On October 31, 1969, a man walking his dog found Helen Puttock, twenty-nine, in the back court of her tenement on Earl Street in Scotstoun, Glasgow. She had been partly stripped, beaten about the face, raped and strangled with one of her own stockings. Grass and weed stains on her feet and shoes showed she had fought hard, and at one point had tried to climb a railway embankment. There was a deep bite mark on her wrist. She had been menstruating, and her killer had placed her sanitary towel under her left armpit. Her handbag was gone.
The evening before, she and her sister Jean Langford had gone to the Barrowland Ballroom in the east end and met two men, both named John. One said he was a slater from Castlemilk; the other was well spoken and would not say where he lived. After more than an hour the four left. Jean's partner walked to George Square for a bus, and Jean, Helen and Helen's partner took a taxi west from Glasgow Cross toward Jean's home in Knightswood, twenty minutes away. In the cab he quoted from the Bible and spoke with contempt of adultery and of married women who went to dance halls. Jean described him as tall and slim, twenty-five to thirty, in a well-cut brown Reid and Taylor suit, with reddish or sandy fair hair neatly rounded at the back, blue-gray eyes, overlapping front teeth, a missing back tooth, a watch on a broad military-style strap and old-fashioned leather half-boots. She thought he gave his surname as Templeton, Sempleson or Emerson. The press called him Bible John.
Police had already been looking at two earlier deaths. On February 23, 1968, the naked body of Patricia Docker, twenty-five, an auxiliary nurse, married and estranged from her husband, with one child, was found in the doorway of a lock-up garage in the lane behind 27 Carmichael Place in Battlefield, a few streets from her home. She had been badly beaten about the face and head and strangled with a strong ligature, possibly a belt. Her clothes, watch and handbag were missing; the bag was later recovered from the River Cart. Her parents thought she had gone dancing at the Majestic, and it took police three days to learn she had been at the Barrowland's over-twenty-fives night.
On Saturday, August 16, 1969, Jemima MacDonald, thirty-one, a mother of three and a regular at the Barrowland, was seen there late in the evening with a slim, well-dressed, well-spoken young man about six feet tall, and was last seen at 12:40 the next morning with him at the entrance to a derelict tenement on Mackeith Street, waving cheerfully to a neighbor. Children were heard talking about a body in the building, and on the Monday her sister, Margaret O'Brien, who had been minding the children, went in herself and found her. She had been beaten and strangled, possibly with her own stockings. Like Docker, she had been menstruating, and her handbag had been taken.
For the first time in a Scottish murder hunt, the Crown Office allowed a composite drawing of a suspect to be published. More than a hundred detectives worked the case full time and took fifty thousand statements, and male and female officers went undercover at the Barrowland until late October 1969, when the owners complained that attendance was collapsing. The picture based on Jean Langford's description became one of the best-known images in British crime.
No one was ever identified. In 1996 Strathclyde Police exhumed John Irvine McInnes, a former Scots Guardsman who had killed himself in 1980 at forty-one and whose employer's business card had been found at the Puttock scene; DNA comparison with semen on the stocking used to strangle her proved inconclusive, the Crown cleared him that July, and in 2005 improved testing disproved the match entirely. Jean Langford had always insisted he was not the man. The convicted killer Peter Tobin was also suggested, notably by the criminologist David Wilson, but Operation Anagram found he was living in Brighton at the time of the last two killings and in custody during another, his DNA did not match, he was five feet six with a distinctive scar, and Jean Langford said he was nothing like the man in the taxi. The police have never conclusively shown that one man killed all three women.