Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock were murdered in the Scottish city of Glasgow in the late 1960s.
Their names became almost synonymous with john biblethe man believed to have been responsible for all three murders.
Each of the young women, aged between 25 and 32, had been out one night at Glasgow’s popular Barrowland nightclub, leaving their children in the care of relatives back home. They never came back to them.
They were all strangled and their bodies dumped a short distance from where they lived.
The search for the murderer was one of the largest ever carried out in Scotland, but despite police questioning more than 7,000 people and taking 4,000 statements, no arrests were made.
Bible John, as he was called after a witness said he had quoted scripture, was never caught and sparked decades of speculation about his identity. Now, a book recovers his story.
“Waiting for the Deluge”, the latest novel by the popular Spanish writer Dolores Redondo, brings this serial killer closer to the rest of the world.
BBC Mundo spoke with the writer within the framework of the Hay Festival Cartagena that takes place between January 26 and 29, 2023in that Colombian city.
Based on the story of a real killer at a time when the concept of a serial killer was just beginning to take shape in the US., whatpWhy did you choose Bible John?
First of all, because it happened a long time ago. That’s one of the reasons. We must always be sensitive not to touch on issues that are too recent, because there are victims and people who are suffering from them.
The other thing that makes him extraordinarily attractive is the fact that he wasn’t captured and could still be alive today.
John Biblia committed his attacks in the years 1968-1969 and the witnesses of the time say that he was about 20 years old, so he could perfectly be alive.
That wouldn’t change your circumstances, even if you’ve been in hiding or led another kind of life or even changed your mind. modus operandi and he has continued to use violence, which is most likely, I would not change it, he would continue to be the same murderer.
It has for me the interest of the time, the fact of how the investigation was carried out and how he managed to slip out of a police cordon that has gone down in history as the largest police operation in Scotland. And still, they didn’t catch him.
This is very striking. It strikes me because of the impact it had on that society.
John Bible, who is not a well-known murderer outside the United Kingdom, is a true legend there.
For decades to come, people continued to talk about Biblia John.
At the time, more than 5,000 men went through line-ups to see if witnesses thought they recognized John Bible among them, and the paranoia it unleashed throughout Scotland reached the point that police issued ID cards justifying that the bearer was not John Bible to avoid lynching.
The fact of how it was recorded in society is very striking, because it generated that kind of paranoia that did not generate it, for example, Jack the Ripper, who went for prostitutes and did not generate that alarm except among the prostitutes of the time.
It is also striking a peculiarity that I have already talked about in other novels, with other types of aggressors, which is that it is the type of person that could go perfectly unnoticed, because John Biblia’s description of the witnesses is not only physical, but also they heard him speak and could see him for hours and they say that he was a kind, polite and neat-looking guy.
I think this is the most terrifying of all, because if you imagine someone with a brutal, wild, dark, gigantic aspect, it is easier to assimilate that it could be someone monstrous, but in someone who could be a normal guy this is very scary.
The fact that it is not known what happened to him has caused some British media to echo your book Y suggested the possibility that he was in Bilbao.
It’s a theory.
Let’s see, I built that theory based on another that has been and is still valid and that is that a serial killer, as precise as John the Bible, who took the women with periods of almost six months between each one and the same place; that is to say, that he was very convinced of his technique, that he used an almost exact technique in the crimes and that he chose them that way, on the one hand it makes me think that perhaps he had committed other types of aggressions before, because it is very refined the method.
And on the other hand, there is a current theory in criminology that says that this type of murderer at that point does not stop just because there are rumors that they are looking for him or because there is a big police operation.
If he definitely stops, it is because he has been imprisoned for another crime, perhaps he has been sentenced for something else and is in prison or has died, which is highly unlikely because he was very young, he did not seem physically handicapped either, he seemed healthy, and the third time is that he left the country.
And that is the one that suits me the most, because it was such a tremendous operation that last year the BBC released a documentary called “John Bible’s House” echoing how powerful that investigation was and how far they went and they didn’t catch him.
There are many theories. Mine is that there has always been a communication channel between the United Kingdom, Ireland, Scotland with the northern ports, with everyone.
Today there is still daily ferry traffic of people and of course, goods. But in those years there were also so many Englishmen in Bilbao, due to the number of British companies that had headquarters there, that it was very easy for it to have gone unnoticed among the Englishmen who lived in that city in the Basque Country.
the murderer killedeither to women who They had the menstruation. How did she know that she hadno the menstruation? How did you carry out its reconstruction?
This has been one of the mysteries in all these years, what the police wondered. You also have to understand that at that time there were not even women in the Scottish police and the knowledge that a police inspector of the time could have of female nature, of their sexual desires or of their tendency to have relationships or not having menstruation , they were from walking around the house, that is, they were null. They did not know the nature of the woman.
In fact, the first theory was that he had surely assaulted them, because when they had their menstruation they had refused to have sex. Later someone, when women entered [a la policía]began to point out that having a period does not have to be so limiting.
This also allows us to see how the vision of the case is changing as criminology progresses, which has taken a turn in 40 years that has been beastly, almost as much as cardiology, which is the other theme of the novel.
Nowadays, in the talks that I give with the book presentations, as soon as I say “he took three women from the same room, between these and these years, the three brunettes, the three more or less of this appearance, each six months or so and he killed all three of them the same way, raped them, left the contents of their bags like this and all three had their periods”, everyone says: a serial killer.
ANDIn the novel, John Bible is chased by a policeman who He is very sick with his heart, an organ that plays an important role both medically and because of the hunches that they guide it.
It is more metaphorical. The real setting is that Bilbao of 1983, including the great flood that destroyed the city as it was and forced it to reinvent itself. Also Glasgow and also John Bible. However, Noah Scott Sherrington is a creation.
He is someone tailor-made for everything he wanted to tell and it is the most narrative and metaphorical part of the novel, which has to do with life, with death, with love, with hope and of course, the heart is capital , because he is sick with his heart, from hunches and from love, which is also present in the novel.
But I say that all Noah is metaphor. He is called Noah after the deluge, he arrives in a boat to Bilbao in the footsteps of John Biblia or after a hunch that John Biblia may have gone to Bilbao.
And his last name is also a metaphor, because Scott Sherrington was a British Nobel Prize in Medicine who won the award for the discovery of the neural connection of a part of our brain: how neurons connect with each other or what comes to be the same , deductive thinking.
His discoveries had such an impact among the writers of the time that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was also a doctor and also belonged to the Royal Society, like Charles Scott Sherrington and even Agatha Christie, put these characteristics on his characters. Sherlock Holmes does it, Poirot does (…)
I gave Noah this last name precisely, because hunches are not hunches, what we call hunches really come from our brain and are information that it interprets in a specific way, perhaps it has no probative value, because it cannot be measured or calculated , it is not exact, but it obeys an intelligent deduction, which works in some people.
He is carried away by what he calls hunches, but they are pure intelligence.
As you mentioned, the story takes place in the summer of 1983 when a great flood destroyed the city, an event that, Whataccounts in the prologue, marked you as a child.
I really like to explain it, because it is a common question in the press, where the ideas for a novel come from. I know that there are infinite things that come at different times in your life. Some like that came many years ago and now it has become real. The way in which it marked me seeing it from the window of a train and the fear that I had that my family would be affected too.
In addition, I have always lived in San Sebastián and in the following years, every year on the anniversary we remembered again.
The impact it had was tremendous in terms of the people who died and the losses that occurred at the time. This, together with the naval crisis that came in the following years, made Bilbao change to the point where the place where the Guggenheim Museum stands today was the wharf of the English, where the ships arrived. English rgueros with the steel to make boats and with the whiskey that they brought from Scotland.
The Bilbao of that time has nothing to do with the Bilbao of today.
Not at all, it was a marvelous city in many ways because of the amount of money and work it moved, because of how welcoming and open. It was a very modern city, but it was also a chaotic, decadent, tremendously polluted city.
Some readings suggested that there were times when it was the most polluted city in all of Europe. There were hundreds of chimneys pouring their smoke without any type of filter. But also, the steel mills or the shipbuilders poured everything directly into the river, even the sewage system, which was very old, poured directly into the estuary, and that was horrible.
It had been built in a totally lawless manner and all the warehouses were mixed up with each other.
A thousand inspectors, a thousand boats everywhere. And a lot of drugs. It was the 80s, heroin was completely free and a lot of dirt and meanness and prostitution and wonderful people, too, and everything mixed there with a Tower of Babel that was amazing and then political tension, let’s not forget that that summer the flag war was breaking out.
It was also the year in which the regional police took to the streets for the first time. I tell it from the mouth of one of the characters, who is a young man from the Ertzaintza who goes out on the streets for the first time, very young and full of idealism and convictions that he is going to change the world.
Through this character you talk about the birth of the Ertzaintza and the idealism of the early days.
Sure, conviction is fine. I have talked to them over time. Many are now retired, others are police commanders and they are the first to admit that they were children, who came out with their heads full of idealism and illusion, believing that they were going to change the world, but I still think it’s fine.
If at 20 you don’t think you’re going to change the world and you don’t think you have something good to give, then too bad.
You portray a time in full political and social turmoil, glancing at the Basque conflict and the possible relationships of the organization navy Basque nationalist ETA with IRA (Irish Republican Army) commandos.
These are issues that were being considered at that time and that were never fully resolved. The suspicion remained. I have never had reliable data. Surely they would be in contact, but what I have tried is to chronicle what was happening at that time, without going so much into what is known now.
You have to keep in mind that it was 1983 and I have to stick to the fact that they are in 1983. I cannot do the analysis from now on, just like the idealism of those young Ertzainas.
This article is part of the coverage of Hay Festival Cartagena, a meeting of writers and thinkers that takes place from January 26 to 29, 2023 in which Dolores Redondo was going to participate, but canceled her participation at the last moment for personal reasons. You can read all our coverage of Hay Cartagena by clicking here.
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