Bible John: A New Suspect by Jill Bavin-Mizzi

[cobalt]

Picking up on New Waterloo's thoughts on BJ and armpits. We're probably in Freudian territory here but the method of suicide and the placing of the sanitary towel on Helen Puttock does seem more than coincidence.

It may explain another puzzle as to why BJ restricted his murders to women who were menstruating. Armpits are traps for human odour and it's sometimes possible to notice when a woman is on her period due to a stronger scent from her sweat. Helen Puttock was wearing a sleeveless dress when she went out dancing at the Barrowfield I think. I am assuming that BJ's views on women were very much taken from Leviticus and that he thought they should be indoors at such times, not out dancing.

[Pcdunn]

From Bible John: A New Suspect by Jill Bavin-Mizzi

“Meanwhile, Donald McDonald, Professor of Oral Pathology at Glasgow University, was asked to compare John McInnes’s teeth with the bite mark found on Helen Puttock’s wrist (preserved as it was in a plaster mould). Professor McDonald concluded that, “while Mr McInnes’s teeth might have made the marks, because of the limited detail it was not possible to make a valid judgement about probability.”262 This “limited detail” stemmed from the fact that John McInnes had been fitted with dentures some three years after Helen Puttock’s murder and so there were simply no teeth to compare.263 His dental records have not as yet been found.”

As for the info on McInnes being fitted with dentures three years after the Puttock murder she cites Audrey Gillan from her introduction to the podcast as the source of this info. We don’t know where this information comes from but I think that we can safely assume that AG got it from a solid source. I can’t be certain but it looks like the authorities either weren’t aware of his dentures before the exhumation or, if they had been told about them, then they weren’t sure of the extent of them because they clearly had hopes of a match up with the bite mark.

After reading about the strange goings-on with the cops and suspect McInnes, reading his dental records seem to have gone missing strikes me as more strangeness. Yet more cover-up? Or merely a weird coincidence?

[Herlock Sholmes]

After reading about the strange goings-on with the cops and suspect McInnes, reading his dental records seem to have gone missing strikes me as more strangeness. Yet more cover-up? Or merely a weird coincidence?

Hi Pat,

I’m unsure about the state of record keeping in the 1960’s dental industry but it was pre-computer of course and the police spoke to a large number of businesses with no luck. I can’t see how they could have missed McInnes’s dentist (whichever one it was) so I can only assume that by the time that the police looked McInnes dentist was gone, along with the records.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I just noticed this..on the subject of teeth.

Audrey Gillan: “At the time of Helen Puttock's murder, John Irvine McInnes had his own teeth, but three years later, he did not. So, what they were hoping to do when they dug up the body, and they were devastated to learn that there was no top teeth, so that was actually what they were doing it for, I think.”

I knew that I’d seen some mention of the top teeth being missing but I couldn’t recall where.

[Herlock Sholmes]

This quote was found by Roger Palmer:


“We are often victims of coincidence. But I’ve heard no stranger tale than the situation a colleague found himself in last week. Mr. John Porter, former editor of the Scottish Catholic Observer, is now the Editor-in Chief of 40 weekly newspapers in Lincolnshire. Last Monday Mr. Porter was visited by detectives investigating “the Bible John murder."

TEETH OUT

Said Mr. Porter: “They wanted to know if I’d had two teeth extracted at Glasgow Medical school not long after Mrs. Puttock was murdered. I confirmed that I had.” Suddenly Mr. Porter realized that not only was his name John, but that he had been editor of a religious newspaper in Glasgow.

“I was horrified,” he told me. “Even though I had nothing on my conscience.”

A spokesman for Glasgow’s Marine Division police told me: “The man we are hunting for has a front tooth overlapping the other.”

“We have checked with every Glasgow dentist on about one thousand patients, trying to find a clue which would lead us to Bible John’s true identity.”

Mr. Porter has merely been the victim of a coincidence—however bizarre his story might be.”


--Sunday Mail (Glasgow) 29 November 1970