🕯️ Who Was Bible John? Scotland’s Most Haunting Unsolved Murder Mystery
Glasgow in the late 1960s was a city alive with music and movement. Dance halls like the Barrowland Ballroom pulsed with laughter, clinking glasses, and the hopeful chatter of strangers looking for a partner — perhaps for the night, perhaps for longer. But beneath the bright lights and swirling skirts lurked a shadow that would haunt the city for decades.
Between 1968 and 1969, three young women — Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald, and Helen Puttock — left the Barrowland with a well-dressed man who quoted scripture, spoke softly about morality, and disappeared into the fog of Glasgow’s streets. Each was found strangled with her own stockings, her body posed in a way that suggested both ritual and contempt.
The press dubbed the killer “Bible John,” a name that captured the chilling contradiction of piety and violence. Despite one of the most intensive manhunts in Scottish history, Bible John was never caught. Composite sketches plastered the city. Hundreds of men were questioned. Leads fizzled. Suspicions turned to neighbours, brothers, even friends — but no arrest ever came.
Decades later, the mystery deepened with the emergence of another name: Peter Tobin. A convicted serial killer whose methods — and hunting grounds — bore an unsettling resemblance to Bible John’s. Tobin frequented the same dance halls, lived in the same city, and even matched the witness descriptions of the charming, well-mannered man who quoted the Bible.
Was Bible John simply an early chapter in Tobin’s murderous career? Or did Glasgow harbour two predators, crossing paths like dark ships in the night? Forensic comparisons have been inconclusive, leaving room for speculation — and fear.
Cold cases like this remind us of how fragile justice can be. How easy it is for memory to blur, for crucial evidence to vanish, and for monsters to melt back into ordinary life, perhaps still attending church on Sundays, still nodding politely at neighbours.
The questions left behind by Bible John continue to unsettle Scotland. Not just because of the brutality of the crimes, but because of the possibility that the real killer — whoever he was — walked away into the Glasgow mist, never to be unmasked.
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I explore the chilling parallels between Bible John and Peter Tobin, along with other haunting true crime cases, in my books.