The jury took just 13 minutes to deliver a unanimous verdict of guilty. The judge, Mr Justice Calvert-Smith, told Tobin, ‘This is the third time you have stood in the dock for murder. On all three occasions, the evidence against you was overwhelming. Yet even now you refuse to come to terms with your guilt.’ Handing down a third life sentence, the judge said he should never be released.
Ian McNicol was in court to hear the verdict and showed no emotion. He was joined in the public gallery by Michael Hamilton.
Outside the court, Dinah’s half-sister Sara Tizard said, ‘After all these years, we at last know the truth and justice has prevailed. We would like to put the trial behind us and remember Dinah as the unique and inspiring daughter and sister that she was.’
DS Tim Wills of Essex Police, who oversaw the investigation in the back garden, said, ‘Peter Tobin I can only describe as pure evil. He has shown no remorse for killing Dinah or any of the other women he has been convicted of killing.’
DS David Swindle of Strathclyde Police, who set up Operation Anagram, said, ‘Peter Tobin has now been found guilty for the brutal murders of three young women. Who knows if he has killed others? No stone will be left unturned and every single piece of information gathered will be investigated by forces throughout the UK to establish if he was responsible for any other crimes.’
When he was convicted of the murder of Vicky Hamilton, Tobin boasted to a prison psychiatrist that he had killed 48 women, then taunted, ‘Prove it.’
What had driven Tobin to such hatred of women is not clear. There has been speculation that the menstrual cycle somehow angered him. This was also true of ‘Bible John’, the nickname given to the serial killer who murdered three women in Glasgow in the 1960s. He has never been caught or identified and, as late as December 2004, the Scottish police were still actively investigating the case, as many experts on serial killing believe that Bible John and Peter Tobin are one and the same.
Bible John’s first victim was 25-year-old nurse Patricia Docker. On the evening of 22 February 1968, she decided that she needed a night out. Her husband, a corporal in the RAF, was stationed in England, and she was staying with her parents with her young son. It was a Thursday night and they were happy to babysit.
She got dressed up for the occasion and fixed her hair. It seems she went to a number of ballrooms that evening. She was seen at the Majestic Ballroom in Hope Street, then moved on to Barrowland Ballroom in Gallowgate (often referred to as ‘The Barrowland’). This was popular with her friends as, on a Thursday night, it catered to those aged 25 and over. It was busy and Patricia did not particularly stand out, and it was difficult to identify all her dance partners. However, it seems that someone offered to walk her home. She never got there.
At dawn the following morning, a cabinet maker on his way to work found the naked body of a dead woman in a quiet lane behind Carmichael Place, a few yards from Patricia’s parents’ house in Langside Place. She had been strangled with her own tights. None of her other clothing could be found. The police determined that she had been dead for several hours and they came to believe that she had been strangled elsewhere and dumped there. When Patricia Docker did not return home, the police came to the obvious conclusion and Patricia’s parents had the terrible task of identifying the body.
The police widened their search for her clothes, handbag and other belongings. Divers even searched the river nearby, but nothing was found. One local resident told the police that she thought she had heard cries for help during the early hours of 23 February, but none of the journalists or photographers who had attended a colleague’s party near where the body was found that night remember anything. A photograph of a policewoman dressed in clothes similar to those Patricia was wearing that night was circulated in the area, but no one remembered seeing her after she left the dance hall.
Glasgow had had recent experience of serial killers. Ian Brady, convicted of the Moors Murders in 1966, had been born there. Ten years before Patricia Docker was killed, Peter Manuel had been hanged. A sociopath and burglar, he had killed at least eight people. So when Patricia’s naked body was found dumped in the street, Glaswegians feared the worst. But that did not stop them having fun.
A year-and-a-half later, 32-year-old Jemima McDonald fancied a Saturday night out. On the evening of 16 August 1969, she dropped off her three kids with her sister Margaret for the night, then headed for The Barrowland. High bouffant hairstyles were still in fashion in Glasgow in 1969 and she travelled across town with a scarf over her hair. When she arrived at the ballroom, she went into the Ladies (toilet) where she took out her rollers and finished off her make-up.
On the dance floor, Jemima attracted attention. Other dancers noticed that she spent much of the evening dancing with a tall man in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore a blue suit and was tall and slim; his red hair was cut short and his appearance was neat. And early the next morning, she was seen leaving the ballroom with him.
The next day, Jemima did not come to pick up her kids as expected. Margaret grew worried. Later that day, she overheard street children talking about a body they had discovered in a derelict building in MacKeith Street nearby. Fearing the worst, Margaret got the kids to direct her to the building. There she found her sister’s battered body.
Jemima was fully clothed, but there were similarities to the Patricia Docker case: both women had been strangled with their own pantyhose; both had been found near their home. Jemima’s handbag was missing and screams had been heard that night. Later, the police found another similarity between the two cases − both had been having their period when they were killed.
A search of the area rendered no new clues and an attempt to question those who had been at The Barrowland that night also proved fruitless, as many of them were married and were out with people who were not their spouses. An appeal from the dance hall’s stage also drew a blank. A policewoman dressed in Jemima’s clothes retraced her final steps. The police released a sketch of the tall man she had been seen with when she was leaving The Barrowland and, for the first time in a Scottish murder investigation, Jemima’s family offered a reward of £100. Everything proved futile.
Despite all the publicity the murders were getting, it did not put people off going to The Barrowland. Twenty-nine-year-old Helen Puttock was hell-bent on going there on the night of 30 October 1969. Her husband, a soldier, who was going to stay at home with their two young boys, begged his wife to be careful. But Helen was not worried; she would not be alone. She was going with her sister Jean and was sure they would be safe together.
At The Barrowland, they met two young men, both called John. One said he came from Castlemilk. Helen spent most of the evening dancing with the other John. He was tall, slim and had red hair. When they left The Barrowland, Castlemilk John shared the two sisters’ taxi. During the journey, the man said that his name was John, he played golf badly, but a cousin had recently hit a hole-in-one. Jean also remembered he mentioned that he had a sister; he said that they had been raised in a strict religious household and he was still able to quote long passages of the Bible – hence his nickname. The surname he gave, Jean recalled, was Templeton, Emerson or Sempleson. Tobin was a Roman Catholic with a strong religious background; as we have seen, he regularly used pseudonyms. One of them was John Semple.
He spoke of how his father regarded dance halls, such as The Barrowland, as ‘dens of iniquity’, condemning the women who frequented them as evil. He also referred to Moses and said, ‘I don’t drink at Hogmanay. I pray.’
Bible John also seemed upset by Jean’s presence; he wanted be alone with Helen. Ignoring Jean for much of the ride, he did not even say goodbye when they dropped her off.
The next morning, Helen’s fully clothed body was found in the street by a man walking his dog. Again, she had been strangled with her own nylons and her handbag was missing. She, too, was menstruating when she was murdered. As if to draw attention to the fact, the killer had removed her sanitary to
wel and tucked it under her armpit. And this time he had left two clues that might help identify him – a semen stain on her tights and a bite mark on her wrist.
Thanks to Jean, the police now had an accurate description of the man they wanted to question. The suspect was around 6ft tall, and of medium build. He had blue-grey eyes and light reddish hair, which he kept cut short. His watch had a military-style band. The teeth marks on the body showed that two teeth in the upper-right part of the mouth overlapped.
A new artist’s impression of the suspect was circulated – this one in colour. It prompted over 4,000 calls from people who thought they had seen or knew the man in the picture. Jean was called to the police station over 250 times to see suspects, but none of them turned out to be the man she and her sister had shared a taxi with. Men who bore a resemblance to the killer but had been eliminated from the inquiry were issued with cards by the police showing they had been questioned and cleared. One of them was used in a reconstruction of Helen’s last evening, with a policewoman playing her part that was aired on BBC television. Helen’s husband made an appeal to his wife’s killer to turn himself in, and offered his life savings as a reward for information leading to his arrest.
Over 50,000 statements were taken and over 100 policemen worked on the case. Younger officers in plain clothes mingled with the dancers in The Barrowland. Taxi drivers and bus crews received particular attention. One man said he had seen a young male with scratches on his face on the bus on 31 October. He had got off at a stop on Gray Street. Police combed the area, but found nothing.
The suspect’s military wristwatch band and his short hair led the police to believe that he might be a member of the armed forces – or even a policeman. Dentists were questioned about patients with overlapping teeth, and staff at nearby golf clubs were asked about anyone who had recently scored a hole-in-one. A Dutch psychic called in by a local newspaper was inspired to draw a map, but a search of the area drew a blank.
Since it was the mid-1970s psychological profiling had yet to be developed, however a Glasgow psychiatrist said that although Bible John was sociable, he was prudish. He would probably read widely on subjects ranging from sorcery to the Nazis and go to the cinema by himself. This did not help.
Although only three murders have been officially ascribed to Bible John, he may have committed others. In 1977, another young woman who spent her last night in a Glasgow dance hall was found strangled and without her handbag. This sparked a new round of interest in Bible John. In 1983, a wealthy Glasgow man hired a private detective to find a childhood friend whom he thought resembled Bible John. The man was found living in the Netherlands and was cleared.
Another man who had been cleared was John McInnes, a suspect in the investigation in the 1960s. He bore a close resemblance to the sketch of the suspect, but Jean had failed to identify him. Nevertheless, he continued to be a prime suspect until, in 1981, he committed suicide.
In the 1960s, DNA fingerprinting was as yet undreamt of. But in 1996, DNA from the semen left on Helen Puttock’s tights was compared to a sample taken from one of John McInnes’s siblings. The match was inconclusive; nevertheless the police requested the exhumation of John McInnes’s body from a graveyard in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire.
The resulting publicity led to the harassment of McInnes’s family. But when the tests were completed it was found that his DNA did not match that in the semen on Helen Puttock’s tights; neither did his teeth match the bite-mark on her wrist. Jean said that she always knew that McInnes was not the killer and she had repeatedly told Strathclyde Police they had the wrong man. John McInnes was re-buried and finally left to rest in peace.
But the investigation was still not over. In October 2000, Professor Ian Stephen, a leading criminal psychologist who is said to have inspired TV’s Cracker, passed the name of a new suspect on to the Lothian and Borders Police, asking them to forward it to Strathclyde. He said he had obtained the new lead from an expatriate Scot living in the USA who suspected that a member of his extended family was Bible John. The suspect was the son of a policeman; he had been married in the Glasgow area and lived in Lanarkshire with his wife and two children, until he moved to England in 1970.
According to the file Professor Stephen passed to the police, the suspect’s behaviour changed dramatically in the late 1960s, when he increasingly went out alone at night and sometimes failed to return until the following day.
Professor Stephen told the BBC, ‘I would like to think that his name has already been considered and ruled out but I am not hopeful. The police were looking for a stereotype, a known sex offender at the time. The profile appears to fit that of Bible John. While the information is circumstantial, I think the police have got to have a serious look at it.’
The Strathclyde Police said they would look at the new information.
In December 2004, DNA taken from a Glasgow crime scene two years earlier was an 80 per cent match to the semen found on Helen’s tights. Samples were still being collected from a number of suspects in their fifties and sixties and, in May 2005, a spokesman for the police said, ‘Science will solve these killings. We have no doubt of that.’
That October, Strathclyde Police set up a new Unresolved Case Unit to re-examine the evidence in the Bible John Killings.
Dr Adrian Linacre, a lecturer in forensic science at Strathclyde University, said new processes could be employed to identify traces of evidence which previously could not be found. ‘Now with the advent of DNA profiling, someone who’s just held something for a brief period, or held someone, you’re going to transfer your DNA,’ he said.
However, Joe Jackson, a detective involved the Bible John investigation who went on to become head of Glasgow’s CID, dismissed the DNA evidence. As DNA fingerprinting was not developed until 1984, he said it was unlikely that the samples from the 1960s had been collected or stored properly. ‘Bloodstained clothing used to be stored in plastic bags,’ he said. ‘Scientists told us to dry them out and put them in plastic bags, which caused them to ferment eventually. The drying-out process usually involved the items being draped over pipes in the boiler room of police offices. I cannot say for certain how the tights were stored, but I cannot see them being treated as gingerly as would be necessary for a clear DNA comparison.’
It also had to be remembered that the semen stain on her tights may not necessarily have come from the killer.
Jackson also commented on the unconventional policing methods used in the Bible John investigation. ‘I formed part of what the press called the Marine Formation Dance team – detectives assigned to attend dance halls,’ he said. ‘We’d dance with customers and question them while showing nifty footwork. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it.’
Joe Jackson is convinced that Bible John is Tobin. ‘I saw his photo after the church killing and thought, “This is as near Bible John as you’re going to get”,’ he said.
Tobin was in his early twenties, and living in Glasgow at the time of the Bible John killings, and he was a regular at city dance halls. He met his first wife, Margaret Mackintosh, then 17, at a Glasgow dance hall in 1968. Soon he was raping, beating and strangling her, driven to violence by her menstrual cycle. Tobin left Scotland in 1969, the year the killings stopped.
After Tobin’s conviction, detectives issued pictures of him as a younger man, and these do bear a striking similarity to the artist’s impression of Bible John drawn up at the time. DS David Swindle, head of Operation Anagram, said, ‘The picture might jog people’s memories. Everything indicates that Tobin has probably killed other people.’
When the picture of the young Tobin was shown on Crimewatch in 2010, 63-year-old Julia Taylor came forward. She said that he had approached her in The Barrowland dance hall 40 years before and had pestered her to go to a party in Castlemilk with him. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the pictures of Tobin as a young man,’ she said. ‘It was the man who came up to me so many years ago in The Barrowland. I am 100 per cent certa
in Tobin is Bible John.’
She often went to go dancing at The Barrowland with her friends in the late 1960s, despite the Bible John scare. ‘There was one night that I have never forgotten, when this weird man asked me to dance,’ she told the Daily Record. ‘I got separated from my pals and he came up to me – there was something odd, cold and clinical about him. He seemed to be always thinking and wasn’t that warm and friendly, although he was extremely polite.’ She had never forgotten him. ‘He wore a silver-grey suit which was very well cut and a blue shirt with a plain, coloured tie. He looked a bit out of place as he was so over-dressed. He did not want to dance on the main floor and took me to the upstairs dance floor. It was quieter there. He kept asking me to go to a party in Castlemilk and was extremely persistent but I told him that I didn’t know him or the area.’
At the time, because of the Bible John panic, there were posters warning women to be careful. ‘When I kept refusing to go to the party, his whole face and attitude changed,’ she said. ‘He turned from being charming to being really odd and frightening. He said, “You better get off the dance floor because I am not dancing with you any more.”’
Julia remembered walking off the floor to get her coat as the man circled around watching her. ‘It was chilling,’ she said. ‘I saw a bouncer and I was going to tell him to check the man out but I was scared. I just ran out and never stopped. I looked back and he was watching me, glaring at me. I was scared stiff and I have never forgotten that feeling of total terror.’
Tobin’s first wife Margaret Mackintosh remembered visiting his parents in Paisley, just a few miles outside Glasgow. Before they were married, he took her to Earlbank Avenue, 200 yards from where Helen Puttock was found. She also remarked that he enjoyed having sex with her when she was menstruating. The sight of blood turned him on.
Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home Page 13
