Bible John: A New Suspect by Jill Bavin-Mizzi

[New Waterloo]

I have an understanding about ID parades but not from 1969. Please forgive me if most of you know this but they can be a bit hard to get your head round. ID parades are about positioning a suspect (somebody you have some suspicion about not merely a person who fits the description of an offender) into a group of ‘stooges’ who are paid a small amount of money and look similar to the suspect you have in custody. A positive ID adds weight to the evidence you already have obtained about your suspect.

Official parades are officiated by officers or staff who have not been involved in the investigation. This is to avoid suggestions that witnesses were led to pick a particular person or given information about the suspect in other words to avoid bias and corruption. Or accidental disclosures to witnesses.

it is not a case of lining up people who fit the description to see who is picked out. The idea is to see if the police suspect can be picked out of the line up.

casual ID procedures are just fishing trips, wandering around trying to find the offender. The danger is that if you show a photo of a person to a witness as a single photo and the witness says yes thats him my understanding is you lose the chance of a formal ID later. Why? Because you have shown a photo and this could influence the result in a subsequent official line up.

Beattie was very close to Jeannie and should really stay away from any official ID procedure I would think.

I will try and dig something ip about ID procedures in 1969. I may have just said a load of rubbish but I think its about right.

NW

[cobalt]

HS said:

Stonehouse to Wishaw is 17 miles. Stonehouse to Hamilton is just 7 miles.

The distance from Stonehouse to either Hamilton or Wishaw is about the same, around 8 miles. But his point about the three Moylans employees all living within 10 miles of each other is very likely correct. (Ten players from the Celtic football team which won the European Cup in 1967 were born within 11 miles of Glasgow.)

Beattie was very close to Jeannie and should really stay away from any official ID procedure I would think.

That's standard procedure these days and probably was back in 1969 as well. In my experience as a 'stooge' in an ID parade around the time of the BJ murders the parade was managed by an experienced station sergeant. No detectives involved in the burglary were seen by any of us. We had to give our names and addresses which were written down in the record, and sign that we had received payment.

Maybe Herlock has identified a problem of holding two ID parades around the same time. You obviously cannot show the witness the same 'stooges' as you did for the first parade since it would be obvious who the suspect actually was second time round. That might explain why Smith was not formally paraded- they didn't have enough suitable stooges.

Despite all the procedural requirements, I find it hard to believe that an experienced detective like Beattie would not have taken the opportunity to grill a suspect inside Partick Marine once he had been identified. His absence seems very odd.