Bible John is a nickname of an unidentified serial killer who was operating in Glasgow, Scotland in the late 1960s.  It is unsure how many people he killed, but the police attributed three murders to him.

Although these murders didn’t seem to have the same MO, there were certain similarities between all three victims:

• All had spent the last night of their lives at the Barrowland Ballroom
• All three were strangled with their own nylons
• Each body was left in very close proximity to the victim’s home
• The handbags of all three were taken after the murder (possibly as souvenirs?)
• All three victims were menstruating

All three victims were seen leaving the Barrowland with a man of similar description, which the CID distributed to newspapers. A color portrait (the photo on the left) based on witnesses’ descriptions was created by a member of the Glasgow School of Art and widely circulated in the Glasgow area. A lot of people claimed to have seen or known the man although they have never found him…

The question remains: Could Peter Tobin (read the previous article) really be Bible John? Could Glasgow’s legendary murderer really have kept killing, taking lives almost 40 years after the Barrowland murders? And – four decades on – can the police really gather enough evidence to get a conviction?

The detectives investing the death of one of Tobin’s victims quickly realized that he was a potential serial killer. “He has done this before,” one investigator said after seeing mutilated remains of his victim. This was a murder carried out by tried-and-tested means.

Psychologists too were quick to realize that Tobin hadn’t begun killing in middle age. Ian Stephen, the Scottish criminal profiler who inspired the TV show Cracker, is sure Tobin has a history. “You don’t usually start being a serial killer in your forties or fifties,” he said yesterday. “You start fairly early on in your life.”

Like Bible John, Tobin was young, smart and handsome. And he liked the dancing. Tobin was said to be a regular at the Barrowland ballroom, where “John” picked up his three victims, Pat Docker, Mimi McDonald and Helen Puttock.

So how does the evidence stack up? First, his looks. Even today some believe the 62-year-old Tobin looks a bit like the straight-jawed twenty something shown in the Bible John portrait. But photos of a young Tobin reveal an even closer resemblance. His age also fits. Tobin would have been 21 at the time of the Bible John killings. He was already violent, having spent his youth in reform school, when the Barrowland murders took place. He was living in the Glasgow area when the first two women were found. Tobin and Bible John also share another habit: they are both thought to have kept mementos of their victims. Bible John stripped or partially stripped the girls he killed, taking it is believed, their handbags. Tobin too kept grisly souvenirs.

Can all this just be a coincidence or there is more to it? I guess, without any conclusive evidence, we will never know for sure.

-article written by David Leask rewritten and adapted by admin-

Police believe that Peter Tobin may be one of Britain’s most prolific serial killers, also known as Bible John. Following his conviction for murdering 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton, detectives believe that there is evidence to suggest he could have committed up to a dozen more murders.

Peter Tobin was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting the 15-year-old schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton before cutting her body in half and burying her remains in the back garden of his house in Margate, Kent. He also put Vicky’s purse, near an Edinburgh bus station to lay a false trail for police. And it did work as no one ever suspected the girl was killed, they thought she ran away from home, until another investigation (the following case) linked Peter to both murders.

The 62-year-old man is already serving a life sentence for raping and murdering the 23-year-old Polish student Angelika Kluk and hiding her body in a Glasgow church.
A jury of 12 women and three men took less than two and a half hours to find him guilty of his second brutal, sexually motivated murder more than 17 years after the schoolgirl disappeared. Check out Peter Tobin trial: photo evidence, and an interesting video Peter Tobin guilty of murder

Police forces believe he could be found guilty for a number of other unsolved murders, and they have reopened the case files and examined a possible link to Peter Tobin. His movements around the country – he has lived in Bathgate, Paisley, Brighton, Margate and Portsmouth – place him in the right location to commit some of the murders. He has also become a prime suspect in the 40-year hunt for Bible John.

Former detective Joe Jackson, who investigated the 1960s slayings, said he suspected Tobin the moment he was arrested for Angelika Kluk’s killing in 2006.

He said: “I remember when Tobin got caught for the murder in the church. When I saw his photograph, I thought, ‘This is as near to Bible John as you are going to get. This looks a winner. He fitted the bill in every way and he had connections with religion. Looking at Tobin’s track record, he is someone who should be considered very, very carefully…

More about Bible John case and his similarity with Peter Tobin in the next post, coming tomorrow.

-article by James Matthews and Paul O’ Hare rewritten and adapted by admin-

An elusive serial killer, linked to 10 murders in South Los Angeles and Inglewood over nearly two decades, resurfaced early last year to kill again. Over years, it’s been unclear that a single man was behind the slayings. Police linked those cases and tied the latest slaying after conducting DNA analysis in May 2007.

“The day those tests came in, we realized we had a serial killer on our hands who has been active for 23 years,” said LAPD Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who heads a task force of seven detectives charged with solving the killings.

Except for one black man, the killer has targeted young black women. He sexually abused the women, detectives said, and left almost all of their bodies in a corridor along Western Avenue in South Los Angeles, often in alleys. Detectives suspect that most of the women were working as prostitutes at the time they were killed.

The first known attack came in the summer of 1985, when 29-year-old Debra Jackson was shot three times in the chest, at a time when widespread cocaine use, rampant crime and vicious killings were afflicting South L.A. Overwhelmed by the violence, police did not realize they were confronting something larger until three years later, when ballistics tests showed that the same handgun had been used in seven other killings.

The last known murder linked to this serial killer happened on the first day of 2007 when a homeless man found the body of Janecia Peters, 25, on South Western Avenue. She had been shot and covered with a garbage bag.

Investigator checked the killer’s DNA against a federal DNA database of known criminals but found no matches. One promising route was to try comparing the serial killer’s DNA with samples in the criminal database in search of one of his close relatives.

The possibility of a match had raised hopes among LAPD detectives that they would catch a break in a case that has stymied the department for years. However, search of DNA databases for the killer’s family members came up empty. The task force is now left to continue with ongoing efforts to revive leads from old cases, search for missed clues and hope someone with knowledge of the killer comes forward.

“We were hoping,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Charlie Beck, who is overseeing a task force of detectives working to solve the case. “Police work is very much about exploring every avenue. We went down this one and it didn’t turn out to be fruitful.”

-article by Joel Rubin and Richard Winton, rewritten and adapted by administrator-

Archie “Mad Dog” McCafferty, a serial killer served 23 years in prison for the murder of three people in Australia and was living in Edinburgh under a new identity, by the name James Lok. The 58-year-old’s past was only revealed when he was caught driving a stolen car and his original name was given in court.

McCafferty emigrated to Australia with his family when he was ten years old. He was constantly in trouble with the police. By the time he was 12 was placed in an institution for stealing, he already had a long record. By the time he was 18 Archie had been in institutions five times and had been classed as an incorrigible juvenile delinquent. He fell in love and married Janice Redington, but only their marriage lasted only six week when she caught him sleeping with another woman. Jenice wasn’t impressed, but Archie’s response was so violent it prompted his first visit to a psychiatric hospital.

He was jailed in 1974 for murdering three tramps in a five-day killing spree, sparked by the death of his six-week-old baby son. The baby’s death was an accident caused by his mother falling asleep and rolling over on top of the infant. That incident seemed to change him forever. At his trial, McCafferty said he heard the voice of his dead son telling him that if he killed seven people the boy would be brought back to life. After killing a few inmates he got a nickname “Australia’s Charles Manson”, but soon after he was deported back to Scotland.

McCafferty, who now uses the name James Lok, has been living in Beaverbank Place in Broughton while working as a self-employed painter. He said the only reason he changed his name was because he wanted a ‘quiet life” and his neighbors seemed to know nothing about his past identity.

Speaking following yesterday’s court appearance, McCafferty said that he was “not a criminal”, with his latest offence involving a “car, not mass murder”. He added: “I’m just a normal guy trying to get on with my life. My crimes were 35 years ago.”

Sheriff Charles Stoddart said: “I’m satisfied on the basis of the social inquiry report and what has been said on your behalf that I can deal with this with an alternative to custody.”

To read more about this interesting case and to find out everything about Archibald’s childhood, his victims and the way he killed them as well as all the deatils from his trial, go to truTV library.

-article by Alan McEwen rewritten and adapted by administrator-

Scientist from ChemImage and Oak Ridge National Laboratory discovered a field portable system that can detect, so far invisible, latent fingerprints on human skin. Whether to stop them from fleeing, immobilize them, or dispose of them, murderers often grab their victims, and so the crucial evidence linking the perpetrator to the victim is often right there, but until recently, attempts to retrieve those prints rarely met with success.

The skin posses a number of distinctive characteristics, that make lifting latent prints really hard. Skin tissue grows and constantly renews itself, shedding old cells that might contain the imprint of an assailant’s grip. As the skin regulates the body’s temperature and excretes waste matter through perspiration, latent prints can be washed away. In spite of the obvious difficulties, scientist have been looking for a reliable method throughout history (dating back in the 1970.) And all that research led to development of a workable method for developing identifiable latent prints on human skin.

Two methods that proved useful so far are: glue fuming device that spreads glue fumes over the skin and special brands of fingerprint powders. The new system though, takes advantage of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-based agents to visualize latent prints. A team led by Linda Lewis of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division is working with ChemImage to identify fingerprint components that are SERS active – those components that give a Raman emission when using a SERS reagent.
The ORNL team has identified a novel dielectric nanowire coated with silver as the SERS agent of choice.

All these methods for developing latent print on human skin work only if the body is examined soon enough, and give better results if the body was deceased when handled. Under ideal laboratory conditions prints could be obtained (one way or the other), but by inventing this method researchers wanted to make sure that practitioners in the field could obtain similar results. In real life though, victims are usually not found immediately, bodies are starting to decompose, various elements and harsh conditions influence the longevity of latent prints on skin. Even though, as we can see with all that’s been said, the chances might be small, it is highly recommended that if forensic scientists believe that perpetrator might have touched the victim, they should try to recover any possible latent prints on the victim’s skin.

-article by Ivan Ross Futrell updated from Science Daily, rewritten and adapted by administrator-