I grew up in Glasgow and was nine years old when the Bible John killings took place. Young as I was, I do remember the fear around the city at that time, especially the longer his crimes went undetected and particularly amongst the female adult community. The big mystery was, besides his unknown identity, why he seemingly, if thankfully, stopped his spree at three brutal murders. That said, the pertinent point is made in this two-part BBC Scotland production that he may well have killed other victims, whether here or somewhere else in the world.
The programmes used vintage news footage of the time, together with interviews with some of the retired police personnel, newspaper journalists and regular visitors to the Glasgow Barrowlands dance hall where he picked up his victims, each time on the night when unaccompanied married women frequented the place, with some latter-day analysis of the events by profilers, criminal psychologists and, in an imaginative touch, even a modern court portraitist to depict the murderer displaying his reportedly crooked teeth. This is important because the two best-known images of him in all the papers at the time both showed him in a tight-lipped pose, firstly in an artist's impression and then a police identikit picture, the latter marking one of the first times such a tool was used in a major criminal investigation.
One of the saddest things in the story was undoubtedly the interview carried out today with the husband of the third victim, a man who seems never to have gotten over his loss and who we learn lied to his son about the cause of his boy's mother's death, which when it became known to him, soured the father-son relationship and possibly led to the young man's early suicide. It is sometimes easy to miss or forget the collateral damage such a devastating loss can have on the surviving family members, as this still-haunted, gaunt-featured man's appearance makes clear.
The tragedy is that modern-day policing methods such as CCTV, computer databases and DNA profiling weren't available back then, with the point coming across that a motiveless crime by a ruthless and secretive perpetrator is the hardest one to break. It's more than likely that we'll never know the identity of this serial killer and the programme debunked the theory that the convicted Glasgow-born mass murderer Peter Tobin could have been John although it is possible the real killer is still alive today and may yet reveal himself on his death bed. This would at least provide some closure to the remaining families of his victims but it sadly seems that like the Jack the Ripper crimes of Victorian London, we'll never get to know who he was or why he did what he did.
