Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  Sophisticated crime-writers like to say that it was a mere coincidence that all three women were in the same physical condition, but it is one of those things that are not proveable, and common-sense does seem to indicate that it is relevant. It is, however, ridiculous to suggest that Bible John with his feral instincts could sense when that was so. Whether or not a Glasgow girl in the swinging sixties would offer that information when it became obvious that some sexual contact might be in view is a different matter. Not that she would necessarily have rejected his advances for that reason, anyway. It must be a valid possibility that he eliminated them because of their condition – that it was a trigger. By this reasoning, on other occasions he could have satisfied himself without committing any crime and spared the girl. The trouble with this thinking is that reports by women of having safely entertained a man met at the Barrowland who resembled the description provided by Jeannie Williams did not come up.

  Nor did another stranger, ‘Castlemilk John’ emerge from the thickets to help Jeannie Williams with the 300 or so identification parades which she so willingly attended. He had been her dancing partner on that last evening and she thought that he was a married man. They had all made up an impromptu foursome and the two men had ample opportunity for conversation, although he was not in the taxi at the end. He told Jeannie that he was a slater or builder from Castlemilk. We may charitably hope that as he read the newspaper over the family breakfast table he reasoned that he did not have anything substantial to add to the search for Bible John, who vanished as mysteriously as Jack the Ripper. There was supposed to have been a last sighting of him at about 2.00am on the following Friday morning, when a dishevelled man with a dirty jacket and a red mark on his cheek was spotted on a night service bus plying along Dumbarton Road, but it has not been made at all clear why he should have been the one.

  No-one could have anything but admiration for the intensity and dedication of the investigation under Detective Superintendent Joe Beattie. It is impossible to think of a clue – and there were many promising leads – which he did not pursue to infinity. As in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, it is now thought that the team was overwhelmed by the cumbersome card-indexes and files which were to be superseded by computer technology. If Bible John had been so disordered in his mind that he had continued to frequent the Barrowland, where it was joked that the police had a formation dance team on the floor, of course he would have been caught. Other unsolved murders in Scotland which followed in 1977 were mooted, but with not much conviction, as his handiwork. Since, notionally, the Barrowland was a vital feature of his insanity and, unhindered, he would have carried on with his work into double figures, it might be that when he was, as it were, locked out of the core of his fantasy, the impulse died. Perhaps.

  Because Joe Beattie did not succeed, he was criticised for relying so heavily on his chief eye-witness but there is no doubt that Jeannie Williams had scrutinised Helen’s partner as closely as if she had almost had a premonition. (And she certainly felt misgivings in the taxi when he was morose and clearly could not wait to get rid of her.) There was the promising matter of his dentition. She observed that his two (middle?) front teeth overlapped slightly and that one tooth, number 4 or 5 in dental terms, was missing on the right upper jaw. Several hundred Glasgow dentists were circulated and over 5,300 men thrown up by this enquiry were interviewed and eliminated. Perhaps a young man with such a gap in his teeth had not been to the dentist for some time, although someone must have extracted the missing tooth. Serial killers do not like being hurt.

  The red or sandy hair cut quite short and rounded at the back seemed like a gift at first and Glasgow hairdressers and barbers – some 450 of them – were questioned in vain. If Bible John had been wearing some kind of false hair, one feels that Jeannie would have spotted it. The author is open to correction, but believes that a man in the 1960s would have had difficulty in obtaining a product which would dye his hair a convincing shade of red or sandy that could be washed out after the dance. It is well known that young men of this hair colouring were collared in the streets by members of the public during the very open investigation. If Bible John chose to stay in Glasgow and lie low, the red hair must have been a problem to him because anyone who knew him, if only the assistant at the corner-shop where he bought staples of food, would immediately have been suspicious if he had suddenly changed his hair colour. For one thing, hair dyeing was much more unusual then than it is now.

  Bible John said in the taxi that he worked in a laboratory, knew the public houses in Yoker, and mentioned that he had plenty of money, but all of this material was regarded from the first as a deliberate lie, and none of it helped. His choice of a laboratory as a respectable job is interesting – it is not the first avocation which would occur to most men out to cut a dash. Perhaps he had some bubbling phials of chemicals in his home or digs and experimented with poisons – that would be a typical serial killer’s hobby. He was a non-smoker, which helped in a negative way when ticking off points in assessing a suspect. Hundreds of men were eliminated: Jeanie Williams was the final arbiter.

  There were some especially tantalising hidden clues in the case. What was the nature of the badge on Bible John’s lapel which he kept fingering and putting his thumb over as if he were trying to conceal it from Jeannie and Castlemilk John? It did not matter if Helen Puttock saw it. It appeared that Bible John had not realised that Helen was ‘with’ Jeannie until it was too late and he had already worked on his prey. The other two victims had been on their own and were happy to leave with him. This may have been the cause of some of his bad behaviour at the cigarette machine and in the taxi before he dropped Jeannie off; he was milling over his mistake and facing up to the fact that this time there were two good eye-witnesses and that his turn at the Barrowland was over. Jeannie just thought that he was angry with her for being in the way. Strangely, she, Jeannie, did not want him to know where she lived, and stopped the taxi accordingly, but Helen was driven on oblivious to her doom. It was after midnight, they were all tired, it was dark in the taxi, whiskies had been taken earlier in the evening at the Trader’s Tavern, Helen had made her choice and judgement had gone. There were signs of a deadly struggle and a chase where Helen had tried to climb a railway embankment. Those who knew her said that she would have put up a fight and used her long finger-nails.

  The presumably assumed name of Helen’s partner, which Jeannie only half heard and did not take in properly – John Templeton or Sempleson or Emerson – might have had some significance. In the cloakroom, Helen told Jeannie some detail about her partner, something about where he lived or worked, but she could not remember what it was although she racked her memory for years. Hypnosis might have been able to retrieve it, but the Crown Office in Edinburgh vetoed the plan which was already in place, with Jeannie willing and Dr Raymond Antebi of Duke Street Hospital, Glasgow, prepared to give it a go.

  There was a curious incident just after the scene over the faulty cigarette machine, when Jeannie saw that Helen’s John was saying something to her which she did not seem to believe because she was shaking her head (or was it a frank proposition?). Then he produced some card or paper, pink, perhaps, from his pocket, and Helen’s attitude changed from a kind of playful incredulity to surprised acceptance. Jeannie tried to get a look at it, but he slipped it back in his pocket, saying, ‘You know what happens to nosy folk’ and tapping the side of his nose in a vulgar gesture. Like the badge, the nature of the card is anyone’s guess but it is the change in Helen’s attitude which is telling. All the girls who frequented the Barrowland carried in their minds – but it was fading now – the knowledge that two of their number had been murdered in that and the previous year and to some, limited it seems, extent, they were on their guard.

  Neither sister, obviously, recognised any likeness between Helen’s partner, as he appeared at the dancing and in the taxi, and the black and white line-drawing prepared after the second murder by an artist, Lennox Paterson, of t
he Glasgow School of Art, which had been shown on television and reproduced in newspapers. There had been no eye-witnesses to the encounter between Bible John and his first victim, Patricia Docker, but two witnesses had been found in the Jemima McDonald case. A boy thought that he had seen her sitting in a public house with a man, while a girl thought that she had seen her sitting on a sofa in the Barrowland with a man who was good looking, and some of whose features she could describe in the most general sense.

  When, however, Jeannie arrived on one of her first visits to the Marine Police Office to be interviewed by Joe Beattie, she saw that first drawing on the wall of the office and said immediately, ‘That’s like him.’ She was taken to see Lennox Paterson and from her impressions he did the famous colour painting, which he later refined, and which was in its turn widely circulated. To the author, this ‘portrait’ has always had the look of the young John Ruskin, Victorian writer and thinker, and that is strange, because Ruskin, too, had peculiar ideas about women, finding their bodies repellent, and being unable to consummate his marriage. But the face of the killer, refined, as it were, by a freak of nature, is only a mask. The mind inside the 60-year-old (or so) face now, years later, its hair grey or metallic-dyed, still feels no remorse, no desire to confess.

  The police should have known that John Irvine McInnes was not the one, when he boasted and laughed in his village of Stonehouse about having been pulled in to identification parades, and was happy to be known locally as Bible John! It is not entirely clear to an outsider why an early suspect eliminated by Joe Beattie, not identified by Jeannie Williams, should have been elevated into a prime suspect in 1995. DS Beattie had retired in 1976, and genetic profiling had been developed in the 1990s. It was thought in the city that a political agenda lay behind the decision to use DNA testing in an attempt to close the Bible John case for all time. If a resounding success could be achieved, then, so the thinking went, a spanking new national DNA databank might be set up at Strathclyde. A stain on Helen Puttock’s clothing had been preserved and it was found to yield DNA. We do not know if the stain was the sole such specimen, but that is the implication. There was then a wide logical jump to apply the matching technique to a suspect, for Joe Beattie’s investigation had eliminated all those first suspected. The old data was put on computer and the name of Mclnnes apparently kept coming up, and so a new enquiry concentrated on him, fuelled perhaps by old hunches and suspicions. Jeannie Williams, who had passed him over, when now shown his Scots Guards photograph, pointed out that his ‘jug ears’ were absolutely wrong. She could not look at him again in the flesh, because he had committed suicide at the age of 41 on April 29th, 1980. Circumstantial evidence included his strict upbringing by parents of the Plymouth Brethren sect, his red hair, and the fact that he was at the Barrowland on the night of the Helen Puttock killing. He had not confessed.

  It is understood that two relatives of John McInnes, a brother and a sister, agreed to have samples taken for DNA analysis and that the match with the Bible John stain was sufficiently close for an exhumation of Mclnnes’ body to be sought. Again, the relatives gave permission. Great distress was undoubtedly caused. The grave was opened on February 1st 1996. Unfortunately, the coffin of the mother who had died aged 91 had first to be uplifted. DNA tests referred to Cambridge University and the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Berlin proved negative. Even if the result had been positive, the authorities may not have realised the abhorrence felt by many people of different disciplines. Going on a fishing expedition, disturbing graves, a profound taboo, especially when relatives are still living, seems to be a novel procedure, like cloning, which needs to be watched.

  There is a view that it is no worse, and in the interests of science and justice, than the exhumation of a body to determine true cause of death upon suspicion, but the cases are not on equal terms. A murder victim cries out from the grave for justice. If no foul play is discovered, no harm has been done. A suspected husband, say, has been vindicated. A murderer disclosed by DNA in his own grave cannot be convicted. The relatives of his victim are partially satisfied by the revealed truth. It is a moral, not a legal justice. But if the grave of an innocent person is disturbed, there is neither legal nor moral satisfaction. Judging from the precedent of the McInnes disaster, the relatives of the person traduced could feel relief but would have preferred the uncertainty of not knowing. Elimination of multiple suspects dead from suicide or natural causes by sampling from grave to grave would clearly be indefensible.

  CHAPTER 16

  JOCK THE RIPPER

  The compulsion to make false confession, to enjoy a fleeting vainglory, be important, a somebody, the focus of attention, is a little more frightening when attached to a pretendant to Jack the Ripper, because a nasty murder or two will often have preceded the claim.

  The most famous Ripper confessor was undoubtedly Dr Thomas Neill Cream, the Lambeth poisoner, who fed strychnine to prostitutes. The legend is that Billington the hangman heard him say, ‘I am Jack the ...’ just as the bolt was drawn. An obscurer case, on the Continent, is that of a Frenchman named Oulie, who ‘called himself Jack the Ripper’ and was condemned to penal servitude for life at the Aveyron Assizes in 1889. He had butchered a shrieking woman in her own room, fled, and jumped into a pond with suicidal intent. Fished out by pursuing gendarmes and put up for trial, he argued in his own defence that the dead woman had ruined him physically for life, and therefore he had a right to his revenge. Sometimes the false confessor is insane and suffers from a delusion that he has actually offended as he insists. There is also a type of severe obsessive-compulsive, who wonders, as the notion preys on him, if he might have done it. Or there is the unsatisfactory case of the befuddled alcoholic who wonders if he might have done it. (As happened to Philip Yale Drew, the actor suspected in 1929 of murdering a tobacconist in Reading.)

  William Henry Bury, the Dundee Ripper, self-confessed Jack, was a known alcoholic, but (the author believes) may well have been an insane alcoholic. He has become of the colourful company of Jack the Ripper suspects, and there has been many a worse candidate. The dates have to be right (as they are here): i.e. he has to be placed in the Metropolis between (arguably) August and November 1888, and decent propinquity to Whitechapel is persuasive, the more so if the suspect has a reason to be on the streets (as here). However, the method of killing and the nature of the rippings have to be an exact match (as here they are not) for the suspect to be declared of classic cut. Also, funnily enough, the mere fact that someone said he was Jack the Ripper somehow makes it the less likely that he was so.

  Not a great deal of material has appeared so far about William Henry Bury, even though there is a piquancy in the concept of Jack removed to Scotland and hanged there, his identity disclaimed by the London Establishment. Euan MacPherson from Montrose announced in the Sunday Mail of January 10th 1988, that he believed that Bury was the Ripper, and that he had completed a book to that effect. A photograph of a young-looking Euan in his sweater, in the mode of Colin Wilson at the time of his The Outsider, one elbow on a fine pile of manuscript, accompanies the feature. Sadly, the book has never appeared (at this time of writing) although it would be received with great interest. A good entry on Bury was included in the Scots Black Kalendar and Donald M Fraser, in Scottish Mysteries (Mercat Press, Edinburgh, 1977) has gone to contemporary sources to produce a fresh and detailed account.

  Bury was born in Wolverhampton in 1859, that landmark year of the publication of On the Origin of Species, but what was Darwin to him? Euan MacPherson, in a taster for his full, promised book, a feature appearing in The Scots Magazine (January 1988) revealed the family history which his research had produced. Bury had an elder brother and sister and, most importantly, his mother became insane when Bury was six months old. She died in Worcester County Asylum – that is ‘Powick’, lately toppled to dust and covered over by estate houses. It was one of the great county asylums, erected out of sheer philanthropism, and sheltered many poor souls, some of who
m yet wander the streets as if this were the Middle Ages, and are now less well received than then. The author visited the site in the summer of 1996 and saw the last long hall turned into a shell, the hills of Malvern showing through cavernous gaps in its tenacious structure. There are no details of the mother’s illness, nor of the father.

  When he was 18 years old, Bury moved to London. In the year of the Ripper, 1888, aged about 29, Bury married, in April, a girl named Ellen Elliott. By then he was already an alcoholic, improvident and violent. Most people imagine Jack the Ripper as a loner, constitutionally wifeless, but the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter William Sutcliffe, is a glaring proof of the exception. Bury’s habitat was Bow, a poor, crowded part of the East End, nothing to do with Bow Bells, Cheapside, and Bow Street, Strand. If not quite contiguous to Whitechapel, it lies only a mile or so, depending on your point of reference, to the broad north-east. If you lived there in 1888, both districts probably felt like much the same territory.

  It is still possible to find in directories the three known streets in which Bury lived. There may have been more: he was certainly a cheat and a bilker. He lodged with an Elizabeth Haynes in Swaton Road (the first matrimonial home); at11 Blackthorn Street; and at 3 Spanby Road. All were within a quarter-mile triangle in Bow. Limehouse Cut, a terrifying canal, ran south-west to the docks. Bury was an employed man, although he was only just employable. He worked as a sand and sawdust seller for James Martin, of Bromley, who also employed Ellen Bury, his wife, as a domestic servant. This cannot be, as given, Bromley, Kent, a salubrious suburb some ten miles southwest of London, but rather Bromley-by-Bow, with its self-explanatory name. It was in Bow, incidentally, that an earlier bogeyman, Spring Heeled Jack, capered up to Bearbinder Cottage, Bearbinder Lane and assaulted Miss Jane Alsop.