Latest / Crime Incident / He Quoted Scripture in the Taxi: The Bible John Murders

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He Quoted Scripture in the Taxi: The Bible John Murders · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Between February 1968 and October 1969, three women left the
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: same Glasgow dance hall, the Barrowland Ballroom, and never made
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: it through their own front doors. Each was found within
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: yards of home, and the only real glimpse anyone ever
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: got of the man believed responsible came from a woman
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: who sat beside him in a taxi for 20 minutes
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: and listened to him quote the Bible. A taxi ride
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: is why this case is different from every other unsolved
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: file we have opened together. Most uncaught killers are shadows.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: A shape on a grainy camera. A voice on a
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: phone line. This one has a face. He has a height.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: A haircut. An accent. A suit with a brand name.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: A wristwatch.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Two overlapping front teeth and one missing molar. He has
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: opinions we can quote back at him word for word
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: more than half a century later. What he does not have,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: to this day, is a name that anyone can prove.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: So here is what we are going to do. Over
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: the next while we are going to build him, feature
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: by feature, the way Glasgow's detectives did, one detail surfacing
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: from each crime, until by the end you are looking
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: at the most complete portrait ever assembled of a killer
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: who was never caught. And then I am going to
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: show you why the portrait itself might be the problem.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: But a portrait of him only matters because of them.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: So before the man, the women. Start with the room
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: they all chose. The barrel and ballroom sat on the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: gallow gate, in Glasgow's East End, a working-class palace of
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: a place. its name spelled out in neon stars on
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: the roof. By the late 1960s, Glasgow was a city
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: of shipyards and tenements, of smoke and rain and Friday wages,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: and the dancing was how you got out from under it.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: The Barrowlands Thursday night was famous for a particular reason.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: It was the over-25s night, and it had a reputation
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: as the night when married people went dancing without their
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: wedding rings.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Nobody asked questions on a Thursday. You could be anyone.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Hold on to that, because anonymity was the water this
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: man swam in. Patricia Docker was 25. She was an
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: auxiliary nurse at Mearnskirk Hospital, and she was, in the
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: plainest sense, a young mother doing her best in a
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: stretched thin life. Her husband was a corporal in the
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Royal Air Force, stationed down in England, so Patricia had
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: taken their four-year-old son and moved back in with her
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: parents in Langside. On Thursday, the 22nd of February 1968,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: she left the boy with her mother and father, told
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: them she was going dancing at the Majestic on Hope Street,
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: and went out into the winter dark, One night out,
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: that was the whole plan. A nurse, a mother, one
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: evening of music. For reasons no one ever established, she
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: did not stay at the Majestic. She ended up at
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: the Barrowland, almost certainly because of that over-25's Thursday. And
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: this is where the portrait gets its first stroke. Faint,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: almost nothing. Somewhere in that hall, witnesses later thought, she
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: met a man in his mid-to-late twenties with reddish or
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: light brown hair, and left with him.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: That is it.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: That is all the first crime gives us of him,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: a young man, reddish hair, a silhouette on a dance floor.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: The next morning, a cabinetmaker named Maurice Goodman walked to
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: the lock-up garage where he kept his car, in a
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: lane behind Carmichael Place in Battlefield, and found her. She
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: was lying in the garage doorway, and I will tell
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: you what matters and leave the rest where it belongs.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: She had been beaten and strangled, and she was just
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: a few streets from her parents' house, close enough that
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: she had nearly made it. her handbag was gone. Her
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: clothes were gone and were never found, though police divers
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: later pulled her handbag and a few small belongings from.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: The river cart.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: A neighbor remembered hearing a woman cry out, let me go,
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: twice the night before, and thinking nothing of it. There
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: was a party in a lane that night. Nobody saw anything.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Think about what that tells you about this man, because
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: the detectives did. He attacked her within earshot of a party,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: yards from houses full of people, and walked away so
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: calmly that the night simply closed behind him. The investigation
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: stumbled at the starting line. Her parents believed she had
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: gone to the Majestic, so for three days police canvassed
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: the wrong ballroom entirely. By the time a witness placed
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: her at the Barrowland ten days in, the trail was
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: cold air. Detectives questioned 700 of the city's 1,300 taxi
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: drivers trying to trace how she got home.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: Nothing.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: An anonymous letter arrived from a woman in the north
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: of England who police believed had seen something that mattered.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: They appealed publicly for her to come forward. She never did,
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: and so the file was quietly shelled as what the
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: era assumed it must be, a one-off, a crime of passion,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: a single stroke of a portrait nobody knew they were
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: painting yet. Eighteen months went by, eighteen months in which
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: nothing happened, which is its own kind of clue, and
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: we will come back to it. Jemima MacDonald was thirty-one,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: and everyone knew her at the Barrowland. She was a regular,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: a mother of three from Bridgerton. and her nights out
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: ran on a family system. Her sister Margaret O'Brien minded
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: the children while Jemima danced. On Saturday, the 16th of August, 1969,
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: the system worked the way it always had. Margaret took
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: the kids. Jemima put on her dancing clothes and walked
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: out of McKeith Street toward the music. Now watch the
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: portrait sharpen, because this time there were witnesses who looked properly.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: As midnight approached, several people saw Jemima in the company
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: of a man. and their descriptions agreed with each other
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: in a way that should make the back of your
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: neck prickle. Young, somewhere between 25 and 35. Tall, 6
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: foot to 6 foot 2. Slim, well-dressed. And, the detail
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: everyone repeated, well-spoken, which in the east end of Glasgow
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: in 1969 marked a man out like a lighthouse. His
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: short hair was described as fair, or ginger, or dark
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: with fair streaks, and notice how that rhymes with the
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: reddish-haired silhouette from 18 months earlier. Around half past midnight
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: she left with him, walking in the direction of home.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: At twenty to one, a neighbor saw her standing with
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: the man at the entrance to a derelict tenement, and
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: here is the detail that hurts. She seemed completely unconcerned.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: She waved nonchalantly. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: did not read as danger. He read as a gentleman
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: walking a woman home. On Monday morning, it was Margaret
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: who found her. Her sister had not come home, and
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: by Sunday there were rumors running through the street. Children
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: who had been playing in the empty building and come
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: out talking about what was lying inside. Margaret, fearing exactly
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: what you fear when you have heard a rumor like that,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: walked into the derelict tenement on McKeith Street herself. Jemima
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: was there. She had been beaten and strangled, roughly 30
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: hours earlier, and again the geography is the cruelty. She
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: died a stone's throw from her own children. This time,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: the city of Glasgow police laid the two files side
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: by side and saw the rhyme. Both women had spent
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: their last night at the Barrowland. Both had been beaten,
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: then strangled with a ligature. Both had their handbags taken.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: And there was a third thing the files shared. Something
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: the pathologist noticed, and the detectives kept close. A private
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: signature I am going to state once, carefully, because it
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: matters to the psychology. Both women had been menstruating that night,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: and the killer had known it, and had left evidence
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: at each scene that he wanted the police to understand
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: that he knew. Whatever was driving this man, it was
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: not impulse. It was judgment, some private verdict about women,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: delivered in the dark. And yet, officially, the murders were
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: not yet linked. What did change was the police playbook.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: For the first time in a Scottish murder investigation, a
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: composite drawing of a suspect, the man Jemima was last
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: seen with, was released to the press. Undercover officers, men
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: and women both, were sent into the Barrowland on what
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: they called dance duty, night after night, pretending to flirt
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: and spin while scanning every tall, fair-haired man in the room.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: Picture that for a second, a dance hall full of couples,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: and scattered among them, detectives dancing with each other, watching
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: over each other's shoulders. It ran for weeks, it produced nothing,
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: and the Barrowlands owners complained it was scaring off customers.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: The portrait now had a body, height, build, bearing, a voice,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: but it still had no face. The face arrived on
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: the last night of October 1969, and it arrived because
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: of one woman's memory. Everything you are about to hear,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: every detail that made this case immortal, exists because a
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: sister paid attention. Helen Puttock was 29, a mother of
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: two little boys, married to a soldier named George. She
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: lived on Earl Street in Scottsdale, in Glasgow's West End.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: On the night of Thursday, the 30th of October, she
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: wanted to go dancing with her sister Jean, and George
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: stayed home with the children. There was apparently some reassuring
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: to do, some ordinary marital negotiation about a night out,
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: and Helen's side of it was simple.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: She would be with her sister. She would be fine.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: At the Barrowland, Helen and Jean fell in with two men,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: and by a coincidence that would tangle the case forever,
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: both men were called John. Jean's dance partner was easy
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: to account for. He said he was a Slater from Castlemilk,
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: and he checks out of this story early, catching his
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: bus at George Square. Helen's John was different, and Jean
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: studied him, not because she suspected anything, but because he
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: was worth studying. He was polite, he was well-dressed, in
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: a brown well-cut suit, and Jean even clocked the label,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Reed and Taylor. He was well-spoken. He did not say
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: where he lived. Then the cigarette machine jammed, and the
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: mask moved. Jean had put her money into the embassy
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: machine and got nothing out, an everyday annoyance, worth a shrug.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Ellen's John did not shrug. His politeness snapped into something
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: hot and entitled. He demanded the manager, argued with him aggressively,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: demanded to know who the local member of parliament was,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: as if a stuck cigarette machine were a matter for government.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: And then he turned to the sisters and said something
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Jean never forgot. My father said these places are dens
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: of iniquity. They once set fire to this place to
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: get the insurance money, and did it up with the
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: money they got.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: Dens of iniquity. In a dance hall.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Then he showed Helen some kind of identity card, which
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: seemed to impress her, and when Jean asked to see
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: it too... he pulled it back, tapped the side of
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: his nose, and said, You know what happens to nosy folk?
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: You know what happens to nosy folk? Sit with the
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: temperature of that sentence for a moment. Then get in
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: the taxi, because the three of them did. Helen, Jean,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: and John, heading west from Glasgow Cross. a 20-minute ride
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: toward Jean's home in Knightswood. 20 minutes. That is the
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: entire window in which the most hunted man in Scottish
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: history was ever truly seen. And Jean, sitting in that cab,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: effectively took his portrait. He said he did not drink,
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: that at Hogmanay, the biggest drinking night in the Scottish calendar,
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: he prayed instead. I don't drink at Hogmanay.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: I pray.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: He talked about his upbringing, mentioned things detectives would later
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: chase for years, laboratory work, a family caravan at Irvine,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: a cousin who had hit a hole in one at golf.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: And he told the sisters that he disapproved of married
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: women going to the Barrowland. When they told him they
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: were themselves married, he answered with scripture. You know what
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: happens to the adulterous wife, he said. She gets stoned
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: to death. The Old Testament quoted a small talk, in
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: the back of a Glasgow taxi, to two married women
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: he had just spent the evening dancing with. The press
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: would soon give him his name for exactly this.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: Bible John.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: The taxi stopped in Knightswood. Jean got out. Helen stayed.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: It was her cab too. She was being dropped further on,
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: at home in Scotston, and the door closed.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: And that was the.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Last time Jean ever saw her sister. Early the next morning,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: a man walking his dog behind the tenements on Earl
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Street found Helen. She was beside a drainpipe in the
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: back garden of her own building. Her own clothes, her
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: own back green. I will give you what the record
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: holds by implication where implication is enough.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: She had fought him. fought him hard.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: The ground itself said so, and she had tried to
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: climb the railway embankment behind the flats to get away.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: She had been beaten, subjected to the worst of it,
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: and strangled with one of her own stockings. He had
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: left his signature again. He had left a bite mark.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: On her wrist.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Her handbag was gone, its contents scattered, and days later
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: a man matching his description was reportedly seen on an
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: early morning bus, paying his fare with coins from a
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: red purse like Helen's. And on her clothing there was
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: one more thing, a stain, semen. which the scientists of
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: 1969 could do almost nothing with, but which somebody had
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: the extraordinary foresight to preserve. File that away. It is
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the thread this whole case now hangs by. Now the portrait,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: complete at last, because Jean gave the police everything. A
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: man of 25 to 30, 5 foot 10 to 6 foot,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: slim sandy or reddish fair hair, cut short and rounded
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: neatly at the back. A style so distinct that detectives
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: would show his picture to more than 450 hairdressers. Blue-gray eyes,
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: that brown reed and tailor suit, expensive taste for a
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: young Glasgow man. A wristwatch on a broad military-style leather strap,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: which sent detectives to the armed forces. Unfashionable leather half-boots.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Two front teeth that overlapped, one back tooth missing on
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: the upper right, details so specific that police canvassed the
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: city's dentists, because somewhere, surely, a dental chart matched that mouth.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: And a surname, maybe, half-remembered from the noise of the
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: dance hall. Something like Templeton. Or Sempleson.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: Or Emerson.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: An artist from the Glasgow School of Art turned all
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: of it into a full-color portrait, the first of its
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: kind ever authorized in a Scottish murder case, and that
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: painted face went up all over the city, on newsprint,
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: in shop windows, until half of Glasgow was seeing Bible
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: John on every tram. What followed became the largest manhunt
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Glasgow had ever mounted. More than a hundred detectives, full-time.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Roughly 50,000 statements taken door-to-door. Over 5,000 men questioned in
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: the first year alone. The golf story alone sent officers
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: to hundreds of golf clubs. hunting the cousin with the hole-in-one.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: In June 1970, the case saw the first use of
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: the PhotoFit system in Scotland. And through all of it
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: walked Jean, the only living person who had spent an
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: evening with him, attending identity parade after identity parade, looking
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: into line after line of tall, fair, sharp-dressed men. She
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: would eventually stand through more than 300 parades. 300 times,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: somebody said, this could be him. 300 times she looked,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: and 300 times she said no. That is not failure,
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: by the way. Every no was Jean refusing to hand
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: police the easy answer, refusing to condemn a lookalike just
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: to end her own nightmare. Remember that when we get
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: to what the police later did with her certainty. Because
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: the man never surfaced. The murders simply stopped after Helen.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: And when a killer stops, there are only a few explanations.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: He is dead.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: He is in prison for something else. He has moved away.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Or he was never quite the man you were hunting
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: in the first place. Glasgow has spent over five decades
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: cycling through all four. Here is the part of the
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: story where the portrait starts to work against the truth.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: So listen closely to the wording. Every name you are
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: about to hear is a theory. Not one is a
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: solved case. The first name was John McInnes, a former
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: Scots Guardsman from Stonehouse who had actually been at the
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: Barrowland that final night and stood in an early parade.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: John looked at him and said, no, not him. And
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: she never wavered on that for the rest of her life.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: McInnes died by suicide in 1980. And in 1996... 27
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: years after Helen's murder, the case roared back into the
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: headlines when police exhumed his body from the family plot
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: to compare his DNA against that preserved stain from Helen's clothing.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: The result?
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: No match that would stand. The testing was inconclusive. The
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Crown Office declared there was insufficient evidence, McInnes was formally cleared,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: and the police apologized to a family whose grief had
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: been dug up along with him. Jean had told them
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: all along. The portrait had pointed at a man, and
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: the science pointed away. A second name arrived with its
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: own body count. Peter Tobin, a Scottish serial killer convicted
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: in the 2000s of murdering young women. A man who,
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: it turned out, had met his first wife at the
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Barrowland in 1968 and left Glasgow for Brighton not long after.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: A criminologist, David Wilson, proposed that Tobin was Bible John,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: and the theory was seductive enough that a police operation,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Operation Anagram, examined it. But this attribution belongs to Wilson,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: not to the evidence. Records placed Tobin in Brighton by
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: the later murderers He was inches shorter than the man
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Jean described. His DNA reportedly did not match, and the
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: senior investigator on Anagram said plainly that nothing linked him
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: to the Barrowland killings. Tobin died in prison in 2022,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: guilty of terrible things, but never charged with these. And
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: the portrait is still generating names. In 2024, a historian
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: named Jill Bavin Mizzi published a book advancing a new candidate,
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: a John Templeton, born 1945. And you can hear immediately why.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Templeton is one of the very surnames Jean thought she
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: heard in the dance hall half a century ago. The
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: book was passed to Police Scotland for assessment, but marked
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: the category. This is an author's hypothesis, argued from the archive,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: not a police identification. Other names have come and gone
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the same way. A suspect named by a retired detective,
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: eliminated by DNA. A man traced to the Netherlands, questioned, eliminated.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Even Helen's husband George was formally eliminated by DNA and
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: dental comparisons. The stain that could clear men, over and over,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: has never once closed the case, and by the time
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: modern testing wanted more from it, the sample had degraded
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: too far to give it. Which leaves one final possibility,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the one that unsettles everything you have heard tonight. And
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: I owe it to you because it is the deepest
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: open question in the file. What if the portrait is
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: too good? Some researchers, and reportedly some detectives who reviewed
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: the files in the 1980s, have argued that the case
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: may not be one man at all. 18 months of
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: silence sit between Patricia and Jemima. The crime scenes differ
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: in ways I have spared you. Only in Helen's case
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: does the biblical, moralizing stranger actually appear in a witness account.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: The earlier two men are silhouettes that were folded into
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: him afterward. On that reading, Bible John is partly a
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: real murderer and partly a creation, a composite the press
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: and the police assembled because a city in terror needed a.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Single face to hunt.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: In 2022, a BBC podcast even aired claims that the
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: account of a taxi driver witness had been buried, and
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Police Scotland confirmed the next year that it was assessing
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: what the podcast raised. 57 years on, the case is
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: still officially open, still formally unsolved, still subject to review.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: Patricia Docker's son grew up without her. Jemima McDonald's three
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: children grew up without her. Ellen Pudock's two boys grew
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: up without her. And Jean, the woman who took the
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: only true portrait, kept attending parades and kept saying no,
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: and died in 2010 with the answer still owed to her.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: So here is where the case stands as.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: We leave it.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: No one has ever been charged. The exhumation cleared the
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: favorite suspect. The famous theories have names attached. Wilson's Tobin,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: Bavin Mizzi's Templeton, and the police stand behind neither. What
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: survives is the portrait. The neat rounded haircut. The overlapping teeth.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: The brown suit. The voice saying grace over a city's fear. Somewhere,
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: that mouth belonged to a real man. Either he died young,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: or he grew old quietly. A polite church-going neighbor somewhere.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: The kind of man nobody suspects.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: Which.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: if you think about it, is exactly what he was
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: on the dance floor too. Next time, we leave the
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: dance hall for a case that is this one's mirror image.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: A killer nobody ever saw. No portrait, no witness, no
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: face at all, who was caught anyway, decades later, by
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: a single fragment he never knew he left behind.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: Thank you for listening.