The genesis of this book was a story I heard very early in 1995, and I worked on the book all through that year, finishing a satisfactory draft just before Christmas. Then on Sunday January 29 1996, just as my editor was settling down to read the manuscript, the Sunday Times ran a story headlined ‘Bible John “living quietly in Glasgow’”, based on information contained in a book to be published by Main-stream in April. The book was Power in the Blood by Donald Simpson. Simpson claimed that he had met a man and befriended him, and that eventually this man had confessed to being Bible John. Simpson also claimed that the man had tried to kill him at one point, and that there was evidence the killer had struck outside Glasgow. Indeed, there remain many unsolved west-coast murders, plus two unsolveds from Dundee in 1979 and 1980 — both victims were found stripped and strangled.
It may be coincidence, of course, but the same day’s Scotland on Sunday broke the story that Strathclyde Police had new evidence in the ongoing Bible John investigation. Recent developments in DNA analysis had given them a genetic fingerprint from a trace of semen left on the third victim’s tights, and police had been asking as many of the original suspects as they could find to come forward to have a blood sample taken and analysed. One such suspect, John Irvine McInnes, had committed suicide in 1980, so a member of his family had given a blood sample instead. This seems to have proved a close enough match to warrant exhuming McInnes’ body so as to carry out further tests. In early February, the body was exhumed (along with that of McInnes’ mother, whose coffin had been placed atop her son’s). For those interested in the case, the long wait began.
As I write (June 1996), the wait is still going on. But the feeling now is that police and their scientists will fail — indeed, already have failed — to find incontrovertible proof. For some, the seed has been sown anyway — John Irvine McInnes will remain the chief suspect in their minds — and it is true that his personal history, compared alongside the psychological profile of Bible John compiled at the time, makes for fascinating reading.
But there is real doubt, too — some of it also based on offender profiling. Would a serial killer simply cease to kill, then wait eleven years to commit suicide? One newspaper posits that Bible John ‘got a fright’ because of the investigation, and this stopped him killing again, but according to at least one expert in the field, this simply fails to fit the recognised pattern. Then there’s the eye-witness, in whom chief investigator Joe Beattie had so much faith. Irvine McInnes took part in an identity parade a matter of days after the third murder. Helen Puttock’s sister failed to pick him out. She had shared a taxi with the killer, had watched her sister dance with him, had spent hours in and out of his company. In 1996, faced with photos of John Irvine McInnes, she says the same thing — the man who killed her sister did not have McInnes’ prominent ears.
There are other questions — would the killer have given his real first name? Would the stories he told the two sisters during the taxi ride be true or false? Would he have gone ahead and killed his third victim, knowing he was leaving a witness behind? There are many out there, including police officers and numbering people like myself, who would refuse to be convinced even by a DNA match. For us, he’s still out there, and — as the Robert Black and Frederick West cases have shown — by no means alone.