Bible John murders: Angus Sinclair and Peter Tobin linked to killings
NC Bible John (L) and the crime scene (R)
A detailed investigation by an amateur detective has also identified a flat that may have been the scene of the third and final slaying, with police now being urged to search the premises for any surviving DNA evidence. The sleuth – known only as ‘Nate’ – has submitted his cold case analysis to a range of interested parties, including Justice Secretary Michael Matheson, crime author Ian Rankin and criminologist Professor David Wilson. A previous investigation into the unsolved murder of Nairn banker Alistair Wilson uncovered new information that led Dr Wilson to describe the case as “eminently solvable”. Now the publicity-shy operative has turned his attention to perhaps Scotland’s best-known mystery, ahead of the 50th anniversary of “the first of the three murders commonly and mistakenly attributed to Bible John”.
I believe Tobin was the man inside 107 Earl Street with Helen Puttock Nate
The sinister nickname will forever be linked to the deaths of Patricia Docker on February 22, 1968, Jemima MacDonald on August 16, 1969, and Helen Puttock on October 31, 1969. All of them are thought to have been dancing at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow’s East End before their murders and the hunt for their killer led to a mysterious sandy-haired man who was said to be fond of quoting scripture. Now Nate’s probe has revealed Angus Sinclair would probably have known Ms Docker, a pretty 25-year-old nurse, as her family lived in the same street in the city’s Langside area as his future brother-in-law Robert Hamilton and his wife Mary. Sinclair had already been jailed for killing a child and would later commit the infamous World’s End murders with Gordon Hamilton, another of his brothers-in-law through his marriage to wife Sarah.
Then aged 22, Sinclair purchased a van after his release from Saughton Prison in Edinburgh and is known to have used it to have sex with an underage girl in Langside Road. Nate suggests he met Ms Docker while visiting his in-laws on Langside Place and persuaded her to go on a date before strangling her in his van, following the same offending pattern witnessed throughout his life. Police have always said the victim must have been killed elsewhere and her body dumped in a lane behind Carmichael Place, a few streets away from her home. Bible John did not strike again for 18 months until the murder of Ms MacDonald, a 32-year-old mother-of-three, whose body was found in a derelict building on MacKeith Street in Bridgeton. She lived on the same street, immediately next door to a man called Daniel Tobin, who was “almost certainly” a cousin of the man who would later murder Vicky Hamilton, Dinah McNicol and Angelika Kluk.
Glaswegian Tobin was then aged 22 and living in Brighton, where he had married his first wife Margaret on August 6, and Nate believes the couple had travelled “up the road” to visit his family. The Scot is also named as the killer of Ms Puttock, whose body was found behind 95 Earl Street in Scotstoun, three blocks from her mother’s home at 129 Earl Street, where she was living with her husband George and their two children. No blood was found at the scene and Nate’s dossier states: “Did Bible John fetch a mop and a pail after the deed? Of course he didn’t. It must have been clear to everyone then, as it is now, that the locus of the crime was a private dwelling. She was murdered in a nearby house and her body dumped in the back courts of Earl Street. That’s why there’s no blood-strewn public crime scene. That’s why no one saw or heard a thing.” On the night of her murder the 29-year-old went out dancing with her sister, Jean Langford, whose evidence about sharing a taxi back to Scotstoun with a strange man named ‘John’ later formed the basis of the serial killer legend. However, Nate has discovered that Ms Puttock’s aunt, Agnes Gowans, lived at 107 Earl Street and reports an elderly lady from the area suggesting the victim and her sister may have used the flat for romantic encounters when their aunt was away.