This episode contains disturbing images of murder. Parental discretion is advised. It's early in the evening of Thursday, February twenty second, nineteen sixty eight. A few floors up a tenement flat in the south of Glasgow, twenty five year old Patricia Docker sat in front of her bedroom mirror. She applied the finishing touches to her look for the evening after a light dab of lipstick. She regarded her reflection, pleased with the favorite orange crocheted dress and her nicely curled hair.
She couldn't help thinking she looked a little tired, though, but when wasn't she Between the long shifts working as a nurse at Glasgow's Victoria Infirmary and being a single mother to her four year old son, Sandy, it was hard for her to imagine a time when she wouldn't be tired. Only the year before, Patricia's marriage to her husband, a Royal Air Force technician, had broken down. The couple were living together with their son in Cyprus, where Patricia's
husband was stationed. Now she was in Glasgow, back living with her parents, the sole career to her son. It had been a difficult transition but slowly, Patricia had got herself back on her feet. Things were starting to look up, and that night, as she sang her son to sleep, staring down at his sweet face, she felt a swell of love and hope for the future. Around eight pm, she said good night to her parents and headed out
into the cold. Spotting a cab on the street, she asked the driver to take her to the Majestic Ballroom, where she'd arranged to meet some friends to attend an over twenty five's dance. One of them had met her husband at a similar event. Though meeting a future husband was far from the first thing on her mind, at the very least, she was looking forward to letting her hair down for the night. Inside the ballroom was packed
a hot cauldron of noise and smoke. Men and women in sharp suits and colorful dresses threw each other about on the dance floor, sweat beating on their foreheads. Patricia spotted her friends quickly and headed over to join them, and for the next few hours they drank and danced, finding no end of suitors to accompany them on the dance floor. At some point, Patricia's friends noticed that Patricia
was no longer with them. One remembered her saying something about moving on to the barrel Land Ballroom, a couple of miles east. They assumed she'd met someone good for her. They thought she deserved to have some fun after the terrible year she'd had. Early on the morning of February twenty third, nineteen sixty eight, a man left his house in the south side of Glasgow to walk to work. As he passed at garage only yards away from Patricia Docker's flat, he saw something strange out at the corner
of his eye. At first, it looked like a discarded mannikin from a clothing shop. Then, with horror, he realized it was the naked body of a young woman. In shock, the man stumbled back to his house and phoned the police. Later that day, the body would be identified Patricia Docker. The police assumed she'd been raped, although there was no
clear evidence to suggest this was the case. What was beyond doubt was that she'd been strangled to death barely a stone's throw from her home, while her parents and
her four year old son slept soundly. Soon after officers arrived at the grisly scene, they began to search the surrounding area Hoping to find some clues as to who had murdered Patricia, They interviewed dozens of people who'd attended the dance at the Majestic Ballroom, including several young men who remembered dancing with Patricia that evening, but the encounters had all been brief and the men had alibis for the night. Nobody seemed exactly sure when Patricia had left,
or whether she'd been alone at the time. The male officer writing the report on her death described Patricia dismissively as a rather spoiled woman who appeared to enjoy the company of men. Divorce had only been legal in the UK for a decade and still carried a heavy stigma. Divorced women in particular were shunned, and divorced single mothers all the more so, And despite it all, Patricia also had the gall to go out and enjoy herself at the end of a long week. The trail went cold
soon after, and no arrests were made. The brutal murder made headlines and terrified Glasgow's residents. Just as scary as the crime itself was the reality that the killer was still on the loose. But as the months went by people began to move on. They chalked up what had happened to Patricia as a bizarre, tragic, one off, something that happens to people who don't know any better. Instead, it was the beginning of a nightmare that would haunt
the city for decades to come. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLain Smith. On the evening of Saturday, August sixteenth, nineteen sixty nine, Jemimah MacDonald left the house she shared with her sister on the East side of Glasgow. Jemima or Mima to her friends and family, was thirty two and a single mother to three children. She loved to dance, and that night she was going to the
Barreland Ballroom, one of her favorite venues. She still had her curlers in when she left the house, and not by mistake. This was her trick. She'd keep them in until the last possible moment, concealing them under a headscarf until she arrived at her destination. Once there, she goes straight to the rest rooms and take them out, ensuring that her hair stayed bouncy or night. Saturday evenings were always lively at the ballroom, where a live band played
the pop hits of the day. The following morning, Mima's sister, Margaret, found that Mima's bed was empty. After searching the rest of the house, she soon realized that Mima had never come home. Margaret tried not to panic. Maybe Jemimah had just spent the night at a friend's house, she thought. But deep down, Margaret knew this didn't make any sense. For one thing, the Barreland Ballroom could hardly be closer to their house. It was less than a mile away,
and Mima had three children at home. Mima would never just go a war. At the very least, she would have called pulling on the first clothes she could find. Margaret hurried outside onto the street and began to walk. The morning sunlight was painfully bright in her eyes. She wandered toward the end of her street and took a right turn, heading north. She had a vague, half formed plan to walk to the ballroom, though it would surely be closed at this time, but she didn't know what
else to do. As Margaret made her way to the Baryland Ballroom, she passed a derelict house in her neighborhood where she was startled by a sudden shriek. A group of children burst out of the house and hurled passed her, almost knocking her over in their haste to get away. Annoyed, Margaret was about to shout after them when she caught a snatch of the children's frantic conversation, did one of them just say a body? Margaret walked towards the abandoned house,
her stomach coiling with dread. The front windows had all been smashed, and the front door, hanging off its hinges, rattled in the breeze. Margaret stepped inside the property, ignoring every instinct in her body telling her to turn back. It was cold and damp, and as she turned a corner into what would once have been a living room, she came upon a sight that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Her dear sister Mima was crumpled in the corner of the room, her open eyes
staring blankly up at the dusty ceiling. Bruises covered her face and neck, and she was fully clothed except for her stockings, which were wrapped tightly around her pale throat. Eighteen months on from Patricia Docker's unsold murder, another young woman had died of violent death in Glasgow. Unlike Patricia, Jemima mac donald was confirmed to have been raped, but both had been beaten and strangled to death at the end of a night out. Their bodies found less than
two miles apart. The only significant difference between the crimes was that Jemima's body was fully clothed, while her handbag and other possessions were missing. The male officer writing the report felt it pertinent note that Mima received benefits as a single mother, that she often frequented the dance halls of Glasgow, and that she quote appeared to be extremely fond of male company. Whatever judgments may have been made about Jemima's personal life, her murder could not just be
swept under the carpet. The nightmarish story of Margaret discovering her own sister's body drew sympathetic press coverage across the country. The pressure to identify a suspect was intense. As the police began to piece together a picture of Mima's evening, They soon discovered that she'd last been seen at the Barreland Ballroom on Tuesday evening, three days after her disappearance. Punters at the ballroom were greeted by a startling sight.
A crowd of some twenty uniformed police officers gathered at the entrance, each of them holding up a large photograph of Jemima's face. Some knew immediately who this young woman was. Others were confused, having missed the news, But soon enough everybody there was brought up to speed. Early in the evening, the music came to an abrupt halt. Then a detective stepped onto the stage at the front of the dance hall. He briefly recapped the known facts about Mima's death and
urged anybody with information to come forward. In particular, he said they were eager to talk to any barrel and regulars in the crowd that had been roughly two thousand people at the ballroom on the night Jemima disappeared. Somebody had to have seen something. Over the next few days, numerous people came forward to tell the police that they remembered seeing Mima on that set Satday evening. Several of them had seen her leaving the ballroom around midnight accompanied
by a man. Based on several of these eyewitness statements, the police put together a description of the man Mima had left with He was tall and slim, between twenty five and thirty five years old, with reddish hair. He'd been dressed in a smart blue suit, looking like a perfectly respectable young man. Nothing about him had rung alarm bells to anyone, including Jemima, who, by all accounts, had
left with him willingly. The police also figured out roughly what route the couple had taken after leaving the ballroom, thanks to various bystanders who'd seen them together on the streets. They'd taken a short cut towards Mima's house, walking for about fifteen minutes until they reached a secluded lane. They believed the couple had spent some time in that lane
winching Scottish slang for kissing before Mima was killed. But despite all of these details about Jemima's final moments and a solid description of the man who had almost certainly murdered her, the police was still no closer to finding
their suspect. Soon they turned to more unorthodox methods. On Saturday, August twenty third, exactly a week after Jemimah MacDonald's murder, a woman was seen walking down the street wearing a black pinafore dress, high heels and a brown woolen coat, exactly what Jemima had worn on the night of her murder. The woman walked steadily from the Baryland Ballroom to the derelict house located on mc keith Street where Jemima was killed.
To anyone who had seen Jemima on the final night of her life, it would have felt like seeing a ghost, and that was the point. The woman was, in fact a police officer orchestrating an elaborate re enactment in the hope of jogging anybody's memory about the time leading up
to Jemima's death. Some witnesses did come forward with new information, but there was still nothing concrete, nothing they could use to identify a suspect, and the pressure was mounting because now investigators were confident that Patricia Docker and Jemima MacDonald had been killed by the same person. At the time,
very few people used the phrase serial killer. It would be another five years before that term became widely known, when the FBI established its Behavioral Science Unit and pioneered the practice of criminal profiling. But though the terminology was new, the terrifying notion of a lone nightmarish monster stalking the streets was not. It was just over a decade since Glasgow was terrorized by the specter of Peter Manuel, a vicious murderer who'd killed at least seven people and is
still known as Scotland's worst ever serial killer. Though Manuel was hanged in nineteen fifty eight, its crimes cast a shadow over the city and haunted its police force. They were determined to do whatever it took to stop this latest killer before he claimed any more victims, and so, for the first time in Scottish history, the police commissioned a facial composite sketch of their suspect based on the eyewitness descriptions. They printed this sketch onto thousands of leaflets
and posters and distributed them all across the country. Their goal was twofold first and foremost. They wanted to cast as wide a net as possible, encouraging the wider public to come forward with any information about the suspect. But they also hoped that seeing his likeness on wanted posters would deter the killer from striking again, but it did no such thing. On the evening of October thirtieth, nineteen sixty nine, twenty nine year old Helen Puttock left her
house with her older sister Jeanne. All day had been debating whether to go through with their night out. Three months after Jemima MacDonald's murder and unease had settled over the city and many women stopped going out after dark, but Helen and jean were determined not to let fear rule their lives. As long as they stuck together, they thought they'd be all right. Helen had recently split up with her husband, George, and although the breakup was her decision,
it had been a hard few weeks. She was sorely in need of a night out, and there were few better places for it than the Barreland Ballroom. On that Thursday evening, the dance hall was once again packed with energy and excitement, and Helen soon began to forget her troubles. At some point, she told her sister she was heading off to buy some cigarettes. Finding a cigarette machine by the bar, she put in some coins and pressed the button,
but the pack got stuck. Elen shook the machine as hard as she could, but the packet refused to drop. She was just about to give up when a young man asked if she needed help. The man was about her age, well dressed in a smart suit with a winning smile. After successfully unjamming the cigarette machine for her, he introduced himself as John. Ellen and John hit it off immediately. He was a good dancer and an even better conversationalist. He asked a lot of questions about her
life and seemed genuinely interested in the answers. It had been a while since Helen had met anyone like him. After some more time dancing, Ellen and Jean decided to call it a night. Why don't they all get a cab back together, suggested John, since he was heading in the same direction, and so the trio left and piled into the back of a cab together. In the back of the cab, Ellen and Jean lit cigarettes as they
moved west through the heart of the city. They listened with interest as John began to talk more about his own life. He told the sisters that he'd been raised by very strict, devoutly religious parents who'd put the fear of God in him from a young age. They certainly wouldn't have approved of their activities that night, he said, declaring that dance halls are dens of iniquity. He asked them if they knew what the Bible said about adulterous women.
Ellen and Jean chuckled nervously. No, they said that they should be stoned to death, said John, all emotion suddenly gone from his face. Then, unprompted, he began to recite a passage from the Bible. The transformation was unnerving. As John spoke, his eyes took on a glazed appearance, and his voice changed, becoming deeper and more forceful. It was as if he'd suddenly been possessed, And then just like that,
John snapped right back to his usual charming self. Though a little unnerved, Ellen and Jean laughed off his strange behavior as a joke. John called through to the driver and instructed him to drop Gene off first, since he and Helen were both going to the same neighborhood. A short time later, Jeane climbed out of the cab. She watched Helen wave goodbye through the window as the taxi pulled back out into the road and disappeared into the night.
That last mental image of her sister would haunt her for the rest of her life. The next morning, a woman got up early to take out her rubbish in Scotsten, a neighborhood on the bank of the River Clyde. As she walked into the back court where the bins were stored, she stopped in her tracks. Helen Puttock was lying, fully clothed and face down on the ground. She'd been dead for hours. The woman's screams soon attracted a crowd of horrified passers. By the fact that it was Halloween made
the night Marrish seen all the morm A cab. Helen had been raped, beaten, and then strangled to death. Glasgow's serial killer, it seemed, had struck again. When the police arrived at the scene, they were able to determine a few grim details about Helen's final moments. Grass stains on her feet showed that she had tried to escape her attacker by fleeing up the side of a railway embankment,
and her injuries suggested she'd fought for her life. As the authorities began to look more closely at the three murders, they noticed another unnerving detail. All three women had been menstruating at the time they were killed. This might have seemed like a coincidence, except that a sanitary pad had been left close to each of the bodies, indicating that this was a twisted kind of signals for the killer. This time around, police were more optimistic about their chances
of catching the killer. Unlike Patricia and Jemima, Helen hadn't gone out alone. Her sister Jean had been with her for almost the entire evening and was able to give a detailed description of the man. Helen had gone home with. Her description matched the profile the police already had from the Jemima MacDonald eyewitnesses, and with the additional information she provided, they produced a new and more accurate sketch of the
suspect's face. Unfortunately, John had been evasive about where he lived or what kind of work he did, but the details he'd shared about his childhood at least gave them something to work with. That strange behavior in the taxi, meanwhile, would earn him the moniker Bible John. Over the next few months, the police arrested and interviewed dozens of potential
suspects and followed up on hundreds of leads. Determined to leave no stone unturned, they also took some more unusual steps, like bringing in a psychic who was confident he could locate Bible John. This proved to be an empty promise. The police also hired a psychiatrist to produce one of the first ever criminal profiles, using the information from Gene about John's childhood and religious beliefs, along with clues that might point toward a preferred process in the way he
committed his murders. But for all of this work, the investigation was ultimately fruitless. Nobody was ever charged for any of the three murders, and the case remains unsolved to this day. It's been widely speculated that Bible John is in fact Peter Tobin, a prolific killer who was convicted of killing three women in Glasgow during the nineteen nineties. He would have been in his mid twenties during the Bible John murders and once boasted to a prison psychiatrist
that he'd killed more than forty people. However, Tobin denied that he was Bible John, and no evidence was ever found linking him to Patricia's, Jemima's or Helen's murder. He died in prison in twenty twenty two. Another theory was that the killer was a man named John Irvin McInnis, and that his identity was deliberately covered up because McInnis
was the cousin of a very senior police officer. In nineteen ninety six, Helen Puttock's body was exhumed so forensic investigators could take a DNA sample from her tights and compare it to McInnis. Given all the advances in DNA technology, hopes were high, but the analysis was inconclusive. The sample was also compared against the DNA of a number of other high profile British killers, including Tobin, the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe and Fred West. None of them were a match.
Just recently, however, this cold case is warming up again in response to allegations of police corruption during the original investigation, which were made public in a BBC podcast titled Bible John Creation of a Serial Killer. Police Scotland announced in twenty twenty two that it was taking a fresh look at the case. But for now, more than fifty years on from the tragic events, there remains no justice for Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock, and no closure
for their families. This episode was written by Emma Dibden and Richard mclin Smith. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
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