Bible John: Scotland's High-Minded Jack the Ripper

hello everyone welcome back to a brand new episode of the casual criminalist i as always am your casual criminalist also known as your host i definitely don't want to imply that i'm some sort of competent criminalist indeed i just read a script that callum has provided i don't even know what we're talking about today it's going to be a bit of a surprise callum decided not to include a title on this episode i believe it could be about bible john who i believe is kind of the scottish version of of jack the ripper or that could be another episode we've got coming soon cause i gave callum a bunch of ideas and he gave me a bunch of scripts and i i suppose i should have done more preparation for this show but well here we are should we just jump into it today because [Music] open scene opening scene i suppose a smoggy city along the banks of the river clyde one half historic sandstone tenements on quiet leafy lanes the other dilapidated high rises scarred by the effects of economic decline welcome to scotland 1960s glasgow to be specific a city split between the glory of its shipbuilding past and the misery of its contemporary condition i have been to glasgow once when i was a young man i think i must have been about 18 or 19. and i went there as part of a university club and we stayed in the hotel for the club and then for the club's activities and then i was there for one more day one more night until my train left to go home and i stayed in this youth hostel and it was the worst youth hostel that i think i've stayed in i've stayed in some pretty rough ones but this seemed to be more like a place where homeless people might live for a night and i you know i don't want to sound like i don't like homeless people but it was a bit of a weird experience i remember i i was just like what shall i do i didn't really have any money to go out for dinner or drinks or anything so just staying in this hostel and watched that the movie doom on my laptop was around the time doom came out so whenever that was i was young this one-time jewel of imperial britannia had lost its sheen after going through something of a rough patch following the second world war by the latter days of the mid-20th century drugs alcoholism and crime were rampant sectarian gangs roaming the streets at night with knives and straight razors tucked into their waistband because remember in the uk we don't really have guns i mean there's some gun violence but it's really really minimal there's a lot of knife crime though because we might not sheet each other but we sure will stab each other which i'd rather like i'd rather have knives than guns but i guess it's all bad but aside from being one of the most and also this hostel i stayed in it felt like sketchy it i didn't really feel like i was in danger but i'd have felt in danger if i'd have gone walking around outside in the kind of part of town it was in glasgow's i don't know i didn't see a very nice side of glasgow i suppose but aside from being one of the most likely places to get head-butted in all of europe a move charmingly nicknamed the glasgow kiss i didn't even know that it was it was and still is one of the best places to party too this was the swinging 60s after all anyone who didn't fancy getting in a machete fight or developing a taste for heroin could instead pass their evenings in one of the many thriving dancers so what do you fancy doing tonight jeff you want to go uh heroin machete fight dancing dancing sounds good chief among them was the barrowland ballroom a beacon of youth culture on the east side of the city center its iconic neon sign shone technicolor light down upon revelers from all over scotland who came half for the music and half for the seedy reputation that the place had garnered over the years remember that scene from star wars in the dodgy alien cantina i'll let you into a little secret dear viewer i've never seen i i've seen i always say i've never seen star wars but it's not quite true i've seen two star wars i saw one when i was a kid and they were re-running the movies from the 60s or wherever and they're flying through the woods on hoverbikes and then i saw the one that was released a few years ago um with the ball that rolls around i i'm not really into it but i'm a huge star trek nerd i just don't like fantasy and star wars is fantasy let's not even get into that but look 99 of people have probably seen star wars so imagine that dodgy cantina that i myself cannot picture well just imagine that with slightly less comprehensible accents and just probably compared to aliens right i struggle to understand like very thick scottish accents take some getting used to and when the concerned parents of scotland thought the barris couldn't stoop any lower this hub of boozing dancing biting and sleazing became the primary setting for one of the most shockingly violent stories to ever unfold on the streets of this troubled city i'm talking of course about the murders of bible john ah it is bible john i'm glad i guessed it right otherwise well i mean well i already admitted to being fairly crap at my job but uh here we are anyway let's move on the 22nd of february 1968 it was a thursday evening a prime night for those who wanted to get a head start on the weekend by heading out to town or god i guess callum has provided something that i'm supposed to read in a scottish accent going off a dancing oh i don't even know why i try please don't hate me scottish people i'm sorry i'm just not going to try accents anymore uh oh he's even pronounced providing me a uh pronunciation guide gone up there dancing all right as the locals would say if there are any glaswegians listening please excuse the terrible act thank you for apologizing for me callum i already did it i don't read these ahead by the way spoiler alert absolutely nobody on the south side of the city a young nurse named patricia docker was getting ready to join them the south side of glasgow has always had a relatively rough reputation so it's pretty fitting that patricia's neighborhood was literally called battlefield despite actually being one of the nicer parts here she was living on langside place with her mother and father the wilsons who no doubt pestered her over whether she was going where she was going that night and with who she told them she was off to the majestic ballroom but in fact she would never end up making it through those doors on that fateful evening not for any nefarious reasons mind you oh have some patience we'll get to that we sure will catch a criminalist i was designing the thumbnails for some of the earlier episodes today and i was like is that enough blood splatter is that team no such thing as too much more blood splatter because as with you know casual criminals there's going to be some crimes there's going to be some murders it was just because she actually ended up going to the barylands for over 25 nights instead this was probably a pretty common white lie among young glaswegian women yamar and dar were much less likely to let you go have fun in peace if they knew were headed out to the most notorious single spot in the city or rather a spot where people went to act like they were single whether or not that was actually the case this was actually patricia's situation although she was technically separated from her husband and divorce seemed like a foregone conclusion she had recently returned to her glasgow home after a five-year marriage had fallen apart her soon-to-be ex-husband alex was a corporal in the raf and father to their only son who shared his name by 1968 little alex was four years old and left in the care of his grandparents while mom went out on the town patricia doted on her wee boy but at only 25 years old herself she needed a chance to go out and live her own life every now and again as she put on her yellow mini dress slung her gray duffle coat over her shoulders and put on her lipstick and mascara she would have imagined a very different night than the one which was about to unfold a good laugh a few drinks maybe a handsome young guy to dance with and as a hard-working single mother she was duel of that and more and so after giving her wee boy a kiss good night she stepped out into the chilly late winter air and made her way towards the center of town the next time any of her family saw patricia was at the city morgue oh casual christmas we do get morbid quickly don't we laid out on a slab for identification that friday morning a local of battlefields named maurice goodman had walked over to his garage down a lane less than a minute from the wilson's house to find the poor woman naked and dead in the entrance way the officers who responded to goodman's 999 called d.s johnson and d.s mcdonald arrived just after 8am mcdonald later accounted there had been a heavy frost that night we stopped at the car at the overdale street enter the lane the body was lying with the head towards us she was completely naked and there was no sign of her clothing she was lying on her back with her head turned to the right at this stage there was little to go on all the officers could do was cross their fingers and hope for a report of a suspicious person running through the city holding a bundle of women's clothes yeah i mean detecting crime this was the 1960s i guess today they'd be doing you know dna swabs well they could have fingerprinted her and surely there's some like trace evidence on her body they could definitely look into rather than be just like yeah let's go back to the uh i'm not going to do scottish accents again let's go back to the police station i couldn't think of that word for a second police station and have a cup of tea and hope that something falls into our lap or or do some policing guys after a short while the forensic pathologist arrived on the scene okay good good i mean yeah i guess i guess that isn't really their job but they could do some do some policing ducking under the cordon tape and joining the two inspectors their icy breaths merging in the air above the body quickly dr emery ascertained that patricia had been dead for at least a few hours and that her neck showed signs of strangulation possibly by a belt due to the patterns of friction marks left on the skin to make matters worse it seemed as if she was beaten before being murdered and there were signs of sexual assault the post-mortem later confirmed all of this as well as a minor circumstantial detail the significance of which would only become apparent many months later patricia had died on her period yeah that doesn't seem important at all so i'm glad callum threw in like this is going to become relevant i am very curious as to why it could be some like the guy's called bible john the bible is really weird so there could be something about women on their periods in that i'm sure there is if the bible doesn't mention women on their periods multiple times well i would be shocked not super familiar with the bible if you couldn't tell um so i guess there's going to be some sort of weird religion thing going on there just my guess we're going to find out when the ambulance had come to transport poor pat to the mortuary one of ents on board was able to throw the investigators a bone they recognized the victim she had worked as a nurse at means kirk hospital where they could find out her name meaning they were able to make the call to her family on saturday the next step was for detectives to interview the wilsons they had told police that their daughter had been seen wearing a brown handbag a wristwatch and a ring given to her by her grandmother all of which were now missing where had their daughter been going that evening the detective asks well she was headed up to the majestic the ballroom up on hope street and with that the initial investigation was pretty much screwed the detectives went about interviewing the doormen and staff at the complete wrong place which as you could probably guess in yield any case-breaking bombshell so the trail went cold and the murder of this young mother faded into obscurity a minor story in the pages of newspapers filled with a litany of other violent tales i have to say i mean i know it's easy to go and say like oh 2020 hindsight and all that and everything's fine you know everything's easier when you look back on it but if i was those detectives i would feel that if i had hit such a dead end when i'd got to that majestic ballroom i'd be like oh we could go check out the one other ds we could go check out the one that all the kids actually go to rather than the one they tell their parents they're going to especially if they ended up murdered after being sexually assaulted we could try now we've briefly talked about the crime that blighted glasgow at this time but perhaps this is a good time to take a closer look sure the ballrooms had a well-deserved reputation for young lads fighting over pretty girls and hands creeping up skirts in the corners but at the end of the day that would all probably seem pretty tame compared to what goes on in nightclubs nowadays the real danger was on the street yeah and they called them ballrooms ballrooms to me i imagine people have big dresses and men in tails and bow ties dancing around with that their hands up in the air you know like whereas night club today is like i imagine you know cocaine uh the real danger was on the street this was the domain of the ned a term which was popularized around the same time as our story used to refer to small-time football hooligans and street gang members as well as being divided along geographical boundaries these gangs were also divided by religion with a huge influx of irish immigrants throughout the 19th and 20th centuries glasgow had a much larger catholic population than most cities in the historically protestant uk if you're unfamiliar with the significance of protestants and catholics all you need to know is that there's a bloody history between the two spanning centuries in glasgow this primarily manifests in football these the so-called old firm teams of celtic the catholic team and rangers the protestants wow it's like two things i could not care about any less religion and football combined i would be definitely sitting at the sidelines being like i'm not interested in gang violence i want no part of gang violence football or religion like i am well out even today diehard protestants marched through the streets celebrating battles from centuries ago and hardline catholics sing ira anthems at celtic games oh my but all of that is relatively tame compared to the violence of the 1960s neds who were quite happy to pull a blade on anyone who wasn't from the right religion gang or even just housing estate these disaffected youths were even known to hide some heavy-duty weapons like hammers and hatchets in the lining of their linings of their jackets in 1965 alone there were over 850 arrests for carrying offensive weapons like these okay so i know to our american listeners who have probably seen people walking around walmart with ar15s a few axes and knives might sound like child's play yeah it totally is i've been to america a bunch of times and i i i've been to a walmart i went to a walmart once and i was just like walking around getting some groceries oh a machete for three dollars okay and then there's a whole gun section for like hunting and it's like okay this is so weird as a british person i'm sure americans let simon of course i buy an ar-15 when i get my eggs what are you talking about it's very normal but when you're dealing with dozens of slashings cracked skulls and chopped fingertips every week it's kind of a big deal why are they chopping the fingertips that's weird i mean glasgow had a murder rate more than twice as high as london bloody hell for much of the latter 20th century was once dubbed the murder capital of europe that's not a good one it's like there's this big thing in europe you have the european capital of culture which every year a city has chosen it's kind of a big deal and they make the city all nice and like they talk about the tourist attractions it's like european capital of culture it's a little bit different to the murder capital of europe yeah although i feel maybe glasgow has been the european capital for culture at some point times have changed but i don't know i went there ten years ago it's still kind of nasty sorry everybody from glasgow i went to edinburgh that was really nice is there a rivalry between glasgow and engineer i don't even know i feel like in in the uk i don't know like if you're from london what do you feel about people from manchester you definitely feel that from the north but i don't think there's a big like angry rivalry as you can imagine in this sort of climate the body of a young woman turning up in a garage entryway wasn't the biggest shock in the world glasgow is a much nicer place these days but i do have one safe travel tip if you're planning on visiting if someone in the street asks your favorite football team they are not trying to be your friend and whatever you do do not say rangers or celtic that's a coin toss that could end in disaster i'd be like i don't even like football wait what are you talking about this is one thing like people i felt it happened more when i was a kid but you know when you meet someone and they ask you oh you know how are you nice to meet you what do you do in the uk i feel like oh nice to me what do you do what football team do you support and i was always like nobody i don't care and then i just eventually chose one at random just so i could answer the question and not seem like a weirdo because you know as a teenager you just want to fit in be like yeah yeah no i definitely support arsenal they're the best they they kick that ball great the safe move is to tell them you're a wraith rovers fan and go on your way never heard of the ray for overs it doesn't matter nobody's ever been stabbed over the wraith rovers either are they just a made-up team callum i don't even know anyway now you have a better idea of the setting for your of our very own real-life tartan noir drama the lead detectives started by barking up the wrong tree only figuring out that the victim went to the barrel and after their initial public appeal went out and it looks like the case was set to go as cold as the frost on that february morning in battlefield so i guess there's nothing for it rather than worrying ourselves how about we go for a drink it's friday august 15 1969 we paid our for shilling entry fee and we're stepping into the baryland the cabinet smokey room is buzzing with activity hundreds of dancers whirling around under the disco balls or the sound of the band lucky ones cobbled up along the sides that's where we're standing now backs to the wall but we're not coupled up instead we're just clutching our drinks to our chest and trying to buck up the courage to ask someone to dance this feels like you it does it does this feels like uni all over again i'd say it more feels like school dances those were you know with the boys on one side the girls on the other at uni i thought everything was just made a lot easier by the by alcohol being present so we scan around looking for a likely candidate trying to avoid eye contact with anyone looking for a fight it would help if we could head out on our own to the dance floor but i have absolutely zero idea how to foxtrot do you didn't think so callum were really like reeling people in today look at this story we're telling and i'm just breaking the rhythm so the final few songs roll around and we're still glued to the wall starting to feel like the kids who get picked last for last for dodgeball totally i was that kid oh i like football i i feel like i'm talking way too much about football this episode but i was definitely the last person to be picked not because i mean partly because i had no skill whatsoever but i'd also just thought i had no interest in getting involved i'd be like go for it simon i'd be like no i'm good i definitely want to play defense and i'm not going to do a very good job of it let's be honest it's then that we spot a woman standing nearby fresh off the dance floor she's pretty looks in her late twenties early thirties dressed in white with wavy brown hair down to her shoulders she's only standing alone for a few seconds before a guy comes to join her a tall guy about six foot dressed in a blue three-piece suit with a strong glasgow accent over the next few minutes we hear a few snippets of their conversation in the breaks between songs they're chatting about the music the dancing their lives but one thing stands out as strange the guy likes to slip bible quotes into the chat every now and then that's always the charmer we shoot each other a look bible bashing isn't exactly the best pickup strategy try next time you're on tinder you'll see yeah it's not gonna go down well so we start paying more attention to the two of them we're waiting for this nightclub preacher's patter to go down like a lead balloon but wait a minute it's look it looks like it's worked yeah i mean look if you could look you could get away with a lot they're leaning together now heading to the cloak room to collect their coats curveball so that's weird so that's where i went wrong in my uni days not enough fire and brimstone in my pickup lines i should have studied my old testament i don't know about that callum anyway i think it's about time we called it a night you win some you lose some in this scenario we would have been one of quite a few witnesses who woke up a few days later to see this pretty young woman from the barrel and ballroom plastered on the front page of the papers her name was jeremiah mcdonald glasgow native and single mother of three of three and she was dead much like patricia darker 18 months prior she had left her children with her family before heading out for a night to herself jemima's sister margaret was the one trusted to look after her wayne's that's glaswegian for kids by the way wow you learn something new every day there we go when her sister failed to come home on saturday morning margaret was concerned but she still expected jemima to turn up with a wild story sometime later that day but then sunday came then monday and still no sign of her some ominous rumors had begun to i this is like i get the anxiety that a parent might have i remember you know it wasn't 10 years ago 15 years ago that i was a young kid going out i'd be like yeah yeah yeah i get to go out and you know drink too much party with my friends see them the next day and it'd be like yeah i i and i was a boy i and i have a daughter who's very young but i'd be like yeah no i get that that that would make me pretty anxious i'd be like yeah and i remember my mom my stepmom saying like yeah no she she she was saying like yeah get anxious when you guys are out and i was like what what are you talking about don't worry now i get it totally hundred percent get it some ominous rumors began shifting around the housing estate that weekend local boys were heard trading tales of a body in an abandoned tenement don't freak tails guys call the police with three kids in a house crying for their mother these rumors only fueled margaret's anxiety so much so that on monday morning she went to investigate herself walking through what is wrong with you call the police walking through the hallway of the derelict old building treading over smash glass and cigarette butts she found the exact thing she had been dreading her sister lay in the middle of one of the rooms just another discarded thing in this barren and abandoned place dramaia was clearly dead heavily bruised still clothed with her stockings thrown down beside her the medical examiner discovered that one of them had been used to strangle her to death after a horrible ordeal of beatings and rape she was just 32 years old all of this begs the question why the hell didn't those kids tell an adult it took a full 30 hours to get the police on the scene thanks to those youngans laissez-faire attitude towards corpses yeah why is wrong with you if you think that video games are to blame for desensitizing the youth to violence remember that would be another three years before the release of pong that which wasn't violent at all despite the delay the police were actually able to gather quite a significant amount of evidence from the scene including some dna from the stockings i didn't even realize could they do dna back in the day like this i didn't even realize i thought i knew they did some like blood type matching and stuff which was like you know circumstantial but that's cool i mean i guess you can gather the dna and they'd figure maybe this would be useful later anyway on top of that since they knew exactly where jemima had been on the night of her murder they were able to collect a healthy amount of eyewitness reports which placed her in the company of our silver tongued bible lover from before by the way i don't know i'm guessing because it's referred to like as you know scotland's jack the ripper i don't think we i don't think bible john ever got caught i'm not 100 sure and i know callum likes to leave it to the end and he doesn't like to reveal upfront whether this person got caught so even if they know the name they'll often just use their like you know jack the ripper and said the actual person's name i don't think he's ever got caught which is well obviously already terrible but it's going to get worse got a sick script in front of me from the descriptions a photo fit was produced with the image of the killer he was slim-faced a smirking young man with short reddish-brown hair combed neatly to the right a very public manhunt ensued with police releasing the image of their suspect in newspapers for the first time in scottish history whether this was a brilliant idea or a fatal misstep is up a debate because this was the first step in turning the story of a tragic murder into a full-on national nightmare okay i don't know what error they've made but to me it seems like a very that seems like a good idea to release the image to the police so hopefully someone can identify him and he can get caught maybe i'm missing something what could possibly go wrong with that he sees it he gets angry and he kills more people he's gonna kill more people anyway though let's see but despite all of that no significant progress was made in catching the killer the minor media frenzy produced no real leads and the police resorted to staking out the barrowlands with a crack team of undercover dance cops instead and before you even ask i've already trademarked the name undercover dance cops for my upcoming scream play so back off it sounds like it would be like 21 jump street it must have been a pretty strange beat just dancing the night away and waiting for some guy to come chat you up with his best noah impression but it was a short-lived thing at any rate i don't know if you realize but when undercover cops start roaming around a notoriously seedy bar famous for fights in one night stands it tends to kill the vibe so owners started demanding an end to it while some of their colleagues were dancing the night away however the less fortunate investigators at glasgow city police had begun to draw some tentative connections between this case and a similar one from a year before i'm gonna guess it's the one that we covered at the beginning of the episode today one key detail suggested a pivot from a simple murder investigation to a potential serial killing with a recurring motive jemima had been on a period at the time that is a bizarre motive and again bible has something to do with this it's definitely got something to do with the bible probably the old testament duck is the old testament scary and weird the old testament's like angry god 18 months apart two married women attended the same dancehall both of them on their period both how do you he just are you on your period but she's like how do you know uh both found dead in quiet corners of the city beaten and strangled with their handbags missing the theory that these two crimes might have been connected held a small place on the lower corner of the investigative pin board but still considered tentative at best but in october of 1969 one final tragic event would blow that doubt right out of the water and cement the killer's place in infamy for decades to come i'm going to guess that that event is someone else's getting horribly murdered on october 31 1969 at around 9 00 pm oh no it's gonna be two people two sisters entered the traders tab and on kent street in the market area at the back of the barrel and ballroom gian uh jenny langford was the older sister of the two wearing a dark green coat with a shirt and blouse her little sister 29 year old helen pardock sat across from her in a short sleeved black dress normally a pair of women dressed up to the nines would be an unusual sight in the run-down old man's pub but on a friday night like this there are always a few scat around the place loading up on as much alcohol as possible before closing time while waiting for the ballroom to heat up ah yeah pre-drinking would definitely do that because it's expensive to drink in nightclubs so at university we'd uh we'd definitely well we'd drink at home first because it's cheapest to drink at home then we'd go to the pub for a couple and then we'd go to the nightclub later and you'd probably only need one drink because you're probably quite sloshed by the time you get there that's exactly what the sisters sat doing now while chatting about their lives and the men in them earlier that day helen had got into a pretty fierce argument with her husband a military man on leave from his post in germany he wasn't too happy about helen going out on the town with her sister while he was left to look after their two kids if there's one thing you should know about glaswegian women it's that they can be strong-willed so she got her way in the end as 10 o'clock crept up the bomb and rang the bell for last orders young dancers and scowling market traders alike finished their drinks then filtered out into the night air it was a short walk to the paris where the women made their way from the cute cloak room to dance floor as they did so they passed a dire omen posted on the notice board in the hallway alongside flyers and band listings a police sketch of a certain slim-paced man inside the main hall the familiar energy was radiating off the dancefloor and the girls were keen to get stuck in jenny was the first to land a dance partner john from castle milk on the south side he wasn't exactly the best looking guy in the world but he was a good enough talker and a dancer to win her over until closing time helen watched her sister disappear into the crowd but was only left on her own for a few minutes before she was approached herself her lad was also called john because apparently that was the only name allowed for glasgow men born in the 1940s we'll call them castle milk john and handsome john for simplicity i'll let you guess which one is secretly the psychopath it's i know kind of saying like the the the handsome guy is the psychopath because you know i feel like ed bundy is the like typical like okay good looking guy who is also a total psycho and then there's lots of movies like american psycho where the psychopath is good looking like christian bale or whatever but i i reckon like most psychopaths are not good-looking right in in reality they're they're probably really weird uh especially especially like the murdering ones maybe they're like psychopaths i don't think there's a correlation essentially is what i'm saying when the song stopped the two sisters met at the side and introduced their partners handsome john was incredibly well turned out he wore a well-ironed suit and shirt with nicely combed hair this wasn't your usual barrel at barryland's bachelor by any means jenny took a long hard look at this strange young man by her sister's side good enough that she would be able to describe his face in vivid detail over and over in the days months and years to come have you guessed which john is the murderer yet handsome john is bible john yes he is good i'm glad even callum knows we get it but if you have to ask why didn't anyone guest i mean his face was literally hanging on a wanted poster in the hallway for christ's sake well yes or no it wasn't really his face not the face of the man who stood in front of jenny now the photo fit hadn't done his good looks in clean complexion justice his hair was much more red than previously described and at any rate the printouts were in black and white he must have stood five foot ten tall because his mouth was at eye level revealing two overlapping front teeth whenever he spoke closing time rolled around and the group jostled towards the exit stopping at the cigarette machine on the way jenny put her money in to buy a pack but the machine jammed up swallowing her cash this was the first crack in the calm demeanor of handsome john the previously soft-spoken and refined guy snapped he made a show of shouting for a manager and laying into the staff with an over-the-top rage it's probably not a good look also probably had a bit too much to drink or maybe just a psycho at this point castlemilk john decided it had enough this was not a battle he had any interest in fighting while the others went off to queue for a taxi he said his goodbyes and caught the last bus home never to be heard from again meanwhile handsome jon was ranting about how his father called dancehall's dens of iniquity a phrase which was incredibly old-fashioned even back in the 1960s scare [ __ ] he's a bit of a bible lover isn't he you can already tell with the good with the good vibes starting to sour the two sisters stepped into the taxi while this suave young guy held the door then followed them inside the scene we've just witnessed was the exact nightmare imagined by the sister's mother also called jean before they went out into the night she had reminded them about the ballroom killings but helen would just comfort her mum with jokes really who'd tried to do anything with her with sharp nails like these a glasgow girl through and through she had a fighting spirit and wasn't afraid of anyone the evidence at the scene confirmed as much grass stains on the soles of her feet cracked nails tracks in the dirt on a railway embankment from an attempted escape a deep bite mark on her thigh helen had fought the very end but ultimately wasn't able to make it to safety the police arrived on the scene on the 1st of november to find her partially clothed laying next to a drainpipe at the end of the garden of a scots-down flat she had been raped beaten and strangled just like the other victims her handbag was missing and she was found to be on a period at the time of the attack the detectives informed the family and spoke to a distraught jenny the same day despite her raw grief she was able to recount everything about the previous night down to the finest detail this gave them an invaluable foothold in their investigation they knew what the killer looked like how he spoke they even knew the color and pattern of his tie she told investigators about everything which had happened during the tense taxi ride home after johnny boy had calmed down about the cigarette machine he still didn't seem quite right the two women tried to engage him in conversation but he was snappy and short he insisted on heading to jenny's house first to drop her off in 20 minutes it took to get there jenny and helen tried all sorts of avenues to warm up the atmosphere all they could get out of their new companion were a few short remarks about how his cousin had recently scored a hole-in-one at golf how was neither a celtic nor a rangers man but an agnostic a word which was alien and intimidating at the time i was teetotal and prayed rather than drank at new year how he detested married women who went to ballrooms and all of that with a smattering of old testament judgment for flavor perhaps strangest of all was when jenny asked for a cigarette john reached into his pocket and grudgingly produced a half-finished pack of embassies which he had been reluctant to share with him earlier on at this point she was sick of this self-righteous cigarette hoarding by washer and glad to hop out of the taxi as soon as they got near the home now all of these juicy details are the stuff policemen's dreams are made of jenny's statement really hammered home the religious angle which until now had been a minor footnote of seemingly little consequence crucially they were now convinced without a doubt they were dealing with a full-fledged serial killer yeah twice as a coincidence three it's like alright something's up under the guidance of john betty one of glasgow's top detectives at the time jenny actively joined the hunt for the man who killed her sister the police produced a new photo fit for the killer this time made up of one woman's detailed testimony rather than a patchwork assembled from dozens of past half-remembered accounts but there's also another kind of person who thrives on this kind of vivid violent detail journalists the press went wild for the story of the silver-tongued killer and his freshly reworked face was on the front of every paper in scotland one major tabloid ran with the headline the dance hall don juan with murder on his mind that is a very long headline which is far catchier than it had any right being a pretty good line for bible john the musical if anyone is ever tasteless enough to write it let's hope not although i believe they made an american psycho musical which is uh i mean at least that's not based on a real story but that's uh yeah an interesting choice all the details began to emerge the entire city of glasgow let out a collective gasp of terror parents demanded their daughters stay home past sunset thousands of concerned citizens rang the police stations claiming their neighbors or workmates fit the description it was the kind of all-pervading irrational fear that you can surely only understand if you've lived through this kind of thing before and you'll probably know already as a fan of true crime the media don't exactly go out of the way to calm down this kind of hysteria yeah of course not they're going to sell way more papers if you're scared like during covet i've spent way more time like i'm not even into the news i don't read a lot of news it's like during covert it's like i'll look at the news at least once a day just to see what's going on like is everything all right well obviously not but it's uh it's different and it's obviously good for the news websites it's their bread and butter after all here they had a ready-made sensation with the kind of idiosyncratic details that really capture the imagination so the journalists of scotland ran with the story they invented a nickname which virtually everybody in the country will recognize even to this day so what was it the bible bashing ballroom bastard satan's strangler the demon of dancehall well actually the tabloids were a little more tasteful in those days so they went with the comparatively restrained moniker bible john i guess they were tasteful because uh what's his face rupert murdoch hadn't arrived on the scene yet uh rupert murdoch uh and callum leaves me a note here if you'd prefer to omit all swearing change it to the ballroom bible basher and it's like no it's okay we could say bastards before we go any further it's worth saying a word about the holy aspect of this case this was what would eventually capture the terrified imagination of this religiously charged volatile secretarian city after all the idea of a violent misogynist named john justifying himself with the bible was nothing new especially in scotland this is the homeland of john knox the protestant reformist who founded the church of scotland about 500 years ago he wrote a work titled the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women although it sounds like the title of a pinned post on an in-cell internet forum this was actually a deeply prejudiced theological book arguing against female monarchs scotland produced another john of questionable character around the same time john calvin another preacher of the reformation calvin was not a fan of criticism one one of his peers named jacques gruey accused him of hypocrisy johnny boy is said to have had him tortured and executed and his house burned down just for good measure i guess i i'm just realizing i know really very little about the history of scotland it's quite embarrassing i'm like what what happened with who the church of scotland it is i i guess i could make some videos about this and learn something even his roman catholic hating buddies weren't completely safe from this treatment as the spaniard michael cervetis found out when he was tried for heresy and then burned alive the good old days the court decreed that fresh wood would be used to draw the whole affair out as long as possible and agonizing 30 minutes in all i i can't remember where i heard this but i heard that you know if you're being burned to steak you know burned at the stake here's a pro tip apparently alive apparently it's a good idea to take deep breaths because then you'll die of uh smoke poisoning smoke inhalation whatever it's called before the flames get to you which i imagine is preferable so what i'm saying is if you're a sadistic guy named john in scotland who wants to commit some faith-infused misogyny and murder you weren't short of role models the faith has quite a patchy history there dating back too long before the gang wars of ned's or the red cards of old firm derbies criminal profilers believe bible john had appointed himself as a religiously justified judge above the basic worldly law according to his twisted sense of morality he was dishing out well-deserved punishments to the depraved and dirty of the world to him this meant adulterers and women on their periods he was a total psycho after all yeah does the bible have some problem with women on their periods i feel there's that guy who tried living by he lived by the rules of the bible for like a whole year or something crazy and one of the weird rules what's that guy's name he's like a journalist it's a good book and one of the rules was he couldn't sit down on a chair after a woman on her period had sat on the chair it was one of these really straight so obviously like the bible's got some hang-ups about periods apparently richly and so does bible john which leads us to one question which could have potentially cut the pool of suspects in half which side of the sectarian divide did bible john fall on exactly well when asked about his favorite football team in a taxi he claimed that he was neither catholic nor protestant a shame as glasgow was so divided into sectarian boroughs that this information could have really targeted the search regardless things still seem to be going well with all of the eyes of glasgow peeled for a sight of this mysterious murderer the police were optimistic there was a solid chance he would be spotted the moment he set foot outside of wherever he was holed up recovering from his wounds helen had given him a fair few for his trouble most significantly a deep gash underneath one of his eyes which was spotted as he fled the area on a bus a hundred detectives were assigned to the case with fifty thousand statements collected through witnesses and call-ins and a total of a thousand potential suspects were found hoping that one of the minute little physical details would be the key to it all the police interviewed hundreds of barbers dentists and tailors hoping that one of them would be able to give them a name meanwhile the crack team of detective betty and we jenny carried out over 300 identity parades he would first check the teeth after which she would take a good look at the men and score their likelihood out of a hundred but she never got the same feeling of repulsive recognition as when she saw the sketch that the police artist had made from her description as the days and weeks went by investigators failed to identify any highly likely culprits there were too many half-break leads to handle officers even to do drafting in psychics and spiritualists in an attempt to whittle down the possibilities after all the filing cabinets had burst apart and normal admin procedure had become powerless to keep up yeah perfect let's bring in the psychics that'll solve the problem as they have done so many times in the past not really can you tell that i'm a massive skeptic as it looked like all of this hype might fizzle out without a conclusive arrest the police caught a major break a man who bore a striking resemblance to the police sketch had just gotten into a shouting match with a young woman at the barrellands jackpot the idiot had returned to the scene of his crimes i get the feeling this is not what's happened officers arrived to investigate and question the man outside they compared the photo and description with the individual in front of them red hair check well put together check slim place check everything seemed to match up so they cupped him and threw him back in the back of the police wagon right wait wait hang on a minute one of the policemen presumably said this man is innocent well how so his partner must have asked the teeth the teeth are all wrong it clearly says overlapping front teeth these guys are as straight as a hollywood film stars it can't be him i feel like if you want to change your appearance and one of your notable thing are your teeth you might consider getting your teeth changed it's not impossible oh yeah you're totally right the teeth don't match so there's literally no way this could be the culprit despite the fact that he otherwise totally looks like him and was screaming at a woman like a maniac sorry to trouble you sir you're free to go at this point bible john if it really was him must have immediately stopped sweating and tried his hardest to contain his amazement the records don't state what happened to the officers when the news of this close call reached the strathclythe police precinct it reminded one officer of a similar individual he had arrested several months before for getting into a fistfight outside the ballroom the man had given a fake name and a dress at first before changing them later the officers had driven into the hospital to get stitches in his head where again he tried to use his fake name then escaped out of a window into the night despite potentially coming painfully agonizingly close to capture it seemed bible john was done committing fatal indiscretions amid a continuing storm of hearsay which overwhelmed the investigators the trail went cold once again over the following year their gigantic list of names was boiled down to nothing with that bible john became almost an urban legend yeah dude if you were that close to getting go are murderers like addicted to murder like serial killers are they addicted to murder i guess they have to do it right i mean i'm basing this just on people we've covered on this podcast and watching dexter like they have to right and this guy he's just gonna disappear i get the feeling he's coming back also what's cleared me in was there's maybe five pages of the script left with that bible john became almost an urban legend a myth haunting an entire generation of party-goers which parents would recount to bring their daughters home early from nightclubs these same stories were passed down the generations as a warning a murderous ghost which lingered in the imaginations of every scottish parent who ever watched their child walk out the door to their first night on the town and that brings us to the end of today's episode oh and that brings us to the end of today's episode it's a weighty script callum says no i'm only joking i wouldn't leave you without a little closure the story haunted not only the popular imagination but also the entire criminal justice apparatus of scotland which found its eye turned back towards the case time and time again in the following decades that's it he just stops killing or i mean maybe he goes somewhere else to kill or maybe he changes how he does it but wow the hopes of a tidy resolution dwindled thinner and thinner until it seemed like a pipe dream it would be another 14 years until any substantial lead would come along which happened in the form of a phone call in 1983 the man on the line claimed that he'd grown up with bible john in an area of glasgow called cranhill the two had spent plenty of nights down in the barras in the 1960s and he was convinced that his friend was the infamous strangler himself police tracked down the individual to the netherlands but unfortunately they found nothing conclusively linking him to the murders that means that it was either an embarrassing misunderstanding or a pretty intense prank the next time you need a good laugh just call up the police and tell your mate tell them your mate is the zodiac killer no actually don't do that it's highly illegal yes don't do that it's not a good idea you go that's got to be an imprisonable offense right like to send the police on a wild goose chase the amount of money they must waste and also you're kind of setting someone up for maybe a crime the second time the investigation gathered ahead of steam was another 13 years later in 1996. there have always been a suspicion that bible john might be a military man who killed at intervals whenever he returned home to glasgow on leave that's just one reason why x scots guard soldier john mcinnes was of interest to police years ago he had admitted to being at the barrowlands on the night of the third murder after all but they had trouble getting a confession out of him in 1996 though he had been dead for 16 years after committing suicide in 1980. in lieu of words the police took dna samples from the remains using techniques not available in the 1960s on a frosty february morning not unlike the one on which the first bible drawn victim was found they dug into the frozen earth with pneumatic drills and first they removed the body of mcguinness's mother who was buried above him then exhumed the man himself the small sample of dna from the tights collected way back in the 1960s and frozen for posterity was compared to the new sample from his body police were so sure that they'd finally got their guy but the evidence had deteriorated and the results were inconclusive mcinnis was ultimately cleared due to a lack of evidence now i've teased you with a few dead ends but the next one is legit i promise so just stick with me well i mean mcginnis is only set free or set free i mean he killed himself many many years before but he's only been discounted as a suspect because the dna had degraded it sounds you know there's a lot of not substantial uh circumstantial evidence there in 2006 glasgow was shaken by another terrible crime one which sounds like something out of a dan brown book 23 year old student angelica clark was staying in a residence attached to the saint patrick's roman catholic church in the anderson area of the city originally from poland she worked as a cleaner at the church to help fund her studies after going missing for several days a body was found on the 29th of september concealed beneath the concealed beneath the floor of the church he had been badly beaten manically stabbed and raped the last person to have seen her alive was the handyman of the church a 60 year old man named pat mclaughlin who was now missing his face was circulated on national tv which is when investigators discovered that that wasn't real his real name at all he was actually peter tobin a registered sex offender from glasgow who had previously spent over a decade in prison for the violent rape of two sisters by moving home he had changed to drop off the police radar at the end of 2005. they managed to track him down at the hospital in london where he was admitted under another false name i i feel like shouldn't getting a fake identity be harder than this i mean how do you go under a false name for so long surely at some point you know you're getting a job someone's going to ask for some id of some kind even if you're just working at a church or like if you want to get a bank account or do any of this like normal life stuff you need id just okay i mean maybe it's not as hard as i think i could just disappear change my name yeah what's your name john now just john smith now even if you don't know or remember his story there's a chance the name peter tobin still sends a shiver down your spine this is another one of the most recognizable names in the uk serial killer lineup as ah i'm thinking yeah this name is familiar to me as morbidly iconic as ted bundy in these parts and yes i said serial killer because this wasn't the first body which tobin had buried far from it a search of his past homes revealed the missing bodies of a 15 year old and 18 year old buried in his garden in margate oh that's near where i'm from where i'm from that's way down south he was convicted of all of these murders and is currently serving the maximum sentence possible in the uk at salton prison in edinburgh his fellow inmates have claimed that tobin boasted of killing a total of 48 victims over his grisly career i really hope the maximum sentence is until he dies but i get the feeling it's not because it's the uk it's very rare that someone gets sent away forever without the chance of ever getting out now this story is very horrible and depressing but i brought you here for closure not some fresh nightmare fuel so let's bring it all full circle could this killer who was born in glasgow and frequented the ballrooms of the city in the 1960s be the man that we're looking for you only need to take a look at the photo side by side to pique your curiosity the oldest image available of tobin taken in his 20s bears a striking resemblance to the photo fit of bible john not completely the same mind you but these things rarely are yeah i mean it's not going to be a perfect sketch the whole point is it just should be close there was another eerie echo of the bible john murders in tobin's crimes his 18 year old victim diana mcnichol had been hitchhiking back from a music festival with her killer the friend was dropped off first and mcnichol of course was never seen again the young guy later reported that during the trial tobin had told them he was t-total and that he had a cousin who had scored a hole-in-one at golf it was enough to draw the attention of criminologist professor david wilson anyway one of the uk's leading experts on serial killers and their motivations almost exactly 50 years after the first bible john murder he reported on his own independent investigation as part of a three-year effort wilson traveled to glasgow and retraced the steps of the killer filling the dark alleyways of the city with all the grisly details with which he was intimately familiar he noted how carefully the killer had managed the crime scenes to minimize evidence and agreed with the police that he would have needed a lot of local knowledge to pull it off without witnesses there was clearly an element of pride to the killings he thought the way he had laid the bodies out plainly without shame the way he had beat their faces the fact that he had expressed a hatred for married women who went out to find one-night stands all of it suggested a sense of vindication as if he felt he had dealt out the proper punishment for his victim's sins as a roman catholic tobin had a clear interest in religion and his decision to hide clark's body inside the flooring of an actual church was probably his biggest most self-satisfied act of symbolism several times throughout his life he used religious groups as a cover to hide from the police his attitudes to his conventional romances were also very warped and abusive with all three of his ex-wives reporting that he started out as a charming silver-tongued man of first but after marriage he became a sadist and a rapist who terrorized them in their own homes in particular his wrath was greatest when they were on their periods now all of these similarities are very very intriguing but what about some cold hard dates to back up the story luckily those fall nicely into place too tobin lived in chattelston east glasgow in 1968 and would leave the city for work regularly his later crimes showed a habit of fleeing an area to avoid the heat and a penchant for living under false names to avoid detection in 1969 he moved to england and married his first wife where did they meet well that was at the barylands of course this is the guy isn't it i was like the guy who before he was buried underneath his mother which is also weird i guess i don't know um but i thought he could be guilty but this guy really lines up and with that i rest my case or professor wilson's case i suppose i should say i can't take much credit when he asked an investigator close to the tobin aftermath investigation why the police weren't ready to go public with the damning evidence the reply basically amounted to a reluctance to reopen that old can of worms again please come on i know it was a long time ago but there are jobs to be done the ghost of bible john is relatively quiet these days living mostly in the minds of the elderly generation so nobody wants to be the one to bring it fully back to life is that negligence honest doubt or maybe there just isn't enough hard and fast physical evidence to make the lengthy process worthwhile when police funds already stretched as it is tobin himself isn't going to offer any answers that's for sure he has ignored every interview request from professor wilson meaning our story is sadly lacking the climactic showdown which would surely have hollywood knocking on the door but you're surely with me on this one nonetheless right yeah i am calum i am with you i mean if you're not convinced it was tobin i'll give you a million to our nods on the suicidal soldier or the mystery man in amsterdam it's your money to lose although there is one other possibility i suppose okay you see i i mean it could be uh is this last one that there could be multiple people doing these crimes like they were plastered all over the papers so maybe someone is like a copycat killer or something you see i told you as offering you closure because that's what a story like this cries out for if we can't have justice if we can't have safety we demand at least that much a tidy explanation distills a formless fear a suffocating mist which can expand to fill the streets of a whole city into something incomprehensible suddenly the universal terror of your loved ones being harmed is reduced down to something more manageable a sealed off story with a beginning a middle and an end one which you can file away one step removed from everyday reality there aren't always tidy answers to give however in this case that's because the idea that all of the bible john killings were committed by the same person is not accepted at all i knew it some investigators and academics say that police were too quick to assume that that was the case and that the first killing could have been totally unrelated or the final two may have been copycat killings inspired by it when the media gets hold of a story like this it's really hard to tell apart fact from fiction perhaps the public bible john mania warped the investigation itself and forced the police to give some easy answers which weren't entirely backed up by facts at any rate this still doesn't feel like a closed case it's too deeply embedded in the psyche of scotland to ever truly be closed so i suppose the best we can take away from it is a warning to be wary and watchful for bible johns that walk among us i know we like to take a like to look at the dark side of crime here folks but in all seriousness keep safe out there yes i mean i like to make this a little bit light-hearted but we are always talking about horribly brutal murders and often the people don't get caught so uh yeah you know don't go home with any psychopaths okay and if you see a stranger on a night out who might be in trouble could you ever forgive yourself if you saw them in the news the next day keep that in mind and you might well be a hero in the future here on the casual criminalist here's hoping dismembered appendices if you're grinding your teeth in frustration at peter tobin's reluctance to offer any information about his potential past victims you're not alone it is weird that he would say yeah i've killed like 48 people that when someone wants to talk about he was boasting about it when someone wants to talk about it with him he's like nope not interested in talking about it come on you're in prison forever i mean hopefully in 2015 fellow inmate shawn monahan slash tobin with an improvised shiv frustrated with his refusal to reveal where the bodies were buried if they existed at all the attack left a 20 centimeter laceration down his neck and face i hope you'll enjoy me i hope you'll join me in saying ha too bad yeah number two chief inspector betty feels that the military connection was a key angle left explored due to manpower limitations they did make sure to circulate the police sketch around every uk military base at home and abroad however tobin had actually served a short stint in the french foreign legion before deserting number three finally if you've ever felt like people on the street are staring at you count yourself lucky you're not this guy one anonymous glasgow man brought such a close resemblance to the bible john photo fit that the cops were called wherever he went even though he had proved his alibi half a dozen times already the police ended up making him a special for the last time i'm not a murderer pass to save the trouble of booking him over and over that's incredible that's kind of that's so unfortunate if you just happened it'd be like if you just happen to look really a lot like saddam hussein or you know adolf hitler be like i mean adolf hitler just don't grow the moustache and you'll be fine but yeah that's really super unfortunate this has been another long this felt long but uh super interesting episode of the casual criminalist i hope you enjoyed it thank you to callum for putting together the story for this one and thank you for listening or watching however you consume this if you're watching please do give us a like subscribe if you're listening leave us a podcast review that would be awesome and see you next time

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 529,749

Keywords: true crime

Id: DbbCuoGZFrI

Length: 56min 57sec (3417 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021