By Megan Leitch-Dymond
Perhaps the most well-known serial killer combo to emerge from Scotland is William Burke and William Hare. Their actions and identities will live on in Scottish history.
Burke and Hare operated in Edinburgh from 1827 to 1828, at a time when human corpses were in high demand. Only corpses who had died in jail or by suicide were allowed to be dissected in Scotland, and at a time when anatomical research was advancing, the number of available corpses was dwindling. There was an unexpected demand for cadavers, which led to a spike in grave robbery. Families of the recently deceased were required to keep an eye on their loved ones’ graves until the body was sufficiently deteriorated that it was no longer useful.
Burke and Hare, on the other hand, were far more cunning than mere tomb robbers. Rather than waiting for their victims to expire naturally, the two men would murder them and sell the remains to Dr Knox, who would dissect the bodies for medical research.
Tanner’s Close was the name of Hare and his wife’s lodging house in Edinburgh. When Burke became a lodger, they met for the first time. One of the other lodgers died while they were there, and he owed Hare money. Hare was more upset about the financial loss than the death itself, until Burke proposed they sell the body for cash.
They’d perfected their murder technique to make it easier to carry out and less likely to raise suspicion. The practice became known as ‘burking’; they would fill the victim with booze until they passed out, then put them on their back. The victim was detained by one of the men, while the other held the victim’s head back and covered his mouth and nose. After that, the bodies were sold to Dr Knox.
They were apprehended after two residents discovered their most recent body hidden under a bed in one of the rooms. The couple who discovered the body were horrified and attempted to flee to notify the authorities, but they were financially bribed with an offer of £10 every week. They declined and walked away. Soon after, the police arrived and arrested the two men, as well as Burke’s wife and Hare’s mistress.
Hare was offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying against Burke in the criminal case. Burke was later found guilty of the murders of sixteen individuals and sentenced to death by hanging and public dissection.
Bible John is a name which terrorized the people of Glasgow in the late 1960’s. Between February 1968 and October 1969, Bible John patrolled the floors of the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow and targeted the young women who visited there.
Patricia Docker, a twenty-five-year-old woman, attended the Barrowland Ballroom in February 1968, and the next morning her bruised body was discovered metres away from her front door.
In August 1969, thirty-two-year-old Jemima McDonald left her three children at home in the care of her sister Margaret to spend the night dancing at the Ballroom. Jemima’s body was discovered three days later.
Helen Puttock, twenty-nine, and her sister Jean paid a visit to the Barrowlands in October 1969. The next morning, her corpse was discovered in her backyard.
All of the women were raped and strangled with their stockings, and they all left the Ballroom with a man.
Helen’s death provided the crucial lead the authorities had been looking for. Jean and Helen were escorted out of the Ballroom by two men both named John. One John took a cab with the two ladies after the other John abandoned them to take a bus back to Castlemilk. During the journey, John shared his religious beliefs with the two ladies.
Jean was able to provide a description of John to the police, allowing them to finally place a face to the crimes. However, over five-thousand suspects were interviewed and ruled out, as well as over three-hundred identity parades. There was no public response. The police even carried out an undercover operation in the Barrowlands, but were unsuccessful.
Bible John’s exact identity has remained a mystery for over fifty-years, but there have been numerous candidates over the years.
In 1996, sperm samples from Helen’s stockings were compared to the exhumed body of John Irvine McInnes, the main suspect, but the results came back as inconclusive.
There are many theories as to who Bible John truly was, some people believe that it was not a single man who committed all three murders, but rather three different men. Regardless, we may never know the truth.
In August of 1946, Peter Tobin was born in Renfrewshire, a town in the south-west of Glasgow. He was one of eight children and was described as a very rowdy child. By the age of seven, he had been sent to reform school and convicted of a minor offense, resulting in a sentence to a young offender’s institution.
He eventually developed into a bright young man, and found work as a chef in a Glasgow restaurant. He spent his weekends at the Barrowland Ballroom.
When he was twenty-two and she was seventeen, he met his first wife Margaret at the Barrowlands. Their relationship blossomed and began taking her on romantic dates that included long drives along Loch Lomond. He appeared to be the ideal boyfriend.
When they moved in together, Peter’s romantic side vanished and he became violent and cruel. Margaret was raped, beaten, and held captive in her own home on numerous occasions. When Tobin slashed their puppy’s neck to ‘stop it yelping’ and Margaret objected, he beat and raped her at knifepoint. In one case, he used the knife to assault her intimate area, cutting her so deeply that blood was seen leaking through the roof by the neighbor’s below them. Her internal damage was severe enough that she was declared infertile.
They went to Brighton together in 1969, and their marriage ended when he was convicted of forgery and burglary and sentenced to prison. He returned to Brighton after his release in October 1972 and stayed there for the next twenty-years. He remarried three weeks after his release.
His marriage to Sylvia, his second wife, was similar to his marriage to Margaret. They had two children together, but one of them died of lung problems, according to reports. Sylvia eventually escaped to a women’s refuge after Tobin subjected her to a series of ‘simulated stranglings’, which he said was his favored method of sexual stimulation.
In 1989, Tobin married his third wife, Cathy. He was in his early forties and she was sixteen. Daniel was their only child together. Tobin presented himself as a charming and romantic spouse, and their marriage began happily. He soon exposed his actual self. To keep her under control, he would threaten to toss their son down the stairs, and he would frequently bring home young-looking prostitutes and participate in choke play. In March of 1990, Cathy finally left, but she had to leave her two-year-old son behind.
Vicky Hamilton went missing on her way from a weekend with her sister in February 1991. Tobin kidnapped her, drugged her, and then raped her before killing her. Her body was dismembered and buried in the garden behind his house. In 2007, her remains were discovered and some of her skin cells were found on a knife in the loft.
Dinah McNicol vanished while hitchhiking home from a music festival in Hampshire in August 1991. Her body was recovered in 2007 in the same spot as Vicky Hamilton, buried in two garbage bags. Tobin’s fingerprints were detected on the garbage bags.
Tobin and Daniel moved to Havant, England in 1993. Under the guise of babysitting, he used his son to get two fourteen-year-old females into his home. He compelled them at knifepoint to take medication which would knock them unconscious. When he was interrupted by his kid, he switched on the gas and escaped with Daniel. One of them awoke five hours later and was able to call the police.
Tobin, on the other hand, had changed his name to Peter Wilson. He was now a member of a religious community, but after the event with the young girls was broadcast on ‘Crimewatch’, he was ousted and reported to the police, where he was detained shortly after. He pled guilty in 1994 and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
They had no idea he was a serial killer who only wanted to kill more people. He moved to Paisley, Scotland, after being freed in May 2004 and changed his identity to avoid being exposed as a registered sex offender. He found work as a handyman for a church.
In 2006, he raped and murdered twenty-three-year-old Angelika Kluk while posing as ‘Patrick McLaughlin’, a handyman who helped out at St. Patrick’s Church in central Glasgow. She was violently bludgeoned, raped, bound, and stabbed sixteen times in the chest. Her body was then buried beneath the church floor, where it is thought she was still alive. Tobin’s DNA was discovered on a dish cloth shoved in her mouth, and his fingerprints alongside the body; which were both linked to Tobin.
He was finally captured in a London hospital, his semen and Angelika’s DNA stained on his t-shirt. He was found guilty of the rape and murder of Angelika in May 2007 and sentenced to a minimum of twenty-one years in prison.
The DNA in this case was linked to the killings of Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol, and he was found guilty of murder in 2009. The jury took only thirteen minutes to reach a decision, and the trial lasted only three days. Tobin claimed he had killed more than forty people, despite only being convicted of three crimes.
There are many people who think Peter Tobin was Bible John. Because Tobin was in his sixties when he was finally apprehended, it is likely that he had been killing for at least forty years. Tobin resided in the Glasgow area at the same time as the Bible john murders; he was a frequent visitor the Barrowland Ballroom, and even met his first wife there; his appearance was strikingly similar to the police sketch of Bible John; he was a religious man; and when he was imprisoned for burglary and theft, the Bible John murders stopped.
Peter Manuel was born to Scottish parents in New York in 1927. The family had migrated to America in pursuit of a better life, but after failing to find it, they returned to Lancashire, Scotland in 1932.
Peter is claimed to have been ridiculed at school because of his American accent, and it wasn’t long before he turned to crime. He was identified as a petty thief by local police officers when he was ten-years-old, and he was placed in a reform school. Manuel, according to his probation officer, had the worst juvenile criminal record he had ever seen. His crimes progressed from small to aggressive and sexual in nature.
He broke into a woman’s home when he was fifteen-years-old and struck her over the head with a hammer. Over the next year, he committed other sexual assaults and was apprehended and convicted of many of them, receiving a nine-year sentence. After this stint, he was imprisoned for rape once more. He moved on to murder after that.
He killed Anne Knellands, a seventeen-year-old girl, in January 1956. She was reported missing for two days before being discovered in East Kilbride’s woodland area. She’d been raped and bludgeoned to death.
Manuel broke into the Watt family’s Burnside home in September 1956 and shot Marion Watts, Vivienne Watts, and Margaret Brown. Before fleeing, he snatched a few items.
Sydney Dunn worked as a cab driver in Newcastle. He picked up Manuel at the central station in December 1957, and his abandoned car was discovered later that night. Dunn’s body was discovered nearby, having been executed with a bullet to the head.
Manuel pursued, raped, and strangled seventeen-year-old Isabelle Cooke as she walked home from a dance at Uddingston Grammar in December 1957. Her body was discovered nineteen days after her murder in a nearby field.
Manuel went after another family home on January 6th 1958. He broke into the Smart family house and murdered Peter Smart, Doris Smart, and Michael Smart - their ten-year-old son. Six days later, their remains were discovered.
He was detained on January 14th, and his trial began in May. He was convicted of eight murders and sentenced to death by hanging, which was received on July 11th, 1958.
Robert Black was born in Stirling, Scotland, and was adopted when he was a baby. From an early age, he was known as a wild child; he was teased at school for his lack of hygiene, and he retaliated by hitting his classmates. He would also show his genitals to the other children, and experiment with sexuality at home before hitting puberty. He was then placed in a care facility, where he was sexually abused by a male member of staff.
Black got work as a delivery boy for a local butcher in Greenock shortly after leaving the care home. Black said that he began abusing girls in their own homes while working at this position.
Black enticed a little girl from a playground into an old air raid bunker in 1963, where he raped her and nearly strangled her to death. He was accused of the crime, but he was not convicted. Regrettably, the molestations continued.
When he started working as a van driver, delivering poster advertisements across the country, his crimes evolved. He took use of the chance to pick random and out-of-the-way victims. He meticulously planned his abductions, installing dark curtains in the back windows of the van and investing in various disguises.
Jennifer Cardy, nine-years-old at the time, went missing while cycling to a friend’s house in Northern Ireland one afternoon in 1981. Her body was discovered in a lake less than a week later. She’d been raped and drowned.
Susan Maxwell, an eleven-year-old girl, went missing near the England-Scotland border in 1982, and her body was discovered hundreds of miles away.
Caroline Hogg, a five-year-old girl from near Edinburgh, was kidnapped in 1983. He pursued her to a playground, where he led her away. Hundreds of miles away, she was discovered dead.
Sarah Harper, at ten-years-old, left home in 1986 to go to the corner shop in Leeds. She never returned.
Black was apprehended in 1990 after a local postmaster in a Scottish town saw him loading a little girl into his vehicle. He dashed over to the child’s mother, but Black had escaped. However, the van resurfaced in the neighborhood shortly after, prompting the police to take action. The young girl was discovered tied up and hidden inside a sleeping bag in the back of the van, and they were able to free her.
Black was found guilty of kidnapping the young girl and given a life sentence.
Initially, Black attempted to pass this off as a random act, but he was soon linked to a slew of other murders around the United Kingdom. The amount of paperwork accumulated as evidence weighed slightly over twenty-two tonnes, and they were able to place him in the areas of the victims using petrol receipts.
He was found guilty of three murders in May 1994, and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum sentence of thirty-five years.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Three of the five entries carry a conviction figure this archive cannot support, and one is a substantial error. William Burke was tried and convicted of ONE murder, that of Margaret Docherty, and hanged for it in January 1829; the sixteen given here is the number of deaths attributed to Burke and Hare together, which is how this archive carries them both. Hare was never tried at all, having turned King's evidence, and that is the reason the pair are remembered as an injustice as much as a crime. Peter Manuel was convicted of seven murders, not eight; he was charged with eight and acquitted of the killing of Anne Kneilands, and this archive records seven convictions with nine to twelve deaths attributed. Robert Black was convicted of three murders in 1994 as the article says, but he was convicted of a fourth, the killing of Jennifer Cardy, in Northern Ireland in 2011, after this piece was written; the roster carries four. Peter Tobin's three convictions and his claim of more than forty are both as stated. Bible John remains unsolved and this archive files him that way, so John Irvine McInnes, named here, was never charged and the 1996 comparison was inconclusive.