The Barrowlands dance hall on a Saturday night was always sweaty, smoky and packed. Women, enjoying the anonymity of the crowd, hitched up their skirts. Men eyed them as if at a cattlemarket, daring to make a move.

During those frenetic nights in the late 1960s, thousands of marriages were formed. But so too was one of Glasgow’s darkest legends: the story of the serial killer Bible John.

After three women died in the space of 20 months, all apparently picked up at the Barrowlands by the same charming, well-dressed man who quoted from the Bible, the city was gripped by the chilling folklore. For the past 40 years the identity of the killer has remained an unsolved mystery.

Striking parallels between Bible John and Peter Tobin, who was jailed for life last week for the murder of Polish student Angelika Kluk, look certain to be examined by the police.

Tobin, a sexual predator, was believed to be living in Glasgow in 1968 and 1969, the years when the murders took place.

Over 20 months, the bodies of Patricia Docker, 25, Jemima McDonald, 32, and Helen Puttock, 29, were found. All three had been dancing at the Barrowlands and all were abused and strangled. The way the bodies were left suggested a common assailant.

At the time of the first murder, Tobin would have been 21. He was known to frequent dance halls. A crude police photofit from the time bears likenesses to Tobin. Additionally, Tobin was a religious man, a Roman Catholic who throughout his life has sought links with churches.

What gives credence to the theory is Tobin’s apparent lifelong savagery towards women in particular the account given by his first wife, whom he met at a dance hall in Glasgow in 1968, when she was 17.

Margaret Mackintosh has described being swept off her feet by the well-dressed charmer who turned violent and sadistic. He imprisoned her in a flat, beat, raped and abused her.

Two other women who married Tobin after he moved to England, Sylvia Jeffries in 1973 and Cathy Wilson in 1989, have also given distressing accounts of being imprisoned, throttled, raped and beaten by him.

There is also the suggestion that Tobin was driven to violence by the menstrual cycle, something which has long been speculated about Bible John.

Tobin was convicted in 1994 of raping and molesting two 14-year-old girls in Portsmouth. He had drugged them first. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but released in 2004, having being placed on the sex offenders’ register.

He next surfaced, under a false identity, back in Glasgow, at St Patrick’s Church in Anderston, where he met the young Polish student Angelika.

The pattern of his attacks suggests a lifelong vice, and would explain why police from both England and Scotland wish to talk to him about other unsolved rapes and murders.

Detectives will be reexamining the disappearance in 1991 of Vicky Hamilton, a 15-year-old from Bathgate, West Lothian. Tobin was known to be living in the Bathgate area at the time with Cathy Wilson.

The fact that he moved to Brighton in 1969 with his first wife might explain why the Bible John killings ceased.

Over the years, many names have been put forward as candidates for Bible John. In 1996 the then Lord Advocate closed the file on a prime suspect, the Scots guardsman John Irvine McInnes, whose body had been exhumed. McInnes committed suicide in 1980, aged 41. Lord Mackay said that there was not enough evidence to link McInnes with the killing of Helen Puttock.

Les Brown, a retired Strathclyde police officer who worked on the hunt for Bible John, said last night that Tobin should undergo DNA tests.

Strathclyde police declined to comment on the links.

Times Recommends

• The bright side of this winter rain
• Story behind the picture: Snow Leopard, 2008
• Times Charity Appeal: The Place2Be