It was like a scene from a 1970s Dirty Harry movie.

Only it was in a pub in the Southside of Glasgow, not downtown San Francisco.

A gunshot had rung out from a giant .357 Magnum revolver and two men were lying on the floor, one dead and the other injured.

The first victim, James Nelson, 48, had been enjoying a quiet drink with friends.

Minutes later he was dead after a bullet passed into his chest and then through his heart and lungs, killing him immediately.

However, the same bullet had passed though his body and entered John Sweeney sitting nearby.

As the gunman calmly walked from the pub, staff, horrified and terrified in equal measures, phoned the emergency services.

There was nothing that they could do for Mr Nelson. However, they managed to save the second man and he was taken to the nearby Victoria Infirmary.

The gun was similar to the one made famous by fictional Californian movie cop Harry Callaghan, played by Clint Eastwood.

Now it had turned up in a bar on Glasgow's Southside.

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The stray bullet had entered Mr Sweeney's back and then ricocheted off his ribs, narrowly missing his kidney, liver and lungs.

He had a lucky escape in more ways than one.

It was November 1986. The location of the shooting was the Victoria Bar in Victoria Road, Govanhill.

It was like a scene from a Wild West movie as drinkers scattered in all directions to avoid the crossfire.

They didn't know who the gunman would turn on next.

The police were there within minutes sealing off the area, but the gunman had disappeared into the night.

Soon police learned the name of the man responsible.

His name was Edward Burke, known locally as Stab Eddie.

He had been convicted of murder in 1967, when only 19, for stabbing teenager John McMurdo to death in Buchanan Street.

However, he had been freed ten years later on parole.

Now Burke had struck again but this time the deadly weapon of choice was a gun, not a knife.

He was a double killer and the most wanted man in Glasgow.

Burke was originally from Cumbernauld but had chosen to settle in the Southside.

He had come to the attention of the police as he was ruffling the feathers of other criminals in the community who didn't like outsiders muscling in on their patch and creating problems.

That was bonus for the police because suddenly they were getting information they might not have ordinarily got.

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Before the shooting they had been told that Burke kept a knife behind a cistern in the ladies’ toilet of the nearby Queen’s Park Cafe outwith the knowledge of the owners.

However, a search of the premises at the time had failed to locate the weapon.

As a result, an order had gone out to officers to stop and search Burke whenever he was seen in public. A step which Burke in turn had complained about through a solicitor.

Complaints are always bad news to cops, particularly ambitious ones, as it can put a block on promotion while they are being investigated. Burke would have known that.

Now it looked as though the police action against him in previous weeks had been more than justified.

More information came in to suggest that Burke may also have concealed the murder weapon behind the same cistern in the same ladies’ toilets.

When the police went there, they found the giant handgun used in the murder.

It was not known how Burke had managed to conceal such a large weapon.

Had he got a woman friend to do that for him or had he just walked in as bold as brass and put it there himself?

At that point police did not know where their murder suspect was, but around midnight they got another break.

An informant said that Burke had been living in a two-bedroom flat in Waddell Court in the Gorbals with a woman.

At around 4.30am, a police team raided the flat and arrested the prime suspect as he lay in his bed.

An early edition of a daily paper was lying beside him detailing the murder committed only a few hours earlier.

The headline screamed out “shot in cold blood" and "man dies in pub horror”.

It was not clear if Burke had bought the paper to glorify in his crimes or if he was worried about the consequences of what he had just done.

Because of danger that he posed, Burke was handcuffed by the arresting officers before being frogmarched out of the tower block into a waiting police van.

A large dog and his police handler had also been put on standby outside the flat in case Burke made his escape.

He was then taken to a nearby police station where he was charged with murder before a court appearance later that day.

With Burke in police custody, the full story of the horrific deadly shooting began to unfold.

A shocked customer told of how he had gone into the bar to sell some tickets for a football lottery then heard an argument at a nearby table.

Burke had been sitting at a table with other customers when an argument had developed.

He had pulled out a gun on one of the customers, who was heard to say: “Put that gun away or I will stick it up your a**e."

At this stage Burke was seen crouching on the ground holding the long-barrelled weapon.

The same witness said that Burke had calmly strolled out the pub after the murder, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, with the other regulars looking on in stunned silence.

The lottery-selling customer was even more horrified when he realised the murder victim was someone who had bought a ticket from him only minutes earlier.

Unfortunately, his luck had run out.

Another key witness talked of how he had bumped into Burke in the Queen’s Park Cafe after the shooting and Burke had asked for a lift down to the Gorbals.

As he drove away, they passed the police cars which had just arrived at the scene of the fatal shooting.

A woman then told police that Burke had admitted the shooting to her later that evening about 8pm.

He had taken her to the Queen’s Park Cafe but she had left after he went to the toilet to leave the gun.

Burke then returned to her flat to sleep on the settee, where police found him early that morning.

When the case called at the High Court in Glasgow, Burke denied murdering Mr Nelson and the attempted murder of Mr Sweeney.

The jury were told of the terrifying force that the Magnum carried with one bullet killing one man and seriously injuring another.

Burke was given his second life-term for the bizarre and apparently motiveless murder.

He was freed on licence in 2002 having served almost 16 years for the double shooting.

But it was clear he had not learned his lesson.

Two years later he was back at the High Court, this time on drugs charges along with two other criminals.

Burke, Alan Brown and George Forrester had been arrested after a raid by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency on a house in Coatbridge in November 2003

They tried to get rid of the cocaine, worth around £50,000, by hurling it out of a sixth-floor window. But the bin bag was recovered by officers standing below. 

Trial judge Lord Bracadale told the trio: "You were concerned in the supply of cocaine with a high purity and a high value. 

"It was clearly an organised operation with you three at the top of the distribution chain."

All three men were jailed for a total of 23 years with Burke, now 56, getting seven.

In 1974, Brown, 59, killed a security guard during a raid on a Glasgow railway depot and was then sentenced to life.

Lord Bracadale jailed him for a further seven years.

Forrester, 36, received nine years after the court was told of five previous drugs offences.

Recalling the double pub shooting in his 2012 memoir Crimestopper, detective inspector Bryan McLaughlin, now retired, said: "Burke had come to our attention some time before the double shooting when [he] turned up in the Gorbals.

"He was from Cumbernauld and the local criminals did not like the incomer who had a reputation as [a] troublemaker.

"I had seen many gunshot wounds in my time but two victims being claimed with one bullet was a new one on me."