Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  Sheila Garvie’s version of this brutal bedside murder placed the two men in the murder room and distanced herself from the murder, with some good circumstantial detail. She was woken, she said, some time after 11.30pm, by someone whispering to her to get up. The bedroom light was off but the room was lit from the landing light. She recognised the voice and figure as being those of Brian Tevendale. He took her by the arm out on to the landing and there was another man standing there, a fair-haired man whom she did not know at all. She was hustled into the bathroom and told to get in and stay there. She noticed that ‘he’ (not specified) was carrying a gun. She did not know at that time that it belonged to her husband. She heard the bedroom door closing, and ‘terrible thumping noises’.

  After about five minutes, Tevendale tried the bathroom door. She unlocked it. He said something like ‘You won’t have any more of him to put up with.’ He asked her to stay beside the girls’ door in case they came out. After a while the two men pulled her husband from the bedroom in a sort of groundsheet.

  All three were brought up for trial at the High Court in Aberdeen on November 19th 1968 and they all pleaded Not Guilty. It was a sensational murder trial by reason of the sexual revelations, and it was much enjoyed by those who had never felt a wound. It was noticed that the older generation particularly relished the spectacle of the downfall of younger members of society who had enjoyed a freedom denied to them, and who had come to a sticky end.

  Yet there was intense human misery attached to the proceedings: one woman juror was so affected by the distress of Sheila Garvie’s mother that she fainted and the trial continued with only fourteen in the jury box. At one stage, Max Garvie’s skull was produced in court from a cardboard box, and held aloft with riveting effect.

  Brian Tevendale, unlike his two co-accused, did not give evidence on his own behalf, and he was to be found guilty by unanimous verdict. Sheila Garvie appeared weak and tired, and the case raises questions about evidence given by a person so ‘tranquillised’ by Valium or Librium, new drugs then, that she felt depersonalised, out of herself, with her mouth and throat dry and painful after hours in the witness-box. It must be said, even so, that her evidence as reported was very able and consistent. Would the jury have believed her if she had not dyed her dark hair blonde? Ruth Ellis, convicted of murder in 1955, had also been seen as a ‘brassy blonde’.

  Contemporary commentators at the Garvie trial did not think that her tales of her husband’s cruelty brought her much sympathy. The predicament of the trapped wife was not greatly understood. If she were guilty, as she was found, it was a clever bluff for a woman of her limited background to insist that ‘I felt morally responsible because I had allowed Brian to fall in love with me and had become emotionally involved with him. I felt I had unconsciously provoked him in the emotional state in which he was. I was at a crossroads in my life. I took a decision that night that, whatever happened, I would protect Brian because of what he had done for me.’

  Under Scottish law, those defending her had lodged a pre-trial notice of intent to attack the character of the dead man. As Laurence Dowdall, her solicitor, later commented, this was a two-edged sword because it provided a motive for murder. In fact, it looked more like a lead-up to a defence of provocation! The background would probably have come out in the course of the proceedings, anyway. The ‘attack’ on Max Garvie was to explain the whole constellation of circumstances and to stand against any idea that this was an ordinary eternal triangle and a conspiracy to murder an unwanted husband, retain her standard of living, cash-in insurances, and keep the children. Although Sheila tried to explain that the three doomed last months of freedom with Tevendale after the murder were a nightmare of guilt and terror, this final period must have alienated the jury, especially when a picnic photograph was produced, in which another man was light-heartedly lying on top of her.

  The crunch or turning-point of the trial from Sheila Garvie’s point of view was a section of Trudy Birse’s evidence which was unexpected and certainly did not come up to proof. Trudy, described as a green-eyed feline extravert was, it will be remembered, Max Garvie’s girlfriend, one member of his orchestrated quartet, and she was also a Crown witness. Even so, under the Scottish system of law, Laurence Dowdall was able to interview her before trial – it was quite permissible – and he had not found her hostile to his client. In his ‘Postscript’ to Sheila Garvie’s own story, entitled Marriage to Murder (Chambers, 1980) Laurence Dowdall describes his shock when, in court, she departed from her previous account and damaged his client. Let us use the words of the trial judge, Lord Thomson, on this point:

  There is in the evidence a good deal of doubt as to how much Mrs Garvie said to Mrs Birse after the murder and how much Tevendale said to Mrs Birse and how much was said when both Sheila Garvie and Tevendale were present. If you accept Mrs Birse’s evidence there is evidence that Mrs Garvie said to Mrs Birse something to the effect that she had gone into the room upstairs and told Tevendale and Peters that Max was asleep. If that is true, it is a damning piece of evidence against her.

  Both solicitor and advocate for Sheila Garvie thought that Trudy Birse had been under emotional strain, that she was not a liar, and not a malicious woman. Laurence Dowdall thought that she really did not know what she was saying, and that she was the greatest enigma in the case.

  A point in Sheila Garvie’s defence, upon which she placed much confidence, was her ability to disprove the damning part of Alan Peters’ statement in which he said that she ‘let them in’ from the garage to the farmhouse. The plain meaning of the phrase, presumably, is that without her intercession, they could not have gained access. She said, and her mother confirmed this, that there was no lock on the connecting door, and a joiner was brought to testify that he had fitted a lock to the door in question at a date after the murder. By the time of his actual evidence in court, however, Alan Peters had modulated his previous statement: they went in through the garage and at the end of a corridor leading from the garage into the house they were met by Mrs Garvie. He was unable to say whether or not she was expecting them but she did not seem surprised that they were there.

  Peters, who was only 20 years old, stood up well to cross-examination and he must have struck a chord with the jury when he said that he was afraid that ‘If I didn’t assist [Tevendale] in any way I would get the same’. On those lines, his lawyers had lodged the unusual special defence of coercion by Brian Tevendale. The judge, however, in his summing-up, directed the jury that coercion was simply not open to Peters and that they must disregard it. It had never anyway been decided in Scotland whether coercion could ever be a defence to a charge of murder. Even so, (Lord Thomson told the jury) Peters’ state of mind was still relevant.

  Sheila Garvie had the advantage of a spectacular defence team – Laurence Dowdall had briefed Lionel Daiches, QC – and it was clearly a shock and a disappointment to them when they did not secure an acquittal, although the adverse verdict was only by a majority. Her solicitor suggested that if the jury had had the opportunity to consider their verdict on the same day as silver-tongued Lionel Daiches had addressed them, they would have acquitted, but a weekend lay between his speech on a Friday and the judge’s charge on the following Monday. We might wonder about that. Mr Daiches’ peroration took the form of quotation of the famous passage from John Donne’s Meditations (the first part of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions) – ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main... Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...’ ‘And’, modern Counsel ended, ‘for all of us.’

  In old murder trials it was fully expected of flamboyant defence counsel that there would be appeals to the Bard and snippets from the Classics. William Roughead effortlessly filled his essays with references to Stevenson, Shakespeare, Webster, Galt, Scott, Dickens and Conrad... This seems to be perfectly acceptable as long as
the quotation springs naturally to the mind, and Donne was all the rage in the 1960s, with the ‘no man is an island’ sentiment widely subsumed in thoughts about ‘commitment’. Even if the man on the Clapham omnibus was not privy to the whole text, he certainly knew his filmed Hemingway. However, a discerning Scottish jury might not have appreciated the incongruous connection between so fine a piece of literature and a particularly sordid criminal case, nor the implication that, given a moved notch or two in their circumstances, they would have found themselves in Sheila Garvie’s shoes.

  After ten years in prison, Sheila Garvie was released on parole in September, 1978, and published her book in 1980. Brian Tevendale was released three months later, in December. He was reported as making certain colourful remarks which implicated Sheila Garvie in the actual commission of the crime, but what he said then was not evidence and would be out of place in a book of this nature. Sheila quickly remarried. She had taken over from her aunt and uncle a boarding-house in Aberdeen, and there she met a young Rhodesian, David McLellan. After only eight months, the union ended in ‘violence and bitterness’. She had made another wrong choice. On Christmas Eve, 1981, she married again: her third husband was Charles Burdon Mitchell, a drilling engineer.

  CHAPTER 15

  BIBLE JOHN

  Serial killers should, perhaps, be assigned to a new subcategory of insanity. ‘Sadistic sexual psychopath’ is beginning to seem no longer an adequate diagnosis for the incorrigible desire to kill other human beings. The categories of madness are not necessarily closed. If we could look the killer firmly in the eye and say, ‘You think that it is all right to carry on killing, and therefore you are insane. You are suffering from Serial Killer Psychosis [or whatever] and you must stay locked up because there is no cure for your condition’, then we have cleared the air, and the issue has not been fudged. The offender knows how he stands and how he is viewed by society.

  A serial killer is totally consumed by his intention to kill and kill again. He is not curable. He is not amenable to reason. Remorse is lacking. He is like an alien, programmed with a different agenda from the rest of us. That is why studies like that headed by Andrian Raine of the University of California (v. Daily Telegraph, 14th April 1998) may ultimately be of more value than the art of ‘psychological profiling’. Raine found that a study of 38 murderers indicated that it was possible to be born without a part of the brain involved in creating ‘a sense of conscience’. He described an ‘identifiable biological dysfunction’.

  It is now official that some score or so serial killers walk among us on this island. The lay person instinctively feels that this tribe of outcasts ‘must be mad’ and is puzzled and disappointed by the routine label. It might be thought that if we account them mad, then the concept that they are ‘evil’ is no longer available. We are somehow reluctant to offer them the ‘excuse’ of actual mental illness, of not being able to help themselves. This, however, is what we should recognise, because it means that we acknowledge the dangerous inflexibility of the condition, a madness in its own right, standing with the major psychoses and defined with its own observed symptomatology.

  Some serial killers do develop the symptoms of schizophrenia, anyway. Unless everything that he stated or let slip during one whole evening at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, on October 30th 1969, was deliberately calculated to mislead, Bible John’s conversation and behaviour as he prepared the ground for his third known murder of a young woman was in fact quite abnormal and paranoid in character, so much so that it might have been noticed if he had been in some structured setting, as was widely thought, such as the military or the police. It is possible, but it does not seem very likely, that he was clever and cool enough to plan or improvise a number of clued remarks which he seeded into the conversation with his victim, Helen Puttock, and her observant sister, Jeannie Williams, such as, ‘My father says these places are dens of iniquity. They set fire to this place to get the insurance money, and done it up with the money.’ He prated of ‘adulterous women’ and disapproved of married women frequenting the Barrowland. When asked what he did at the New Year, he said that he did not drink, but prayed. He was an agnostic, though (an inconsistency of sorts) and did not believe in all that religious carry-on.

  The abnormal and inappropriate behaviour occurred when he overreacted and made a scene about a faulty cigarette machine, ranting, asking for the manager, and enquiring who the MP for the area was. (But he showed local geographical knowledge and knew the logistics of getting around Glasgow without a car...) It is a strange thought that he might have knowingly constructed a pious characterisation for himself, and later rejoiced at his given title, Bible John, while the real man behind the mask was nothing like his invention. Jeannie Williams in the taxi with the unobservant driver which bore them away from the Barrowland late at night, saw glimpses of the real man, no longer polite and correct but cold, angry, silent and arrogant.

  Can we, then, see Bible John as he really was, perhaps cleverly inventive of his false persona, strutting about his small back bedroom or obscure bedsitter gloating over his newspaper coverage, his shabby bookcase bursting with the obligatory mental furniture of the serial killer – Nazism, the occult, sadomasochism, true crime, and so on – and organised in pride of place his Barrowland trophies, a handbag and some clothing spirited away from his pleasurable outings? But we must not mock him because he is mad. He carries within his lonely mind the consuming drive to kill – Serial Killer Psychosis in itself – or he is already germinating, or in the throes of, a good old-fashioned schizophrenia, in which latter case, he has been unable to prevent Jeannie Williams from glimpsing the seething delusions and disordered religious thoughts which torment him. Additionally, SKP may merge into schizophrenia during the sequence of the crimes, as appeared to be happening to Ted Bundy in America and to the Yorkshire Ripper, now in Broadmoor.

  There must be a significance in Bible John’s choice of the Barrowland as the place to find his victims. He may simply have felt at home there, not uncomfortable. The very name may have meant something personal to him, such as an image of a wasteland with someone – him, watching himself – trundling a barrow containing a body. His thought content may have been rich and bizarre. The futuristic, bleak, 1930s façade, like some gateway to an imagined Science Fiction Hell, might have attracted him. Or he may simply have thought it more louche than other halls such as the Majestic, especially on Thursday nights for the over-25s, when he knew as well as anyone that married women without their wedding-rings and married men all calling themselves ‘John’ made their way to the Barrowland for illicit encounters.

  Inveigh as he might against adulterous women, it was precisely on a Thursday night that he made two of his catches. Patricia Docker, aged 25, was in fact separated, a nursing auxiliary at Mearnskirk Hospital, and she went to the dancing on Thursday, February 22nd 1968. Helen Puttock, aged 29, was certainly married, and she left her husband baby-sitting when she went with her sister to the Barrowland on Thursday October 30th 1969. The victim in the middle, Jemima Mcdonald, aged 32, was a single mother of three children, and she did go to the Thursday nights, but actually encountered Bible John on Saturday night, August 16th 1969.

  All three young women, brunettes, dressed in the 60s finery of short dresses, with elaborate make-up and hairstyles, were described as vivacious and attractive, but, meaning no unkindness, they did not have film-star good looks and Bible John steered clear of conspicuous blonde bombshells. Presenting himself as of NCO-type, with pinned-on inappropriate good manners, such as pulling out a chair for his dancing partner as if they were at a tea-dance and not a whirling, jiving, bacchic scene, he was (to use an anachronism) a toff to them, and an exciting catch. They were not prostitutes, but ordinary Glasgow girls leading hard lives, just getting by, full of spirit.

  Bible John could easily have picked up prostitutes on the streets or in the bars if that had been his fancy, but he was not like Jack the Ripper with a ‘down on whores’, although we
have a right to postulate that he did not like women. He did not seem to be a married man and he never, incidentally, mentioned a mother during his personal revelations although there seemed to be a sister, which detail he retracted. Perhaps he avoided prostitutes because, unlike Jack the Ripper, he was intent on full sexual congress. His design was rape, if necessary, followed by strangulation with a ligature such as the victim’s tights or one of her stockings. There was something about the lively, flirtatious girls dancing their cares away at the Barrowland that appealed to him, and he went back for more.

  On how many occasions, not always successful, he prowled the ballroom, leaning nonchalantly against a pillar and watching the action, we simply do not know. With his now famous red or sandy hair, cut unfashionably short, especially for a man of his age – somewhere between 25 and 35 – together with a decent suit and half-boots so unfashionable that passing ‘hard lads’ twitted him as he left with his prey on his arm, he was reckless that he stood out from the crowd and quite confident that his semi-professional style would secure a compliant girl. The modus operandi was politely to escort her nearly to her home, a guardian in such dangerous times, and then lure her or persuade her to invite him to a nearby dark corner for some sexual favours. Screams were heard only once.

  It is a very curious fact that all three victims were menstruating at the time when they were killed. To a woman, that seems extra cruel, but that concept would have no reality to Bible John in his madness. It is difficult not to equate his expressed opinions on women with the Mosaic law (Leviticus 15.19) that a menstruating woman is ‘unclean’. Bible John did not ‘preach’ at the two girls in the taxi, nor ‘spout’ long extracts from the Bible, but as he mumbled evasively while trying to preserve a front of normality, he did show familiarity with the text of the Bible. In particular he seemed to refer to a woman being stoned, and to Moses in the bulrushes, and he seemed to have a preoccupation with childhood deprivation and foster homes.