it.

  ‘She relived those days, when she was too young to know real unhappiness, talking of days out, places she had been with boyfriends. It was like her memories were being awakened, but physically she was losing her appetite, hardly eating, poking at her food.

  ‘Since telling me about the baby, she had never mentioned it again, but now she wanted to talk about her daughter, starting off by going back to being attacked by the man she thought was Bible John, then how Isobel came to be born – how it happened, the one night stand, being sick all over him, wondering later if that might have been Bible John, sex meaning nothing to her, being asked “Are you pregnant?” – and at that she broke down and cried. She said she had kept it from everyone because she was so scared of the shame that would have been piled on her if news of the birth had leaked out. She’d say, “I look at you with your family about you and think that could be me. Maybe Isobel’s got kids of her own.”

  ‘I suggested “Why don’t we go around the adoption agencies and try to find out? They don’t tell you, but they can pass on messages.” She said no: “I have got nothing to offer. If she ever comes looking for me, I’ll welcome her with open arms, but I won’t go looking for her because I could upset her whole life and I don’t want that. We don’t know what she’s been told or anything. Better leave things as they are.”

  ‘Maybe her parents should have been sterner, knowing she was going to the Barrowland during the Bible John era. But there was always a kind of morbid curiosity about her. There was a lot of fear about at the time: many parents wouldn’t let their daughters go, but Hannah almost enjoyed wondering if there would be another victim. She was fascinated, drawn by the sensationalism of it. Don’t get me wrong, she wouldn’t have wanted to be murdered, but it was almost a dare to continue going. She knew she was dicing with danger, but that attitude summed up so much of her life. I used to call her “Hard-hearted Hannah” and yet one of the tragedies was that she was so brilliant with kids. She had an ability to mesmerise them, thrill them with her stories. She would have been such a wonderful mother to Isobel.’

  In June 2001, while Hannah was unburdening her memory, the past was being recalled in the High Court in Glasgow. Since the night in 1978 when little Mary Gallagher had been attacked and brutally murdered, her family had never given up hope that one day they would see justice for her. At the time of her death, a police scientist had cut a sample of the dead girl’s body hair and it had lain in a box locked away in a police-station storeroom with the rest of the evidence. More than 20 years later, following a decision to have another look at unsolved cases from the past, a fragment of DNA was found in semen on the hair.

  The sample matched that of an inmate in Peterhead prison who was nearing the end of a life sentence for other offences against girls. He had denied being Mary’s murderer, but a jury found him guilty and he was jailed for life. Mary’s mother Catherine watched, along with other family members and friends of the dead girl, many of them in tears, as the man was led away back to his cell in the grim Aberdeenshire jail that had in centuries past housed French prisoners of war, knowing he would never ever be freed.

  The sensational case was widely reported that night on television and in the following day’s newspapers. It demonstrated that, even many decades after an offence was committed, thanks to the advances in DNA testing, no criminal was now safe.

  Mary had died in the east end of Glasgow and, as with the violent death of any woman in that part of the world, reference to it brought back thoughts of Bible John. Those same thoughts flashed through the mind of Hannah, as she took her meagre breakfast the next day. She mused, too, about DNA and wondered, ‘Could it have told me who Isobel’s father was?’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  BLOOD ON THE WALLS

  Just as her mother had realised the time had come to leave Graeme Mason, so Isobel knew her marriage was doomed and the only thing left to do was to walk out in the hope of starting afresh. She felt she had given the relationship her best shot, but living with a man she once loved had become a nightmare. Marital break-up is nothing unusual: more than 40 per cent of all unions end in the divorce courts.

  It was a sad ending, but then while she and her husband had been together, there had been plenty of gloom and disaster in the world around them. The fairy-tale life of Diana, Princess of Wales had come to a tragic conclusion in August 1997 when the car in which she was a back-seat passenger crashed in the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel in Paris. Her 15-year marriage to the heir to the throne had ended the previous year and now her life was over too. One-time American football star O.J. Simpson, having been found not guilty of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown, and a friend, was instead ordered that same year by a civil court in America to pay £20 million in damages to their families. The marriage of US President Bill Clinton, however, survived after his affair with Monica Lewinsky was made public.

  And murder and mass killing would always dominate the media. Dr Harold Shipman would opt to take his own life after being found guilty of poisoning 15 elderly patients, although the real figure probably ran into hundreds. Television pictures showing the horror of 11 September as it happened, taking nearly 3,000 lives, were almost too incredible to be believed. In a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands, Libyan Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was sentenced to life after being convicted of blowing up a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie.

  These were mass killers indeed, yet Bible John, with a mere three murders to his credit, would always fascinate, such was the allure of mysterious death to the Scots public. The hunt for him continued to make occasional headlines, although most were for spurious reasons, not least the fact that one of the detectives involved in the inquiry was related to John McInnes, whose body had been exhumed.

  ‘That is common knowledge and no big deal,’ said Joe Beattie, the detective, and most agreed. He was c
onvinced there had been more than one killer involved in the deaths of the three women attributed to the madman. Joe went to his grave in 2000 perhaps wondering if he might meet in the afterlife at least one of the men he had spent so much of his life hunting. The old cop never doubted that if he came face to face with whoever had squeezed the life from Helen Puttock, he would instantly recognise him. ‘I know more about this man than I do some members of my own family,’ he used to say.

  The public never lost interest in the case of Bible John. From time to time, the police would investigate tip-offs that named someone as a killer. Rarely, if ever, did newspapers get wind of these, but invariably the old files would be dragged out by detectives, only for them to discover the name had already been checked out and cleared three decades before. There were approaching 50,000 names in those files, most of them witnesses, dancers who had been to one or other of the halls at the time of the killings. Was the name of the man who attacked Hannah from behind among them? Was Isobel’s father? Was Bible John? Perhaps all three were the same person. It was assumed only one man knew the answer, but did someone else?

  And so the mother and daughter whose paths seemed in so many ways to run parallel began anew the course of the rest of their lives. But while Hannah shunned a new partnership, Isobel would quickly meet someone else. It was hardly surprising: young, single, attractive women are rarely without offers of company. She was hesitant at first about allowing this new friendship to develop, but after a handful of dates realised she had become fond, very fond she would admit to close friends, of her new man.

  As the weeks rolled into months and the bond between them strengthened, she realised she was in love and could only hope that this time it would last. The closure of her marriage had been a traumatic experience, although throughout her adoptive family had as ever been there with support and kindness. They knew, having gone through their own separation and divorce, how she was suffering, feeling alternately guilt and anger, warmth and hate, reliving the good days and bitter that they had not lasted.

  She had planned for a life once more as a single girl, even to the extent of buying her own house – a fortunate move, as it turned out, because her boyfriend was married with children and although separated from his wife needed a place of his own. Eventually, Isobel and her lover settled down in a home he bought for them. But the ghosts of the past were about to enter her life: the murdered women and Bible John, a lost mother and outings drinking tea by the roadside, nights in dance halls and a wedding guitar. These and a hundred other interwoven pieces would begin to slip into place.

  Having committed herself to the new man, Isobel decided to start afresh and so she sold off the majority of the possessions she had built up during her marriage, believing a clean sweep would remove any lingering traces of a relationship she now wished only to forget. The couple warmed to their new home and became as many of the married couples that surrounded them: going out at weekends, enjoying chats with neighbours and calling on their respective families.

  It seemed idyllic and the future looked bright. They had mutual friends and friends of their own, whose companionship they enjoyed. Then a maggot found its way into this rich harvest of love and trust. Isobel suspected her partner had a special woman friend, one he could not and would not discuss with her. ‘I thought everything was all right between us until he started having his mobile phone turned to silent so it would not make a sound when someone called it. At first this did not seem peculiar because he worked much of the time away or late in the evenings and, as I worked unsocial hours too, I just wasn’t used to hearing the sound of his phone. And then he began cooling towards me. When I asked him if he still loved me, instead of pressing my hand and answering “Yes”, he’d look away and mumble something to the effect that there was no need for me to ask.

  ‘To me, it was obvious what was going on and I began to get very suspicious that he was seeing somebody else. Friends who had gone through this sort of experience told me their partners would become very subtle and devious, but he either did not care that I’d find out or he simply didn’t think I’d work out he was being unfaithful. One day, he told me he and some friends from work were going off to Glasgow the following evening to play ten-pin bowling. I asked if the others were taking their wives and girlfriends and he said they were not, that this was just a bunch of guys getting together.

  ‘I asked if a few of us could come and watch, then they could all go off and we would have a girls’ night, but he told me that would spoil the evening. The next night, when he came downstairs to go bowling, he was dressed in his best suit with a collar and tie. I had been ten-pin bowling and I knew that was not how you dressed for it. That night, I went to bed on my own and cried myself to sleep, knowing he was with another woman.

  ‘Two days later, he made another excuse to go out, claiming it was work-related. His expression said it all: he was meeting his new girlfriend again. That night, he came in late and I pretended to be sleeping. I waited until he drifted off, then quietly slipped out of the bed and went to look for his mobile. Normally, he left it in one of his pockets, but it was nowhere to be seen. So I found his car keys, opened up the glove compartment and there was the phone. I was reading through text messages that were so obviously from a woman arranging to meet up with him, giving him intimate promises of wild sex, when I heard a noise behind me and there he stood. He had woken up and followed.

  ‘There was a huge row. We shouted and screamed at one another, making such a din in the middle of the night that the neighbours were woken up and lights went on in the houses around us.

  ‘Eventually, it calmed down and we went to bed. The next morning, he telephoned but when I answered, hoping to receive an apology, he demanded: “What was all that about last night?” I told him to stop treating me like an idiot, to just be upfront and honest with me. Then I heard him tell me he was seeing somebody else. He reminded me I was living in his house and ordered me to quickly find somewhere else to stay. I was devastated.

  ‘A day later, I was off work and, because it had been a really rotten week emotionally, decided to sit down with a couple of bottles of wine. It was the night of one of the Big Brother finals on television. By the time my partner arrived home, I was steaming. By eight, I was pissed. A friend was texting me on my mobile telephone and I was sending messages back to her. Eventually, I was too drunk to type a reply and went into the hall to contact her using the landline phone but, as I did so, he turned the sound down on the television in order to listen to what I was saying. He heard me calling him a few names during the conversation and sprang up, barged in the hall and grabbed the telephone from me.

  ‘It developed into a fight, and as my shoes were lying on the floor I picked one up and battered him with it. It had a wedge-type heel and he must have felt it when I whacked him. There was a lot of pushing and shoving while we struggled and eventually he rang his parents, pleading with them to come to the house. When they arrived, they obviously sided with him because blood is thicker than water.

  ‘But there was lots of blood: his. It was all over the walls and, being a man, he was really milking this situation for all he could. The four of us stood there arguing and shouting. It was getting to the point of no return, so I phoned the police. I phoned the bloody police.

  ‘Two policewomen arrived and spoke to each of us in turn, asking what had happened. An ambulance was called to take my cheating boyfriend to hospital while I was arrested and carted off to a local police station, where, after being made to empty the contents of my handbag, I was locked in a cell while they went off to the hospital to interview him. A couple of hours later, they returned, cautioned me, asked why it had started and what had happened. So I went through the story from day one.

  ‘When I finished I was asked to stand up and they said I was being charged with assault. They then told me that they were entitled to take my fingerprints and DNA. I knew what having fingerprints taken meant, the ends of your fingers were rolled in a pad of ink
and then onto a sheet of paper. Giving the DNA sample was very simple; a small swab was put into my mouth and removed and that was it. I was puzzled why it was necessary but thought nothing more about it. Why should I? I had whacked my boyfriend, but that was all. In any case, it meant my being released and all I wanted was out of there.

  ‘They said he had made it clear he didn’t want me anywhere near the house or anywhere near his work, so that night I stayed with friends.

  ‘My car and all my belongings were at his house, so the next day I tried continuously to get in touch with him to find out when it would be convenient for me to collect them. He would not answer my calls but eventually telephoned the friends I was staying with to say I could get in at a certain time, as long as one of them was with me and I did not touch anything. When we arrived and he opened the door, I saw that the blood splashes were still on the wall. That was for effect, of course; he could have washed them off because he was still there looking sorry for himself but had instead left them for all to see. No doubt he’d had the neighbours in for a look as well.

  ‘My friend went inside, spoke to him and came out with my clothes. That night I went back to see the police because I really did not understand any of what was happening, but all the two policewomen could tell me was that his injury had not been serious.