Patricia Docker, twenty-five, was found in a lane off Carmichael Place in Bridgeton in February 1968. Jemima McDonald, thirty-two, was found in a derelict building in Mackeith Street in August 1969. Helen Puttock, twenty-nine, was found in a back court in Earl Street, Scotstoun, in October 1969. All three had spent the evening at the Barrowland Ballroom in the east end, all three were strangled with their own stockings, and all three were menstruating, a detail the investigation made a great deal of.
The name came from Helen Puttock's sister Jeannie, who had shared a taxi with the man and gave the only substantial description there has ever been: young, well dressed, reddish fair hair, softly spoken, who had quoted from the Old Testament and spoken disapprovingly of women who went to dance halls. An artist's impression from her account was circulated across Scotland and became one of the best-known images in British criminal history.
The manhunt was the largest in Scottish history to that date. More than fifty thousand statements were taken and the Barrowland was worked for months.
Nobody was identified. In 1996 the body of a suspect, John McInnes, was exhumed and DNA testing failed to link him. In 2004 Angus Sinclair became the leading candidate, and although he was later convicted of other murders in the period, no evidence has ever connected him to these three. Modern reassessments have also questioned the premise: the three killings may not all be the work of the same man, and Bible John may be a construct assembled by the press and the inquiry from one witness's account of one evening.