So was this man really BIBLE JOHN?
For 54 years one man has been prime suspect in the horrific Barrowland Ballroom murders. Now police are probing new claims that his role in the killings was covered-up by senior officers...
AS police confirmed they are investigating allegations of a coverup in the 1960s Bible John murders, the spotlight has fallen again on one suspect – John Irvine McInnes. His body was exhumed in 1996, but DNA testing was ‘inconclusive. Detectives believe he was the man who shared a taxi with murder victim Helen Puttock and quoted passages from the Bible to her.
They believe he was Bible John.
Now claims have emerged that police allegedly colluded to shield McInnes as he was related to a senior officer. So, what is the truth about him? An in-depth investigation by journalists ALAN CROW and PETER SAMSON, who interviewed McInnes’s friends and family in the 1990s, resulted in an explosive book which, for the first time, revealed his deeply religious background, his domineering family and his intense hatred of women...
THE grey, icy, early morning calm was shattered at 9.07am on February 1, 1996. From the white marquee erected just an hour earlier at the cemetery came the clattering of pneumatic drills biting into the frozen ground. A portable generator droned, feeding power to the drill blades. The only other sound was the distant buzz of motorway traffic on the M74 linking Scotland with England.
A female pathologist wrapped against the bitter cold in a beige, dark fur-trimmed coat stood patiently waiting. Green Wellington boots protected her feet from the deep blanket of snow.
Uniformed policemen stood close in the bleak graveyard in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire. New recruit Dawn Ogilvie, 23, guarded the tent. It was only her first week in the job. About half a dozen graves were hidden behind the white walls of the marquee. The small group of people who had moved inside focused their eyes on just one. The name on that headstone was John Irvine McInnes – the man police believed to be Bible John. He’d been buried there in 1980 after taking his own life.
Was this the man who preyed on young women after a night out dancing in Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom? Did his sadistic reign as Bible John bring fear to a generation of women? Did he kill poor Helen Puttock, Pat Docker and Jemima McDonald?
That dawn exhumation would hopefully give police the last missing pieces in a jigsaw. They hoped DNA tests on McInnes’s remains would positively link him with one or all of the Barrowland killings.
Shortly before noon the digging crew touched the coffin containing McInnes.
Within hours his body was laid out on a cold steel mortuary table – 16 years after his death – his secrets ready to be disclosed.
JOHN Irvine McInnes really needed a drink, and it was almost opening time at his local, The Old Ship Inn in his home village of Stonehouse.
He’d been at the Barrowland Ballroom last night. His usual Thursday night. He’d gone on his own – as usual – but Thursdays were an over-25s night and full of women out on their own too.
But, the morning after, he really needed that drink. It was his day off and he spent it the way he always did – playing dominoes with the pensioners down at the pub.
He told friends he thought some of them were repulsive and smelled of stale beer. But he would often boast it was good fun trying to cheat them out of their pension money.
He’d get dressed up to go to the pub – often wearing the smart Italian suit he had worn the previous night at the Barrowland. McInnes spent a great deal of his social life at The Old Ship Inn. He’d often meet his brother Hector over his favourite tipple – a half pint of beer and a half of whisky.
Many afternoons he’d leave his mother Elizabeth’s house at 26 Queen Street. As he stepped onto the pavement he might have glanced lovingly at his prized, gleaming green Ford Cortina.
He would walk to The Old Ship Inn because it was far enough away from the watchful eye of his mother. His family were members of the strict Plymouth Brethren religious sect. Because of her beliefs she was known to frown on those who drank alcohol and she didn’t want her son doing it. She also disliked gambling. In fact, she despised most things her son wanted to do.
McInnes’s mother dominated him. Villagers believed her influence extended to insisting that he use her maiden name of Irvine as his first name.
And villagers recalled McInnes seemed to accept that his mother’s word was law – although it didn’t stop him breaking the ‘rules’ behind her back.
He liked his expensive, well-cut suits, his freshly laundered shirts, and often wore his distinctive blue and red striped Scots Guards regimental tie which he received after finishing his National Service.
He was often caught glancing at himself in the pub mirror, checking his appearance and preening his hair.
Despite his rather unorthodox appearance, McInnes could often be found mingling with the village’s elder statesmen. They would be there when he arrived – always during the afternoon – sitting around the pub snug.
McInnes also enjoyed a bet – some said he was a compulsive gambler. He would spend hours trying to win a pittance at the domino table. The stakes were low – pennies rather than pounds – but it was a thrill for McInnes to try to take money from these pensioners.
He was a strange sight perched there, dressed to the nines. To these regulars McInnes was from a different world – and he rarely gave much away.
But there was something else about McInnes which made him stand out. He would often, quite suddenly, begin quoting from the Bible. One of his favourite passages was from Corinthians 13:1-13, and they remembered him suddenly
shouting out: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man I put away childish things...’
They just ignored him. He stopped soon enough when he realised no one was paying that much attention.
The old men knew religion was one subject to steer well clear of in the west of Scotland.
And, because they already knew John McInnes as Bible John.
In fact, he made no secret of it. Ever since he had announced – almost proudly – in the pub one day that he had been questioned as a suspect in the Barrowland murder inquiry he’d been known locally as Bible John. He thought it was amusing.
He told friends he had been picked up by the police and taken in for four identity parades.
He seemed to revel in the fact he was a suspect.
McInnes certainly looked like the man whose identikit picture was in the newspapers, he joked, so it was understandable that the police wanted to talk to him. He liked the Bible and the real Bible John had supposedly quoted from it to one of his victims.
But he said he’d never been picked out at one of these line-ups. He’d been ruled out as a suspect. But he enjoyed the notoriety the nickname gave him.
Regulars said he thought it was great, but he was paranoid about his mother finding out.
Villager George Golder remembered: ‘I met him after he came back from one identity parade. We were standing in the street and he told me all about it.
‘I’ll never forget it. All he could do was laugh and laugh.’
McInnes also placed regular bets with local bookie William Clarkson. ‘He was always well spoken and he liked his gambling,’ recalled Mr Clarkson. ‘I wasn’t surprised when the police announced he was a suspect. He was known by the nickname Bible John for years.
‘I remember once he came in. He’d been away for some time and said he’d been in England and he told people he had been questioned.’
But McInnes’s behaviour left a lasting impact on another local. It was a moment which she said would haunt her for the rest of her life.
She knew John McInnes well and it was not unusual for him to call at her home. But this time it was very different.
Jane Reid opened the door one day to see McInnes on her doorstep. He walked straight past her, heading for the front room. She immediately felt a chill. There was something different about the man she knew so well; something frightening about his presence.
She followed him into the room and before she could say anything she caught his eye. He started to speak. But it was all too much for Jane. The look on his face, the sound and tone of his voice – it was haunting. She knew about him being quizzed by the police and taken to the line-ups in Glasgow. Suddenly she felt threatened and uncomfortable. She had to escape.
Jane ran from the room, out into the hallway and pulled open the front door. She was agitated, breathless and afraid. She was outside, away from McInnes. She waited petrified outside her own house for two hours until a male neighbour went into the house and persuaded McInnes to leave.
Jane never reported the incident to the police but a friend who she confided in revealed: ‘She was petrified. She said she felt threatened by McInnes’s look and how he was speaking to her.
‘She has her own reasons for not discussing it but ever since that day she was convinced that he was the real Bible John, the man who killed.’
McInnes was born in Stonehouse on September 10, 1938. He spent a largely uneventful childhood in the village and did his National Service in the Scots Guards, returning to civilian life as a furniture salesman. He met – and married – coal miner’s daughter Ella Russell. Their tempestuous marriage lasted for 12 years, during which they had two children, Lorna and Kenneth.
He switched jobs and became sales manager with a US stamp trading firm. He drove his green Ford Cortina to work every day. In his new job McInnes baffled colleagues by regularly quoting from the Bible.
But McInnes fell foul of his new employers. They held weekly meetings to discuss sales targets on Thursday nights so his boss could keep a check on how McInnes and the rest of the employees performed. But McInnes had somewhere more important to go – the Barrowland Ballroom. He and his boss often rowed after it was discovered he was skipping these meetings to go to the over-25 nights at the dance hall.
McInnes also spent some time living in the Lanarkshire village of Newarthill. But he was still a regular visitor to Stonehouse to see his family. And he was still strongly influenced by his parents, who were strict followers of the Plymouth Brethren sect.
McInnes was forced to attend their meetings. The most fanatical of Brethren believers have little contact with the outside world and condemn drinking and smoking.
For McInnes’s mother and father, a place such as the Barrowland dance hall would be seen as a ‘den of iniquity’ and a ‘seat of the Devil’. According to friends, for McInnes, years of indoctrination had shaped his view of women and especially those who went out dancing. He saw them very much as inferior – women should be forbidden to wear make-up and revealing clothes.
To the Brethren, their purpose in
He seemed to revel in the fact that he was a police suspect’
Ever since that day she was convinced that he was the killer’
life was to raise children. They didn’t believe women should leave their youngsters at home to head out in pursuit of pleasure.
One theory explored by writer Norman Adams suggests the answers to the Bible John mystery lie within the close-knit Brethren sect.
In his book Goodbye, Beloved Brethren, published in 1972, Adams wrote: ‘In searching for a killer such as Bible John one must theoretically narrow the field down to the type of man likely to quote freely from the Bible.
‘Police do not think he is over-religious, but a man with a normal, intelligent working knowledge of the Bible.
‘Bible John could well have been brought up by a family with a strict religious background and this makes one immediately think of a minority religious group rather than the established church. Can it be that his years of segregation from the world outside, his close-knit family, the harsh measures inflicted during his upbringing, has had some effect on this young man?’
Whatever went on inside McInnes’s head, one thing was abundantly clear. Friends say he was tormented to a degree that drove him to the brink.
Was it the break-up of his marriage, his rejection of the Brethren movement, the feeling he had disappointed his mother and continued doing so with his visits to the pubs and dance halls?
Was it all these factors building up into a climax of emotional turmoil that left him helpless and ill-equipped to cope with his life?
Or was it simply guilt – the burden of carrying the terrible truth that only he knew, that he was the real Bible John?
Villagers spoke of him attempting suicide three times. One incident was well known in the village. When McInnes briefly ran the sweet shop he suddenly vanished. It was another shopkeeper, Willie Ramsay, the local fishmonger next door, who eventually walked into McInnes’s premises.
It was clear to Ramsay that McInnes had tried to kill himself. Was this a serious attempt – or simply a cry for help?
If it was escape from life he was looking for, it finally came for John McInnes in April 1980.
Margaret, the barmaid, was on duty in The Old Ship Inn on Tuesday, April 29, 1980. She looked up as McInnes walked in. She immediately noticed he didn’t give his customary cheery smile. He walked to the bar and ordered his usual – a half pint and a whisky.
That night he didn’t spend as long as he normally did in the pub, but he
Was it simply guilt – the burden of carrying the terrible truth?’
drank more than usual. Margaret remembered: ‘He was depressed. I’d seen him like that before. He was often down in the dumps. Everyone talked about it. That was the last time I saw him.’
McInnes finished off his drinks and set off on the short walk to his mother’s home.
He climbed to the attic. And in that dark, confined space he took a blade and calmly sliced into an artery in his armpit.
When McInnes ended his life, he perhaps thought he would find everlasting peace.
But 42 years later, a question mark still hangs over him. Was he really Bible John?
•Adapted from Bible John: Hunt for a Killer, First Press Publishing