Carlos Alba: Has true crime writer finally identified Bible John?

It’s said that everyone remembers what they were doing when the second plane hit the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001.

I was in a pub in Mull, asking the bartender if she could warm a bottle of formula milk for my two-month-old daughter, who was in the car outside with my wife.

Anyone who’s old enough, remembers what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

If you’re Scottish and of a certain age, you will remember the first time you ever heard the name Bible John.

No two words are capable of striking visceral, Pavlovian fear in a young mind, than the soubriquet assigned to the man who briefly stalked a Glasgow dancehall in the late 1960s to make bloodied corpses of three, bright young women who had their whole lives ahead of them.

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Even the name contains a terrifying simplicity, combining the pervasive notion of everyman with a scriptural reference in a country where religion is associated with conflict, proscription, and punishment.

If a man called John was responsible for such apparently random acts of savagery, he could be your neighbour, your friend’s father, or the man who drove the school bus, and not even God could save you, was the message inculcated in the fragile minds of a generation of children. Only in Scotland could a serial killer be used as a form of parental control.

Almost 60 years on, the aquiline, feminine features of the 1969 artist's impression of the killer who was never identified remain a grim and haunting presence,........

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