Bible John: A New Suspect by Jill Bavin-Mizzi

[Herlock Sholmes]

Surely if a poster is up on a police wall then the person in said poster must still be connected to the case in some way? Otherwise they would take the photofit/portrait down? Or am I missing something Regards Darryl

Hi Darryl,

There’s quite a bit in this case that we could file under ‘strange’ and this would seem to be one of them. Jeannie is saying that the person in the picture that she saw had been eliminated by the police but none of these pictures were of named individuals. And as you say Darryl, if one picture was from a description given by a witness who was later found to have been lying then why would it still have been on display? It has to be possible that after 27 years Jeannie was just mistaken about what had been said to her at the time.

[Herlock Sholmes]

There is a lot of ambiguity in both Jeannie's oral account and the article about Lennox Patterson.

I don't think Patterson was asked to do a sketch after the Pat Docker murder; when he talks about the 'first' murder I think he is referring to the killing of Jemima MacDonald, which was the first time he was approached. Thus the 'second' murder is probably a reference to the murder of Helen Puttock.

Jeannie contradicts herself regarding the poster she saw inside the police station. First of she says it is definitely him, then she says it is not him but you can see the resemblance. A bit of a muddle but what seems clear is that the Patterson sketch done in respect of the Jemima MacDonald murder was, from Jeannie's point of view, pretty accurate. What we can't know is how much Jeannie's memory of the poster influenced the description she gave to Patterson when the portrait was done.

Maybe that is what the police were trying to avoid when they told her not to pay any attention to the poster on the wall. Because as HS points out, they cannot have discounted a suspect on the basis of a generic sketch.

Agreed Cobalt. The frailty of memory has to be kept in mind here considering the lengthy passage of time. It does seem strange though that they didn’t just get someone drawing the picture with Jean sitting there so that she could suggest alterations or improvements. If they had done that then wouldn’t we have expected this version to have been the one that she favoured?

[Herlock Sholmes]

I’ve just listened again to episode 8 - Revelation. I thought I’d lay out a list for clarity of some of the points raised from discussions with the 1996 detectives.


~ Action 14 - Two days after Helen Puttock’s murder why did a team of such senior officers go to Stonehouse? Detective Superintendent Beattie (senior investigation officer) Detective Superintendent Tom Valentine, Detective Inspector William Campbell and Detective Inspector Tommy Grant. This kind of thing would normally have been done by a Detective Sergeant or a Detective Constable or both.
McEwan and Hughes suggest a bit of glory-hunting maybe?

~ Why did they take their suspect to the station at Hamilton (which is a small station in Lanarkshire) when the headquarters for the case was at Partick Marine Station in Glasgow?

~ Why, when they spoke to Joe Beattie in hospital in 1996 (saying that he was perfectly lucid) could he recall the trip to Stonehouse and yet he couldn’t recall the name of the suspect. In the biggest case of his career after something so important had occurred to make him and those other three senior officers charge over to Stonehouse? Even though he was adamant that this witness was put in front of Jeannie (who failed to ID him)

~ Why could the 1996 team find not one single mention of McInnes’s name in the record?

~ Why did Jimmy McInnes try to minimise his roll in the original investigation? (Although he admitted that the Stonehouse suspect was his cousin, John Irvine McInnes.

~ When the team went to Stonehouse their first port of call was Sandy, John Irvine McInnes’s cousin and he said that it was the Moylan’s card that led them to his door and yet there’s no mention of this card in the investigation files.

~ Why did Hector McInnes try to claim that the card was false evidence?

~ Why did Jimmy McInnes follow Detective Jim McEwen and try to intimidate him during the 1996 investigation?

~ Why was it that when a Mrs Palka (?), a Barrowland dancer claimed to know who the killer was it was Jimmy McInnes’s who went to interview her?

~ Why is the interview book blank with no statement taken?

~ Why was there an attempt to rub out her name from the interview book?

~ Why were the following statements re-numbered to hide the gap in the sequence?

~ Why, when the taxi driver Alexander Hannah was called in, was it Jimmy McInnes (the man who supposedly took no part in the enquiry) who dealt with him?

~ Why when they fingerprinted his taxi were there no prints? How can you have no fingerprints in a Glasgow taxi?

~ While the taxi was being fingerprinted Hannah was taken on the route that he took on the night of Helen’s murder. On that very afternoon Jeannie saw an identity parade. Why wasn’t Hannah shown the identity parade? He’d had Bible John in his taxi after all.

~ Beattie told the 1996 detectives that John Irvine McInnes was put on the ID parade but Jeannie failed to pick him out but according to the timeline McInnes was at Hamilton police station; nowhere near to Partick Marine.

~ There are very strict rules about recording ID parades so why is there no record of the one that Jeannie saw?

~ Mickey Moylan said that his employee Thomas Murphy (who worked in his Wishaw shop) had been pulled into Partick Marine. His other employee Len Smith said that he had to show Jeannie his teeth but that this wasn’t during a formal ID parade.

~ Why was it that when detective Davy Frew had suggested to Beattie that they make some enquiry into the area where the dishevelled man on the night bus was seen Beattie refused? Was it because 5 m utes walk from where he got off the bus was where McInnes’s aunt and uncle lived. Somewhere that he had sometimes spent the night if he’d missed his last bus?

~ How come when shown a group of 12 photographs, taxi driver Alexander Hannah immediately picked out John Irvine McInnes as the man that was in his taxi? And not only that he correctly stated that McInnes was older in the photograph that he was shown?

~ How come when shown a group of 12 photographs the bouncer that was involved in the cigarette incident unhesitatingly picked out the photograph of John Irvine McInnes?


‘A bit suspicious’ doesn’t really cover it does it?