BBC Scotland is screening a two part documentary on the Bible John case, the first part going out on Monday past (you can catch it on the iPlayer and it’s well worth it).
It’s a case that has haunted Glasgow for decades – and was the very first feature I wrote for the Glasgow Evening Times and effectively setting me off on the true crime journey that led to my current fiction.
In the dying years of the 1960s, three separate women visited the Barrowland Ballroom in the east end in search of a fun night out at the dancing.
What they found was a killer. Or killers.
The artist’s impression of the suspect
In February 1968, Patricia Docker was found murdered in a lane only yards from her southside home. She had gone out for a night with friends, first to the Majestic – the Magic Stick, as it was known – in Hope Street but then to the popular Barrowland.
The machinery of a police investigation swung into gear. Inquiries were made. Interviews were conducted. Statements were taken. However, the trail ran cold.
In August 1969, Jemima McDonald was found in a derelict flat in Bridgeton. She had also been at the dance hall and detectives discovered she had left with a man.
The description was sketchy but it did help create an Identikit image of the suspect. For the first time in Scotland, that image was issued to the press.
But again, they drew a blank.
Two months later, the body of Helen Puttock was discovered in a back court in Scotstoun.
Like Patricia and Jemima, she’d been strangled. Like Patricia and Jemima, she had been on a girls’ night at the Barrowland. Three dead women, three tragedies. Three families and their friends left to grieve and wonder who had done this to their loved one.
This time, though, the police thought they had a more accurate description of a man seen with Helen.
The suspect had shared a taxi with his victim and her sister and by piecing her statement together with others, they were able to create the image of the man they desperately wanted to talk to.
That taxi ride also brought us the nickname that has followed the case from newsprint into dark legend.
During the journey from east to west, the man talked about himself, including the fact that he’d had a strict religious upbringing. He made reference to Biblical passages. He talked of ‘dens of iniquity.’
And so Bible John was born.
The fames Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow
The hunt stepped up a number of gears. The murder squad based themselves in Partick Police Station, known as the Marine because it had covered parts of the riverside, because that covered the area where Helen Puttock had been murdered.
They interviewed hundreds of people, took thousands of statement. They made appeals at the Barrowland and other dance halls. They mixed with the dancers, becoming so proficient on the floor that some became known as the Marine Police Formation Dance Team.
They visited tailors to try to match the unusual suit worn by the suspect. They spoke to dentists because his teeth were distinctive. They visited golf courses because he’d talked about a hole in one.
They tried to trace another John – known as Castlemilk John – who had also been with the women and the suspect for a time but he never came forward. It was common for married men to go out ‘on the pull’ and John was an easy enough pseudonym to cast around.
A portrait in oils was even produced, based on the description of the suspect. However, it was recently pointed out that the portrait bears a striking resemblance to an earlier work by the same artist. Does this discredit it? Maybe, maybe not.
No-one was ever arrested.
Time passed and the largest, most extensive manhunt the city had ever seen had to wind down. There were other crimes to investigate and the manpower was needed elsewhere.
Bible John faded from the neon glare and merged with the shadows. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he moved away. Perhaps he was jailed. The nickname lived on, though, largely thanks to the press and people like me.
The question is, was there a Bible John? Were the three tragedies not connected at all? The then Strathclyde Police stated that the murders had never been officially linked. The reality is that they were and one senior detective told me that was a major mistake. If the three probes had been conducted independently then perhaps a vital piece of evidence could have been uncovered. But perhaps not.
Criticism has also been levelled at the decision to focus on the fuller description from the third murder at the expense of other differing descriptions. Also, the lighting in the dance hall and in the taxi would not be ideal – and the main witness had admitted to have been drinking.
Like other unsolved cases, the so-called Bible John cases will never die. Hundreds of people think they know who he was – it was a guy next door who behaved strangely at the time and had a suit similar to the one police described. It was a relative who was later convicted of rape. It was someone else who had very strange material in his attic. But there’s seldom anything that closely resembles proof.
A 1995 probe police concentrated on the then relatively new-fangled wonder of DNA profiling. A sample of semen found on Helen Puttock’s tights contained the miracle genetic fingerprint and a search was launched to see if there was a match with any of the suspects. Investigations zeroed in one man, by that time dead. His relatives agreed to give blood and, according to one forensic scientist, the match was the closest she’d ever seen. Permission was granted in 1996 to exhume his body, which became a media cavalcade. Then everything went quiet. What was supposed to take weeks turned into months – until it was somewhat sheepishly revealed that no match could be found.
Cynics believed that the entire affair was merely a bit of PR for DNA profiling, but if that was the case it failed, miracle development for investigators it is. The problem lay with the samples. DNA samples can be easily contaminated and can erode if samples are not stored properly. Genetic fingerprinting was not even a glimmer in a scientist’s eye in the late 1960s and although the original sample would have been stored carefully it may not have been careful enough to protect the material. I was once told by a former officer that material linked to the cases in those days could be hung over radiators in the police station to dry – while many of the productions in this matter were storied in boxes in the attic of Partick Marine. Remember, this was before the massive leaps in scientific detection. Forensic science was far from in its infancy in late 60s but it was not as advanced as it is today.
In addition, the suspect had been buried in a family lair. The passage of time had seen the coffin break down and the corpse contaminated. In all, the DNA breakthrough in the Bible John case was something of a disaster.
It has also been posited that Peter Tobin could have been responsible. He was convicted of the brutal murders of Angelika Kluk, a Polish student whose body was found buried beneath a Glasgow church, and of teenager Vicky Hamilton, for many years one of the most perplexing of Scotland’s missing person cases. Tobin, it seems, told a prison psychiatrist that he was responsible for 48 murders and the claim was taken seriously enough for a special UK-wide operation codenamed Anagram to be set up to piece together any evidence. In relation to the Bible John killings, Tobin was known to be living in the city at the time of the first two but was resident in Brighton when Helen Puttock was murdered. The methods of murder between the 1968/69 murders and others over the next forty years may be different but Tobin, who may yet prove to the nation’s worst serial sex killer, could have ‘evolved.’ He would have been in his early 20s during the Bible John days and as the years went by he could have perfected his methods and widened his target range, each time driven either by his lust for rape or his desire to kill.
However, Anagram found no cast-iron link to him – and he has refused to confirm or deny any involvement.
If – IF – there was a single Bible John, why did he stop? Was he arrested for another offence? Did he die? Move away? Or did he mature, essentially grow out of the urge to kill? Did he find some other outlet for his violent tendencies?
One jailhouse rumour might be the answer. A well-known crook told more than one person in prison that he murdered a man he believed to be the killer. This man disappeared late in 1969 and the jailhouse chit-chat suggested that he had to die because he was ‘making life too hot for them all.’
Possibly. Maybe. Perhaps. Could be.
All words that must be used when discussing the mystery.
Glasgow’s most notorious serial killer, if such a beast ever existed, remains under whatever rock he has hidden for over 50 years.
The final part of a short series on the execution of justice – and of the condemned – in old Glasgow.
John Murdoch had been the assistant to both Young and McArthur, as well as others, for thirty years when he became the ‘go-to guy’ for towns needing someone ‘topped.’ A baker to trade, he performed his official duties on a piecework basis but he was around 70 years old when Young died. Rheumatism had stricken his legs and he could walk only with the aid of a stick. Newspapers commented on the sight of him tottering up the steps to the platform and in 1849 one reporter opined that it was perhaps time that he gave up the work altogether. But old Murdoch grimly hung on – the £30-£40 fee for a topping was not something he was eager to do without – and at the age of 84 he almost botched what was to be his last service for Glasgow.
On 2 October, 1851, Archibald Hare, a man said to be of ‘repulsive and dogged aspect’, was sentenced to death for the stabbing of a man in Blantyre. Murdoch may well have been in the courtroom to hear the verdict, for it was his habit to attend the Circuit Court whenever a capital case was to be heard. Hare, who legend states was the nephew of ‘bodysnatcher’ William Hare (but legend is wrong), was to die on 24 October. The hangman laboriously hauled himself up the gallows steps and fixed the rope around Hare’s neck. In addition to being repulsive and dogged, Hare was a very slight man and when he was turned off he merely twisted on the end of the rope, trying desperately to free his bound hands in order to clutch at the hemp biting into his throat. Murdoch had to speed the man’s end by grabbing hold of his legs and swinging on them until the struggles eased and finally ceased. The authorities concluded that this particular Finisher was too old to continue and allowed him a pension out of the public purse. He died, aged 89, in Bothwell.
Glasgow then hired hangmen from other parts of Britain to, as Tam Young used to say, ‘get their business done.’
Over thirty years earlier, though, it would have been Tam who did the honours at the first quadruple hanging in Glasgow – during which two of the men facing their doom publicly displayed their affection for each other.
Robert McKinlay, (also known as Rough Rob), William Buchanan, Robert Guthrie, (alias R. Hunter Guthrie), and Alexander Forbes were led to the scaffold on the Green on 8 November, 1819. They had each been found guilty of various counts of housebreaking. McKinlay and Buchanan had been audacious enough to break into Bothwell Castle, near Hamilton, and make off with a gold watch, a silver snuff box, a silver spoon, a silver candlestick, a silver bread toaster ‘and several articles of wearing apparel.’ They had forced open a window and crept around the castle while the owner, the Right Honourable Lord Douglas, slept.
Glasgow-born McKinlay was a 23-year-old former cotton spinner who had, a broadsheet said, ‘long given up the sober pursuits of industry’ to set about ‘gaining a livelihood by fraud and theft’ through the ‘more dangerous way of living by preying on the property of the public.’ At the time of his arrest he was also wanted for a variety of other burglaries. He had earlier broken out of Greenock Jail and had avoided recapture by going to sea for eight months. He was caught on this occasion ‘in the Green asleep’ with some of the stolen items on him and ‘his Lordship’s neckcloth about his neck.’ He was destined to have something less pleasant around his throat. He had perhaps been fingered by his accomplice arrested earlier.
Buchanan was only 18-years-old and was also a cotton spinner to trade but was of a ‘very unsettled disposition, and much addicted to pilfering’, a state of mind which had already seen him do a twelvemonth in the Bridewell.
Lord Douglas appeared to be a very forgiving man for he had done what he could to have the men’s lives saved, but had failed.
Guthrie, a Paisley weaver, and Forbes, from Glasgow, had been found guilty of a housebreaking in Kilmarnock, during which they had taken a silver watch, five shirts, two pairs of shoes, cloth, food and cakes. A police officer spotted them near Barrhead two days later and with the aid of a ploughman managed to arrest them, finding some of the stolen articles on them.
When condemned to death, Guthrie stated that he thought the sentence ‘very hard.’ The 25-year-old was by trade a Wright but was a known criminal who had also previously tried to break jail, in his case the prison at Ayr, while 18-year-old Forbes was of ‘honest industrious parents’ but had ‘given himself up to idleness and drunkenness.’ He, too, had escaped from prison, having busted out of Paisley. He continued with his life of crime, almost being caught in the Gallowgate once, until he was arrested. Again unsuccessful efforts were made to have their sentence commuted. In the eyes of the law they were all menaces that had to be eradicated.
All four were described by a broadsheet of the day as ‘good-looking young men.’ The writer went on to say, ‘Never did the inhabitants of Glasgow, and the surrounding countryside, witness a more awesome and disturbing spectacle.’
Another broadsheet commented, ‘The melancholy scene we have this day witnessed must have the effect of touching with anguish the heart of every friend of humanity – every lover of our species; four young men (a sight never before witnessed in Glasgow) suffering ignominiously, shamelessly, and ingloriously on the scaffold, for breaking the laws of their country, whom, had the ability they evidently possessed, been directed aright, might have been an honour to themselves, a happiness to their families, and made them useful members of society.’
This writer hoped that the ‘heartrending spectacle’ the public witnessed would make anyone tempted to follow in their footsteps by ‘preying on the property of the public’ to think twice. What they thought of McKinlay kissing Buchanan farewell as the nooses were draped around their necks can only be surmised. Obviously, there was something more between the two than just friendship. The two young men continued to hold hands, made difficult by their being bound, until Guthrie gave the signal to the hangman. The four men ‘struggled very much’ before they were finally still.
The following year saw yet another quadruple execution. On a Sunday in December 1819 a gang invaded the home of Dr Robert Watt in Crossmyloof, a well-known doctor who had died seven months before. His widow, her young children and servants were in the mansion at the time and the men, their faces blackened, proceeded to ransack every cupboard and drawer before making off with all the cash and silver plate they could find. One held a loaded pistol to the head of the widow while another wrenched the rings from her fingers.
Four men by the name of Grant, Crosbie, O’Connor and McColgin was arrested the following October and tried in Glasgow in November. When condemned to death, lawyer and social campaigner Peter McKenzie noted, all ‘broke out into a loud volley of curses and swearing, and actually attempted to kick some of the witnesses and officers of justice near to them.’ At just after 3pm on Wednesday 8 November they were turned off together by Tam Young. According to one report the four men struggled dreadfully before they died and their bodies hung for 40 minutes before being cut down.
McKenzie went on to detail the tragic life of Mrs Young after the event. She lost much of her fortune through bankruptcy and all but one of her children died before her. Only the youngest girl survived but tragedy hit her, too – just before she was due to marry a distinguished surgeon he died of Typhus Fever.
The following year, Young officiated at a triple execution. On 24 October, Michael Macintyre, William Paterson and Wardrope Dyer were brought from the prison, marched across the road and onto the scaffold. Macintyre and Paterson had been found guilty of breaking into a house and stealing ‘various articles of wearing apparel.’ McIntyre was a 20-year-old Irishman whose parents had ‘endeavoured to gain a livelihood by hawking earthernware through this country.’
Their son was left to his own devices and tried to make a living by selling gingerbread in the streets but also during this time ‘became acquainted with idle and dissolute company’. He soon drifted into crime and was ‘well known to the keeper of the Bridewell.’ He enlisted in the army but his larcenous nature led him to be found ‘several times guilty of plundering his comrades’ so he was punished – no doubt by flogging – and then drummed out of the regiment. He obviously did not learn from the experience for he was arrested fairly soon after returning to Glasgow.
His accomplice William Paterson, born in Manchester of Scottish parentage, came to Glasgow when his father died in the East Indies. His upbringing was such that he very early on ‘fell a prey to every species of vice with which every large city abounds.’
Dyer was a native Glaswegian, having been born to reputable parents in the Drygate. He became a weaver but ‘got acquainted with women of very questionable characters, took up with gamblers, boxers and bullies who were always the first to point out the object of plunder, and ever ready to partake of the booty, but too wary to share in the danger.’ Dyer, though, was all too willing to take the risks and that brought him to the platform in October, 1821, where he would die facing the monument. He was only 22 years of age. In the jail, before they were led out, he had been moved by the preaching of the minister but McIntyre and Paterson were made of sterner stuff and warned other prisoners within earshot that if they ever wished to avoid hanging, then plead guilty. After the execution, it was revealed that Dyer had pointed out the haunts of ‘questionable characters’ and the eye of the Glasgow Police was upon them.
The final declarations of the accused on the platform were generally of a religious nature, leading to a warning against drink, keeping bad company and fornication. Paisley weaver turned housebreaker David Wylie, on 12 November 1823, warned the crowds to beware of gangs of thieves. He urged onlookers to avoid ‘bad company, especially resetters, who haunt young men in their houses; who give their meat and drink to the pilferer which they prompt then to take in a clandestine manner; little money is given to the depredators; and what is gained by these destroyers of youth who sell the property of honest people, is spent in debauchery, drunkenness and everything which degrades human nature.’ He considered ‘bad women and Sabbath breaking’ two of the worst evils, in addition to the one for which he was convicted.
Wylie died, aged 17.
However, perhaps the strangest of all declarations on the scaffold came in 1853, when Hans Smith McFarlane and Helen Blackwood were executed for murder. They had lured ships carpenter Alexander Boyd to a house in the New Vennel. There they drugged him with a mixture of whisky and snuff, robbed him and then threw his body from a window. They denied the charge but the principal witnesses against them were two brothers named Shillingshaw, both less than 12 years of age, who had been sleeping under a bed in the same house and watched the whole scene. The boys had been kept in prison since the murder because they had nowhere else to go. At the trial in Edinburgh, a third person, Ann Marshall, was found guilty along with McFarlane and Blackwood but her sentence was commuted to transportation. There was no such mercy for McFarlane and Blackwood, for they were to hang. ‘We have not got justice,’ remarked the woman. ‘There is a higher judge for us. We are innocent.’
On being returned to Glasgow, McFarlane and Blackwood were lodged in Duke Street Prison. There McFarlane asked the governor if he would be allowed to marry his co-accused. The request was turned down – but McFarlane had his mind set on making an honest woman of her, figuratively speaking at least. On the day of their death, 11 August, they were both moved to the South Prison before being led out to the scaffold. A crowd estimated to be 40,000 strong rippled far into the Green and before them McFarlane shouted, ‘Helen Blackwood, before God and in the presence of these witnesses, I take you to be my wife. Do you consent?’
The stunned ocean of faces waited to hear the woman’s response. ‘I do,’ she said.
‘Then before these witnesses I declare you to be what you have always been to me, a true and faithful wife, and you die an honest woman.’
The officiating clergyman intoned Amen, the bolt was drawn and the newly-weds plunged into the gaping maw beneath them. T.M. Tod remarked in his ‘Scots Black Kalandar’, ‘This marriage, we understand, was not recorded in the Registrar General’s book.’
McFarlane and Blackwood insisted their innocence to the last, as did weaver Andrew Stewart who was condemned for a street assault. Although he admitted he had struck the victim, he insisted that he had not participated in the subsequent robbery. Lawyer Peter McKenzie tended to believe him and labelled the case a miscarriage of justice.
The victim was Italian Filipo Testi, who McKenzie wrote was a ‘mild, fine-looking young man, who scarcely understood the Scots language.’ He earned a living as a street trader, selling ornaments and little works of art from a board which he carried about Glasgow on his head. Belfast-born Andrew Stewart was a weaver who lived in Bridgeton with his parents and had never been in trouble with the law. One Saturday in August, 1826 (McKenzie says it was May, but he was writing from memory long after the events) he came to Glasgow to be paid by his employer. With money in his pocket, he tarried too long, visiting the Theatre Royal and lingering in the Boat Tavern in the Saltmarket with some friends. As he made his way home via the Gallowgate, he encountered Filipo Testi in East Nile Street. The Italian had lost his way and in his faltering English asked Stewart directions. The 25-year-old weaver, his mind befuddled with drink, did not understand him and began to believe that Testi was making a fool of him. Testi tried again but still could not make himself understood. Then he put his hand on Stewart’s shoulder. Stewart shrugged him off. Testi became more excited in his questions, desperate to make himself understood. Finally, Stewart took offence and punched him. If he had been sober, perhaps he would have been more patient. But he was not and Testi fell to the ground. A policeman standing nearby saw the punch and ‘sprang his rattles’, panicking Stewart who ran off down Charlotte Street and onto the Green, leaping over an iron gate that police had earlier locked to prevent anyone from getting into the park at night. The officer had followed, leaving Testi stunned on the ground, but lost him in the dark.
According to the prosecution, Testi was already being stalked by ‘a gang of ruffians’ who had been told by a woman that he had money on his person. These ‘street blackguards’ then materialised from the darkness and pounced on the man while he lay prone in the street. They robbed him of his gold repeater watch, chain, his gloves, his tobacco and ‘five or six segars’. They also relieved him of two one-pound notes, a guinea note and 10 to 12 shillings in silver. The gang was seen rifling his pockets but anyone who attempted to prevent them was threatened. They did not stop until other officers arrived, alerted by their colleague’s rattle. The gang, like Stewart, bolted for the Green where they argued over the division of the spoils.
Stewart, meanwhile, made it home where he told his mother what had happened. Two days later they came for him while he was eating breakfast. The officer who had chased him identified him and charged him with assault and street robbery. Police also arrested George Buckley and James Dickson, on whom they found Testi’s wallet. The Crown case was that Stewart had acted along with Buckley, Dickson and others to attack and rob Testi. The young weaver insisted he had never seen the men before. He told the police his story. Yes, he had struck the blow but it was in anger not as part of a street robbery. He had not meant to hurt the man. He repeated it to lawyers. He told anyone who would listen. He was not believed.
The jury, by a majority, condemned Stewart for assault and robbery but acquitted Buckley on a Not Proven verdict. The young man had been identified by witnesses, while Buckley – a known crook – had not. One witness prevaricated so much that he was jailed for two months for contempt, to be fed nothing but bread and water. Dickson, however, was found guilty of robbery – he had, after all, been found with part of the booty. He was to be transported for life but Stewart was to die. The judge said that street robbery was an atrocity and that it was ‘necessary to make a terrible example, especially in the case of the poor foreigner.’
‘So it is,’ replied Stewart, ‘but I am not guilty in the way imputed to me.’
The case excited sympathy among the liberal minds of Glasgow and it was hoped that a reprieve would be forthcoming. On the day set for the execution, 1 November, supporters turned up early at the post office in Nelson Street in order to catch the London Mail coach. They hoped that a letter would reach them from the Home Secretary saving the young weaver’s life. No letter was sent. Andrew Stewart walked up the scaffold steps followed by the tall frame of Tam Young. The young man’s mother stood by steps and cried out, ‘My son! My son! My innocent son! May the God of Heaven receive you into his everlasting arms.’
Another Irishman died that day. Edward Kelly had had been convicted with another man, whose sentence of death was respited, of robbery in the Bridgegate. The victim, James Fleming, had picked up a prostitute and while in her company she had learned that he had a sum of money about his person. When he left, she alerted some of her ‘abandoned colleagues’ who set about him in the street, dragged him into a close and robbed him of over £100. Kelly, 21-years-old and ‘never bred to any regular business,’ and his co-accused were arrested while they were splitting the loot. A third man got away with around £40 of the haul and was never caught.
Public executions continued on the Saltmarket until 1865, when multiple murderer Dr Edward William Pritchard had his date with the noose. Hanging continued for almost a century but it moved indoors – to Duke Street and Barlinnie prisons – away from the eyes of the horrified, or entertained, public.
Another series of extracts from Glasgow’s Black Heart, my history of the city’s crime and punishment, now out of print.
This time I’m looking at the area between Glasgow Cross and the river, which became the centre of the judicial process. Here were jails, courts – and execution sites.
Part 1 looks at the old Tolbooth.
Apart from the few cells in the police headquarters, Glasgow’s prison provision was catered for by the Tolbooth, built in 1626 on the site of an older structure, and in the next century, a ‘Bridewell’ – a House of Correction – in Duke Street. In addition to crooks, the jails also had to cater for vagabonds and debtors. The Tolbooth jailer was also expected to supply coals for the council and court meetings but in addition to his salary he received monies from the prisoners themselves, particularly the debtors.
In the jail’s early days, for the first eight days incarceration, he could demand two shillings Scots or tuppence a day if the inmate was a townsman or four shillings Scots, fourpence a day, if they were ‘Outintownsmen’. After eight days he received whatever the magistrate decided. Fees for beggars and vagabonds were also fixed by the serving magistrate but were kept low as these were paid out of the public purse. From 1696, the Scottish Parliament passed an Act of Grace which decreed that the creditor at whose hands the debtor was jailed also had to pay towards his or her upkeep. However, not every jailer profited from the arrangement. In 1661, the city treasurer was ordered by the council to give jailer Charles McCleane £20 Scots or One pound, 13 shillings and fourpence Sterling ‘for his extraordinary pains in keeping the Tolbooth and getting no profit thereby, having only thieves and lounes (insane persons) as prisoners.’
Prisoners, meanwhile, were allowed to supplement their funds by begging from the windows. They did this by lowering a bag or a basket with a length of rope to the street in the hope that a friend, relative or a kind-hearted stranger would drop in a few pennies. On one occasion, an inmate thrust his head out to see if anyone was making a deposit to his jail fund and ended up wedged between the bars on the window. As a punishment, the jailer left him in that position for some time before he sent someone to cut him free. Naturally, other implements could also be placed in the makeshift hoist, implements that may well have been used in furthering the many escape attempts. In October 1791, convicted thief James Plunkett escaped from the Tolbooth. He was rearrested on 25 November when he tried to steal four pairs of silk stockings from a shop on the Trongate. He was chased into the Saltmarket where he was caught when he stumbled over a bag of stones which was to be used for building a causeway. Determined not to be returned to the jail, he tried to pull his pistol but his pursuers managed to disarm him. He knew the jig was up when someone in the crowd recognised him as the prisoner who had fled the jail the month before, even though he had tried to disguise himself by cutting his hair.
The Tolbooth buildings had first been erected in 1626. All that is left now is the 113 foot high steeple with its four-dial clock. It is imposing enough today, sited in the centre of the confluence of High Street, Trongate, Gallowgate and Saltmarket but in the 17th to 19th centuries it must have been a most impressive sight. And it needed to be, for it was not only the centre of civic authority, but also the symbol of judicial power. The sheriff court met once a week and, along with the police court, dealt with relatively minor offences. Often the sheriff or the magistrate presiding sat on the bench reading a newspaper or even drinking, paying little heed to the proceedings and only looking up to pass sentence, generally guilty. It was left to a clerk to make sure everything ran smoothly. There was no permanent High Court of Justiciary sitting in Glasgow so more serious cases were dealt with by the West Circuit Court which arrived in the city every April and September amid great pomp and ceremony and situated itself in a room that formed part of the Tolbooth complex. The old judges, more used to the comforts and splendour of Edinburgh, found coming to Glasgow something of a chore. The old building was somewhat cramped, what with the burgeoning civic authority and the legal hierarchy all sharing the same ground with the ever-growing band of miscreants. By 1807, there were just under 2000 criminal cases being heard each and every year. Punishments were swift and hard and not every sentence entailed prison for any length of time. Serious cases, which could include some petty thefts, meant death by hanging (from the Tolbooth condemned cell those who were about to die could salute the gallows paraphernalia dangling from the steeple). Whipping was also common – a record from 1575 said that the common hangman was paid five shillings ‘for scourging of ane hussy throw the town.’ Men could be nailed by an ear to a post and could only get free if they could were able to pull or cut the nail out. A few took the opportunity to wrench their head clear. But others could have their liberty removed for periods of time – and that was the cause of the serious overcrowding.
By 1807 the old jail was deemed insufficient for purpose. The prison population had exploded to four times the number it could comfortably house and its 32 cells were crammed with criminals and debtors from Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Dunbartonshire awaiting trial. Sanitary conditions were intolerable, even in those days when the most basic conditions were something akin to luxury.
Just over a century later, a speaker at the Old Glasgow Club told his audience, ‘Innocent and guilty, young and old, diseased and infirm were confined together, without courtyards for exercise, chapel or infirmary. No wonder that jail fever (typhus) was a scourge, and incarceration was not only punishment, but a direct cause of degradation to those who were convicted of a first offence and not beyond redemption.’
The gentlemen of the town council approached Parliament for the funds to build a new prison but were refused, so the magistrates and bailies resolved to go it alone. They had grand plans – the new facility would house not only a jail but a court house, for the increase in the number arrests obviously had a knock-on effect on the business of trials and sentencing. And a site had been selected that was thought ideal, although as author Bill Knox wrote, ‘their choice was hardly a beauty spot.’
Garnethill. Situated north of the city’s most famous thoroughfare, Sauchiehall Street, and rambling towards West Graham Street over a hill so steep that even The Little Engine That Could would not even try, the area begins properly at Cambridge Street to the east and ends to the west at the jumble of motorway slip roads at Charing Cross.
Visually, it has not changed much since 1952. Certainly, some of the tenements have been bulldozed to make way for smart new red-brick homes. Many of the remaining buildings look cleaner now than they would have done in the austere days of post-war Britain, thanks to the passion for stone cleaning in the city during the Eighties. In one such sandblasted tenement is the Tenement House, a National Trust for Scotland property which has won a number of top tourism awards. Tourists flock to this small flat which acts as a living museum of the way ordinary Glaswegians lived between the wars.
But there have been other, more noticeable, more destructive changes. Now there are playgrounds that used to be buildings and buildings that used to be churches and although most of the streets are still there (the area has been spared many of the ravages of town planners, although not escaping them completely) they bear the signs of modern-day life – one-way streets, residents’ parking bays and the ubiquitous parking meters. However, there is still the proliferation of guest- and boarding-houses which helped give Garnethill its unique atmosphere back in the early Fifties, when it was known as the Soho or Bohemia of Glasgow. They said then that the streets never slept.
The people who live in the area have changed, of course, but it still has a cosmopolitan feeling about it, an international atmosphere largely due to its Chinese – this is the city’s Chinatown – and Asian citizens, rather than the transient population which inhabited the ‘digs’ of old. And then there are the art students, of course, who attend the Charles Rennie MacIntosh designed School of Art.
But perhaps somewhere in the new Garnethill there is a resident who can remember the Garnethill of old. Perhaps there is someone who recalls those damp and depressing days in October 1952 when the streets, normally filled with the sound of children’s laughter, fell silent, when parents held their children close and prayed for the arrest of the shadowy person who left a young child to die on a set of cold stone steps.
An arrest which never came.
Lost
The last time anyone other than her killer saw four-and-a-half-year-old Betty Alexander alive for certain was as she played with friends outside her home at 43 Buccleuch Street, Garnethill. She looked happy and smart in her fawn brown coat, kilt, grey and red jersey, fair stockings and brown shoes. Her unruly curly fair hair was brushed as neat as possible, her brown eyes sparkled, her young face marred only by the small scar on the right-hand side of her forehead.
On the afternoon of Tuesday 7 October, she helped her grandmother make the beds in the house and then went down to a local grocer to help him in his shop, something she often did. Later, she returned to her grandmother with some flowers from the shop.
‘Then she went downstairs to play,’ Mrs Isobel Alexander, her grandmother, later told reporters. ‘She was whistling and singing. That was the last time I saw her.’
She continued: ‘She was a lovable, sweet little girl who used to talk to anyone who spoke to her but would not wander away of her own accord.’
But at some point, Betty did wander away from her street, although whether it was of her own volition or whether she was abducted or enticed we will never know. When she did not return home, her mother Barbara set out to find her, walking the streets and lanes, calling her daughter’s name. But there was no sign of the little curly haired girl with the scar on her forehead.
Hunt
A larger search-party was formed by friends and neighbours. Ultimately, the police were alerted and joined the search. Later that night, at about 8pm, Barbara Alexander thought she heard her daughter calling to her from the lane which runs between Buccleuch Street and West Graham Street. The worried mother walked up the gas-lit alleyway, peering where she could into back courts and shadowy corners, calling out Betty’s name again. But Betty did not answer and Mrs Alexander left, her hopes dashed. She had no way of knowing that she could have walked within a few inches of where her daughter may have been lying, either dead or near to it.
By the following day the press were on the story, too. After reports in the evening and daily papers, readers contacted the police with claims that they had seen the girl in various parts of the city. Each sighting was carefully checked. None of them turned out to have been Betty Alexander.
One person even thought she had seen the child crying in Woolworths in Sauchiehall Street just before closing time on Wednesday night. The police asked the manager to re-open the store to see if the little girl had been locked in somewhere. But it, like all the others, proved to be a false alarm.
At assembly in the local primary school, the headmaster, flanked by city detectives, told his young charges of the child’s disappearance and asked for any children to come forward who might have seen Betty or who possibly heard her calling out from the darkness of the lane. A number of youngsters came forward with information.
The search shifted gear, extending to the entire 16 square miles covered by what was then the Northern Police Division. Detective Chief Inspector Neil Beaton admitted publicly that fears for the girl’s safety were mounting. But, he said, everything possible was being done.
‘Teams of police, policewomen and detectives are on special patrols,’ he said, ‘and we have inquired into hundreds of reports by people claiming to have seen Betty. Nothing has come to light.’
By the time he made that statement, two days after the girl’s disappearance, perhaps the experienced officer knew there was little hope of finding her alive.
But the search went on. The driver of a dark saloon car seen in the street on the night Betty disappeared was traced and eliminated from inquiries. An appeal for a man said to have been seen with her was made. He was wearing a blue suit and was described as small, stout and middle aged. This man, though, was never found.
Search-parties combed old air-raid shelters, disused now but still evident in bleak postwar Britain. Dark closes and seldom-used lanes were visited many times. Parks, including nearby Kelvingrove Park, were searched and sections of the Forth and Clyde canal at Port Dundas were dragged by Ben Parsonage of the Glasgow Humane Society.
But still there was no sign, not even the slightest trace, of the little girl.
The girl’s photograph was posted on every police box and police station in the city. Police officers folded copies into their notebooks for ease of recognition on the offchance that they came across her during a patrol.
Friends, neighbours and strangers threw themselves wholeheartedly into the hunt. It is at times like this that people often come together, showing a community spirit which is still seen even today when such feelings are said to be dead. Later many of these same people would come together to murmur darkly of lynchings and vigilante justice. But that was after the shock of a young girl’s brutal murder turned to fear and suspicion. For now, local mothers, some of whom might not even have known the Alexanders, formed their own groups and searched the neighbouring areas of Anderston and Partick by torchlight. Their leader, Mrs Rose McGurley, a neighbour to the Alexanders, said: ‘Most of these women have been neglecting their homes to help look for Betty. I’ve spent over 16 hours going over back courts and closes in the district and will go on looking until she is found.’
But the little girl was closer to her home than the searchers realised.
Found
At about 2pm on Friday 10 October, Mrs Agnes Hunter, the 55-year-old cleaner at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children’s dispensary in West Graham Street, went out to the building’s backyard to beat carpets. She always did this at around that time on a Friday. No one else had any reason to go there on any other day – both the door from the dispensary and the wooden gate leading into Buccleuch Lane at the rear were kept locked. The yard was private property and nobody had been in it – not even part of the search-party since she had last been there the Friday before.
At least that’s what she thought.
What she found when she opened the door from the dispensary sent her screaming back into the building. Little Betty Alexander lay on her back on top of her coat at the head of a small flight of steps leading to the dispensary door. Her clothes were disarranged although there were no immediately visible signs of injury. But she was dead – and had been for some time. She may even have been lying there since the very first night she went missing.
‘It was a terrible sight,’ said the cleaning woman later. ‘I want to forget it as quickly as possible.’
The courtyard had not been searched during the three days and two nights that Betty had been missing. There had seemed to be no need. Everybody had been looking for a little girl who was full of life and who had perhaps wandered off and got herself trapped somewhere. The courtyard was surrounded by ten-foot-high stone walls, too high for such a little girl to climb over. The gate was always locked. It was not overlooked by any houses, apart from the caretaker’s house but he and his family had moved out six weeks before. Only the dark and empty windows looked down emotionlessly on the scene now. Scrawled in white paint on the wall beside the gate leading from the lane to the yard were the words ‘The Wages of Sin is Death’. Hardly a fitting epitaph for a young child. But it was a message that many locals were ready to give the culprit when he – or she – was caught.
TO BE CONTINUED
Adapted from a chapter in ‘No Final Solution’ (Mainstream, 1994)
