Bible John: Police Scotland ‘assessing’ new claims made in podcast about notorious Bible John murders

The killings were features in a BBC podcast

Police have said they are “assessing” claims made in a podcast covering the Bible John murders in the 1960s.

Patricia Docker, 25, Jemima MacDonald, 31, and Helen Puttock, 29, were all killed in Glasgow in 1968 and 1969 after visiting the Barrowland Ballroom in the east end of |Glasgow.

The murders remain unsolved despite one of the largest police inquiries in Scottish history, with the suspect known only as Bible John due to quoting scripture during a taxi journey with Ms Puttock and her sister before she was murdered.

A podcast released by the BBC last year examined the cases, speaking to the families of the victims and former police officers who investigated the murders.

The award-winning podcast, Bible John: Creation of the Serial Killer, claimed the involvement of the man in the taxi, who was also believed to be the last person to see Ms Puttock alive, was covered up because he was the cousin of a senior police officer.

It alleged that the name of the man in question was known to high-ranking officers at the time, but it never appeared in official records connected to the murer investigations. Officers interviewed said they believed the man to be John Irvine McInnes, who was the cousin of detective Jimmy McInnes. The detective, the podcast said, was good friends with the then senior police chief, Detective Superintendent Joe Beattie.

The body of John Irvine McInnes – who died by suicide in the 1980s – was exhumed in 1995 in relation to the investigation, with DNA analysis against a sample taken from Ms Puttock’s tights coming back inconclusive, clearing him of involvement.

A spokesperson for Police Scotland said yesterday: “We are assessing the contents of a recent podcast in consultation with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

“The murders of Helen Puttock, Jemima MacDonald and Patricia Docker remain unresolved, however, as with all unresolved cases, they are subject to review and any new information about their deaths will be investigated.”

The families of the serial killer's victims said they had recently been told that information from the podcast series had triggered new lines of inquiry, although some expressed doubt that the latest developments would change much.

Allan Mottley, Jemima MacDonald’s eldest son, said: “When the police phoned and said they were going to reinvestigate, that was a bit of a bombshell. I never imagined that they would get to this and that they would relook at it all.

"I am not expecting that much to be honest. They might openly admit these murders were not investigated properly in the first place and we might get an apology over the way they were investigated.”

The case prompted one of the largest and high-profile murder investigations in Scottish history, with police interviewing more than 7,000 people and taking around 4,000 statements in the course of their inquiries. However, no arrests were ever made, and no-one has ever been charged over the killings.