Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
Michael Bilton
Revelatory investigation into the police handling of the Yorkshire Ripper Case which spanned over 14 years. Newly updated to include Sutcliffe’s bid for freedom in 2008, and the verdict from court in 2010.For over twenty years, the dark secrets of the biggest criminal manhunt in British history have remained a closed book. Detectives refused all requests to tell the inside story of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation that logged over two million manhours of police work. The victims who survived maintained a wall of silence. And the detailed forensic evidence, witness statements and autopsy reports have remained locked away.Until now.Award-winning writer Michael Bilton has persuaded the key people to talk. After years of exhaustive research he can finally reveal the extraordinary truth behind the murder enquiry that left Peter Sutcliffe free to kill again and again.With exclusive access to the detectives involved, to pathologist's archives and confidential police reports, the story of the hunt reads as tensely as any thriller. Its measured analysis of the calamitous investigation is also a shocking and important indictment of the most notorious murder hunt of the twentieth century.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
Wicked Beyond Belief
The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
Michael Bilton
Copyright
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperPress in 2003
The extract from a report of High Court hearing R v Peter Coonan (formally Sutcliffe) before Mr Justice Mitting, on 1 March 2010, published in the Independent, is reproduced with kind permission of The Press Association.
Michael Bilton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
WICKED BEYOND BELIEF: THE HUNT FOR THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER. Copyright © Michael Bilton 2003, 2006, 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007388813
Version: 2018-12-06
Dedication
For my Father
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Chronology
Preface
1. Contact and Exchange
2. The Diabetic Detective
3. ‘A Man with a Beard’
4. Tracks in the Grass
5. Impressions in Blood
6. A Fresh Start
7. Punter’s Money
8. ‘The Job Is Life; Life Is the Job’
9. A Miserable Place To Die
10. Chinese Walls
11. The Wrong Track
12. Going Covert
13. ‘He Comes from Sunderland’
14. Bad Feelings
15. Swamped by Paper
16. ‘He Lives Somewhere, He Works for Someone’
17. ‘The Beast I Am’
18. Mad or Bad?
19. DNA, DNA, DNA
20. A Suitable Case for Treatment?
21. Unmasked: Leeds, West Yorkshire, 2006
The Final Chapter: Crime and Punishment in 2011
Note on Sources
Text Notes and References
Bibliography
Author’s Note on the Appendices
Appendix A: Statement of Peter William Sutcliffe to West Yorkshire Police, 4 January 1981
Appendix B: Subsequent Police Statements, January-February 1981
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
About the Publisher
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
BOREHAM, LESLIE: High Court judge who presided over the trial of Peter Sutcliffe at the Old Bailey in May 1981.
BOYLE, JOHN: Detective inspector Ripper squad, January 1981. Interrogated Peter Sutcliffe after his arrest.
BYFORD, LAWRENCE: Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, responsible for the West Yorkshire police area. Conducted review of what went wrong with the Ripper investigation. Reported to Home Secretary in December 1981.
CATLOW, GRANGE: Detective superintendent Manchester CID. Jack Ridgway’s deputy.
CRAIG, DONALD: Assistant chief constable (crime) West Yorkshire 1975/76 before he retired.
DOMAILLE, JOHN: Detective chief superintendent, senior investigating officer (SIO) on murder of Patricia Atkinson in Bradford, 1977. Head of Special Homicide Investigation Team (Ripper squad) April 1978–March 1979.
ELLIS, STANLEY: Dialect expert and senior lecturer at University of Leeds. Advised police on ‘Geordie’ tape.
EMMENT, LESLIE: Deputy chief constable, Thames Valley police. Member of Byford advisory/review team.
FINLAY, ALF: Detective superintendent, SIO for Jacqueline Hill murder in Leeds, November 1980.
GEE, DAVID: Professor of forensic pathology at Leeds University and Home Office consultant pathologist. Conducted post-mortems on Ripper victims.
GERTY, DAVID: Assistant chief constable, West Midlands police. Member of Byford advisory/review team.
GILRAIN, PETER: Detective chief superintendent, SIO for Barbara Leach murder in Bradford, September 1979.
GREGG, CHRIS: Detective chief superintendent, head of West Yorkshire Police Homicide and Major Enquiry Team (HMET). Launched the hunt for the hoaxer.
GREGORY, RONALD: Chief constable of West Yorkshire.
HARVEY, RONALD: Commander, New Scotland Yard. Special adviser on crime to Home Office. Member of Byford advisory/review team.
HAVERS, SIR MICHAEL: QC, MP. Attorney General. Led prosecution at Sutcliffe’s trial.
HOBAN, DENNIS: Detective chief superintendent and head of Leeds CID. SIO for first two Ripper murders, Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson, in 1975/76. Died March 1978.
HOBSON, JIM: Detective chief superintendent. Dennis Hoban’s deputy in Leeds. SIO on inquiry into Irene Richardson’s murder. Put in overall charge of the investigation in late November 1980, six weeks before Peter Sutcliffe was arrested.
HOLLAND, DICK: Detective superintendent. Pivotal figure in the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Drafted in after the murder of Jane MacDonald in 1977 and remained until the killer was arrested.
HYDES, ROBERT: Probationer police constable in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Arrested Peter Sutcliffe, 2 January 1981.
KIND, STUART: Professor of forensic science, head of Home Office Central Research Establishment at Aldermaston, 1980. Member of Byford advisory/ review team.
LAPISH, TREVOR: Detective chief superintendent, SIO on Yvonne Pearson murder in Bradford, January 1978.
LAPTEW, ANDREW: Detective constable on Ripper squad, July 1979, when he interviewed Peter Sutcliffe and named him as a strong suspect.
LEWIS, JACK WINDSOR: Linguistic expert and lecturer at University of Leeds who advised police on tape and letters.
MILNE, HUGO: Psychiatrist who examined Peter Sutcliffe and gave evidence for the defence at his trial.
O’BOYLE, ‘DES’ FINBARR: Detective sergeant, Ripper squad, January 1981. Interrogated Peter Sutcliffe after his arrest.
OLDFIELD, GEORGE: Assistant chief constable (crime) West Yorkshire police. Ran the Yorkshire Ripper investigation 1977–80.
OGNALL, HARRY: QC. Senior member of the prosecution team at Sutcliffe’s trial.
OUTTERIDGE, RON: Forensic scientist. Spent two months with Russell Stockdale advising Ripper squad in 1979.
RIDGWAY, JACK: Detective chief superintendent. SIO on murders of Jean Jordan and Vera Millward in Manchester in 1977/78. Ran five-pound note inquiry.
RING, ROBERT: Police sergeant in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Arrested Peter Sutcliffe, 2 January 1981.
SHAW, GRAHAM: Detective Superintendent, S10 West Yorkshire Police. Led police arrest team in Sunderland in hoaxer case.
SLOAN, ANDREW: National Coordinator of Regional Crime Squads in 1980. Member of Byford advisory/review team.
SMITH, PETER: Detective sergeant, Ripper squad, January 1981. Interrogated Peter Sutcliffe after his arrest and took his confession.
SMITH, STUART: Detective Sergeant, West Yorkshire Police. Conducted interviews with John Samuel Humble.
STOCKDALE, RUSSELL: Forensic scientist on several Ripper murders. Spent two months with Ron Outteridge advising Ripper squad in 1979.
SUMMERSKILL, SHIRLEY: MP and former Home Office minister who vetoed a public inquiry into the Black Panther case in 1976 and argued that the police had learned lessons from any errors made.
SUTCLIFFE, SONIA: Peter Sutcliffe’s wife. They married in 1974 and divorced some time after his arrest.
THATCHER, MARGARET: Prime Minister in 1980 at the time of the killing of the Yorkshire Ripper’s final victim in November 1980. Ordered William Whitelaw to beef up the Ripper investigation.
WHITELAW, WILLIAM: Home Secretary, 1979/80.
ZACKRISSON, DAVID: Detective inspector in Northumbria police. Wrote report in 1979 warning the ‘Geordie’ tape was an elaborate hoax.
CHRONOLOGY
1969
30 SEPTEMBER: Bradford, West Yorkshire. Peter Sutcliffe arrested in the red-light area and charged with going equipped for theft ‘with a hammer’.
1975
5 JULY: Keighley, West Yorkshire. Anna Rogulskyj attacked. Senior investigating officer (SIO): Detective Superintendent P. J. Perry.
15 AUGUST: Halifax, West Yorkshire. Olive Smelt attacked. SIO: Detective Chief Inspector Dick Holland.
28 AUGUST: Silsden, near Keighley. Tracey Browne attacked. SIO: Detective Superintendent Jim Hobson. Unacknowledged Ripper attack.
30 OCTOBER: Leeds, West Yorkshire. Wilma McCann murdered a hundred yards from her home. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Hoban.
20 NOVEMBER: Preston, Lancashire. Joan Harrison murdered. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Wilf Brooks, Lancashire CID.
1976
20 JANUARY: Leeds. Emily Jackson murdered. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Hoban.
9 MAY: Leeds. Marcella Claxton attacked at Roundhay Park. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson. Unacknowledged Ripper attack.
1977
5 FEBRUARY: Leeds. Irene Richardson murdered in Roundhay Park. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson.
23 APRIL: Bradford. Patricia Atkinson murdered in her flat. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent John Domaille.
26 JUNE: Leeds. Jayne MacDonald murdered. SIO: Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) (Crime) George Oldfield.
10 JULY: Bradford. Maureen Long attacked. SIO: ACC (Crime) George Oldfield.
1 OCTOBER: Manchester. Jean Jordan murdered. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Ridgway, Manchester CID.
14 DECEMBER: Leeds. Marilyn Moore attacked. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson.
1978
21 JANUARY: Bradford. Yvonne Pearson murdered. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Lapish.
31 JANUARY: Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Helen Rytka murdered. SIO: ACC (Crime) George Oldfield.
25 APRIL: Special Homicide Investigation Team (Ripper squad) set up at Millgarth police station, Leeds, under Detective Chief Superintendent John Domaille, with Detective Superintendent Jack Slater as his deputy, plus ten other detectives.
16 MAY: Manchester. Vera Millward murdered. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Ridgway.
1979
MARCH: Detective Superintendent Dick Holland takes over Ripper squad at Millgarth; also in charge of the centralized incident room.
4 APRIL: Halifax. Josephine Whitaker murdered. SIO: ACC (Crime) George Oldfield.
2 SEPTEMBER: Bradford. Barbara Leach murdered. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Gilrain.
1980
21 AUGUST: Leeds. Marguerite Walls murdered at Farsley. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson. Unacknowledged Ripper killing.
24 SEPTEMBER: Leeds. Uphadya Bandara attacked at Headingley. SIO: Detective Superintendent Tom Newton. Unacknowledged Ripper attack.
5 NOVEMBER: Huddersfield. Teresa Sykes attacked. SIO: Detective Superintendent Tony Hickey. Unacknowledged Ripper attack.
17 NOVEMBER: Leeds. Jacqueline Hill murdered. SIO: Detective Superintendent Alf Finlay.
25 NOVEMBER: ACC (Crime) George Oldfield sidelined as head of the Ripper inquiry. Jim Hobson takes over with temporary rank of ACC.
26 NOVEMBER: External advisory team appointed by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Mr Lawrence Byford. Reports to the chief constable before Christmas.
1981
2 JANUARY: Peter Sutcliffe arrested in a car with a prostitute in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
5 JANUARY: Peter Sutcliffe charged with murder of Jacqueline Hill.
22 MAY: Peter Sutcliffe found guilty of thirteen murders. Sentenced to life imprisonment.
2006
18 OCTOBER: John Humble arrested in Sunderland and later convicted for being the sender of the Ripper hoax letters and tapes.
PREFACE
Poor Wilma. A strong-willed and feisty woman, she was determined to live life on her terms. It was either her way or no way. A driver picked her up. She agreed, late one night in October 1975, to a risky proposition from a total stranger: sex for a fiver. With a bunch of small kids to care for on her own, this was how she got by. And now? She was dead, the first publicly acknowledged victim of the Yorkshire Ripper.
Her body – shrouded by a low-hanging mist at the edge of a football field – was found early the next morning. The damp and miserably cold vapour clung as grimly and insistently to the frail corpse lying on that grassy bank as it did to the rest of the city of Leeds that autumn.
The fog was almost a symbol of the terror and fear that was to come. It seemed to hang perpetually over the North of England for some considerable time, like some mysterious and impenetrable miasma. And it never lifted for five long years. It enveloped and chilled the lives of millions who lived there, men and women, young and old. But most of all women.
A year later, MPs in the House of Commons voiced deep concerns about a major police investigation that turned into a fiasco with tragic results. There was little or no glory for the detectives who had led the hunt for the notorious killer called the ‘Black Panther’, who turned out to be Donald Neilson from Bradford – a vicious and cold-blooded criminal, wanted for the murders of three sub-postmistresses and the kidnapping and murder of heiress Leslie Whittle. As in the Yorkshire Ripper case there had been an all-important hoax tape-recording that threw detectives off the trail of the real killer. Like the Ripper case the hunt involved several police forces. Like the Ripper case there was a great deal of resistance to calling for help from outside, and when the end came it was two bobbies in a patrol car who made the arrest, not realizing they had caught a vicious killer. Finally, as in the Ripper case, when it was over there was a need for scapegoats: the officer in charge suffered the humiliation of being shifted sideways – out of CID and into uniform.
Some MPs demanded an inquiry into the mismanaged conduct of the Black Panther investigation, but the then Labour Government refused. Home Office Minister Dr Shirley Summerskill told Parliament the case:
has been discussed by chief officers of police collectively and I am quite sure they are fully aware of the need to learn any lessons which may be learned from such an investigation … the fact that a particular investigation is a matter for discussion by chief officers of police is a reflection of our system of policing in this country. The local control of police forces is an essential element of that system. Chief constables in this country, unlike some continental countries, do not come under the direction of a Minister of the Interior, in the enforcement of the law. The responsibility of deciding how an offence should be investigated is for them and them alone.
But when the Yorkshire Ripper case concluded five years later in 1981 it was abundantly obvious that Britain’s chief constables, and the police service as a whole, had disastrously failed to learn the lessons of the Black Panther investigation. Government ministers, senior officials at the Home Office and the Government’s law officers saw little merit in an agonizing public debate over the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. MPs’ demands for transparency were turned down, and there would be no public inquiry. But there was a major shock in store for the criminal justice establishment when Sutcliffe’s trial opened at the Old Bailey in London.
The prosecution, led by the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, pushed for a suspiciously speedy hearing, accepting a guilty plea to manslaughter from the accused, Peter Sutcliffe, on the grounds that mental illness had diminished his responsibility for his crimes. It all seemed done and dusted. The court proceedings would be over within half a day because both defence and prosecution were in complete accord.
However, they had not reckoned with the Judge’s reaction. To his very great credit Mr Justice Boreham refused what was in essence a plea bargain. Instead he ordered a full and open trial by jury to determine whether Sutcliffe was mad or bad. The jury would hear the evidence and decide for themselves whether Sutcliffe was guilty or not guilty of murdering thirteen women; or was guilty of manslaughter because he did not know what he was doing. Justice demanded that this gravest of matters should not be swept under the carpet. Ultimately he was convicted and given a thirty-year minimum sentence.
It seems extraordinary that nearly thirty years later the arguments about Sutcliffe’s responsibility for his crimes had never gone away. A new team of lawyers came back with a vengeance in 2010, when the Yorkshire Ripper went to court saying that having served his minimum sentence, he was entitled to know when he would be released. For the public at large the very idea seemed preposterous, incredible even; but Sutcliffe’s psychiatrists at Broadmoor secure hospital had declared their great success in treating him and were arguing that all along he had suffered from mental illness, meaning that his responsibility was diminished when he committed his crimes. Sutcliffe’s lawyers argued this meant he was entitled to a reduction of his minimum sentence.
All this was made possible because the European Court of Human Rights in 2002 ruled that judges – not the Home Secretary – should decide how long a lifer spends in gaol. So once again Peter Sutcliffe stood at centre stage making headlines, once more his activities invaded the psyche of the British public, fearful that the courts might actually believe he was almost an unintended victim of the Ripper case and set him free. Politically, the very idea was quite toxic, and the Prime Minister and Justice Secretary were both put on the spot, as an anxious public demanded to know: ‘Is this man actually going to be freed?’
Dealing as it did with one of the most notorious killers in British criminal history, the Yorkshire Ripper case raised crucial questions. Before her death, Myra Hindley – the 1960s Moors murderer of several children – had routinely tested the patience of the public with her woeful cries that she had served her time. Now another notorious serial killer was following suit. Thirty years before, the thought that Sutcliffe would ever be freed would have seemed utterly fanciful. Then Britain woke up and found that three decades had slipped by, the thirty-year minimum sentence passed at the Old Bailey in May 1981, was almost at an end – and now the law was different.
After Sutcliffe was snared in January 1981, there were enormous issues raised which needed truthful answers, especially about the failure of the police to solve very serious crimes. Today, such matters would be openly debated and inquiries held. But back then the public at large, the families of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims, the media, the taxpayers of West Yorkshire, MPs, even seasoned high-ranking detectives closely involved in homicide investigations, were never given answers. The key questions had been: Why did it take so long to catch this terrible serial killer? Had the police been up to the task? Who should be held accountable for mistakes that were made? The reason for this was the huge sensitivity surrounding shocking errors in the investigation.
Sutcliffe’s official toll was thirteen dead and seven attempted murders. We now know that he attacked many more women and that there were many opportunities to apprehend him which were tragically missed. In recent times, public disquiet over the Stephen Lawrence murder in London and the multiple killings by Dr Harold Shipman resulted in full and transparently open inquiries. In contrast, public disquiet over the Yorkshire Ripper investigation was flatly dismissed with platitudes that everything would be better in future. No open inquiry took place. Serious questions were posed but the answers only emerged behind closed doors. A high-level secret inquiry had recommended revolutionary changes in the way the police investigated serious crime, and yet openness, transparency and the acknowledgement that the public had a perfect right to know the truth about the police hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper were nowhere to be seen.
In January 1982, seven months after Sutcliffe was given twenty terms of life imprisonment, the then Home Secretary appeared before Parliament to announce the findings of an internal Home Office inquiry by one of Britain’s most senior and respected policemen, Mr Lawrence Byford. He had brilliantly investigated what went wrong with the Yorkshire Ripper case, but William Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, refused to publish Byford’s penetrating report which stripped bare all the mistakes that were made. Instead a brief four-page summary of its main conclusions and recommendations was placed in the House of Commons library. This summary only scratched the surface of the body of crucial facts garnered during Byford’s six-months-long inquiry by an eminent team of senior British police officers and the country’s leading forensic scientist, which was a model of its kind.
In a quiet and unsensational way, Byford’s report laid out its unvarnished and unpalatable truths in more than 150 closely typed pages. It contained much extraordinary detail. Such was the confidentiality surrounding the report that it was printed privately outside London and not by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. No senior civil servant, not even the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, was allowed to view a copy until Mr Byford delivered it personally to William Whitelaw. As one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary, Byford knew that in preparing the report he and his inquiry team had a grave duty to perform not merely for the benefit of the police service, but for the country as a whole.
Byford and his team did not shirk their responsibility. The changes his report recommended were truly ground-breaking, so much so that a cynic might say that if there had been no Yorkshire Ripper, it might have been well to invent him, as the sole means to force dramatic but profoundly necessary changes upon a creaking police service.
As a staff writer for the Sunday Times based in Yorkshire from 1979 to 1982, I became closely acquainted with some of the detectives, pathologists, forensic scientists and outside advisers who were most closely involved in the Ripper case. Over the succeeding years many of the figures principally involved in the investigation spoke to me off the record about their work on the Ripper Inquiry and how it personally affected them. Some, like Dick Holland and George Oldfield – key members of the Ripper Squad – went to their graves feeling they had been scapegoated. Others felt their actions and motives were totally misunderstood. Until I had got my hands on a copy – some seventeen years after it was written! – the Byford Report had remained an official secret. It was not till the summer of 2006 that the Home Office at last released the report and some of their own files, following an application under the Freedom of Information Act. Britain’s most senior detectives, those with responsibility for investigating major crimes, had not been allowed to study this vital account of what had gone wrong.
I read the Byford Report for the first time in 1998, and realized that here was a sensational story. Answers now fell into place. All too many mistakes had been made, and a good number of those closely involved with the most important criminal investigation in British history agreed that the full story deserved to be told so that the British public – and more urgently, future generations of detectives – could learn its lessons. Hence this book.
For me the real story was as thrilling and chilling as any crime novel, containing as it did such complex characters and so many twists and turns. The more I got to know the detectives the more fascinated I became by who they were – and why it was that some of them had got it so disastrously wrong. These were not one-dimensional figures, and I endeavoured, as I wrote the narrative, to put flesh and bones on some of them so that they could be seen for what they were, human beings trying to do a difficult job.
Some were clearly better than others, but I have no intention of pillorying anyone for mistakes that were made. As a writer you cannot examine how an institution works and forget the very people who make up that institution. When the institution fails you need to look at its whole structure, which in the case of the police service starts with ordinary policemen and women on the beat and progresses upwards through a hierarchy, beyond the chief officers, to the Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Home Office civil servants in the Police Department, and then the ministers in charge, ending with the Home Secretary.
You had to live in the North of England to comprehend how such a terrible series of crimes terrified a major part of the British Isles. Still today, what most people want to know is: What went wrong? Why did it take so long to catch Peter Sutcliffe?
Even thirty years later, and allowing for the benefit of hindsight, some of what has emerged about the investigation seems truly shocking. As with other notorious murder cases, when the subject of the Yorkshire Ripper is mentioned it brings dreadful memories flooding back for those most intimately involved. The families of Sutcliffe’s victims deserved to know what really happened during that awful period when a beast called Peter Sutcliffe roamed the North of England creating outright terror. They also needed to know that some good came out of that terrible era and that lessons were learned about complex cases.
The police officers trying to track down this utterly ruthless killer were decent and honest men. Amid the chaos that gripped the investigation there were some brilliant detectives. Most were totally committed, but tragically some, just like the police service for which they worked, were way out of their depth. The British police have an extraordinary record in solving homicides, and G.K. Chesterton’s reflection that ‘society is at the mercy of a murderer without a motive’ is now only partially true. Random prostitute murders are still every senior investigating officer’s worst nightmare, but in recent times we have seen successful investigations into the serial killing of call-girls in Suffolk and a fresh round of prostitute murders in Bradford. It is very different now from that period in the last century when the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was so complex and protracted that it simply overwhelmed the West Yorkshire Police. Many of the detectives involved paid a high price – ruined careers, ruined health, ruined marriages – and in a few cases it led to their premature deaths.
Now as then, I am not remotely interested in Peter Sutcliffe, the individual. Many have asked whether I ever wanted to interview him. The answer was a resounding. ‘No!’ What could he tell me that I didn’t already know – that he was a sick and perverted killer who got powerful sexual thrills from having women at his mercy as he slaughtered them? For me it would have been a worthless exercise to ask Sutcliffe serious questions and expect believable or valuable answers. The detectives though were another matter completely. I was intrigued by them as people, and by the service for which they worked. I wanted to put the reader in their shoes, as they attended a murder scene or an autopsy or a press conference. There can be no freedom without a system of laws and we need these dedicated men and women to enforce those laws. The British police service remains one of our pivotal institutions; it safeguards much of what we take for granted.
More than three decades after attending his trial in Court Number One at the Old Bailey in May 1981, I resolutely maintain that there was only a single villain in the Yorkshire Ripper case. It was, and is, the monstrous and twisted individual I saw giving evidence in his own, highly implausible, defence of the indefensible. Peter Sutcliffe was, and remains, wicked beyond belief and it will come as a comfort to many that some of our most senior judges, led by the Lord Chief Justice himself, seem to agree with me.
Michael Bilton, January 2012
1
Contact and Exchange
Exactly twenty-nine minutes after the body of Wilma McCann was found, the telephone rang beside Hoban’s bed. It was at 8.10 a.m. Early-morning calls were nothing new for the head of Leeds CID. He had been sound asleep for nearly an hour, having crawled between the sheets next to his wife, Betty, not long before dawn. He had been up since 1 a.m. at a murder scene in another part of the city for most of the night. A phone call now was the last thing he needed. The control room at Wakefield was on the line. ‘A murder, sir,’ the operator said. ‘A woman, at the Prince Philip playing fields, Scott Hall Road, Chapeltown. Found by the milkman, sir. The local police surgeon is at the scene already and Mr Craig is on his way.’ Craig! The assistant chief constable in charge of crime was turning out. That settled it – Hoban couldn’t take his time, he wanted to be there before him.
Betty was already downstairs making a cup of tea. She knew what to expect. No point in making him breakfast. He’d be up and off. He’d wash and shave, take his insulin, get dressed. Then he’d be gone. She knew it would be midnight before she saw him again. ‘There’s another murder, young woman this time in Chapeltown,’ he said downstairs in the hallway, kissing her on the cheek and saying goodbye at the same time. ‘Dennis …’ she hardly had time to say ‘take care’ before he was gone. Through the front-room window she saw him reverse his blue Daimler on to the road and drive off. For the umpteenth hundred time in thirty years of marriage, Betty was left alone while her husband went chasing criminals.
A freelance photographer arrived at the playing field before Hoban. The scenes of crime team had not yet put up a tarpaulin screen to shield the body from prying eyes. A uniformed officer prevented the freelance going any further. A 500 mm telephoto lens was clipped on to his Nikon camera. Looking through the eyepiece, he could clearly see one hundred yards away the body of a woman on its back, trousers above her ankles. Just then several figures moved into the framed image from left and right. Two uniform constables from the area traffic car were dragging a crude canvas screen closer towards the woman. And just then, moving slowly into frame from the right, the scenes of crime photographer arrived with his large plate camera already clamped on to its tripod. The freelance had only seconds to take the shot before the body was obscured. His shutter clicked and almost immediately the camera’s motor-drive whirred and wound on. A pathetically sad image of a murder victim in the morning mist was captured for all time on 35 mm film.
More newsmen turned up. Film crews from the local television stations; reporters from the Evening Post. There was some relief for the waiting journalists when Hoban arrived, clearly identifiable in his light-coloured raincoat, belted at the waist, his brimmed hat hiding his receding hairline. There was an almost symbiotic relationship between them and the local CID chief, and so a formal ritual was played out. They would wait patiently, perhaps go door-knocking to see if any local neighbours knew what happened. He’d do what he had to do, then help them. Those in search of a story and pictures needed the goodwill of the man in charge. They had to be patient and not take liberties, not impinge on the investigation. To solve this murder, any murder, Hoban knew he needed information from the public. The media were a valuable resource, so he’d personally make sure they got the story in time for the first edition of the Post and the first news summary on the local TV stations at midday.
Formal greetings with his colleagues were just that. Formal. It was cold. There was low-lying fog. The men around him stamped their feet, arms folded against their chests, trying to keep warm. Some had been waiting at the crime scene for nearly an hour since the woman was found at 7.41 a.m. by the passing milkman. The date was 30 October 1975, the eve of Halloween and only days to go to Fireworks Night. It was that time of year when local kids had been making effigies of Guy Fawkes, standing on street corners, asking ‘Penny for the Guy’. The local milkman was making the early-morning round with his ten-year-old brother. Mist hanging over the area made it difficult to see properly as Alan Routledge drove his electric-powered milk van into the rectangular tarmac car park of the Prince Philip Centre. He got out to deliver a crate of milk and there, on a steep banking on the far side of the car park, near the rear of the caretaker’s house and the sports field clubhouse, spotted what he at first thought was a bundle of rags or perhaps a children’s ‘Guy’. Out of curiosity the brothers edged closer. It was the body of a woman. Routledge ushered his sibling away and ran for a phone. He told the police operator he had found a woman with her throat cut.
The uniformed officers laid down a series of duckboards across the grassy area to the murder scene. Hoban moved forward, treading carefully on the slatted wood. Devlin, the police surgeon, greeted him. The woman lay on her back, at a slightly oblique angle across the slope, the head pointing uphill and the feet directed towards the edge of the car park. Her reddish-coloured handbag lay beside her, its leather strap still looped around her left hand. Her white flared slacks had been pulled down below her knees; both her pink blouse and her blue bolero-style jacket had been ripped apart. Her bra, a flimsy pink-coloured thing, had been pulled up to expose her breasts. Blood from stab wounds had leaked over to the right side of her body. The blood had dried. More blood from a stab wound on the left side of her chest trickled down to the edge of her pants, obviously, thought Hoban, because her feet were pointing downhill. Her auburn hair had been backcombed into a beehive style high above her head, but now much of it was spread out on the grass. She had worn a pair of shoes with an inch-thick sole and a four-inch heel. Her knickers were in the normal position covering her genitalia. They bore a large, colour printed jokey motif, part of which Hoban could easily read without bending down: ‘Famous meeting places’. A small button lay behind her head and some coins were in the nearby grass. The wounds were divided into several areas: a stab wound to the throat; two stab wounds below the right breast; three stab wounds below the left breast and a series of nine stab wounds around the umbilicus.
By the time the local Home Office pathologist arrived at 9.25 a.m. Hoban knew the dead woman’s name and the fact that she lived barely a hundred yards away. The back entrance to her council house in Scott Hall Avenue opened out on to the playing field. Neighbours told officers making house to house inquiries how Wilma McCann lived with four young children, separated from her husband. Two of the children had gone looking for their mother at first light when she failed to return home, after having left the eldest, Sonje, aged nine, in charge. Sonje and her brother went to wait at the nearby bus stop to see if their mother had caught an early-morning bus home. They were standing there freezing when a neighbour found them with their school coats over their pyjamas.
Nothing surprised Hoban any more, he’d seen all this before. Desperate women. Children neglected. Leeds City council officials had already been alerted that the four McCann children would almost certainly need foster care. No one knew at first where their father lived. Initially, because Wilma was found so close to her home, Hoban considered that this might be a domestic incident that got out of hand. Perhaps the former husband was involved. Then he heard that Wilma frequently went out at night to the local pubs and clubs to ‘have a good time’ – and she got paid for it. Like many single mothers on the breadline, she slept with men for money. She came and went via the back entrance to hide the fact that she left the children alone for several hours and frequently returned late at night. For this she had paid the terrible price. Although she had no convictions for prostitution, Hoban knew the fact that she was a good-time girl would be a major complication.
Standing there that morning, he hoped and expected they could solve this case quickly. The victim would surely have some relationship to the killer – a motive would be established and with luck and a fair wind they would have their man. The other senior man to arrive at the McCann murder scene was the forensic pathologist, David Gee, who knew Hoban well and admired his professionalism as a top detective. Each had earned the respect of the other. They had already spent most of the night together at the scene of another murder elsewhere in the city and Gee also had only just dropped off into a very deep sleep when the phone call came through alerting him to this latest case. Not unreasonably, he regarded it as a bit of a nuisance. He had made good speed, considering he had to drive in to Leeds from Knaresborough, twenty miles away, during the morning rush hour. Hoban filled him in on all he knew so far. Gee – notebook in one hand, biro in the other – stood as he always did, listening intently. For a few minutes he looked at and around the body. Eventually he drew a diagram and wrote a few cryptic remarks. For a murder involving multiple stab wounds it was what he would have expected. There was heavy soiling of the skin at the front and right side of the neck because of the stab wound on the throat. Blood was staining the grass beside the victim’s head. The blood trickling from the chest and abdomen had also soiled the right side of the victim’s blouse. Other spots of dried blood could be seen on the front of both her thighs, on the upper surface of her slacks and the upper surface of her right hand.
Gee’s very first thoughts were that the blood seepages running vertically downwards from the stab wounds in all directions suggested she had been stabbed to death where she lay. One blood trickle ran into the top of her knickers and then along it. When the panties were removed, he could see the trickle did not run down inside, probably indicating that no sexual intercourse had taken place either just before or just after the stabbing. Some blood soiled her long and tangled hair, but this was maybe due to blood escaping from the wound to her neck.
Once the body had been photographed, Ron Outtridge, the forensic scientist from the Home Office laboratory at Harrogate, moved closer and began taking Sellotape impressions from the exposed portions, hoping to find tiny fibres, perhaps from the killer’s clothing. Gee took swabs from various orifices – vagina, anus, mouth. Then he began measuring the temperature of the body at roughly half-hourly intervals. In an hour, between 10.30 and 11.30 a.m., Wilma’s corpse grew colder by two degrees, falling to 71.5°F. However, once the sun came up, the external temperature began to rise. By a simple calculation Gee determined that death happened around midnight, according to the hourly rate at which the body dropped in temperature. A gentle south-westerly breeze eventually blew the fog away and by 11.40 the temperature was 59°F, quite warm for an autumn day. The sky, however, remained overcast and there were a few spots of rain. For protection, the body was partly covered by a plastic sheet raised above the corpse on a metal frame so as not to contaminate any clues. By this time there was slight rigor mortis. Outtridge then removed the slacks, shoes and handbag. Plastic bags were placed over the head and hands and the body was gently wrapped in a much larger plastic sheet for the short journey by windowless van to the local mortuary. There the rest of the clothing was removed and handed over to Outtridge. A fingerprint specialist examined the body for prints on the surface of the skin.
The team, including Hoban and Outtridge, gathered again for the formal post-mortem at 2 p.m. It was a long and exacting process which took four hours. Most officers hate post-mortems. ‘It is not only the sight but the smell of the body and the disinfectants,’ recalls one senior detective who had been involved on countless murder inquiries. ‘The smell would cling to your clothing and when I got home I would strip, put clothes in the washer and my suit on the line. I would then have a shower but I would also lose my sex drive for several days. I think a lot of policemen are affected in this way.’
After the formalities of measuring and weighing the body, Gee quickly made an important discovery. Because Wilma had been lying on her back when found, there had been no examination of the rear of her head. On the examination table, her head propped up on a wooden block, he quickly located two lacerations of the scalp that had been concealed by her long hair. One was a vertical and slightly curved laceration, two inches in length, its margins relatively clean cut and shelving towards the right. This wound penetrated the full thickness of the scalp and through it a deep fracture in the skull could be clearly observed. Two inches to the left was another head injury, not so severe. Gee pointed out the two wounds, and later this portion of Wilma’s skull was shaved so they could be photographed prior to her brain being removed and studied.
Gee then began minutely examining the fifteen stab wounds to the body, trying to follow the track of each beneath the surface of the skin. It was a difficult task. The majority of wounds to her abdomen were very close together. It proved impossible to show the direction of each individual track of each individual wound. He had greater success in tracking the wounds to the neck and chest. Here, patiently, slowly, was a scientist methodically at work trying to learn what kind of weapon or weapons had been used to kill Wilma; and to determine more precisely how she actually died.
Gee’s final conclusion was that death occurred within minutes of the victim being struck on the head, then stabbed. He believed the weapon involved in the stabbing was more than three inches long and a quarter of an inch broad. She’d been hit on the head with a blunt object with a restricted striking surface. It could have been a hammer, but at this stage Gee favoured something like an adjustable spanner. There was nothing special about the stab wounds. The victim had been struck from the left side. Death had occurred probably early on the morning of 30 October.
Back in his office later that night Hoban began absorbing the information flowing in. House to house inquiries by the Task Force began to give a more detailed and increasingly depressing picture of Wilma’s lifestyle. Her former husband had been traced. Her parents were contacted in Scotland. Criminal records showed she had four convictions for drunkenness, theft and disorderly conduct. The local vice squad believed she was a known prostitute, though she had never been cautioned.
Wilma had been born and brought up near Inverness, one of eleven children. Her father was a farm worker. She had been christened Willemena Mary Newlands. According to her mother, she had been a good speller as a child, full of life but inclined to go her own way. Mrs Betsy Newlands said she had brought up all eleven children strictly. Wilma had to be in bed by 10 p.m. every night and when her father discovered her wearing make-up he took it from her and buried it in the garden. She could quickly become emotional, and when she did everyone would know about it. From leaving the local technical school she went to work at the Gleneagles Hotel near Perth. She had been pregnant with her daughter, Sonje, before she was out of her teens.
After Sonje was born, Wilma met a joiner, Gerald Christopher McCann from Londonderry, Northern Ireland. They married on 7 October 1968. A few years later they moved to the Leeds area, where five of Wilma’s brothers lived. She and Gerry had three children of their own in fairly quick succession – a son and two daughters. But by February 1974 the marriage was over. Wilma couldn’t settle, she hadn’t the self-discipline to adapt to either marriage or motherhood. She liked her nights out. And she liked other men. Gerry left and soon took up with another woman and had a child by her. He continued to see his kids after school and bought them birthday presents, Wilma did not ask for money from National Assistance but earned it her way – when she went out in the evening. Gerry McCann wanted a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery and Wilma was happy to give it to him. Court proceedings were imminent.
From early on after Wilma and Gerry separated, nine-year-old Sonje seemed to be doing most of the caring for her half-brother and half-sisters at the house. In fact Wilma came to rely increasingly on the little girl, who was expected to grow up quickly and take on board responsibilities for her siblings way before her time. As a mother, Wilma was hopeless. She had degenerated into a terrible drunken state. The house, when police searched it, was filthy. She was sexually promiscuous and irresponsible and Gerry, a caring father, had become increasingly concerned that, since their separation, Wilma was neglecting the children’s welfare and leaving them alone for long periods in the evenings.
Hoban knew inner-city Leeds intimately. He had worked there for thirty years, he knew the streets, he knew the back alleyways, the pubs and clubs. He met his vast network of informants there – the criminal classes who gave him tipoffs that made him probably the best-informed detective in the city. He knew the wide boys, the spivs, the con men, the burglars, the pickpockets, the whores, the fences. He also knew the serious criminals, the ones who thought nothing of taking a shotgun on an armed raid on a bank or post office. He had, over the years, locked up hundreds of criminals and earned himself a fierce reputation. Newspapers referred to him as ‘Crime Buster’, or more particularly as the ‘Crime Buster in the sheepskin coat’ – a fitting reference to Hoban’s liking for sartorial elegance in the city responsible for making the made-to-measure suits that clothed half the male population of England through chain stores like Hepworth and Montague Burton.
Hoban’s extraordinary gift for solving crime and his energy and dedication had marked him out from the beginning of his police career. Commendations from magistrates and judges at the assize courts and quarter sessions came thick and fast. There was an inevitability about him rising to the top. He could move easily among those who skated the line between what was legal and what was not. He would drift into a pub or nightclub and soon there would be an exchange of glances as he clocked one of his snouts, some thief, vagabond or ne’er-do-well with information to sell. Thirty seconds apart, they would make for the gentlemen’s lavatory where a ten-shilling note was exchanged for a piece of paper or a discreetly whispered conversation.
Hoban was not a great drinker. His diabetes put paid to that. But he enjoyed social occasions and he loved the status his job gave him. He thrived on working his way up from humble origins to the top, to being a Citizen of the Year in Leeds. And he luxuriated in his work as a police officer. It wasn’t a job, it was a way of life. It was like a drug. He knew it. Betty knew it. His two sons knew it. And murder was his greatest professional challenge. Finding the person or persons who had snuffed out the life of some undeserving man or woman from among the half million souls who lived in the city of Leeds – that took some doing. And Hoban was very good at it. He had been involved in almost forty murders and solved them all.
The day Wilma’s body was discovered and the hunt for her killer launched, Hoban returned to Betty at midnight, his mind troubled by the fact that Wilma McCann, because she persistently had sex for money, might not have known the man who killed her. In these situations the search for an individual who killed with frenzied violence was a top priority because they were such a danger. The early stages of a murder inquiry took precedence over almost everything. The following morning he was due to undergo firearms training on a local range. Before Hoban drifted off to sleep he had to remind himself he must contact someone and cancel the appointment.
For the next week, apart from Sunday, Hoban worked until midnight every day. On the Sunday he went in an hour later, working only a twelve-hour day, so he was home that night shortly after ten o’clock. Wednesday he took off and spent the day with Betty. He tried to be home by 10 p.m. if he could, but frequently it was impossible. Occasionally other crucial duties as the head of the city’s Criminal Investigation Department demanded his time which took him away from the murder inquiry, such as briefing the assistant chief constable, Donald Craig, or a conference with prosecution counsel in connection with other cases destined for trial. But Hoban, once these appointments were out of the way, kept himself and his officers hard at it. He made frequent appeals through the press and on local radio for people to come forward with information. He needed eyewitnesses who had seen Wilma, possibly with her killer.
As each detail came in, it was filed in the index system at the murder incident room. This in turn generated more inquiries: men friends, especially previous lovers, to be traced, interviewed and eliminated; vehicle sightings to be checked; follow-up interviews arising from house-to-house inquiries to be actioned, carried out, checked and then more follow-up actions sanctioned. A more detailed picture of Wilma’s movements on the night she died began to emerge slowly. She had left home at about 7.30, telling Sonje that the younger kids were not to get out of bed. She was ‘going to town again’ and would be back later. From 8.30 to 10.30 p.m. she had been in various city centre pubs. About 11.30 she was on her own at the Room at the Top nightclub, in the North Street/Sheepscar area of the city. The last positive sighting of her was about 1 a.m. when two officers in a patrol car spotted her in Meanwood Road. Other witnesses had seen her trying to hitch a lift by jumping out in front of cars, causing them to stop. She was roaring drunk. The laboratory report, while it showed no trace of semen in her body, did confirm she had consumed a hefty amount of alcohol, between twelve and fourteen measures of spirit. Reports came in of a lorry driver who had stopped near where Wilma was seen weaving her way down the road. Initially, there was some confusion, because another lorry was also seen to pull up and an eyewitness saw Wilma engaged in conversation with the driver.
An early search of her home produced an address book and so began the task of locating a large number of Wilma’s clients, though Hoban discreetly told the press they were searching for past ‘boyfriends’. He appealed for any not yet contacted to come forward. To label a victim a prostitute in this situation was unhelpful. Experience showed the public were somehow not surprised at what happened to call girls. Photographs and stories in the press about Wilma’s orphaned children were intended to create sympathy.
A week after Wilma was killed, Hoban had late-night roadblocks set up on the route she had taken when she left the Room at the Top. As a result, the lorry driver who stopped to talk to her revealed he didn’t pick her up in response to her plea for a lift home. She was totally drunk and clutching a white plastic container in which she was carrying curry and chips. He was heading for the M62 motorway, across the Pennines to Lancashire. A day or so later a car driver came forward to say he had seen Wilma getting into a ‘K’ registered, red or orange fastback saloon, looking similar to a Hillman Avenger. The driver was said to be coloured, possibly West Indian or African, aged about thirty-five, with a full face ‘and thin droopy moustache’. He was wearing a donkey jacket.
Six weeks after the murder, Hoban’s investigation was clearly floundering. All the normal checks had revealed nothing. The witness pointing them in the direction of the red or orange hatchback also mentioned an articulated lorry, which he said had been parked nearby. Despite inquiries at 483 haulage companies the police drew a blank. A total of twenty-nine former ‘boyfriends’ were interviewed and eliminated. They were still searching for the driver of the fastback car to come forward.
From December 1975 and into the New Year Hoban resumed more of his duties as the head of Leeds CID. There were important functions to attend – dinners held by the Law Society and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He had court appearances in Birkenhead as a result of a famous incident at Headingley when a protest group dug up part of the cricket pitch and poured oil over the wicket, causing the Test match against Australia to be abandoned. The protesters were an unlikely group, trying to right an injustice in the case of George Davis, a London criminal they claimed had been wrongly imprisoned for a bank robbery. It was a high-profile case and Hoban was intimately involved.
He made his obligatory appearance at the chief constable’s pre-Christmas cocktail party for senior officers at the force headquarters in Wakefield. The chief, Ronald Gregory, had reason to be pleased with the way things were going in his administration. Two years previously the West Yorkshire Police Force had merged with the big city forces in Leeds and Bradford to create the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police, one of the larger forces in the country, stretching across a wide area of the North of England. Gregory knew there would be tensions in bringing together the county coppers with the city forces. Leeds and Bradford had had autonomy previously, each with their own budget, chief constable and head of CID. Gregory hadn’t wanted too much disruption and hadn’t insisted on major changes in personnel. The cocktail party, at lunchtime on 22 December, was another getting-to-know-you session.
Hoban knew many of the senior detectives in the newly combined force. Before becoming the senior detective in Leeds, he had been deputy coordinator of No. 3 Regional Crime Squad, which covered a wide area of Northern England. As a detective superintendent he had close contact with his counterparts in the major towns and cities in the West Riding. The senior men were expected to get along with each other and make the amalgamation work. But the easy-going jollity of the cocktail party was in part an illusion. It still rankled the senior Leeds officers that the West Riding men were in the driving seat. As city detectives they were used to dealing with tough gangs and sophisticated crime. They believed the county boys lacked the hard experience needed to deal with ruthless criminals. ‘Donkey Wallopers’, they called them. However, on this occasion the chat was friendly. Most knew Hoban had an unsolved murder, but this was nothing new in their line of work. His reputation stood him in good stead. He was viewed as ‘a hard and occasionally ruthless man’ – ‘a decent bloke’ – ‘a fucking great detective’.
Renewed inquiries among prostitutes in the Chapeltown area over Christmas and the New Year of 1976 produced information about a fifty-year-old Irishman, known to drive a clapped-out Land-Rover, who frequented the area. It was a total red herring. Neither the Irishman, nor the driver of the vehicle thought to be an orange/red fastback car, was ever traced. (In retrospect, it seems highly likely that the driver of the fastback car was Peter Sutcliffe, who at the time drove a lime green K registered Ford Capri. It was some years before the Ripper squad learned that street lighting at night could often give witnesses a confusing picture of the colour of vehicles they were trying to describe. Sutcliffe had a swarthy appearance, which at night and at a distance could have led to him being confused for a light-coloured West Indian. And, of course, he had a droopy moustache.)
By the middle of January 1976 the McCann murder squad, numbering 137 officers, had worked 53,000 hours. Five thousand houses had been called at, these inquiries having generated most of the 3,300 separate index card references in the incident room. These in turn had spawned 2,880 separate actions or follow-ups. Five hundred and thirty-eight statements were taken. There were other clues which were never resolved. The vaginal swabs taken by the pathologist found no trace of semen, but there was a positive semen reaction on the back of Wilma’s trousers and pants. Forensic scientists at the Harrogate laboratory were unable to produce a blood group, most likely because the person who deposited this sample did not secrete his blood cells in his bodily fluids. (Possibly Sutcliffe masturbated over Wilma after he attacked her.) Keeping details of the injuries secret from the media, Hoban announced at one point that the killer seemed to have ‘very personal feelings towards Wilma’. He was clearly speculating elliptically that the frenzied nature of the attack and the physical presence of some sexual motive, i.e. the semen, perhaps made this a personal assault.
In Wilma’s home the scenes-of-crime officers amassed a large number of fingerprints. A fragment of fingerprint on a door jamb was never eliminated. A purse missing from her handbag was never found. To help jog the memory of potential witnesses, a woman police officer dressed up in Wilma’s clothes and a photograph of Wilma’s face was superimposed. Two thousand posters were distributed to shops and other businesses, but little hard information was produced. There was little to distinguish this case from many other unsolved murders. According to Professor Gee: ‘We simply had an unsolved murder in which the only slightly unusual feature was the use of two weapons to cause the injuries.’
Eight weeks and five days after Wilma McCann was murdered, Dennis Hoban was once more summoned from home before breakfast to the scene of the homicide of a woman. Soon, because of the nature of the injuries and the circumstances in which she died, he became firmly convinced that the man who murdered McCann had killed again. Newspapers began talking about a Jack-the-Ripper style killer on the loose.
There had been a false alarm only a few weeks previously at a ghastly murder scene which Hoban attended in Leeds after a ‘photographic model’ and her young child had been stabbed to death. The dead mother also turned out to be a prostitute and Hoban briefly suspected a link. However, this double homicide was almost immediately detected by a combination of good luck and alert thinking by one of Hoban’s former protégés on the No. 3 Regional Crime Squad. A mentally deranged seventeen-year-old youth called Mark Rowntree was quickly arrested by Detective Chief Inspector Dick Holland, stationed at Bradford CID. When the burly rugby-playing detective investigated the killing of a young man, aged sixteen, in nearby Keighley, he came away with a confession from Rowntree that included two other homicides he hadn’t even known had happened. The deaths of the woman and her son in Leeds were barely a few days old and Hoban, who hated bureaucratic paperwork at the best of times, had delayed circulating full details to surrounding divisions. Rowntree confessed to Holland his guilt in a one-man killing spree which included the sixteen-year-old youth, the prostitute and her son, and an eighty-five-year-old widow. He was eventually sent to Broadmoor.
Now, on Wednesday, 21 January 1976, in response to a control room telephone message, Hoban donned a warm, dark brown car coat and his familiar hat and made his way to a derelict area destined for redevelopment. Part of the Manor Street Industrial Estate off Roundhay Road included a row of boarded-up, dilapidated, red-brick buildings, scheduled for demolition. A uniformed inspector took him to an alley between two derelict houses adjacent to a cobblestoned cul-de-sac, Enfield Terrace. The passageway had been roofed over at some point, but the roofing had caught fire and been destroyed. Now the only parts remaining were charred timbers and the passageway was open to the sky. The front of the passage was open but the back was completely filled by masses of rubbish, burnt wood, scrap metal and junked office and factory furniture. The inspector told Hoban that at 8 a.m. a man on his way to work parked his car at the far end of the cul-de-sac almost opposite the passageway. When he got out of the driver’s door, he glanced to the right and saw a pair of legs lying among the rubble about fifteen feet inside the alley. At first he thought it was a shop-window dummy, then realized it was the body of a woman.
Treading carefully, Hoban noticed there were clear drag marks of disturbed earth from the front of the road, along the passageway, to where the body lay on its back. There were also small areas of dried blood on the surface of the cobbles and concrete on the ground. There is never a pleasant place to be brutally murdered, but this was a terrible location in which to die. The first police officer at the scene had earlier noted a boot impression in the roadway, near the entrance to the passageway, and pointed it out to Hoban.
A gale was blowing as the police surgeon, who had been waiting patiently for Hoban to arrive, pulled back a plastic sheet partly covering the body of a middle-aged woman. It had protected the corpse from the wind and rain. The body lay sprawled on its back just outside a doorway, a striped dress pulled up above the waist. The woman’s fawn-coloured imitation leather handbag lay several feet from her head, its flap open. Its contents showed her name was probably Emily Jackson, and that she lived near Morley, a town in the west of Leeds. The brown-haired woman had hazel-coloured eyes and nicotine-stained fingers on both hands, more pronounced on the right than the left. She wore a wedding ring.
Mrs Jackson still had on her red, blue and green checked overcoat and was sprawled on the right of the passage, just in front of the piles of rubbish, with the left arm by her side and the left leg stretched out straight. The right arm was directed out at right angles from the body, and the right leg was bent upwards and outwards, flexed at the knee and hip. The lower limbs were clad in tights, which were laddered and bore a large hole six inches above the knee. She also wore black panties, which were in position, though the left side of the upper edge of the tights was slightly displaced downwards, exposing the knickers. The feet were bare. One cheap-looking white sling-back lay on the ground beside the right foot; the other was a short distance away, closer to the right-hand wall. There was a muddy footprint on her thigh similar to the one in the soil at the entrance to the alley. The front of the body was soiled by dirt in various areas, especially the front and outer sides of the thighs. The face was heavily soiled with mud and blood, and there was bloodstaining on the front of the dress, on the right arm and right hand. The ground beneath and above the head was soiled by small pools and trickles of coagulated blood.
Professor Gee arrived at 9.30 a.m. to be followed soon after by Outtridge from the Home Office laboratory at Harrogate. Examining the spot where the woman lay, the pathologist bent down. The exposed part of the body felt cold to Gee’s touch. Hoban then took him to the front of the passageway, to the cobbled roadway, opposite a flat-roofed modern factory building, the premises of Hollingworth & Moss, bookbinders. Two duckboards had been placed either side of a large piece of hardboard that shielded some vital evidence from the elements. When the hardboard was lifted Hoban and Gee saw a pool of red-stained rainwater – diluted blood. The woman had been struck, probably at this spot, then dragged up the passageway. A chill wind blew strongly and there were intermittent squalls of cold rain. Gee and Hoban quickly agreed that preserving any evidence in these conditions was going to be difficult – particularly contact trace-evidence, which might have been passed from the killer to the victim in the shape of minute fibres of clothing. Gee was reluctant to record the body’s temperature, since this would have involved displacing the victim’s clothing. Instead he instructed that the body be enveloped in large plastic sheets and taken to the public mortuary for a more intensive examination.
Task force officers had begun an inch-by-inch fingertip search among the cobblestones along Elmfield Terrace. Ten officers in overalls, some wearing gloves, got down on their hands and knees in the wind and rain and painstakingly grubbed their way along the street. Among them was a twenty-four-year-old Bradford constable, Andrew Laptew. He had joined the Bradford force after sailing the seven seas as a trainee Merchant Navy officer. After experiencing the delights of South America, the Far East and Australia, he made a determined bid to become a police officer. Joining the Task Force had been an exciting moment, since its members regarded themselves as part of an élite unit. ‘Fingertip searches were back-breaking work because that is what we did – felt with our fingertips to see if we could find any clues,’ he remembered twenty-five years later. They found nothing to help the investigation.
The formal post-mortem began at 11.15 a.m. Until then, no attempt had been made to look more closely at the body, especially at the back. The victim was forty-one years old and slightly overweight, which made her look several years older. She was five feet six inches tall. Donald Craig, the assistant chief constable, stood close to Hoban watching while the normal forensic procedures in a homicide autopsy were applied. Craig was an experienced murder investigator, who had solved all seventy-three murders on his patch during a three-year spell as the West Riding CID chief during the early 1970s. It made him a bit of a legend and people either loved or loathed him. He was tough, uncompromising and, some even said, a bit of a bully at times. He had few social graces and rarely apologized for anything. The West Riding man and the Leeds City man respected one another. You couldn’t take away Craig’s track record, and he had attended dozens of autopsies, so he knew what to look out for. His father, too, had been a policeman.
For nearly eighty years, since the late nineteenth century, the mechanics of identifying and preserving evidence at crime scenes encompassed a process that combined logic with rigorous scientific method. Minute specks of material could prove vital, and in eighty years the technology had changed dramatically. Forensic techniques now encompassed the use of highly expensive electron microscopes and mass photo spectrometers.
The very process of photographing and measuring evidence, particularly in cases of murder, had been perfected initially in France in the 1890s by the clerk to the premier bureau of the Paris Préfecture of Police, Alphonse Bertillon. He had photographed the bodies of victims and their relationship to significant items of evidence at the crime scene, including footprints, stains, tool marks, points of entry among other details. Even today one of the cornerstones of forensic science remains the ‘exchange principle’ first developed by one of Bertillon’s students, Edmond Locard: ‘If there is contact between two items, there will be an exchange.’ When anyone comes into contact with an object or someone else, a cross-transfer of physical evidence occurs. They will leave evidence of that contact and they will take some evidence with them. The job of the forensic scientist is to locate this material to help ultimately identify the criminal and achieve a conviction in a court of law. ‘The criminologist,’ Locard maintained, ‘re-creates the criminal from the traces the latter leaves behind, just as the archaeologist reconstructs prehistoric beings from his finds.’
The process was necessarily painstaking, time consuming and expensive. What Gee, Hoban and their close colleagues hoped to achieve during the next seven and a quarter hours in the Leeds city mortuary was to lay the vital groundwork to help them find and convict the murderer. The application of scientific rigour was not the only process at work. A further ingredient was also required: an attitude of mind or, in more familiar terms, ‘a hunch’, born out of years of experience. Hunches were not mere guesswork. Even at this stage, Dennis Hoban was already speculating out loud privately to Gee that the murderer of McCann was likely to be ‘a long-distance lorry driver’. This intuitive judgement by the senior detective was based on several factors: the possibility that the killer carried tools in his vehicle; the failure to trace the likely killer from among McCann’s boyfriends, with whom she sometimes had sex for money; and the fact that many lorry drivers travelled through Chapeltown from the A1 to the M62 motorway.
As with the McCann autopsy, the process of garnering evidence was protracted. Outtridge examined the clothing, taping the material, looking for fibres or other contact traces; the fingerprint specialist looked for possible evidence that the skin had been touched. Swabs were taken in the search for semen; samples of hair were removed from the scalp, the pubic region and eyebrows. The outer clothing showed no sign of having been penetrated by stabbing. Two areas of dirt soiling on the woman’s tights were closely examined. They measured roughly three inches by four, on the inner and outer right thigh, and appeared several inches above the right knee. These were the marks resembling the sole of a boot, similar to the footprint found in sandy soil close to the murder scene. A plaster cast of this ridged impression at the scene had already been made by the time the post-mortem started. The area of the boot impression on the tights was carefully cut out before the rest of the clothing was removed from the body, which rested on the autopsy table. Along with all the other samples, these were later taken back to the Harrogate laboratory by Outtridge for microscopic examination.
As the clothing began to be removed, it swiftly became apparent that the woman’s bra had been lifted above her breasts and there was a huge number of stab marks to the trunk and back, some so close together as to give the impression of the holes in a pepper pot. They were very small, about one eighth of an inch in diameter, some round, some oval and a few very definitely cruciform in shape, leaving a strange impression on the skin, as if caused by an ‘X’-shaped instrument. Gee thought the wounds ‘very odd’ and subsequently contacted a series of eminent colleagues around the country to see if they could throw light on what had caused them.
Those who had previously attended the post-mortem on Wilma McCann immediately realized the significance of the injuries. It was clear her clothing had been raised to inflict the injuries and then put back in position. Moreover, when Professor Gee examined the head, two significant lacerations were found, one on top of the head, the other at the back. In the first the full thickness of the scalp was penetrated and in the depths of the wound a depressed fracture of the skull was visible. In the second, at the back of the head, a depressed fracture was found beneath the wound. Gee concluded both injuries had been administered with a flat round instrument with a restricted striking surface, like a hammer. A number of bruises and abrasions to the face and throat made it obvious she had been dragged on her face along the ground. When Gee probed deeper, minutely trying to trace the track of a particular wound, he found the blow had passed through the sternum and there reproduced the cruciform shape in the bone. There was also evidence that the neck had been compressed and the victim had been menstruating slightly.
On the body itself Gee counted a total of fifty-two separate stab wounds – in five separate groups – two at the back and three at the front. On the back thirty of the stab wounds were concentrated in an area roughly six inches by eight – hence the impression of a pepper pot. Twelve stab wounds were counted in the abdomen. The killer had turned Emily Jackson over and repeated his frenzied attack. There were so many stab wounds to the trunk situated close together that it was impossible to assign individual tracks to most of them. Since tracks of wounds passed both from the front and from the back of the body into the interior, and many passed into soft tissue, it was impossible for Gee to ascertain the length of any of the tracks with any precision. He thought the weapon might be between two and four inches long. Several people, observing the professor’s precise handiwork in trying to track the wounds, commented that a Phillips cross-head screwdriver was the most likely cause.
At the end Gee finally gave Hoban his scenario by which the woman had met her death. There were blows to the head, dragging to the site where her corpse was found, raising of the clothes, stabbing, turning over and more stabs, in the course of which the assailant trod on her thigh, then the clothing was pulled down. She hadn’t been drinking. Later analysis by the laboratory at Harrogate found semen on a vaginal swab, but it was thought this was from sexual activity prior to the attack. Gee, the scientist who preferred not to deal in speculation, could not say exactly what kind of stabbing instrument had been used – but among the strong possibilities was indeed a Phillips screwdriver. Neither was he totally sure this was the work of McCann’s killer. There were clear similarities, but he could not rule out coincidence. Hoban, on the other hand, felt more certain he was dealing with the same killer for two murders, a suspicion strengthened when he started to hear details of the lifestyle the woman had led.
The murdered woman’s husband, Sydney Jackson, had a difficult story to tell the officers who interviewed him. He realized he was under suspicion himself, for the circumstances of his marriage were slightly out of the ordinary, even for Leeds. His story came out in dribs and drabs over the course of many hours of questioning. As he told it, and as Hoban initially understood it, she was insatiable and had had many affairs. He turned a blind eye to her activities, which included having sex with many boyfriends because her sexual appetite was such that he could not satisfy it.
Later that afternoon Hoban gave another television interview in the murder incident room at the newly opened Millgarth Street police station in Leeds city centre. Looking extraordinarily dapper for a senior detective, in his Aquascutum suit, red shirt and floral tie, he relayed some of the few facts at his disposal, putting the best possible gloss on the woman’s private life. ‘She was a woman who liked to go to public houses,’ he declared matter of factly. ‘She liked to go to bingo. She led a life of her own, really. We are anxious to contact any friends, lady friends or men friends, who may have seen her last night. She probably went to the Gaiety public house, which is a very popular pub in the area. We know the van she was in finished up on the Gaiety car park this morning … She had severe head injuries. There are other injuries I don’t wish to elaborate on at this time.’
Sydney Jackson at first kept from police the fact that since Christmas his wife had been trying to solve their financial and income tax problems by working as a prostitute. Then, under an intensive interrogation which ended shortly before midnight the day his wife’s body was discovered, he finally admitted that he often accompanied her when she went out looking for ‘business’. No one in the local community where they lived had a clue. The truth was that Emily and Sydney’s marriage was a marriage in name only: they stayed together for their children’s sake. Each, it appeared, went their own way, except that Sydney not only knew of his wife’s secret life, he drove her to her work. He had gone with her in their van, which his wife drove, to the Gaiety pub, a mile from Chapeltown, on Roundhay Road. It was a large, modern open-plan building that became a popular local drinking haunt, particularly for West Indians. The pub was surrounded on three sides by back-to-back rows of small Victorian terraced houses. Strippers danced at lunchtimes and prostitutes regularly gathered there at all hours looking for punters. Sydney had gone into the pub for a drink. Emily went immediately to work. Sydney stayed inside, listening to Caribbean music being thumped out on the juke box until about 10.30 p.m. He then emerged to find his wife had not kept their rendezvous. They had arranged she would drive him home. Assuming she was with one of her men friends, he instead caught a taxi back to Morley and only discovered what had happened when police called at their house in the morning.
His wife had been born Emily Wood in 1933, one of five brothers and three sisters, who lived with their parents in Hemsworth, a mining village. The entire family later moved to Brancepath Place, Leeds. She and Sydney married on 2 January 1953, when she was nineteen and he twenty-one, and during the early part of their marriage lived at various addresses in the Leeds area. Six years later she left him to live with another man. In 1961 they resumed their relationship and eventually set up house in Northcote Crescent, Morley, and became partners in a roofing business which they ran from home. They had three sons and a daughter, but tragedy struck in 1970 when their fourteen-year-old son, Derek, was killed in a fall from a first-floor window.
Emily was a hard-working, energetic woman, quite attractive in her own way. Neighbours remembered her as someone who was always busy. Because Sydney didn’t like to drive, Emily picked up the roofing supplies in their battered blue Commer van. She ferried the men who worked for them from job to job, took the kids to and from school. She also did the paperwork for their business. The day she died one of the neighbours recalled how Emily was supposed to be picking her ten-year-old son up from school. ‘When I got back my husband was waiting for me at the bus stop,’ said the neighbour, who lived just along the road from the Jackson family. ‘I thought something was wrong. And when we got home the boy was sat with a policeman in their house … they [Sydney and Emily] often used to go out but we thought they were going to the bingo in Leeds, we never realized what she was doing.’
After the death of their son, which Sydney said Emily never recovered from, they began to live from day to day. ‘We decided life was too short, we would live for today and not bother about the future. Sometimes she would go out alone, and I would meet up with her for a drink later on. But I do know that she never went in pubs on her own. She’s been in the Gaiety five times at the most, and always with me. We got on together as well as most. We both believed in having a good time – after all, why stop in every night? We believed in having fun while we could.’
Sydney remained strong and reasonably composed for the sake of his children after the murder, but went through a difficult time as he realized he was under suspicion for killing his wife. The day after Emily’s body was found the door-stepping journalists were rewarded when Sydney opened his heart to them. Sitting in the lounge of his semi-detached house, holding his head in his hands as he wept, he told them: ‘I know what people are saying – but I didn’t do it. There’s nothing I want to say to the man who did it, there’s nothing I can say, but if he’s done it once, he’ll do it again. I just pray they catch him.’
The information about Emily’s secret life was clearly an awkward embarrassment. Emily’s married sister refused to believe the things being said about her: ‘It’s time someone denied what is being said about Emily going into clubs and so on. She just wasn’t that kind of person.’ Unfortunately for Emily’s relatives, the press had quickly been let in on the details of her secret life. Hoban had no choice but to admit she had been soliciting about the time she was killed. Moreover, he could not ignore the obvious link with the McCann murder. He believed he had a duty to warn women who earned money by selling sex that they were in mortal danger. ‘While this man is at large no prostitute is safe,’ he declared.
Sydney Jackson made frequent visits to the police station to answer questions, insisting he had not killed his wife in revenge for her becoming a prostitute. Eventually Dennis Hoban went to reassure him that they knew he was innocent. He pledged that his detectives would find the man who killed his wife.
The police had taken away the Commer van containing Sydney’s tools and equipment for his business, so he couldn’t work or earn money. The vehicle had stood, with the ladder on the roof rack, at the Gaiety car park when Emily was murdered. For a while police thought it might have been moved. They were told Emily went touting for business in the van, sometimes taking customers in the back for sex. One look in the rear of the vehicle told them this was an unlikely passion-wagon the night she died. The materials for the roofing business filled up the inside. It was filthy and reeked of bitumen. There was a huge vat for heating tar, gas bottles, cans of paraffin, rolls of roofing felt, half-empty bags of cement, buckets containing trowels and other paraphernalia. Forensic experts gave it a thorough inspection. It was a well-used and abused vehicle, with the front bumper almost hanging off and several dents in the rear nearside panels. Four fingerprints were found that could not be eliminated. They also never determined who left a fingerprint on a lemonade bottle in the van, or another on a sweepstake ticket found in Emily’s handbag.
Two days into the murder hunt Hoban appealed for women who worked the streets in the area to come forward. He announced that Emily used her van to solicit clients. ‘Sometimes she would leave the van in the Gaiety car park and go with clients in their own cars, when they would drive to some secluded place for sex. It was probably on one of these excursions that she met her killer.’ Newspapers quickly linked the murder of Jackson with that of McCann: ‘RIPPER HUNTED IN CALL-GIRL MURDERS’ announced the Sun on 23 January.
A month later a witness came forward to say she had actually seen Emily around 7 p.m. getting into a Land-Rover. Police had begun questioning all convicted and known prostitutes in the area. One, a nineteen-year-old streetwalker, had been casually chatting to Emily moments before she got in the vehicle. A description of the driver, a man with a bushy beard, was widely circulated and an artists’ impression issued to the media. All Land-Rovers registered in West Yorkshire were checked, with negative results. Some time later a man answering this description, the owner of a Land-Rover registered in Essex, was interviewed and cleared. He had been temporarily staying in Leeds and admitted consorting with prostitutes. However, he denied that on the night in question he had been out looking to pay for sex with a woman. He had a cast-iron alibi. Some detectives believe he may well have picked up Jackson, and even had sex with her, but denied it emphatically because he had been driving while disqualified. There were searches for other vehicles. Sydney told police Emily had spoken of one of her clients as being ‘funny’ – they failed to locate him or the Moskovitch estate car he drove. Another witness saw a dark blue ‘L’ registered Transit van near the murder scene around 3.30 a.m. A list of 329 vehicles registered in Leeds was drawn up and 278 owners were eliminated from the investigation. The remaining fifty-one were never traced. It proved another frustrating investigation.
No attempt was made to trace the boots the killer wore. Hoban thought too many workmen in the city used this type of footwear to waste time on this particular line of inquiry. It did suggest the killer was not an office worker, but was perhaps involved in manual work. He sent an urgent telex to police stations in West Yorkshire asking that anyone brought into custody wearing similar boots, who might have a vehicle containing tools, such as a workman’s van, be held for questioning. He also wanted local criminal intelligence cells in collators’ offices to begin examining records for the names of people convicted of series attacks on prostitutes.
Hardware shops were visited to positively identify the kind of weapon used. Hoban was convinced a cross-head screwdriver was the answer; but Gee, when he carried out a variety of tests using different tools, could not reproduce the same kind of wound. When he tried to produce wounds with a Phillips screwdriver, he found that although the flanges of the tip would indeed produce a cruciform wound, as soon as you drove the weapon in with any degree of force, the rounded shaft destroyed the pattern and left simply a round hole. He began searching for a weapon with flanges all the way up its length. ‘The explanation of course had to be that some of the wounds were not driven home with sufficient force to extend right up the shaft of the weapon, but there were fifty-two of them and it was difficult to follow the tracks of all,’ he said later.
Gee wrote confidentially seeking assistance and suggestions from a number of senior forensic pathologists around Britain and Ireland, including the eminent Professor Keith Simpson. All kinds of possibilities were offered: a carpenter’s awl; the implement in a boy scout’s knife for taking stones out of horses’s hooves; a spud lock key; a roofing hammer; and a reamer. Several pathologists backed the idea of a Phillips screwdriver. ‘I am surprised that you had difficulty in getting a Phillips screwdriver through the skin,’ replied Professor Keith Mant of Guy’s Hospital. ‘I have seen fatal stab wounds from such instruments as pokers, and in one case, a boy was stabbed through the heart with a poker during some horseplay with his brother, who had no idea that he had hurt the deceased, especially when he subsequently walked upstairs to his bedroom. He was found dead in bed the next morning – no blood having issued from the wound!’
More media coverage was generated when a police Range Rover, complete with flashing blue light on top, toured the Chapeltown and Roundhay Road area. It contained a large photograph of Emily Jackson and appealed for witnesses who might have seen her on the night of the murder to come forward. Loudspeaker vans toured Leeds, interrupting weekend rugby and football matches. Cinemas and bingo halls suspended proceedings to broadcast appeals from the police. Publicity about two prostitutes having been murdered within three months caused some local women to stop soliciting. Others said they had no choice and accepted the risks: ‘There is always a danger when you do this game, but you have got to find a quiet spot, a dark spot,’ said one.
Everything told Hoban that Emily Jackson had been picked up in a vehicle while offering herself for sex; she was taken less than half a mile from the Gaiety to Elmfield Terrace, a quiet spot with little street lighting, where she met her terrible end. It was a place to which prostitutes took punters. Some of the girls on the street told him they also had been to precisely that spot. Women gave descriptions of clients, particularly of ones who had been violent. A month after the murder the West Yorkshire Police issued a special notice to all police forces in the country, officially linking the McCann and Jackson murders. They also circulated a description of a Land-Rover driver with the bushy beard. Throughout the next year, a hundred of Hoban’s officers worked more than 64,000 hours. Nearly 6,400 index cards were filled in in the incident room, making reference to more than 3,700 house-to-house inquiries and 5,220 separate actions. A total of 830 separate statements were taken and more than 3,500 vehicle inquiries carried out.
‘We are quite certain the man we are looking for hates prostitution,’ Hoban said. ‘I am quite certain this stretches to women of rather loose morals who go into public houses and clubs, who are not necessarily prostitutes, the frenzied attack he has carried out on these women indicates this.’
He knew that a man capable of killing twice probably enjoyed it, which meant he would go on doing it till caught. He was never more serious than when he issued a dark warning to the public via the press: ‘I believe the man we are looking for is the type who could kill again. He is a sadistic killer and may well be a sexual pervert.’ Emily Jackson had been killed with a ferocity ‘that bordered on the maniacal’. ‘I cannot stress strongly enough that it is vital we catch this brutal killer before he brings tragedy to another family.’
After several months, to Hoban’s obvious distress, his men were getting nowhere. He had tried everything he knew to push the inquiry forward, but the search for the killer was like hunting for a ghost. Every line of inquiry that could be followed was followed. A thousand Land-Rover drivers were checked out. Nothing. Dodgy punters were closely questioned. Nothing. The prostitutes were asked time and again to rack their brains to identify clients who might have been capable of two brutal murders. Countless men were checked as a result. Nothing. An artist’s impression was drawn of the man with the bushy beard. Nothing. He wrote to local family doctors asking them to come forward with the names of patients who might be capable of killing prostitutes. He was frustrated yet again. The Patients’ Association said such a request would prevent men with violent impulses from seeking medical help. The British Medical Association merely restated that the relationship between doctors and patients was confidential.
Hoban was getting weary and his health was suffering. His diabetes was taking its toll and he began to complain to Betty about a pain in his eye. The strong possibility of the killer striking again continued to bother him. By the time the inquests into both the deaths opened in May 1976, he had little new to say apart from the fact that he was certain the two women had been murdered by the same man. Hoban also knew there was a desperately cruel paradox. If there was to be any hope of apprehending the killer, more clues were needed: fresh clues and lines of inquiry that could only be forthcoming if the killer struck again. Another woman would probably have to die. Hoban could only wait.
2
The Diabetic Detective
Dennis Hoban liked what he knew and his entire life was spent living in the north-west quadrant of Leeds. It was his town, he knew its people, and via the medium of local television and newspapers they knew him. It was the city’s prosperity which had drawn his family there. Both his father and grandfather were Irish immigrants from Cork. His father had been first a lorry driver, then a sales rep for a haulage firm. Dennis was born in 1926, the year of the General Strike.
When Hoban became a fully fledged detective in 1952, Leeds was an overcrowded town bursting at the seams, with masses of substandard housing fit only for demolition. Some 90,000 homes needed demolishing, 56,000 of them squalid back-to-backs built a hundred years earlier eighty to ninety to the acre. Post-war housing estates were planned and built across the city, but the council house waiting list stretched out for twenty years. It made Hoban and Betty determined to own their own home.
Their first son was born while they were living next to Dennis’s parents in Stanningley, a working-class district well to the west of the city centre. Then they moved to nearby Bramley, where Betty’s widowed mother came to join them. In the late 1960s the couple bought a brand-new Wimpey home with a large garden on the Kirkstall-Headingley borders, even though Hoban was the world’s worst and least interested gardener. Neither could he turn his hand to DIY in the home, though he loved cars. Shortly after they married he had bought the chassis of a Morris 8 which stood on the drive of their home. Hoban rebuilt it with a wooden frame and aluminium sheeting, but his real hobby was being a policeman. Whatever cars the family possessed were frequently used in his job, often taking part in high-speed car chases.
While his close-knit family endured his obsession with work, all his working life Hoban coped with two ailments, diabetes and asthma. The regime of daily insulin injections was bothersome. Lazy about using his hypodermic syringe, he had no routine for taking insulin. Consequently there were plenty of times when he felt ‘squiggly’, the word he used for being hypoglycaemic. Then he knew he had to eat something sweet, usually a few cakes from the kitchen pantry. He would administer the insulin in a very haphazard way, never at specific times. Then it would be jab – straight into his thigh. ‘He didn’t look after himself,’ his son Richard reflected. ‘He didn’t live in a world where he could look after himself. He never ate well because he was at his best when he was in pubs and clubs and smoky dives getting information from his snouts.’
The family evening meal was often a snatched affair. He would arrive home, wash, shave, eat, watch the Yorkshire TV soap opera Emmerdale Farm, and then be off back to work. He rarely smoked. It would have exacerbated his asthma, already made worse in his early years by the fact that Leeds was one of the most polluted places in the North of England. Soot and smoke from the mills and factories were blown over the town by the prevailing south-westerly winds. For several generations those who could afford it had moved to the cleaner areas of Leeds in the Northern Heights, and ultimately Hoban and Betty joined them.
They had only just moved round the corner to a new and slightly bigger semi-detached house in 1976 when, a few weeks after the inquest verdicts on Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson, they learned he was on the move professionally. As part of a wider reshuffle among the senior management, he was being transferred to the West Yorkshire force headquarters at Wakefield, fifteen miles away. He was to be deputy to the new CID chief of the amalgamated force. A West Riding man, George Oldfield, was being promoted to assistant chief constable (crime). Within a few months Hoban had moved offices to the brand-new divisional police headquarters in Bradford, still as Oldfield’s deputy, but this time in charge of the CID for the entire Western area of the force.
Two and a half years after the amalgamation between West Yorkshire Police and the Leeds and Bradford city forces, the chief constable, Ronald Gregory, had decided to make crucial changes among the senior management. Moving senior personnel around would provide a better balance between the city and county forces. West Riding men transferred into the Leeds and Bradford divisions – some of the senior city boys had to bite the bullet and move to towns like Pontefract, Huddersfield and Halifax. A new culture was being created and these moves were not always popular. Enmities and petty rivalries abounded. Bradford police viewed Leeds detectives as ‘flash bastards’. ‘More gold than a Leeds detective,’ was a popular saying among the Bradford CID, a reference to their Leeds colleagues’ penchant for wearing gold wrist identity bracelets and rings bearing a gold sovereign. Leeds and Bradford officers called their West Riding colleagues ‘Donkey Wallopers’ or ‘The Gurkhas’ – because they took no prisoners, a reference not to West Riding detectives ‘finishing off the enemy’, but a belief by the city men that the county boys hardly ever got to make an arrest.
These important structural changes in the way Yorkshire and the rest of the country was policed had been a long time coming. The amalgamations, creating one big West Yorkshire force covering half a million acres and a population of more than 2 million, had been delayed for more than half a century. Bringing about cost efficiencies and rational organization to law enforcement had been a drawn-out, tortuous process. For almost a hundred years very little had altered in the way the various police forces of Britain were controlled.
By this time the West Riding of Yorkshire no longer existed officially. At the stroke of a pen in 1974 a massive local government reorganization approved by Parliament did away with a nomenclature that had defined an entire region of Northern England for hundreds of years. The East, West and North Ridings of Yorkshire – titles originating from the Anglo-Saxon word thriding, meaning ‘a third’ – became mere counties, bits and pieces of their local geography seemingly thrown into the air by civil servants and politicians in London, only to land as new structures called Humberside, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.
Hoban’s home town of Leeds had managed to weather the storms of economic upheaval over the years better than most. In the immediate post-war years, it remained a giant among the great manufacturing towns. In 1952 it was at the centre of the world’s clothing industry. Montague Burton was the world’s largest multiple tailor, with 600 outlets. Burton’s was only one of several large clothing factories in Leeds, all of which subsequently closed. In the words of Denis Healey, a local MP: ‘It went on making three-piece suits long after people stopped wearing waistcoats, and failed to adapt to the growing taste for casual wear.’
Leeds was a key part of England’s central industrial belt, whose origins, wealth and history had been essentially determined by two pieces of natural good fortune. First was the topography of the landscape across Yorkshire from the Pennines going eastwards – rough moorland and fells capable of little but sustaining sheep farming. It had done this for centuries. In addition there was the availability of vast quantities of water. Via becks and streams flowing off the fells and moors, water from the heavens poured into an abundance of river systems passing through the West Riding in its search for the sea. The rivers not only provided power for the wool and textile mills; their pure soft water also cleaned the wool. Later canals were built east and west of Leeds and waterways made navigable, allowing the wool, its finished products and other manufactures to be transported to both coasts. As the engines of the industrial revolution turned faster, so the population of Yorkshire’s towns and cities multiplied. It doubled and doubled again.
By 1840 Leeds was an industrial and commercial centre with a population of 150,000 and still expanding. Fifty years on and the official census of 1891 recorded Leeds’ population as 395,000. Many were immigrants or their descendants. They had come flooding in initially in the early 1800s from the rural areas of England, but also from deprived parts of Scotland and then Ireland, following the potato famine. Later in the 1880s they were joined by Jews escaping the pogroms in Poland and the province of Knovo in Russia. The only word in English many Jewish immigrants knew was ‘Leeds’. In an effort to escape compulsory military conscription or religious persecution, they had headed for the place which for them signified a modern term for El Dorado.
Dominating the city centre was the magnificent edifice of the town hall, built to demonstrate the achievements of a city bursting with pride at its commercial and industrial dynamism. But where the urban poor were concerned, Leeds, like many other overcrowded British cities, had little to celebrate. In 1858 a sizeable number of the town’s then 15,000 Irish immigrants, who lived in some of the worst housing, were said to have been among the cheering crowds of more than 100,000 who waved flags and shouted greetings to Queen Victoria as she arrived to perform the opening ceremony for the new town hall. The streets were lined with palm trees and triumphal arches and some 18,000 people sang the National Anthem. Looking down on the scene, the town hall’s massive clock tower, rising 225 feet above the new building, was the finishing touch, symbolizing Leeds at its grandest. Yet unseen by the sovereign were the depressing conditions in which many of her subjects existed.
Leeds truly was a perfect example of what Disraeli termed the ‘Two Nations’. It was a town with a physical divide. While great swathes were dirty, soot-ridden, cramped and crowded, other areas, in the Northern Heights, provided cleaner air and fashionable housing for the middle classes. The wealthy escaped the dirt and soot while the tens of thousands of the urban poor who provided the raw manpower for the factories and workshops were herded into overcrowded, insanitary dwellings. Drinking houses and brothels abounded. There were thirteen brothels within a hundred yards of where one unsuspecting churchman had his rooms. He noted that, ‘The proceedings of these miserable creatures who tenanted them were so openly disgusting that I was obliged to call in the rule of law to abate the nuisance.’ Forty-six beerhouses were closed down by police on the grounds that they were frequented by thieves, prostitutes and ‘persons of bad character’. Prostitutes were easily distinguished from factory girls in beerhouses by their tawdry finery and the bareness of their necks, though the costume and headdresses of the factory girls were not dissimilar. In many establishments there was a convenience upstairs for vice. Lord Shaftesbury described parts of Leeds as ‘a modern equivalent of Sodom’.
In accordance with the wishes of the town’s middle classes, prostitution in Leeds in the 1850s was controlled by the police rather than banned. They classified and kept a register of the proprietors and inmates of the town’s eighty-five brothels and lodging houses. This ‘has tended materially to check disorder and to aid the police in detecting crime and bring offenders to justice’, said the chief constable at the time. ‘Any attempt at the removal of these places would answer no good, for the sons and daughters of vice would find a resting place elsewhere and most like would get into respectable neighbourhoods where their proximity would be deeply deplored.’
Had Queen Victoria taken a full guided tour, she would have gone to the rear of the new town hall, which was used as court and bridewell. Below ground she would have entered a different world, one of thievery, violence and drunkenness. Known as the Central Charge Office, the bridewell held prisoners arrested within the town who awaited an appearance in court. The original cells, situated under the front steps, each contained a wooden bench and shackle rings for wrist and ankle; stone-flagged floors, whitewashed walls and gas lighting. A cell held up to four prisoners, each entitled to half a loaf of bread, a pint of ale and sufficient straw for bedding. Right through to the late 1970s, the central bridewell remained a forbidding place. Hoban even gave his young sons a guided tour of the ‘dungeons’. The eighteen cells had no natural light, ventilation or exercise facilities. Conditions in the bridewell, which failed to clear legal certification, had long been criticized, and just at the point of Hoban’s move to Wakefield the Home Office cut an improvement programme to save money.
Leeds had formed its own police force in 1836, paid for out of local rates and overseen by a watch committee made up of local burgers. Like many other newly formed police forces, they were also responsible for fire-fighting. Money for equipment, clothing and everything else came from local funding. The wealthy and local taxes paid for peace and law and order. The preservation of peace and good order were the central priorities laid down by the members of the watch committees. Neighbouring Bradford, slower off the mark in setting up its own police force, did so in 1848. Its headquarters were in a building which housed the city’s fire engines. Police out-stations in both cities were linked to headquarters by morse-code telegraph until the 1890s, when they were replaced by telephones and police call boxes.
Before 1968 the West Riding of Yorkshire was served by nine separate forces. In addition to Leeds and Bradford, the city of Wakefield and the boroughs of Dewsbury, Halifax, Huddersfield, Barnsley and Doncaster each had their own local force. Most were small organizations. The surrounding local government county area had a force based at Wakefield called the West Riding Constabulary. In 1956 it had 354 men in its ranks. Covering a vast geographical area, it was way ahead of other forces in recognizing the importance of keeping intelligence on criminals and was one of the first in the country to establish a criminal intelligence bulletin, the West Riding Police Reports. This confidential publication, printed on the West Riding’s own printing press at the force headquarters, circulated details of crimes and wanted villains between forces.
A 1920 Report by a Parliamentary Committee praised the West Riding’s lead in drawing up a list of classes of criminals by their modus operandi. The force’s chief constable stressed the importance of creating a central clearing house of intelligence information: ‘Its full advantage cannot be developed unless the reports are complete and in the proper form.’ The system was mostly used in the North of England, and not by all forces even then. The First World War interrupted a plan to introduce a similar scheme in the Midlands and the South of England. The Parliamentary Committee was enthusiastic about the West Riding clearing house and believed it to be a big advance not only in detecting crime but also in the systematization of the detective method. ‘The greatest advantage should be taken of it,’ they said, and recommended the Home Office and Scottish Office to develop it further and extend it across the whole of Britain.
Twenty-first century computers can store limitless amounts of information and be programmed to draw links between seemingly unconnected facts in an intelligent way. Police forces around the world, like every other institution and business, are now utterly dependent on them. But in Hoban’s time there were no computers in which local intelligence could be stored. He and his detectives in a murder incident room relied on a card index system, with its complex classifications.
The Parliamentary Committee investigating the police service in 1919–20 was given a simple example where police officers knew how a particular criminal worked, but had no way of passing on the information. There was a burglar in Liverpool who regularly defecated in a corner in every house he broke into. This was known to detectives in the city but not outside Liverpool. How could they inform other forces and how could they communicate the information? ‘There is any amount of knowledge which is not available beyond the actual man who possesses it, or the actual police force which records it,’ a witness told the committee. ‘It is difficult to classify that sort of thing. Every police officer had this knowledge fifteen or sixteen years ago, and we tried to card it in Liverpool but we were up against another difficulty. We had many of these cards describing the methods followed by the particular criminal described on the card, but we had no system by which we could index them. So except for the personal memory of the man who prepared the cards, and he had a very good memory, the thing was valueless and we would not get out an index.’
The person who in 1909 solved this problem for Britain’s police was the then chief constable of the West Riding, Major-General L. W. Atcherley. He got the cooperation of all neighbouring county and borough forces and established a clearing house for information at his Wakefield HQ. In this way intelligence reports about the routes used by travelling thieves and swindlers were analysed. It was well known that thieves travelled to other towns to commit crimes and had long been doing so. In April 1853 three pickpockets from Leeds were arrested among a large crowd come to witness an execution at York Castle, along with numerous other petty thieves who had travelled from as far afield as Manchester and Yarmouth.
By a careful comparison of a modus operandi and a personal description of the criminal, a long list of undetected crimes committed by the same man in different police authorities could be cleared up. Different ways of committing crimes like larceny were broken down and filed separately. A handbook let an individual officer understand and use the system with little delay. He was taught the clues to look for. ‘Four years’ experience in the West Riding with its twenty-two divisions has proved the utility of this system and although the number of cases of reported crime in the county police area has increased by a third, the percentage of undetected crime is very low, and much less in proportion to what it used to be in former years,’ a report revealed immediately prior to the First World War.
The ‘peculiarity of method’, according to the 1920 Parliamentary Report, gave the policemen their clues to solving crime. ‘The leading feature of the Wakefield system which is proving its value against the modern travelling thief and swindler, is the investigation of crime through its methods. In the past, knowledge of this sort has remained far too much in the possession of this or that policeman or this or that police force … the clearing house is the machinery for the detection of crime.’ This prescient observation came to have real force more than sixty years later during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. The keeping of records, and how and where they were administered, was a key feature unrecognized during the prolonged murder hunt, and it had the most tragic results.
Of all the great institutions in Britain, the police service has been among the slowest to bring about radical reform. The prime reason has been the jealously guarded principle that police forces should be subject to control by local communities through watch committees. The argument raged for more than a hundred years. Bradford and Leeds successfully stayed out of the great amalgamation in 1968, only to be absorbed into the West Yorkshire force six years later. Historically, British police forces have been fiercely independent, even leading to arguments over whether the ‘office of constable’ was one subject to local or central control under the British constitution. Towns and boroughs fought to achieve the right to choose their own chief constable rather than have one imposed on them by government. Legislation to bring about reform was seen as interfering with their independent control over the organization and expenditure of the police force in their area.
When amalgamations were proposed, they often met with fierce resistance – not least in Yorkshire. The city of York mounted vigorous opposition to legislation which would have amalgamated forces in the 1850s, provided money from the Treasury for efficient forces, and set up a system of inspections. York also opposed Palmerston’s Police Bill, fearing ‘the police would become a standing army entrusted with powers unheard of in the darkest ages of tyranny’. The York Herald proclaimed: ‘To surrender up the control of the police to the executive government would be an act of folly which every lover of constitutional liberty ought to do all in his power to prevent.’ County magistrates and local watch committees would become mere puppets: ‘Local control of policing which allowed local communities to decide which form of policing best suited them would disappear.’
In 1920 Parliament heard arguments pleading for police forces to be banded together if they were to become more efficient. Forty-eight police forces had less than twenty-five men in their ranks and forty forces had less than fifty officers. The boroughs of Louth and Tiverton consisted of a chief constable, two sergeants and eight constables; total strength: eleven men. Bigger forces meant better administration, training and the chance for individual officers to gain wider experience.
Amalgamations were still high on the agenda when the Royal Commission on the Police reported in 1962. So was the question of the educational standards of men being recruited into the police service. The 1920 Parliamentary Committee had found the system lacking in this respect; so did the Report of the Royal Commission. ‘We have come across no recent instance of a university graduate entering the service, only about 1 per cent of recruits have two or more GCE A levels, a further 10 per cent have five subjects or more at O level and an additional 20 per cent have one to four O levels.’ The report strongly criticized the police service for failing to recruit anything like its proper share of able, well-educated young men. The commissioners’ principal concern was being able to attract sufficient recruits who would make good chief constables fifteen or twenty years hence. This without question remained a problem for the British police force for generations. ‘They preferred to educate the recruited rather than recruit the educated,’ said one senior detective, closely involved in the Yorkshire Ripper case, who had himself given up a university place to get married and join the police force.
Absence of a grammar school or university education had not proved a barrier to men like Hoban, who had left school aged fourteen with no qualifications, joined the Leeds City Police aged twenty-one, and in 1960 become the force’s youngest detective inspector. He achieved promotion on grounds of merit and consistent hard work. The police force in Leeds which Dennis Hoban joined in 1947 after wartime service in the Royal Navy aboard motor torpedo boats had hardly changed in technological terms since Edwardian times. They still carried whistles to draw attention. It was only in 1930 that the city police got its own motor patrol section and even then it consisted of one motor car, one three-wheeled vehicle, two motorcycle combinations and a solo motorcycle. For years bicycles provided the extra mobility for the forces of law and order in their everyday fight against crime.
Leeds got its first police boxes containing a telephone in 1931, and these were the mainstay of communication with officers on the beat until the 1950s, when they were replaced by telephones in pillars. Communication between police stations and headquarters was by wireless. In 1955, by which time Hoban was a fully fledged plain-clothes detective, thirty-three police cars in the city were fitted with radios, but it was to be another ten years before individual personal radio sets were issued to officers. In the mid-1950s, Leeds had had plain-clothes detectives for a hundred years, but specialization within the town’s CID did not emerge until the 1960s, with the setting up of crime squads, a drug squad in 1967 and a stolen vehicles squad in 1970. Hoban, in the early 1960s, took part in an experimental project involving undercover detectives working over a wide area and drawn from several major cities, towns and county forces. They targeted major criminals, using covert surveillance to gather intelligence, often over weeks and months at a time. It was the forerunner of the Regional Crime Squads.
Many smaller towns had their own chief constables – but less than 300 officers. Unlike Hoban’s family, plenty of police officers were tied tenants, living in police houses, including some of the senior officers. There were considerable restrictions in terms of promotion. Some smaller towns, like Dewsbury and Wakefield, had to advertise externally to obtain suitably qualified senior officers above the rank of inspector. The efficiency of the police was a key phrase during the post Second World War period, when important questions about the future were being discussed. Efficiency wasn’t simply a value-for-money term, it also called in question the ability of the police to tackle modern problems, and especially modern criminals, who were far more mobile, being prepared to live in one area of the country and commit crime in another. By the time Parliament voted for large-scale amalgamations in the early 1960s, they were long overdue. Rising crime rates were a national problem.
Once amalgamations had taken place, the actual moulding of large new forces from smaller ones carried sizeable headaches in terms of management. Some towns had given their constables special rights. For example, in Huddersfield Borough a constable could not be moved from his home without his consent. Many a police officer, either buying his own home or firmly settled with a young family in a police house, refused to be uprooted and sent to the other side of the county. West Riding officers were used to being moved, but those in the towns and cities were familiar with their back yard and had got used to it. There were other privileges. Huddersfield being a textile town, officers had uniforms made of specially woven cloth, dyed and finished in police indigo blue – top quality worsted – a reflection of the predominance of wool merchants on the local watch committee. Pride dictated that their officers be dressed in the best cloth – and the uniforms were tailor made. ‘Then we went into the West Riding,’ said one who went on to become a senior detective, ‘and it was like the army, they got the nearest bloody size. There were only two sizes – too big and too small.’
The Leeds City Force of Hoban and his colleagues, with a strength of 1,300 men, was already bigger than some of the newly amalgamated county forces like Cumbria, Wiltshire, Suffolk and Dorset. Plenty of policemen and politicians in Leeds and nearby Bradford wanted the two cities to combine into one large metropolitan force instead of being lumped together with the rest of West Yorkshire. The ever-expanding Leeds–Bradford conurbation is such that the two are for all practical purposes virtually joined together, separated only by a small tract of land; even the local regional airport is called Leeds–Bradford, though each city retains its separate identity.
Hoban’s move to the Wakefield HQ, and later to Bradford as No. 2 in the force Criminal Investigation Department, was greeted with some dismay by his close colleagues, who believed he should have got the top job. Privately they blamed inter-force politics. The chief constable was West Riding; his deputy came from Leeds. The retiring assistant chief constable (crime), Donald Craig, was a West Riding man. So was George Oldfield, who had been deputy ACC (crime) and was now being moved up a rank. When Oldfield was named it raised hackles, not least because he had upset a good number of Leeds detectives during the 1960s when he carried out an investigation into alleged police corruption in the city. To put it mildly, Oldfield had trampled over a lot of city officers to get to the truth. Hoban wasn’t involved, but it may not have been internal politics alone which affected his future career prospects.
Hoban was seen as an officer possibly destined for promotion. Indeed, he himself seriously considered applying for an ACC position. His energy and enormous operational experience as the deputy coordinator of the Regional Crime Squad, and subsequently as head of Leeds CID, had marked him out as the kind of senior man who might benefit personally from the amalgamation. West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police was now a force of 5,000 officers, making it one of the biggest in the country in terms of manpower. There was plenty of opportunity for good men to succeed. But Hoban was going to have to wait before being moved further up the promotion ladder. He needed greater management experience. Where paperwork – the bureaucracy of running a large team of officers – was concerned, his boredom threshold was very low. He frequently passed the buck to junior colleagues, sometimes dumping an in-tray of documentation on them with the words: ‘Sort that lot out – I’ll be back later.’
Brilliant detective he may have been; skilled at administration he wasn’t. Virtually his entire career had been at the sharp end of detective work: feeling collars, making arrests, locking up criminals, and in the process earning twenty-nine commendations from judges, magistrates and senior officers. For this he had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal (QPM) in 1974, a mark of great merit in the police service. ‘It’s for what you have done, rather than what you are going to do,’ said one of Hoban’s contemporaries.
Few of Hoban’s senior detective colleagues around the country at that time had received the QPM, and in 1975 another honour came his way – an award for gallantry, the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct. Alerted by a blackmailer’s phone call that a bomb had been planted in the Leeds city branch of Woolworths, Hoban went immediately to the scene. The blackmailer had demanded £50,000 for revealing the whereabouts of the explosive device in the packed store. Staff and shoppers were quickly evacuated and a suspicious holdall was discovered in the toilets, placed on top of the cistern. Inside were explosives and a timing device. A fire brigade hosepipe was placed inside the room and Hoban proceeded to stand on top of the toilet seat and reach with one hand into the bag and hold the device while detaching two wires with the other. Hoban thought there was about twenty minutes left before the device went off, and he knew the bomb disposal squad could not reach Leeds from Catterick in time. He disconnected the wires from the battery before the army arrived, so defusing the device.
It was a typical piece of reckless heroism, for which he was named Leeds’ first Citizen of the Year by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. But it gave Betty nightmares. She had been on at him to retire as soon as he completed his thirty years’ service. Betty grew resentful, which added to the constant stress she felt about the way Dennis had put his job first throughout the whole of their married life. He never took off the time due to him and frequently worked a fourteen-hour day or longer. She would often say: ‘Please don’t go in today’ – but some inner compulsion clearly made him put his job first. On the few occasions when they did get the chance to go out together, there would be a telephone call and Betty would be left high and dry. They could never plan a proper holiday. And when they did go as a family to Scarborough with their two sons, after three days away from the job, Dennis needed to get on the phone. According to his son, Richard, many years later: ‘It was as if he was suffering withdrawal symptoms.’ ‘If we got to Christmas Day and we got as far as Christmas dinner, he would have to go to the office for a couple of hours.’
Hoban loved his family, and the feeling was mutual, but always, always in the eyes of his wife and two boys, the job came first. Richard Hoban remembers being carried in his father’s arms at the age of three on a family shopping trip in an arcade in Leeds when they witnessed a jewel robbery. ‘I was slung into the arms of my mother and off he went, hurtling after this jewellery thief and caught him. It was the last we saw of him for several hours.’
At home, Richard, his brother David and their mother would become Hoban’s telephone answering service, which included taking messages from informants. ‘We would be “Leeds 66815” – the number is etched on my memory. The snouts would say: “Is that Richard? Tell your dad something’s going to happen, tell him to get in touch with me and it will cost him ten bob or a couple of quid or whatever.” Occasionally you’d get someone ringing up who’d crossed my Dad’s path at some time and they’d tell me what they were going to do to me or David or my mother.’ As well as the household’s phone being used in the fight against crime, the family blue and white Triumph Herald was used to chase criminals. Once Hoban crashed it into a bridge trying to stop someone escaping his clutches.
He loved being where the action was: nabbing villains, being involved in car chases, arresting criminals at an armed bank robbery. Even at the rank of detective superintendent, as the deputy coordinator of the regional crime squad a decade earlier, he made sure he was at the sharp end, posing undercover as a taxi driver complete with cap when a notorious gang was under surveillance. The gang had him drive from Leeds to Grimsby via a nightclub in Doncaster. He had to decline an invitation to go into the nightclub, because the moment the gang got out of the vehicle it was commandeered by a group of drunken sailors who wanted to be taken back to Grimsby. He then returned and collected the gang when they had finished drinking. Later the undercover squad of detectives, secretly guarding Hoban, were treated by him to a night out on the proceeds of the fare for the long trip, paid by the gang. He wasn’t exaggerating when he told a journalist: ‘It’s more than just a job – coppering is a way of life, a hobby, everything – I wouldn’t swap it for anything.’
While Hoban’s abilities as a detective were considerable, his critics could point to his relatively narrow experience in terms of large-scale policing. As one of the biggest constabularies in the country, the new West Yorkshire force would provide plenty of opportunity for qualified men to move up the promotion ladder. All things being equal, Hoban should have been one of those. But his detractors, all of whom came from the old West Yorkshire force, believed his driven personality was a major barrier to him obtaining higher rank. Some accused him of self-aggrandisement, always pushing himself forward – anxious to have his photograph taken for the Yorkshire Post or the northern editions of the national press; or keen to offer himself for interviews on television. From Hoban’s viewpoint, communicating with the public was a big part of the job. He was well known throughout Leeds as the city’s top detective, and he used this image to speak directly to the man or woman in the street, in the hope that they might come forward with some vital clue. A few very senior but quite impartial colleagues saw his administrative weakness as a major flaw.
Some senior West Riding detectives had worked closely with both Hoban on the regional crime squad based at Brotherton House in Leeds and the new ACC (crime) George Oldfield, the senior detective in the West Riding force. They viewed Oldfield, a former wartime Royal Navy petty officer, as the better team player. ‘Dennis was a seat of his pants operator, always a bit fly and capable of going off at tangents. He had a single objective – to catch criminals, and at that he was brilliant. But a modern police force needs people with a broader perspective.’
This professional criticism of Dennis Hoban was a reflection of the different cultures of policing in the bigger towns and cities. It also reflected different methods of tackling serious crime. The West Riding’s operational procedures for solving murders were radically different from those in operation within Leeds before the 1974 amalgamation. The old West Riding force had a paper-led system which was time consuming in the short term but in the long term garnered evidence in statement form from witnesses which would in a protracted inquiry prove crucial in mounting a successful prosecution. Prior to amalgamation, most provincial borough and county force murder inquiries involved bringing in a senior detective from Scotland Yard, because historically the Metropolitan Police was the only force in the country with wide experience of dealing with homicides. County forces tended to adopt the Metropolitan Police way of doing things. The bigger cities, like Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, had the manpower and experience to run murder inquiries without help from the Yard. Each had its own system for tackling murders. The Manchester force took very few statements in a major crime investigation until they were needed for court proceedings. In Leeds, Hoban operated a similar system. Like a general on the battlefield, he was in charge of strategy. He relied on his middle managers to keep him briefed on those lines of inquiry most likely to yield results. He never immersed himself in detail until it was absolutely essential, and as a consequence rarely needed to read reams of paperwork.
Most murders in Britain are solved quickly because there is some domestic involvement such as the victim being known to the killer. In Leeds, Hoban could throw a hundred officers into a murder inquiry and blitz the local area in terms of finding crucial evidence. Over time in Leeds, this method proved very efficient because it found the link between the victim and the killer. Hoban solved nearly all the fifty murders he had tackled, but by the time he was moved to force headquarters at Wakefield, the killer of McCann and Jackson still totally eluded him. He realized that the man who killed these two women had struck at random. They had simply been unlucky victims. In terms of solving murders, finding killers without a personal motive was a nightmare for everyone – the public as well as the police.
One senior officer from outside Yorkshire reckoned that Hoban was the best detective he ever met: ‘He had that great amalgamation of all those qualities that it takes. He had an ability to pick, which is very important. He had an ability to listen to you even though he might not agree with you. He made you feel comfortable in his presence. He had all the qualities you require in a man who is trying to do that job. He has confidence in his team, to let his team deal with the dross and to say to him: “Here you are, boss – this is the one you should look at.” Not for him to be in the sea of what is going on but to be looking at the one aspect really likely to produce a result. He had the ability to pick people round him who were really good and that is a great quality in any senior policeman: “Can you pick the people who’ve got qualities you haven’t got that can support you well?”
‘Dennis Hoban was a very pragmatic, hands-on murder investigator. A lot of people say he overplayed the PR, but I personally don’t believe that. Crime detection is about the senior detective being good at PR. There are all those members of the public out there who can help you, yet you have only a few men to make inquiries, so that mobilization of the public is very important, and Dennis did it.’
In Hoban’s view, public support was at its most crucial in murder inquiries. As a detective, he had too often seen the results of the sudden impulse to kill. As a father, he was absolutely strict with his own sons and he despaired of the way young people were surrounded by violence, seeing it almost as an illness of society: ‘The trouble is that youngsters today see violence all around them, every day. It’s becoming the norm. They see a man getting hit over the head with an iron bar on a television programme, and the man shakes his head and walks away. But it’s not like that in real life. What can and does happen is that the man probably ends up with a steel plate in his head, brain damage, deafness or blindness. He loses his job and his family can break up. I have come across many a criminal who, when faced with the reality of his crime, has had a change of heart. The criminal should be made to pay for his crime. I am a believer in the deterrent effect of hanging, I believe it works.’
Each year Leeds saw, on average, ten homicides, most of them solved because of some link between killer and victim which Hoban’s team managed to uncover. The difficulty came when no such link was found. Most colleagues who knew Hoban well felt he had an extraordinary knack for solving murders and getting the best out of his men, often working on hunches which proved amazingly accurate. He rarely pulled rank, because he didn’t need to, and he displayed remarkable qualities of leadership because he earned the respect of his troops as both man and detective. His key ability was to weigh up the suspect psychologically, a knack which proved him right time and time again. These hunches were the result of years of experience, observation and a deep understanding of people. He always gave credit to the team who worked for him, leading from the front, showing a sense of humour and often pushing himself for forty-eight hours at a stretch, particularly with serious crimes like murders, where he knew you had to crack it early while people’s memories were still fresh.
A perfect example of his approach came in the early 1970s when he masterminded a murder inquiry and threw every resource he had at the problem for thirty-three days. Within a few minutes of the body of Mrs Phyllis Jackson, a fifty-year-old mother of two, being found brutally murdered at her home in Dewsbury Road, Leeds, a master plan for homicide investigations was put into operation. A vehicle equipped with a radio went to the murder scene to act as a control point and a hundred detectives were drafted in immediately. There was evidence she had been raped.
The answer would most probably lie close to the victim and her lifestyle – find the motive, then find the link to the killer. A murder incident room was opened at the police HQ in Westgate. One vital clue emerged from the post-mortem. Mrs Jackson had been strangled, then stabbed with a knife which probably had a serrated edge. A massive search began that included bringing in the army with mine detectors, which made for great photographs and local television news footage that Hoban knew would keep the murder in the public eye. Corporation workmen searched the drains, and every conceivable place where a fleeing killer might have hidden the murder weapon was searched. Much of this was standard in an unsolved homicide, but the procedure was galvanized by Hoban’s sense of urgency, enthusiasm and inspiration.
Experience had shown him the killer was most likely a local man. The victim lived in a new housing scheme within a development area, but with no local facilities to attract people from outside – no cinema, shops or places of entertainment. Anyone present in the area was most likely to be there because they were acquainted with someone locally rather than having stumbled on the place by accident. When the search for the weapon proved fruitless, Hoban tried another tack. A survey of every home in the vicinity was carried out. Every day detectives went to local houses armed with a questionnaire to establish exactly where every man in each household had been at the time of the murder and to see if anyone had noticed anything suspicious.
By such painstaking methods are murders traditionally solved. Reports filtered in about other attacks on women in the city, and while each was carefully probed, none could be linked to the murder of Phyllis Jackson either by method or motive. Fear among women in the city became palpable. There was a run on people buying door locks and safety chains, and stocks at hardware shops ran out in some areas. Special lifeline buzzers were distributed to the elderly so they could summon help if frightened. Some two hundred calls a day were coming in to the incident room offering information, and each call was followed up by detectives working long hours. At that time police officers were very poorly paid, so a chance of overtime was rarely turned down. Murders frequently made the difference for a young detective between having or not having a week’s holiday with his kids at Bridlington, Scarborough or Filey.
Every house within a half-mile radius of the murder scene was visited – without a breakthrough. So Hoban extended the search area by another half-mile. A twenty-year-old illiterate Irish labourer living with his wife in a corporation flat in Hunslet filled in a questionnaire that attracted attention. This former altar boy from County Wicklow, one of twenty-two children, learned many passages from the bible by heart, but he was a womanizer. He had been working on a sewer scheme near the murder scene and claimed that on the afternoon of the murder he saw a man running down Dewsbury Road. He identified the individual involved. But when the other man was checked, his alibi for the time of the murder was perfect – witnesses confirmed his presence in Leicester.
The Irish labourer had recently been released for larceny in Dublin and Hoban’s men were ordered to keep him under close observation day and night so he shouldn’t escape the net tightening round him. Finally, as is so often the case, forensic scientists provided the proof. Despite the fact that the man had washed his bloodstained clothing at his kitchen sink, the Home Office laboratory in Harrogate found thirteen fibres on trousers belonging to the suspect exactly matching those from clothing the victim was wearing when she was killed. Moreover, two hairs, similar in colour and appearance to those of the Irishman, were found on the dead woman.
Another protected inquiry masterminded by Hoban began on 2 April 1974, the day after Leeds City was amalgamated with the West Yorkshire force. Lily Blenkarn, an eighty-year-old shopkeeper known to everyone as ‘Old Annie’, had been brutally killed in a burglary that went wrong. She was severely beaten and suffered horrendous injuries, including a broken jaw and broken ribs. One fingerprint was found on a toffee tin and another on a bolt on the rear door of the premises, a sweet and tobacco shop in a terraced street. Hoban was convinced they belonged to the killer and organized a mass fingerprinting of all males in the area. They were invited to come to two local police checkpoints to provide their fingerprints.
It was the first major operation for the newly amalgamated force and it involved 150 detectives and the task force, a handpicked team of mobile reserves trained to work in major incidents. Some 24,000 people were interviewed in house-to-house inquiries, but some sixty men were unaccounted for. Some on the list had travelled abroad to Canada, Australia, Iceland and Hong Kong. Through Interpol they were traced and eliminated. The mass fingerprinting attracted huge media attention, including TV crews from America.
The killer turned out to be a cold, calm, sallow youth aged seventeen. He had persuaded a friend to give fingerprints in his place, allowing him to slip through the net. The one who impersonated him was the same who had given him an alibi early on in the inquiry. None of this came to light until the murderer gatecrashed a local party. When an argument ensued, he threw a brick through a window. Under arrest, his fingerprints were taken, and after a routine examination by the murder squad fingerprint experts they realized they had their man and someone must have impersonated the killer and given his fingerprints twice. Hoban said it taught him a valuable lesson. Never take anything for granted. ‘Should mass fingerprinting be required again – people would be fingerprinted in their own front room.’ It had been too easy for a killer determined to cover his tracks to collude with someone else to cover up his crime. Hoban’s inquiry had been thrown completely off the trail for a while.
Dennis Hoban’s bid to find the killer of Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson was an ambition that completely eluded him. He felt utterly frustrated, but he had other concerns. The huge volume of crime on his patch never stopped growing. Other women were randomly murdered in similar style and for a while he briefly flirted with the idea that the same man might have struck again. Then his handiwork was ruled out. The file on the McCann and Jackson murders remained open, but resources eventually had to be switched elsewhere. There was a horrible but unremitting truth he had to reconcile himself to: unless the killer struck again the chances of catching him were slim. So long as the murderer kept his head down, the investigation would go nowhere. Another poor unfortunate soul was probably going to die before this man could be put away.
3
‘A Man with a Beard’
In 1963, a seventeen-year-old youth called Peter Sutcliffe appeared before local magistrates accused by Keighley Police of driving unaccompanied while being a provisional licence holder and for failing to display L-plates. There was a similar traffic conviction against him in May the following year at Bradford City Magistrates Court. They were the first of his eleven motoring convictions and an innocuous introduction to the judicial process. But a year later came a more serious encounter. Peter Sutcliffe’s first criminal conviction.
On 17 May 1965 he was fined £5 with £2 7s. 6d. costs at the Bingley West Riding Magistrates Court for attempting to steal from an unattended motor vehicle. The brown-eyed labourer, with black curly hair and (at that time) a fresh, clean-shaven complexion, had been caught ‘bang-to-rights’ trying to break into cars. It had happened on a quiet Sunday night the previous March, in Old Main Street, Bingley, beside the river Aire, not far from his home on the other side of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Cornwall Road, in the Gilstead area of Bingley. He and another youth, Eric Robinson, had been seen trying the door handles of a locked car that had property left on the rear seat. They were disturbed by two people who saw the pair then try the door handles of other cars parked near by. Police were called and a Constable Thornley quickly arrested the youth who would, ten years later, start a series of murderous attacks that became notorious in the annals of crime.
This conviction generated two separate official records: the first at the West Riding Regional Criminal Record Office at Wakefield, the second at the Central Criminal Record Office at New Scotland Yard in London. Each record detailed Sutcliffe’s name, age, date of birth, address, description and information about the offence. More motoring convictions followed in 1965 and 1966, but these were never filed at the criminal record offices.
The next recorded criminal violation by Peter Sutcliffe was during the early hours of 30 September 1969, in the Manningham area of Bradford, close to the city’s red-light district. He was seen late at night sitting in a motor vehicle deliberately trying to be unobtrusive, with the engine running quietly and the lights switched off. When a police officer called Bland approached the vehicle, Sutcliffe immediately drove off at high speed. A search was carried out and the officer later found the car unattended a short distance away. When nearby gardens were searched, Sutcliffe was caught and arrested. In his possession was a hammer.
Questioned by police, he could not provide a satisfactory explanation for having the hammer, but denied criminal intent. He was charged only with the banal offence of going equipped to steal rather than being in possession of an offensive weapon. We now know from Peter Sutcliffe’s own words that he fully intended attacking a woman that night, but the police had no inkling of this. Two weeks later he pleaded not guilty at Bradford City Magistrates’ Court, but the case against him was found proved by the bench and he was fined £25, to be paid at £2 per week. The West Riding CRO based at Wakefield and the Bradford City Police, which had its own separate criminal records office, both listed this offence in their files as ‘Going equipped for stealing’, whereas their counterparts in the Central CRO at New Scotland Yard in London made crucial reference to: ‘Equipped for stealing (hammer)’ and listed under the heading ‘Method’ the words: ‘In possession of housebreaking implement by night, namely a hammer [my italics]’. The Bradford criminal record office carried a passport-size head and shoulders photograph of the offender, whereas the West Riding CRO had three pictures of Sutcliffe in his file – one full length, one head and shoulders facing the camera, a third in profile. All three clearly showed Sutcliffe had dark curly hair, a dark-coloured beard and moustache.
For his next court appearance several years later, Sutcliffe presented the dapper and somewhat discordant colourful image for which he had become infamous within his circle of friends and family. He wore black trousers, brown platform shoes, a leather jacket with a multicoloured shirt and a red tie. By now he was married to the daughter of Czech émigrés and living with his parents-in-law at Tanton Cresent, Clayton, Bradford. He and a friend, Michael Barker, had stolen five second-hand car tyres worth 50 pence each from Sutcliffe’s employer, the Common Road Tyre Company, where he worked as a driver. Sutcliffe had been employed as one of the firm’s tyre fitters. On 15 October 1975, the company reported him to the police, claiming he had stolen tyres from them. When arrested and questioned Sutcliffe immediately admitted the offence and opened up the boot of his car to reveal his booty. By the time he appeared at Dewsbury Magistrates Court on 9 February 1976 to admit a charge of simple theft, Sutcliffe was already a double murderer. But there was nothing to connect him with those crimes. He was fined £25.
The name of Peter William Sutcliffe would not, in fact, feature among the complex index card system in the murder incident room of the West Yorkshire Police ‘Ripper Squad’ until November 1977. Even then he was the subject of only a routine inquiry. But the fact remains that by the summer of 1976 the ‘face’ of the man who had killed twice and would go on to murder another eleven women was buried in a filing system. With the benefit of hindsight we now know he was a serial killer, but successful murder investigations are not about hindsight. They are about foresight, hunches, risks, intuition, leadership, good communication and, of course, a series of standard operating procedures which involve the time-consuming task of knocking on doors, asking questions and comparing the answers with other information in police files.
Yet the ‘face’ of the Ripper, and clues to what he looked like, were lying hidden in the police files of investigations into unsolved, unprovoked assaults on women and a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl at various locations across West Yorkshire during the preceding three and a half years. The victims had been attacked in similar ways by assailants bearing roughly the same description. Tragically for the women Sutcliffe subsequently killed or attempted to kill, for their families and for the children made motherless over the succeeding years, most of these horrendous assaults were never linked as part of any series. More crucially, police ignored the descriptions provided by survivors who had given near-perfect illustrations and helped to prepare photofits of a dark-haired man with a moustache and beard who looked uncannily like Sutcliffe. But in 1976 there was nothing to point to him as being more than a petty thief. When the photofits are seen together today – alongside a police mugshot of Peter Sutcliffe taken in September 1969 – it all looks so blindingly obvious.
It was nearly teatime in Wakefield one day in October 1998. An attractive woman approaching middle age, but whose striking good looks and long dark hair made her appear years younger, answered a knock at her front door. She spoke a few words with a researcher from a documentary film-making company who had called at her home unannounced. Within seconds she was in a state of shock and a feeling of coldness started to overwhelm her. Suddenly she had a flashback at the mention of a terrifying incident that had happened to her twenty-five years beforehand. In the intervening years she had spoken about it to very few people, pushing the subject to the back of her mind. The woman had since married, had two teenage children, and wished to maintain her anonymity. She invited the researcher into her neat, well-kept home. Ushering her into the lounge, she said in her quiet Scots accent: ‘I was sure I had been attacked by the Yorkshire Ripper, but nobody had ever confirmed the fact.’
She was nineteen years old in 1972, working as a clerk-typist in a local firm. It was December, two days before New Year’s Eve. ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’ she went on. She was living on her own in a house in Westgate, at the bottom end of Wakefield. It was a ‘queer’ foggy night. She had been to ‘Dolly Grey’s’ for a drink, but left quite early, about 10.30 p.m., and begun walking down Westgate towards home. As she neared the train station she realized she was being followed. She looked back at the man, noticing his staring eyes, dark longish hair, and beard. She clearly remembers thinking he was up to no good.
With her heart thumping, she carried on walking, thinking carefully about which route to take when she got near home. She planned carefully in her mind which way to get to her house, because there was a beck running at the front of where she lived and she feared the man might throw her in. A few houses near by belonged to prison officers at Wakefield’s maximum security gaol, and she hoped against hope they might not have gone to bed.
Walking past a pub called The Swan with Two Necks, she toyed with the idea of going into one of the bars as people would still be on drinking-up time and she might know them and feel safe in their company. Then she had second thoughts, fearing they might wonder what on earth she was imagining. So she kept walking, still very anxious, and stuck to the middle of the pavement, trying to walk quickly past the ginnels – dark passageways that ran between some of the terraced houses.
She had just reached the row of houses where she lived when she was grabbed from behind. Immediately she screamed loudly and her attacker urgently put his hands over her mouth, telling her: ‘Shurrup, shurrup,’ a couple of times. She still remembered this vividly because his accent sounded local. As a Scot living in Yorkshire, she noticed immediately. She screamed out again and this time he hit her on the back of the head with his fist and pushed her into a low wall, where she received a graze to her face – her only real injury. One of the prison officers opened his bedroom window to see what was happening, and then swiftly came running downstairs to help, chasing after the attacker, but losing him.
The police came and the victim gave a statement. She was told to go to the local police station the following day, to help provide a photofit description. Next morning her sister accompanied her, but while she was there, she said, she felt as if she was the one under suspicion and thought the police did not take her seriously. She was very glad the prison officer could confirm her story. Before she went to the police station she had looked at a photograph of the pop singer ‘Cat’ Stevens – because the attacker looked so similar. He had been a man in his mid-twenties of medium build and about five feet ten inches tall, with long dark hair, dark eyebrows, a beard and moustache, and a similar tuft of beard between chin and mouth. Years later, when the Yorkshire Ripper was apprehended and photographs of Peter Sutcliffe appeared in the newspapers and on television, she said out loud to her family: ‘I’m sure that’s the man who attacked me …’ But after she made her initial complaint she never heard from the police again.
Almost two years later a twenty-eight-year-old student was attacked twenty-five miles away in Bradford. On 11 November 1974 Gloria Wood was approached as she walked across a school playing field some time between 7.30 and 8 p.m. A man offered to carry her bags and then attacked her about the head, causing severe injuries and a depressed fracture of the skull that left a crescent-shaped wound. The weapon was thought to be a claw hammer. According to the victim, the man had worn a dark suit and looked smartly dressed. She couldn’t provide a photofit, but described him as being in his early thirties, 5 feet 8 inches tall and of medium build. He had dark curly hair to the neck, a short curly beard to the hairline. She was unable to remember how he spoke.
The summer of 1975 was long and hot. The sun continued to blaze down all day from clear blue skies for weeks on end. Clothes dried quickly on washing lines, reservoirs emptied, drought warnings were issued, the harvest was safely gathered in and half the country had hay fever. On the edge of the Pennines in West Yorkshire, a mile from the village of Silsden and its early eighteenth-century parish church of St James, lived the Browne family. Upper Hayhills Farm stood nearly 700 feet above sea level. It was there that Mrs Nora Browne bred dogs. She and her husband, Anthony, had four daughters, including fourteen-year-old twins, Tracey and Mandy. Like most parents they laid down house rules and expected their children to abide by them.
One August evening, with only a week or so to go before they returned to school, the twins went visiting friends in the village. Since it was still the school holiday, they were told to be home by 10.30 on what was a balmy, clear and moonlit night. Tracey had hung on too long saying goodbye to her pals while her sister went ahead up Bradley Road, knowing their dad would ‘go mad’ if they were late. As it was a clear summer’s night in a remote rural area, their parents were not unduly concerned that Mandy arrived home first, minus her sister. The girls had walked up and down this country lane on their own dozens of times.
Tracey meanwhile was struggling, her young frame tottering uphill in platform-soled sandals. Her feet ached and as she sat down on a large stone beside the road to take off her sandals and rub them she noticed a stranger, in his late twenties or early thirties, also walking up the lane. He stopped briefly to look at her, standing only a few feet away as he drew level. Then he walked on. She wasn’t afraid and assumed the man was living near by. Her only worry was to get home to avoid her father getting angry with her. The man was clearly dawdling since Tracey soon caught him up again.
‘There’s nothing doing in Silsden, is there?’ he said.
‘Not really,’ she replied, walking beside him.
He then asked how far she had to go, and she answered casually: ‘About a mile.’ When he asked, she told him her name. He said his was ‘Tony Jennis’. Tracey had a friend called Tony Jennison with whom she had spent a lot of time during the holidays playing at a local park. She believed this must be a coincidence, but kept the thought to herself. He then asked if she had a boyfriend and she said she had and that he lived in the village.
They continued walking in silence for a while, so Tracey got a good look at the man, who kept blowing his nose, as if affected by the high pollen count. His knitted V-neck cardigan with two pockets at the front was worn over a light blue open-necked shirt. He had dark Afro-style crinkly hair and beard. He wore flared, dark brown trousers with slit pockets at the front, and brown suede shoes. Suddenly, in his quiet, high-pitched voice, he said: ‘My pal normally gives me a lift home but he’s in the nick for drink driving.’ That term ‘the nick’ stuck in her mind. The man seemed to be dropping back to tie his shoelace or blow his nose. He said he had a summer cold. Otherwise, he never took his hands out of his pockets. Tracey still had no reason to feel fear. Indeed, at times she stopped and waited for the man to catch her up. Finally they reached the gateway to the family farm and he hung back yet again. The pretty schoolgirl was about to turn towards the farmhouse. As well-brought-up kids do in the countryside, she intended to part on pleasant terms by thanking the stranger for his company. Instead she came under ferocious attack. Suddenly he rained down blows on her head and face. In his hand he held something heavy.
At that time a popular hero among young girls the world over was a handsome American tennis star who featured in the finals at Wimbledon. His name was Jimmy Connors and when he power-served to an opponent, he did something he became famous for. He let out an extraordinary grunt, ‘eeeu-uuuugggghhhhhh’, as he unleashed an excess of forceful energy through arm and shoulder and simultaneously exhaled air from his lungs. Tracey Browne remembered how, with each blow to her head, the man trying to kill her made a similar grunting noise.
‘Please don’t, please don’t,’ she cried as the first blow drove her to her knees beside the tarmacked road. Her immediate thought was that this was the notorious ‘Black Panther’ – an as yet unapprehended multiple killer being hunted by police for the kidnapping and murder of the heiress Leslie Whittle. She even shouted out the name, ‘Black Panther’, several times in the hope someone would hear her. To no avail. By now, lying at the roadside, she was in a dreadful state, blinded by both the shock of the attack and blood from her head filling her eyes.
Ultimately a car coming up the lane with its headlights on saved her life. The attacker put an arm under her legs, another round her waist. Scooping Tracey up, he tipped her like a sack of potatoes over a barbed-wire fence and into a field. Then he ran off. She heard his footsteps as he made good his escape. As she lay in the grassy field, she felt numbed by the force of the blows. Staggering around the field, she became disorientated, fearing the man might return and attack again. Covered in blood, she staggered towards a farm worker’s caravan, pleading for help. An elderly man took her in, then helped her to her parents’ farmhouse. She almost fell through the door, her mother gasping at the dreadful sight confronting her: ‘When she came through the door her jumper was squelching with blood.’ At first she thought someone had thrown a pot of paint over her daughter. But then her family saw a severe wound that appeared to leave a hole in the top of her head.
Tracey was rushed to Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds for emergency neurosurgery. She had a fractured skull. Doctors removed a sliver of bone from her brain. She remained in hospital for a week, and later recalled the moment the bandages were removed. Nurses gave her a mirror and told her to take her time. When she looked at herself she saw the truly shocking extent of the injuries to her face. Her eyes were blackened and she had extensive bruising. ‘I never expected it to be so bad,’ she said much later. She stayed off school for six weeks and wore a wig over her shaven head. For the next two years she had brain scans, and drugs to prevent seizures.
The victim had survived the assault and was able to give an excellent description of her attacker. It therefore seems extraordinary that Sutcliffe remained at large. The accuracy of Tracey Browne’s description and photofit was confirmed by another witness who provided police with details, and a photofit, of a dark-haired man with a beard and moustache seen in the neighbourhood. But while Tracey’s photofit description of her attacker appeared briefly in the local press, the one provided by the other witness was never shown publicly. In some ways, it was even more accurate. The man had been seen standing near a ‘white’ Ford car, and Sutcliffe was at that time apparently the owner of a lime green Ford Capri. While searching the area, police found a distinctive ‘hippy’-style bracelet with wooden beads, and a paper handkerchief, which the attacker was thought to have used to blow his nose on.
Taking charge of the case was Detective Superintendent Jim Hobson, who had spent almost all of his career in the Leeds City force as a detective, working frequently with Dennis Hoban from the days when they were constables in uniform. Indeed, he was godfather to Hoban’s son, Richard. At first it was suspected that Tracey’s head had been smashed with a large stick. Later, after a more thorough forensic analysis, a claw hammer was thought to have been used. Through the local press, Superintendent Hobson appealed for anyone who had been in Silsden between 10.15 and 11.15 on the night of the attack to come forward. He was fairly confident, because of the lateness of the hour, that the attacker was a local man. But one particular thing puzzled the police. The man had told Tracey he was living at ‘Holroyd House’. They wanted the help of the public in finding Holroyd House.
Since ‘Holroyd’ is a common enough West Yorkshire surname, dating back to the early fourteenth century, it could be expected that there are any number of places called Holroyd House. In fact, there were very few. Almost certainly the nearest was a 200-year-old house at Micklethwaite, on the outskirts of Bingley, the town which had been Sutcliffe’s home until he married and moved in with his parents-in-law at Clayton, near Bradford. Holroyd House stood adjacent to Holroyd Mill, built in 1812, which for generations had manufactured fustian, a coarse twilled cotton fabric with a nap, like velveteen. Jim Hobson’s early instincts were right: the attacker of Tracey Browne was probably a local man.
Two weeks after the attack, Tracey, wearing a wig and accompanied by a woman detective, made a tour of pubs and discos in the Silsden and Streeton area of Keighley, looking for the man who had tried to kill her. The search proved fruitless. (It appears that Sutcliffe immediately left with his new wife, Sonia, for a holiday visit to Prague with his parents-in-law to visit relatives, stopping off in Rome on the way.)
In recent weeks there had in fact been two other assaults on West Yorkshire women who suffered severe injuries which left crescent-shaped wounds to their skulls, but neither of these was linked with Tracey Browne’s attempted murder. The first was on a thirty-seven-year-old woman, Anna Rogulskyj, in an alleyway in Keighley. Five weeks previously she had been attacked from behind with a hammer and left on the ground suffering head injuries and a number of superficial slash wounds across her body. And on Friday, 15 August 1975, an office cleaner, living at Boothtown, Halifax, received two depressed fractures of the skull, one on the midline at the top of the head, the second at the back. Mrs Olive Smelt, aged forty-five, said she had before the assault been talking to a man aged about thirty, slightly built, dark haired and with a beard or some hair growth on his face. She did not think there was anything unusual about his accent, which again indicated that he was probably a ‘local’ man. One other feature of the attack became clearly visible when Mrs Smelt was examined in hospital. There were two abrasions on her back. One, twelve inches long, ran upwards from the small of her back; the other, four inches long, ran backwards on the right side.
Dr Michael Green, a Home Office pathologist based at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds who examined both women’s injuries, came to a startling conclusion: ‘It might be interesting to look again at the case of Mrs Rogulskyj, who was assaulted on 5 July, and compare the photograph of a wound on the abdomen with a wound on the back of Mrs Smelt,’ he wrote in his report to the police. Unfortunately, it would take two years for the attacks on Rogulskyj and Smelt to be linked to the murder series by the Ripper Squad.
Yet further assaults, by virtue of their modus operandi very similar to those already described, were also excluded from any series. An eighteen-year-old shop assistant was followed down the side of a field at 6.30 p.m. at Queensbury, Bradford, early in 1976. Her assailant then lunged at her from the rear, causing serious head injuries. He was twenty-five to thirty years old, of slim build, between five feet nine or ten inches tall, and with dark hair and moustache, dressed in dark jeans and a green jacket. Seven and a half months later, in August 1976 at Lister Hills in Bradford, a twenty-nine-year-old housewife was set upon during the early hours. Unable to provide any description of the person who assaulted her, she had stab-like wounds to her abdomen and injuries to her head.
In neither of these assaults was a photofit available. But a savage attack on an intellectually challenged West Indian woman in Leeds in the early summer of 1976 produced a description and photofit that perfectly matched the one provided in the Tracey Browne case at Keighley ten months previously. Yet these attempted murders were never linked, primarily because detectives in the Leeds case believed the victim misled them.
Marcella Claxton was a twenty-year-old native of the Caribbean island of St Kitts, who had come to Britain with her mother at the age of ten. She had had a hard upbringing at the hands of her father, and bore the physical and emotional scars to prove it. Educationally she was officially graded as subnormal, with an IQ of 50. However, this doesn’t square with the opinions of those who know her well and say it gives a misleading impression. While Marcella had always had a problem expressing herself, she eventually became a good mother to her children.
In 1976 she was unemployed and living in Chapeltown, the run-down quarter of Leeds that had once been a favourite residence of the city’s prosperous, and not so wealthy, Jewish community. They lived in large late-Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, originally the homes of respectable working and middle classes, many of which were later subdivided into flats. It became the second largest Jewish community outside London. Some 12,000 of the city’s 20,000 Jewish population lived in Chapeltown until the 1930s, when the majority began moving out to the newer, more desirable suburbs of Moortown, Roundhay and Alwoodley, leaving behind them, as J. B. Priestley put it in the 1950s, ‘traces of that restless glitter which is the gift of the Jew’. In their wake came other immigrants – Latvians and a sizeable community of Poles who opted to stay in Britain after the war, who established their own Polish Catholic Church in Chapeltown, and then West Indians and Asians. By the 1970s, however, the area was termed by the media ‘a Mecca of Vice’ or ‘a red light suburb’. The sizeable influx of immigrants from the Caribbean led the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1973 to describe it as ‘The Colony Within’. Chapeltown was ‘the melting pot for immigrants from many lands, for many years’.
Marcella was a single mother of two children (in foster care) and expecting a third. She was three months’ pregnant. She was poor, and the police believed, wrongly, that she was a prostitute. Marcella insists she was not a prostitute. On a Saturday evening in early May 1976 she went out late at night to drink in a West Indian club. At around five in the morning she left her friends, rather the worse for wear. As she walked back home along Spencer Place she saw a white-coloured car cruising the area. Eventually the driver stopped to ask if she was ‘doing business’. She says she said ‘No’, but the driver got out, took her by the hand, led her to his car and said he was going to take her to Roundhay Park for sex. At the park the driver asked her to take off her clothes. He gave her five pounds. She told him she wanted to urinate and went to hide among the bushes until, believing the man had gone, she returned ten minutes later to retrieve her shoes. At this point she received a number of vicious blows on the head. Knocked to the ground, she pretended to be unconscious. The attack stopped and the man drove off. Marcella claimed in a later interview that he had masturbated in front of her before walking back to his car. He told her: ‘Don’t phone the police.’
With her head bleeding profusely, she took off her knickers and held them up to stem the flow. Realizing she was in bad shape, she began half-crawling and half-walking towards the edge of the park. She managed to reach a telephone box beside the road one hundred yards away and made a 999 call. The ambulance took ages to arrive. Slumped in a huddled position, waiting anxiously in the telephone box, she saw through the glass window the driver of the white car touring around as if looking for her. Finally he stopped some way off and walked across to the place where he had launched his attack. Unable to find Marcella, he drove off. ‘He come back to see if I were dead,’ she said years later. ‘He didn’t see me, so he kept on driving.’
At Leeds General Infirmary doctors discovered eight severe lacerations to her scalp, each about an inch long, needing a total of fifty-two stitches. Discharged after six days, it was then Marcella’s second nightmare began. She feared the man would come back for her because she could identify him. She had provided police with a description of a smartly dressed white man with dark hair, a beard and moustache. Amazingly the police did not believe her and said repeatedly when questioning her that the person responsible had been a black man. ‘I said no black man would have done this to me.’ She lost the child she was carrying and began to suffer dreadful headaches and the occasional blackout. The trauma remains to this day, twenty-five years later. ‘It is like my brain is bursting and hitting the inside of my head, sometimes all day,’ she said.
Not long after coming out of hospital Marcella had the shock of her life when she was out for a drink at the Gaiety pub. The man who had assaulted her walked in, took a look round, then went out again. She told friends that he was the person police were looking for, and they rushed outside, but he had gone.
An internal West Yorkshire inquiry some time later reported: ‘Although she had been struck about the head with an unknown instrument there were factors which were dissimilar to previous “Ripper” attacks. Most significant was the absence of stabbing to the body and there was the motive of taking the money and running away … officers were aware of the dangers of including details of an incident which was not part of the series because it would mislead the investigation as a whole.’
In 1978, at a hearing before the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, West Yorkshire Police claimed Marcella had misled them during their inquiries, giving a picture of her attacker that was ‘hopelessly inaccurate’ because her memory was impaired. Her application was rejected.
4
Tracks in the Grass
In the 1870s, seven hundred acres of rolling fields, woodland and two large lakes provided a much-needed gigantic lung for the city of Leeds. It allowed the overcrowded population the chance to breathe clean air, free of soot, grime and chimney smoke. Roundhay Park was personally purchased by the then Lord Mayor, a wealthy clothing manufacturer called John Barran, who intended it as ‘an ideal playground for the people of this city’. At the end of the nineteenth century it was observed of the park: ‘Although it is four miles from the centre of the city it is quickly reached by means of a capital service of electric cars. Once within its gates, the pleasure-seeker or the holiday-maker may quickly persuade himself that Leeds is far away.’ For more than a hundred years it has provided a magnificent prospect for the city people to wander amid a wildlife setting containing whooper swans, Canada geese, great-crested grebes and herons. The crocuses remain abundant in spring, followed by daffodils, bluebells and orchids. Even today keen-eyed inner-city children from Leeds’ bleak urban landscape are often taken to Roundhay Park to spot roe-deer, foxes, rabbits and grey squirrels.
By night, though, it becomes a different kind of habitat, a venue for courting couples and lovers seeking seclusion for amorous recreation. Prostitutes in the 1970s brought their clients here, so it would have been nothing unusual late on a Saturday evening in 1977 for the residents living in the great Victorian mansions along Park and West Avenues, which over-look this part of the park, to see a car pull off the road and stop, and for the headlights to be switched off. Opposite these grand homes with names like ‘Woodlands’ and ‘The Clockhouse’ stands Soldier’s Field, nowadays a recreation area for organized sport, so-called because the army used it as a training ground in the 1890s.
Standing amid a number of beech trees on the periphery of this vast expanse of playing fields was a large flat-roofed pavilion, built of York stone and used as changing rooms by visiting amateur football teams. Sunday morning, 6 February 1977, was bitterly cold with a clear sky. The beech trees stood denuded of leaves, and cast across the ground long shadows in an unexpected burst of warmth and light from a winter sun that hung low in the temporarily cloudless sky behind the houses in West Avenue. Lying on muddy ground in the pavilion’s shade, and hidden from the road, was a body, discovered by a man out jogging at 7.50 that morning. John Bolton, a forty-seven-year-old accountant, lived a stone’s throw from the park. Most mornings he got in a run before breakfast and it was on one of these that he spotted the corpse. At first he wasn’t sure what it was. Then, as he got closer, he could see it was a woman lying on her side. Her face, turned downwards towards the grass, was concealed by her shoulder-length brown hair. ‘I brushed the hair to one side,’ he said, ‘and then I saw the blood on her neck. Her eyes were glazed and staring. She was obviously dead and I ran to one of the houses to call the police.’
Dennis Hoban, as deputy ACC (crime), attended the scene with his longtime friend and colleague Jim Hobson, now detective chief superintendent in charge of the Eastern Area CID. This was Hobson’s patch and he was senior investigating officer. Hoban wore his traditional suit and a Burberry trench coat, but had abandoned his usual trilby or peaked cap, leaving his balding pate that morning devoid of headgear and exposed to the balmy rays of the sun, which after a long winter was something akin to a tonic. Hoban wasn’t treading on anyone’s toes. He saw it as a courtesy to Hobson more than anything else, or so at least he would have convinced himself. Living only a few minutes’ drive away, Hoban could not possibly have passed up the opportunity to visit a crucial crime scene like this, particularly with the murders of McCann and Jackson unsolved for a year and fresh in his mind. The most superficial examination had made it clear to everyone that this young woman had suffered severe head injuries. However, it was not until Professor Gee arrived at the scene that the full horror became apparent.
Gee arrived at 10 a.m., followed fifteen minutes later by Edward Mitchell, a forensic scientist from the laboratory at Harrogate. By then the standard murder investigation procedures had swung into action. The crime scene was taped off, duckboards laid on the muddy ground, the twenty-strong uniformed task force alerted to conduct a fingertip search; and a black plastic screen about thirty-five feet long was placed in front of the body to veil it from prying eyes. In the distance, officers in uniform began alerting the football teams arriving to play their fixtures that the matches would have to be cancelled while the pitches were minutely examined for clues. When Gee first saw the body it lay on the grass with the face directed towards the left shoulder. The upper part was clad in a long brown, machine-knit woollen cardigan with a zip fastener; the lower part, from the waist downwards, was covered by a short brown imitation suede coat with fur trimming. The feet protruded beyond the end of the coat and there was a sock on the left foot but the right foot was bare. Blood soiled her head, hair and cardigan as well as her neck. Leaves beside the body also had a little blood on them. Beside the body was a tampon. Later laboratory analysis confirmed she was having a period at the time she was killed. The tampon was lightly covered in blood, showing she was nearing the end of her monthly cycle. On the other side of the body, nearer to the pavilion, a trail of blood ran between the body and a handbag lying on leaves nearly four feet off. The flap of the handbag was open and a cosmetics bag and a lipstick were next to it. Beneath the handbag was a mortice key and a 1p coin.
Tyre tracks from a vehicle could clearly be seen between the body and the back of the pavilion in an area of muddy ground clear of trees. The tracks led from the roadway, along the back of the pavilion, and stopped close to the body. Mitchell began to examine the surrounding area, collecting his array of samples and taping the woman’s face. Adhesive tape was stretched across areas of bare skin on her arms, legs and back to pick up fibres, possibly from the killer’s clothing. These fibres would be examined under powerful microscopes and compared with the woman’s clothing. Anything ‘foreign’ would be possible confirmation of Locard’s theory of contact and exchange.
After the body had been photographed in situ, the coat covering the lower part of the body was removed to reveal some bizarre details. Originally the woman had worn two pairs of pants, one pair over her tights, as well as a pair of long light-coloured socks over the tights, presumably to make her footwear more comfortable. Now the woman’s long brown leather boots, with three-inch block heels and two-inch soles, lay along the backs of her legs. As she lay dead on the ground, they had been deliberately placed on her legs, stretching from her thighs down to her calves. When the boots were lifted off, the left leg only was found to have a rolled-down pair of tights bunched up around her left knee. Rolled up into the tights was a pair of red pants and the missing sock from her right foot. There were also fragments of leaves and ground debris tucked into the top of the tights. The woman’s other pants, a small brown nylon pair, were in position over her backside and covering her genitalia.
Once the cardigan was pulled upwards towards the woman’s head, her yellow skirt was found bunched up around her waist, together with a blue underslip. She also wore a yellow jacket beneath which her yellow bra was still fastened. After her temperature was recorded and the body photographed once more, she was turned on her back on to a large white plastic sheet. Her hands were crossed over the lower part of the body, the left wrist overlaying the right. Around her right wrist were four metal bangles. There was a seventeen-jewelled fake-gold watch with a narrow expanding strap on the left wrist, its glass partly obscured by droplets of water inside. It was no longer working and the hands were stopped at the 8.50 position. Time had literally run out for her.
Now Gee, Hoban, Hobson and the others could see there was a large wound at the front of the throat, with soiling of the surrounding skin and the front of the jacket, which was fastened with one button. Beneath her hands in the lower part of the abdomen was a truly shocking wound. A large slashing cut on the left side of the stomach had sliced through the abdominal wall. A number of coils of intestine protruded and these were slightly soiled with blood, matted with leaves and pieces of twig. Still more photographs were taken before the body was wrapped in the plastic sheet, ready to be taken to the mortuary for Gee to carry out a more detailed six-hour examination.
Hobson’s team had meanwhile been examining the contents of the woman’s handbag to see if they could identify her. As the senior investigating officer he quickly needed to know as much about her as possible. The handbag yielded a vital clue: a name and address in Roundhay. From this it transpired that the dead woman was called Irene Richardson; that she had applied for a job as a nanny with a family in Roundhay a week or two previously. The person who advertised for the nanny was then able to provide Irene’s home address, a miserable rooming house in Cowper Street, Chapeltown. Apart from a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches, a few bus tickets and a Yale and mortice key, Irene Richardson’s entire wealth lay in her purse – all 35½ pence of it.
Everyone agreed that what was learned from inquiries over the next few weeks about the lost soul who was Irene Richardson amounted to an immensely sad story. She had been twenty-eight years old, penniless, and fending for herself in very straitened circumstances. Born into a large family called Osborne in the Possilpark area of Glasgow, she had six sisters and three brothers. Their mother was a Roman Catholic and they had a Church of Scotland father. The children were brought up as Protestants. It was said to be a poor, large, but loving family. At primary school Irene was a normal child, though somewhat shy and sensitive. She enjoyed music and loved to laugh. But at Springburn Secondary School she turned into something of a rebel, smoking and playing truant. At some point the entire Osborne clan had settled at various places in England: a brother in Corby, Northamptonshire; a sister at Canvey Island in Essex. Another sister, Helen, worked in the hotel and catering industry in Blackpool, then married a Yorkshireman and later set up home in Sheffield. In 1965, at the age of seventeen, Irene Osborne ran off to London and for the next five years or so completely cut herself off from her family. When her father died, they were unable to contact her and she missed his funeral. Before her teens were out she had two children. Her daughter Lorraine’s father was a man called John Henry Wade. Police believed that Alan, the second child, might have been fathered by someone else, a friend of Irene’s called ‘Dennis’, who was never found. Irene could hardly cope by herself, let alone with two small children. Baby Lorraine was fostered out aged eighteen months in 1968 to a dealer in reproduction antiques and his wife, George and Mary Dwyer, from Croydon. They then adopted her when she was four. Irene’s son Alan was also fostered out.
Subsequently she moved to Blackpool, where her sister Helen was then working. There she met her future husband, George Richardson, a barman turned plasterer, in November 1970, and married him in June the following year. They set up home in Blackpool and had two daughters. Until the summer of 1975 Irene was working at the local Pontins Holiday Camp. Their daughter, also named Irene, was two years old and Irene was expecting another baby, Amanda. She almost certainly suffered from severe postnatal depression, for very soon after the baby was born she suddenly left Blackpool for London without saying where she was going. Mr Richardson reported her missing to the police, but she made contact a few months later. As a result, George Richardson travelled to London and located his wife in South Kensington, working in a hotel. They set up home in Kensington briefly, in an attempt to patch up their marriage. It did not last long. In April 1976 Irene left again without leaving a forwarding address. George Richardson did not see her alive again and their children, too, were subsequently fostered.
In London Irene Richardson met and cohabited with a six-foot ex-seaman, Steven Bray, who had absconded from Leicester Prison and was now working as a chef. Irene kept secret from him the fact that she was still married to George Richardson. Bray and Irene arrived in Leeds in October 1976 and moved between various boarding houses in the Chapeltown area. He was employed as a doorman at Tiffany’s Club and Irene began using the name Bray and worked at various hotels in the city as a chambermaid and also as a cleaner at a YMCA hostel, the Residential Boys’ Club in nearby Chapel Allerton. Incredibly she and Bray had organized to get married at Leeds Register Office on 22 January 1977, but neither turned up. Some time later Bray left for London, and then caught a ferry to Ireland, where he remained for several weeks.
Ten days before her death, Irene failed to turn up for work at the YMCA hostel. She had asked the warden for an advance on her wages because she had a large bill to pay. Mrs Nellie Morrison was only able to give her £1. They didn’t see Irene for a few days and then she came to collect her shoes and overalls and apologized for her behaviour, saying she had to get away from a man she had been living with. A week before she was murdered, a man suddenly arrived at the YMCA and collected the wages due to her. But she never saw the money. Hobson learned that in the last ten days of her life she had been wandering the streets practically destitute.
A woman in the rooming house in Cowper Street told detectives that Irene and Bray had twice rented an attic room in the house, and shortly before her death the landlord had let her occupy a ground-floor room rent free for a few days. Rent for a room was normally between £5 and £8 a week. Severely depressed and down on her luck, Irene had been hanging around street corners in Chapeltown. She had been living rough on the streets for about two weeks and spent several nights sleeping in a public lavatory. A few friends allowed her to take the occasional bath in their flat. The room in Cowper Street should have been a life-saver for Irene, who was urgently trying to get a job. She didn’t drink a great deal and only went out at weekends.
On the Saturday night of 5 February Irene spent some time getting ready, trying to dress tidily and applying a considerable amount of make-up, especially around the eyes. At about 11.15 she told her friend Pam Barker, who also had a room in the Cowper Street property, that she was going to Tiffany’s dance hall in the Merrion Centre in Leeds to find Steven Bray. She then briefly visited a house in Sholebrook Avenue and talked to a friend, Mrs Walsh. They parted company at 11.30. Some time before midnight she got into a stranger’s car, apparently willing to have sex with him for money.
The next time George Richardson saw Irene was at the Leeds City Mortuary. The police arranged for a car to bring him from Blackpool to identify her. It was a sight which was to haunt him for years to come. He was convinced Irene had never been a prostitute. ‘She was sick. She just couldn’t settle down,’ he said. Her funeral in Blackpool the following week, he said, would end two years of a living hell. But George Richardson’s life in subsequent years went from bad to worse. He became an alcoholic.
Following the post-mortem Hobson had a clearer idea of what had happened to Irene. For a few days at least she had been prepared to resort to prostitution to get money. He knew from forensic lab results that she had had sex with someone in the twenty-four hours before her death. Swabs from her vagina showed the presence of semen. On the inside of her coat an area of seminal staining was also found, from an ‘O’ blood-type secretor, a male who secreted blood cells into his saliva or semen. There were similar seminal stains on her tights and knickers, but in neither case was sperm found in the semen. The man who previously had intercourse with Irene was definitely aspermous.
It seemed certain she had been picked up in Chapeltown shortly before being killed. Later it was learned that at 11.35 p.m. on the Saturday night another woman had been propositioned on several occasions in Nassau Place, Chapeltown, by a man in a white car. Could the same man have picked up Irene and taken her to Soldier’s Field? She had got out of the car intending to have sex with the driver, but first had to discreetly remove the tampon she was wearing. As she crouched down the killer struck her a massive blow to the head, followed by two more. It was self-evident that if Irene was crouching or kneeling in the split second before she was killed, a hammer raised above the murderer’s head as he stood over her would have been brought crashing down with a greater velocity than if she had been standing. The only saving grace was that Irene would have known nothing about it. The blow would have stunned her and instant unconsciousness would have followed.
‘This was an almost circular, punched-out depressed fracture,’ Professor Gee wrote in his autopsy report, ‘with the central disc of the bone driven deeply into the underlying brain.’ He made another chilling discovery: ‘The bevelling up of one edge of the fracture of the skull clearly showed where the hammer had got stuck by the force of the blow into the skull and had to be levered out to get it clear of the bone.’ The nature of the hole indicated it had almost the precise dimensions of a hammer head. Gee thought the woman had then been dragged from the position of the tyre tracks to the spot where she was found and further injured. The murderer had slashed at her throat, causing a gaping wound exposing the larynx. In a frenzy he then tore a wound nearly seven inches long down the left side of the abdomen, which caused her intestines to tumble out, and two more stab wounds to the stomach followed. The weapons used were probably a hammer with a flat circular striking surface and a very sharp knife of some kind. For Gee the importance of this case lay in it being able to confirm they were dealing with a multiple killer. He preferred to deal in certainties rather than speculation. It was essential not to make a mistake because it could confuse the whole investigation. Now he felt sure he knew. ‘Here was a clear pattern,’ he said later, though it took some time for everyone to agree.
Hobson still wasn’t certain in his own mind that all three murders were linked, but this didn’t prevent speculation in the media. The fact that two other women had been slaughtered in similar circumstances in Leeds, coupled with the grisly detail of Richardson’s throat injury, prompted one tabloid the next morning to splash its story. ‘JACK THE RIPPER MURDER HORROR’: ‘A girl was found brutally hacked to death in a sports field yesterday. And it started a hunt for a Jack the Ripper killer.’ The Sun partially regurgitated the sensational headline it used a year previously, following Emily Jackson’s death: ‘RIPPER HUNTED IN CALL GIRL MURDERS’. This third death was clearly major front-page news. With a madman slaying prostitutes on the loose, Britain had not seen anything like this since the Thames nude murders in London during the mid-1960s. However, it would be another year before the term ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ became common currency.
Sensing the urgency of the situation, Ronald Gregory, the chief constable, was among those who turned up at the murder scene before the body was moved. When suspicions were eventually confirmed that the killing was the work of the man who had also slain McCann and Jackson, Gregory knew he had a maniacal killer in his force area, equal, in his mind, to the worst work of the notorious multiple murderers, Haigh and Christie, a few decades earlier. Gregory’s foreboding was well justified. The search for the ‘Ripper’ would become the most notorious criminal investigation in British history, and far more complex than either the infamous Haigh or Christie cases. For in February 1977 West Yorkshire police had an on-going murder hunt on their hands, a series of crimes to be solved, whereas the Haigh and Christie cases presented no great mystery for investigators, even though they produced sensational trials and equally sensational headlines. The killers were under arrest before police knew they had multiple deaths on their hands. Haigh admitted straight away he was a serial murderer and became infamous as the ‘Acid in the Bath’ killer. There was no police hunt for him as such. Christie had killed eight women over a period of ten years, including his own wife, but none of them were linked to a series for the bodies were not found till very late in the day. Indeed, they were discovered by accident. Christie walled up his victims or buried them in the back yard or under floorboards at 10 Rillington Place in London, where he lived. They later gave off a rather unpleasant smell. Four days after the discovery of various skeletons he was arrested and immediately confessed. Both Haigh and Christie had their defence pleas of not guilty of murder by reason of insanity rejected by a jury at the Old Bailey and both were hanged.
Convinced the man who killed Richardson had to be bloodstained, Jim Hobson telexed a warning to all West Yorkshire divisions and surrounding forces to keep an eye out for anyone coming into custody with bloodstained clothing. He also wanted urgent inquiries made at local dry cleaners. One hundred officers then began house-to-house inquiries. Among those soon interviewed was one of Britain’s top television stars, Jimmy Savile, who lived in West Avenue, opposite the murder scene. He wasn’t at home at the crucial time, but when a neighbour gave him the news he was badly shaken and kept repeating: ‘This is terrible. It is a ghastly thing to happen practically in your own front garden.’ In the following weeks numerous men were hauled in and questioned closely; several items of potential suspect’s clothing were examined at the Harrogate laboratory, along with various pairs of shoes and a bloodstained raincoat retrieved from a dry cleaners in the centre of Leeds. Tools, hammers and knives were also handed over for scientific analysis. A fragmentary fingerprint found on a bus ticket near the scene could not be eliminated. Prostitutes in Leeds were asked to come forward if they had been ill-treated by their clients. Courting couples using Roundhay Park over the weekend were asked to report anything suspicious. None of these initiatives led anywhere. Hobson appealed directly to women not to accept lifts from strangers. The last thing he needed was another murder before they had exhausted all lines of inquiry from the current one.
Four days after Irene died, he sought the cooperation of the public in finding Marcella Claxton, who nine months previously had been attacked in virtually the same spot at Soldier’s Field. Now she had moved home and police couldn’t find her. The local press claimed it as ‘a carbon copy’ attack and reported that Marcella could hold vital clues to the killer’s identity. Hobson told reporters that there were striking similarities. Both women had been viciously attacked with a blunt instrument from the rear; both had clearly been picked up in Chapeltown for sex and taken to Roundhay Park, a favourite place for prostitutes to take their clients.
Hobson said of Marcella: ‘She could help us with vital clues to the identity. It is essential that we interview this woman in view of the recent murder. There may be some connection between the attack on her and the murder of Mrs Richardson.’ An eminent biographer once declared that although hindsight is often the last refuge of the instant historian, scorning hindsight is always the first escort of the evasive politician. He might also have said policeman. With the benefit of hindsight and twenty-five years on, Hobson’s prophetic comment seems like irony heaped upon irony. There was indeed a connection between the two events, but it was overlooked. Marcella Claxton had repeatedly told police that the man who attacked her had been driving a white car; so was the man who tried repeatedly to pick up a woman in Nassau Place, Chapeltown, not long before Irene Richardson was walking in the same area, probably half an hour before she was murdered. Even more damning, Marcella had helped prepare a photofit, but again its value to the investigation was never realized.
Later that day, Marcella spoke to detectives and repeated her description of the man in a white car who attacked her. But next morning at a press conference Hobson briefed the media saying Marcella had given them a description, ‘but this is not necessarily the description of the murderer [my italics]’. It was a comment hardly likely to inspire confidence. The public was told he was aged twenty-five to thirty-five, five feet nine inches tall, medium build, with dark wavy hair, who at the time of the assault was wearing a dark suit with a multicoloured shirt and tie. He was well spoken and drove a white car which was fairly new. Anyone recognizing this description was asked to contact the police immediately. Tragically, the detail police left out from Marcella Claxton’s description was that the man had a beard and a moustache. Nor did they issue to the press the photofit Marcella prepared on 10 May 1976, the day after she was attacked. It had been published in Police Reports, a confidential internal police publication sent to northern police forces, and in a separate police circular a week later. However, the public was never given the opportunity of seeing the actual photofit (which bore a stunning likeness to Sutcliffe). True, Marcella had problems selecting the components for the photofit, but when it was finished she was satisfied it was a good likeness of the man who tried to kill her. But Hobson was not convinced, and was moreover doubly concerned that the public could be misled if given the wrong information. The simple truth was that the West Yorkshire police did not believe what Marcella Claxton was telling them.
Ever cautious, Hobson repeated his warning to the ‘good time girls’ of Chapeltown to be wary of accepting lifts in cars: ‘From our observations taken over the last week it seems that women are still getting into cars in the area. I would again warn them of the dangers.’
Over the next few months, Leeds police mounted a crackdown on prostitutes in the Chapeltown area, arresting and issuing cautions to more than a hundred women. Hobson’s policy was to get sex workers out of the vice area, a policy which appeared to be working. ‘We have clamped down to try to get prostitutes off the streets,’ he said. ‘It is as much for their safety as anything else. We are making every effort to prevent another murder.’ If they insisted on plying their trade, he believed they should let one of their friends know where they were going, or take the car number. Then another tactic was tried. Special squads of police operating in the Chapeltown area noted the registration numbers of cars belonging to men cruising around looking for sex. A similar stratagem had been applied by the Metropolitan Police in London more than ten years previously during the hunt for the Thames nude prostitute murderer. In a proactive effort to apprehend the London killer, all the ‘pick-up’ places in Bayswater, Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill had been kept under observation. ‘A system of “flagging” was introduced whereby the same car in an area more than once became suspect, and if it appeared three times the driver was questioned.’ The operation was not a success.
Under some pressure from the media Hobson was extraordinarily open with information. The press knew the latest victim had head injuries, that her throat was cut and she had wounds to her stomach; they knew files from previous cases were being reviewed and a special watch was being kept on people driving through the Chapeltown red-light area. Hobson also informed the media of a possible connection with the murder of a prostitute in Preston, Lancashire. The Leeds Evening Post was able to inform readers on 8 February 1977, two days after Richardson’s body was found: ‘Police are comparing notes from the files of three brutal murders committed in the last 16 months – two in Leeds and one in Lancashire. In each case a prostitute was the victim.’
The next day the local Leeds evening newspaper gave more information: ‘Mr Hobson said Chief Supt. Brook from Lancashire who is leading investigations into the murder of a prostitute – Joan Harrison – who was found battered to death in Preston in November 1975, was travelling from Blackpool to Leeds today to liaise with Leeds detectives.’ Wilf Brooks, the head of Lancashire CID, had his meeting with Hobson, then left a file on the Harrison case for the Leeds CID chief to examine, ‘because of the striking similarities’, according to the Evening Post on the 10th.
The similarities were indeed striking: twenty-six-year-old Joan Harrison had no convictions for prostitution but had been cohabiting with several men. She had once been a houseproud mother, devoted to her children, but then her life appears to have descended into chaos. She was prepared to have sex to fund her chronic alcoholism and addiction to cough mixtures containing small doses of morphine, often getting through as many as eight bottles a day. She suffered severe head injuries when she was killed in a garage in Berwick Road, Preston, less than a month after Wilma McCann was murdered. Her body was found lying face down, covered by her coat. Her clothing appeared to have been displaced in a similar way to the West Yorkshire killings. She had been wearing two bras, both unfastened. The inner one had been pulled up over her breasts, leaving the outer one in position. The left leg was outside her pants and tights, with the trousers replaced on both legs and partly pulled up. Finally, and most intriguingly, her left boot had been placed tightly between her legs with the zip opened. But there were also several differences. Robbery was thought to be a motive. Her handbag and some of her possessions were missing, and several injuries were thought to be due to kicking or stamping to the head and body. There were no stab wounds and it was thought she had had sex immediately before she was killed. Brooks himself was not convinced of a link between the killings, neither was Hobson. The Lancashire CID chief was more intent on finding the man who had normal and anal intercourse with Joan Harrison. Semen traces were identified as being from a blood group B secretor and police began a mass screening of local men in the Preston area.
In Leeds, Jim Hobson believed he had a more positive line to follow, the most important clue found in the three Leeds murders so far, and something the police could get to grips with: the tyre tracks left behind in muddy ground at the scene, almost certainly by the killer’s car. Scenes of crime officers quickly took plaster casts and calculations were made by the Harrogate laboratory. This herculean task of finding the car that left the tyre tracks began as a matter of urgency the very day Irene Richardson’s body was found. It became known as ‘the tracking inquiry’, because the initial goal was to ascertain the make of vehicle involved by measuring the track width of the vehicle from the distance between the tyre marks left at the scene. Only a certain number of cars would match that particular measurement. If the experts could narrow it down there was a good chance they might isolate the make of the killer’s car, and hopefully find it and, more crucially, the murderer.
As principal scientific officer at Harrogate, Ron Outtridge quickly contacted the murder incident room at Millgarth Street, the brand-new purpose-built police headquarters in Leeds which had been open less than a year. He had narrowed down the track width after a careful analysis of the plaster casts and photographs taken at the crime scene. The inner width was forty-six inches, the outer width fifty-four and a quarter inches. But there was one complication. It was impossible to tell whether the tracks had been made by the front axle or the rear axle. This doubled the number of vehicles involved. Outtridge had isolated the makes of tyres from the 250 different types of tyre available to motorists, but couldn’t determine whether the car had been driven straight on to the grass beside the pavilion or reversed in. All four were cross-ply tyres – one a Pneumant brand, manufactured in East Germany, worn down to 2 mm of tread, with an Esso E110 on the other side of the same axle; and there were two India Autoways tyres, both well worn, on the other axle. Each tyre had certain characteristics peculiar to its make, whether it was winter type, normal road use, remould, cross-ply or radial. In terms of mathematical probabilities, the chances of reproducing this exact combination of tyres were nearly 159 million to one. Another set of tyre tracks at the scene was eliminated. They were found to belong to a Leeds Corporation parks department trailer used to deliver chemicals to the pavilion three days before the murder.
By 5.15 p.m. on the day following the discovery of the body, Outtridge, with the help of the Home Office Central Research Establishment, had produced a list of a hundred different makes of vehicle which could fit the various combinations of these measurements. They were telexed to the Millgarth Incident Room as a matter of urgency. The twentieth vehicle on the schedule of makes was a Ford Corsair, which had a front track width of four feet two and a half inches. (Peter Sutcliffe was at the time driving a white Ford Corsair, which he had purchased second-hand shortly before he attacked Marcella Claxton.)
Jim Hobson wanted to move the inquiry forward quickly and instructed night duty officers throughout the Chapeltown Division to examine all parked vehicles during normal routine patrols. Every time a car was examined the officer took the registration number and tyre details, and a card was filled in showing that car had been eliminated from the inquiry. Other checks were carried out in scrapyards, vehicle breakers and auctioneers, and also of vehicles regarded as abandoned and due to be written off and crushed under the Civil Amenities Act. Tens of thousands of cars were checked in this way, but after six weeks the exercise was abandoned.
Hobson’s team had consulted an expert in the tyre industry, R. J. Grogan of Dunlop Ltd, who confirmed that the vehicle concerned was probably one of twenty-one makes and fifty-one models. His more rigorous and specialized analysis allowed the original list of a hundred models to be cut in half. The tyres fitted to one axle could have been of a diameter of twelve inches, thirteen inches or fourteen inches, while the other pair were of a type only manufactured in thirteen and fifteen inches. The science of determining which kind of vehicle was involved in a crime by analysing the combination of tyre tracks left at a scene was not perfect. A series of complex mathematical probabilities was involved. It was sometimes possible to determine the wheel base when a vehicle had sunk into soft ground when parked, or been reversed and driven off again. It might also be possible to measure the turning circle if the vehicle had been turned on its tightest lock, and again this could narrow down the car involved. However, it was unsafe to rely totally on measurements from front wheel tracks alone, as opposed to the rear wheel tracks, because of wear in the steering joints. A quarter of a century on, the situation is even more refined and tyre tracks can be as good as a fingerprint, according to one eminent forensic scientist: ‘The marks left by tyres when they are examined contain far more evidential value than would, say, a wound relating to the weapon that produced it. If you get a car with [a particular] track width and the turning circle and if that particular tyre is a Firestone, and there is a cut in it there – it’s virtually as good as a fingerprint.’
In a bold move Hobson got approval to carry out a mass screening of all vehicles of these models within the West Yorkshire police area and in the Harrogate division of the North Yorkshire police. It was a massive task and particularly arduous for the inquiry team involved, whose morale and motivation became seriously affected as time went on. Manual searches were carried out at vehicle licensing offices and a search was made of computer records by the Police National Computer (PNC) unit. Hobson learned that 53,000 vehicles would need to be examined. Then there was another problem. The Police National Computer was a relatively new resource, first introduced in 1974. Today it employs twenty-first century technology and there is a second-generation PNC which deals with 200,000 queries a day from British police forces. A vast array of information has been loaded into the system, which includes 42.5 million vehicles registered in the United Kingdom and their owners; stolen property; criminal records; missing and wanted people and disqualified drivers; and people subject to court orders.
But in 1977 the PNC was still in its relative infancy, and programmers were continuing to input the data to build the vast index of vehicles and their owners. A great deal of ‘back record conversion’ had yet to be done, transferring the records of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea on to the Police National Computer. Some information was held in the PNC, but to be sure they would not miss anything Hobson’s team also had to check manually with the local Leeds Vehicle Licensing Office. Sutcliffe’s white-coloured Ford Corsair – KWT 721D – was among the 53,000 vehicles, but would Hobson’s team be able to get to it?
A long list of vehicle owners was compiled. The cards which had earlier been completed during the special night duty check in Chapeltown were cross-checked to eliminate those already examined. What in effect was happening was a mass elimination exercise on the basis of gradually purging vehicle registration numbers until what you had left was the car you were searching for. Hobson rightly gambled that, since all three murders so far had involved the Leeds red-light area, it was reasonable to begin looking in West Yorkshire first. But there was a danger that the vehicle might have been scrapped, or the tyres changed, especially if the suspect became aware that police were making inquiries about tyres. For several years the tracking inquiry remained a highly secret part of the investigation.
The next stage was to develop an index card system for all the remaining vehicles to be checked by personal home visits by police officers. However, the index cards used were filed in registration number order, and then carried the owners’ names. Tragically, no index cards were made out for names of owners as a reference system in itself. Had an index such as this been operated within the murder incident room at Millgarth Street, then the name of Peter William Sutcliffe would have been referenced in connection with the tracking inquiry. Any officer looking up his name in connection with some other aspect of the Ripper investigation would immediately have seen that he owned a car which could have been used in the murder of Irene Richardson.
Even more tragically, circumstances conspired against Hobson and his team. They were simply overtaken by events – another murder and a very serious attack in which a victim survived. Demand for manpower in the investigation became totally overloaded. The incident room was operating a manual, paper-led system. There was nothing in the police armoury at the time to help them sift through the masses of information they were accumulating, let alone the mountains of paperwork yet to come as the bodies of Sutcliffe’s victims increased, along with the fears and anxieties of tens of thousands of women in Yorkshire and the North of England after the discovery of yet another woman found murdered at the hands of the Ripper.
The double tragedy was that Hobson’s team had broken the back of the tracking inquiry when a halt was ordered because further murderous attacks on local women demanded his manpower be shifted elsewhere. The drain on resources had been immense. Of the 53,000 vehicle owners in West Yorkshire whose cars may have left the tyre tracks on Soldier’s Field, only 20,000 car owners remained to be seen. Sutcliffe’s white Ford Corsair was among those on the list waiting to be checked.
5
Impressions in Blood
Just four words made the hair on the back of John Domaille’s neck stand on end. ‘Boss, we’ve got one,’ the voice at the other end said with an air of breathless desperation.
Domaille, the new head of Bradford CID just two months into the job, had answered the call that Sunday night in late April 1977 after returning from a teatime stroll. He was planning a relaxing night in front of the television when a detective chief inspector telephoned with the news that a thirty-three-year-old prostitute had been found dead in her flat in the red-light district.
‘I knew what he meant,’ Domaille recalled. ‘It meant we had one of these so-called Ripper murders in Bradford. I said “Okay, I’ll come over” and I went immediately.’ The DCI gave him a few more details. Her name was Patricia Atkinson. The woman had been convicted of soliciting two years previously. She had been found by her boyfriend at a block of flats in Oak Avenue, off Manningham Lane.
Detective Chief Superintendent Domaille, then a month short of his forty-third birthday, sped off in his car at about 8 p.m., and did not return home until the crack of dawn the following morning. He took the M62 across country towards Bradford, before turning off on the motorway spur, past a large number of factories and distribution centres located among a myriad of newly built industrial units. Then it was down into the city centre and on towards Manningham. His head was buzzing. He wondered who the pathologist would be. Who would forensics send? He wanted the best he could get. The new lab at Wetherby needed to send someone down immediately.
‘There’s so much going through your head when you get a call like that,’ he said. ‘What mortuary am I going to move this to? What time is the PM going to be, when am I going to see the press, which DCI will I have, which detective superintendent? What am I going to tell the boss? What am I going to tell the chief constable?’
The second he saw her he knew she was a Ripper victim. The DCI had indicated as much. Looking at her, he could see why. There had been a massive attack to the head; it was almost smashed in. The clothing was disarranged and there were curious stab wounds and cuts to the body. The signature was the attack to the abdomen. He had seen this before at the scenes of previous Ripper killings which he had attended as the senior officer with overall charge of media and community relations for West Yorkshire Police. Keeping the media onside then was an absolute priority. Now that he was the senior investigating officer, the man in overall charge, it would be no different. He and Dennis Hoban thought alike in that regard.
Going through his mind was the management of the crime scene and what followed. Domaille thrived on this kind of pressure, especially in his dealings with the media. Aware of the need to get it right, he thought of the first two murders and Hoban’s control of the crime scene. That had been total management. It had always seemed to work for Hoban in Leeds until the Ripper appeared. Now in Bradford, Domaille was working with a totally new set-up. If he didn’t get all the bits and pieces on the chess board very quickly, he realized, he would face criticism later. In his own mind he was determined to give the media all he could, even if it conflicted with George Oldfield’s instincts. The ACC (crime) was obsessive about not giving the press too much. He warned Domaille about not keeping enough back to use when he got someone in who was a serious suspect for a killing. Domaille could see the sense of this, but preferred to deal with a prime suspect when the time came. Of course you needed something held back from the press and television which only the murderer could tell you. You had to sort out the genuine article from the cranks who came in to confess to crimes they didn’t commit – but you had to catch your killer first.
‘I’ve always been very keen on telling the media what I’ve got because I believe in the people out there, there’s thousands of them. You’ve got all those eyes and ears working for you and they bring stuff to you. I didn’t have the snouts but I’d got the people. You don’t actually detect it by yourself. You detect it because of all the bits people tell you. This was the first [Ripper killing] in Bradford whereas previously he had been in Leeds. He’d gone outside his area. I wasn’t surprised because Bradford also had a sizeable prostitute area. I thought: “This person is not very far away” because it doesn’t take long to drive from Leeds to Bradford.’
The apartment block Atkinson lived in was seedy. Before he entered the door into the victim’s flat Domaille saw an old mattress from a double bed propped against a wall in the corridor outside. Someone had abandoned it there instead of arranging for it to be taken away. ‘Tina’ Atkinson, as she was commonly known, had rented a self-contained bed-sitting room with a separate bathroom and kitchenette, both of which were in a deplorable condition, with no sign of any effort to clean them. Domaille’s immediate thought was that the flat was used for one thing only: sex. The main room contained a bed, pushed into a corner up against the wall; there was also a two-seater sofa, a dressing table and a couple of dining room chairs. A flower-patterned curtain ran in sections right across the only wall with a window. On a three-drawer dressing table with a large mirror stood an empty vase and two ornamental glass gondoliers.
Two dresses, one a sort of shift with a separate belt, hung on coat hangers suspended from the top of the large double wardrobe, one from the side, one from the door. A third dress, which had also hung on a coat hanger, had been thrown on to the sofa, a simple two-seater affair with wooden arms. Two pairs of pants with black frilled tops lay crumpled on a sofa cushion. A few feet away was a three-bar electric fire, the kind which gave a glow of imitation coal. It was plugged in by a short cable to a socket on the wall. Above the socket, the wall was bare except for a map – an RAC road map of Yorkshire.
To Domaille’s eye the main room seemed reasonably clean. On a sideboard stood a pair of sling-back shoes with platform soles and a plastic tray. On the table, which had a partly check-patterned tablecloth, was a leather handbag, a large ashtray, a box of Scotties tissues and a can of Harmony hair spray, plus a bottle of cheap scent and a tube of hand cream. There was a towel thrown over the back of a chair. On the floor just in front of the table was a large denim shoulder bag. And beside that was a pool of blood. The victim was on the bed, with blankets and a flower-patterned duvet covering her, face down with her head turned away from the door to face the wall. She wore a black brassière, the left shoulder strap visible under the bedding. A pair of Scholl wooden sandals lay just under the edge of the bed. There were spots of blood on the front of the left sandal.
The room was getting crowded with people doing their work. The scenes of crime photographer took several shots of the sandals from different angles, including the soles, to see if there were any traces of blood. Beside the electric fire was a single blue thick-soled lady’s shoe. Domaille briefly pondered whether she had been wearing the sandals when she was killed, or had she just slipped them off and kicked them under the bed? Where was the other blue shoe? He looked down. The floor was covered in a threadbare carpet which looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned for a long time. The photographer bent down to frame a shot of a spent match and a filter-tip cigarette stub.
The woman had probably bled to death on the bed. Her dark hair was soaked in blood, as were the sheets and pillow, which was covered in a striped pillowcase. Her arms were spread out down her side. She had been wearing bell-bottomed jeans. When the bedclothes were pulled back by Professor Gee, the jeans were shown to have been tugged below her knees. Her white cotton pants had been pulled down to expose her buttocks. Her T-shirt had been hitched up and her bra unfastened. There was clear bruising on her right leg above the knee. Her tights had been pulled way down to her ankles and she was wearing one shoe – a blue sling-back denim shoe with a platform sole. This answered Domaille’s question as to whether she had been wearing the wooden sandals. Then someone pointed out what looked like a shoe print in blood on one of the sheets.
Gee’s attention was drawn to the large bloodstain in front of the wooden chair beside the bed, but he could also see spots of blood on the front of the chair legs. He was then shown a short dark leather jacket which was heavily bloodstained in the middle of the floor adjacent to the wardrobe. Pulling back the bedclothes had also revealed the body twisted at the lower part of the trunk so that the abdomen was almost at right angles to the bed. The body was clad in a patterned jumper pulled upwards towards the shoulders. On the edges of the bed, lying on the undersheet in front of the knees, was a mortice lock key. Underneath the right knee was another key – a Yale. It was nearly 10.30 p.m. before Gee began the process of measuring the body temperature at half-hour stages. An hour later the bedclothes were completely removed from the body and handed to an exhibits officer.
By the time the forensic scientist from the new Wetherby laboratory arrived, the bed-sitting room was crowded with activity. The place reeked of alcohol. Fingerprints were being taken. The photographer’s camera flashed intermittently, and several people in suits stood around chatting. Russell Stockdale had the furthest of anyone to travel to the scene of the murder – from Rufforth, near York. He was new to West Yorkshire, only just posted to Wetherby from the laboratory at Newcastle. Having been on call this Sunday night, he was the one who had to turn out. He hadn’t been involved with West Yorkshiremen before, so it came as some surprise to find the SIO, John Domaille, turned out to have a soft Devonian accent. With the exception of Professor Gee, all the others in the room were clearly Yorkshiremen. On the drive over, Stockdale was conscious he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to strike up a rapport with the police from Bradford and Leeds. He was going to meet a new investigating team. Stockdale knew from experience that there was a process of trust and confidence to be built before either side could get the best from each other.
Domaille gave Stockdale the impression of being very young for the senior rank he held, but it soon became apparent that he was extremely confident and more than up to the job. The usual formalities to break the ice with the newcomer were exchanged. Stockdale had long ago decided that professionals in such circumstances be accorded the status they deserved. If you adopted the role of the shrinking violet, you would be treated like a shrinking violet. It was the way of the world.
He strongly believed the forensic scientist had an important role to play at the crime scene. That did not mean he could march in in an arrogant way, because it was very much a joint operation, especially between the pathologist and the forensic scientist. Much of his learning had been on the job training. Stockdale had been a grave-digger on leaving grammar school in Battersea, South London, and was then commissioned in the RAF. He resigned his commission twelve months later and went off to London University. Having graduated as a zoologist he applied for a job at the Newcastle lab in response to a newspaper advertisement. The then director, Stuart Kind, later told him why he appointed him: ‘You were such an odd bugger, rather like myself, that’s why I gave you the job.’
In the bed-sitting room Stockdale discussed with Peter Swann, the fingerprint man, the sequence in which they would do their work. It was crucial they did it as a team, so as not to damage what the other was trying to achieve. ‘Preserving the crime scene is critical,’ Stockdale says of this kind of work. ‘You can preserve a crime scene by not walking into it, but at some stage you have got to go in there and decide on an operational procedure which is going to work and be followed. Everyone else who has an input to make has to know what everyone else is doing.’ He recalled something he particularly learned from later watching David Gee at work. The Leeds University professor, regarded as a gentleman among gentlemen by whose who knew him well, was standing in a muddy field somewhere looking at a fresh corpse and scribbling in a notebook. He said to Stockdale out of the corner of his mouth: ‘What I am doing now – the police think I am very busy working, but actually I am giving myself time to think.’
‘This was a tremendous piece of advice,’ Stockdale reflected. ‘I thought about standing there with him on that occasion over the coming years, and what David said encapsulated the whole experience. You have to make time for yourself to think. You can’t, if you allow yourself to be rushed by people saying: “Come on, get on with it, we have got to get the body moved.” Why? Where is it going? It isn’t going anywhere because I haven’t finished yet.’
On this call-out to Bradford, Stockdale wasn’t aware he was going to a Ripper murder. He had only just arrived down from Newcastle and did not know that three other prostitutes had been murdered in nearby Leeds. Examining the blood distribution patterns in the room, he kept reminding himself not to impede Peter Swann and his team looking for fingerprints. ‘It is well established with all the forces I have worked for, that if the investigation officer’s fingerprints are found, then it costs them a round of drinks in the bar. You tend to go around the crime scene with your hands in your pockets. It is very easy to unconsciously pick something up or touch it, which you really ought not to do. I wasn’t going to break the habits of my career so far.’
Stockdale became conscious of comments passing between other members of the team. ‘Is it him, then?’ ‘Do you think it’s another one?’ The questioning was addressed to no one in particular, like a murmur rising almost to a groundswell. Finally he turned to Peter Swann and asked: ‘Is it who? What’s going on?’
Swann explained. ‘We’ve got a serial killer – he’s being called The Ripper.’
‘Bloody hell, just my luck to pick up one of these,’ Stockdale exclaimed. It was the first time he had heard the words ‘The Ripper’.
Stockdale examined the woman’s clothing carefully. He believed that after they were pulled down, the jeans and possibly the tights as well had been pulled up again partially. Neither the tights nor the zip fastener of the jeans was damaged in the operation and it was evident that some care had been exercised by the killer. The surface of the body was smeared with blood and gave the appearance of having been manoeuvred by the killer, who must have had wet blood on his hands. Looking around the room generally, he could see there had been no violent struggle or any attempt to ransack the place. He concluded that the sequence of events had been as follows:
1 Atkinson was struck on the head from behind as she entered the room.
2 She fell to the floor bleeding and lay where she fell for some minutes.
3 The killer moved the unconscious body to the bedside where probably her leather coat was removed before being dumped in the corner of the room. The jeans could have been undone at this stage and pulled down, together with her underclothes, and this caused the loss of the left shoe. Bloodstaining on the carpet, the handbag, and the smearing on the leg of the bedside chair, showed probably that another blow to the skull had been struck and that the head had moved about on the floor.
4 The killer, with wet bloody hands, manoeuvred the body on to the unmade bed, probably by clambering on to the bed and dragging the body, rather than by lifting it. In doing so a bloody footwear impression was left on the bottom sheet between the body and the wall.
5 The bloodstream distribution on the bed indicated further blows to the head and a great deal of blood being lost as a result of the wounds sustained. He also believed the stabbing injuries to the abdomen were probably sustained on the bed.
6 The killer then began a process of ‘tidying up’, during which the jeans were partially pushed or drawn on to the legs. The bedding was then piled on top of the body and straightened out sufficiently to cover it almost completely, leaving the injuries and the greater part of the bloodstaining hidden from view.
Shortly before midnight all the work that could be done by Domaille’s team, Gee and Stockdale was complete, and the body was placed on a large plastic sheet and put into a coffin shell before being taken to the Bradford city mortuary. There Tina’s ex-husband, Ramen Mitra, identified her body in the presence of Professor Gee and the coroner’s officer. At 1.30 a.m. on the Sunday morning Gee began his post-mortem. It continued until 5 a.m. The usual crowd of officers was present, including a young constable called Alexander, who was, as the first officer at the scene of the murder, also required to attend the post-mortem.
During the autopsy Gee discovered four major depressed fractures of the skull caused by it being struck with a blunt instrument which left crescent-shaped wounds. There were also wounds to the trunk in the form of abrasions to the middle of the back and another group of grazes and stab wounds over the lower abdomen, linked by an irregular linear abrasion across the left side of the chest. He believed that some kind of large-size hammer was involved. Domaille noticed several stabbing wounds just above the pubic region. The killer obviously had some kind of serious sexual hang-up. These and some of the other stab wounds caused Professor Gee particular problems. He thought some object with a blade half an inch wide might have been used – perhaps a screwdriver or chisel.
What he was looking at confirmed what they had seen in the three other murders – a clear and established pattern: similar kinds of head injuries; similar movement of the clothing; the absence of sexual intercourse; and multiple stab wounds produced by a variety of different instruments. ‘So far we had two different knives, one screwdriver, and, I now thought, some rectangular-shaped, rather blunt object, like, say, a cold chisel,’ he said later. ‘In fact, in this I was wrong. I had by now got the clear impression that what happened each time was that the victim was knocked down purely to make them immobile, possibly with the same hammer, then the clothing was disarranged and the stab wounds inflicted with a different weapon each time, because that act provided the necessary satisfaction [for the killer]. One of the big problems I found in an extended series was trying to keep distinct the themes of the patterns of pathology on the one hand and the nature of the actual weapons on the other. But certainly in this case my conception of a hammer on one hand and a blunt chisel on the other prevented me from putting the two together – into one weapon.’ He only ascertained the truth much later.
For Gee, as a forensic pathologist, it was crucial to determine how the death was caused. He examined the pattern of injuries, the position of the body, the nature of the wounds, and endeavoured to reconstruct a form in which the injuries could have been sustained. This meant developing, sooner or later, some idea of what actually happened – the order of events. It also meant developing preconceived ideas about the situation, but this could be dangerous, though he saw no way to avoid it. Sometimes it led to mistakes. In his own mind he saw a clear and logical sequence of events for all four cases in the series so far.
‘I was quite wrong,’ Gee said. ‘It turned out that this particular girl [Atkinson] was indeed struck with a hammer, but the penetrating injuries were caused by the claws of the claw hammer, which was used on this occasion.’ He should have realized this, he said, by noticing that there was a small second abrasion alongside the main one on the side of the body and from the general pattern of marks on the abdomen. ‘I am sure I was misled on this occasion because of having developed this preconceived idea of two weapons being used – a hammer and a stabbing instrument of some kind.’
A thorough search of the flat produced a diary among Atkinson’s meagre possessions. It contained the names of some fifty men, a good many of whom were probably clients. Two days after the body was found Domaille briefed the local news media about the latest killing.
This was a brutal murder, a very brutal murder. The man we are looking for could be a maniac. The leads that we are following are that there are a number of people in the area that I know knew this lady. I have her diary. This lists a lot of people, names a lot of people, and I would like to see all those people, I shall be making inquiries to trace them. I shall treat as a matter of complete confidentiality any information that comes to me. Anyone can ask to see me personally and I think it might be helpful to some people if they came forward to see me, rather than me making inquiries about some of the facts that I know.
Domaille’s team of ninety officers had begun working hard to learn more about the murdered woman. It emerged that Patricia Tina Atkinson’s family had lived in the Thorpe Edge district of Bradford and she had two brothers. In 1960, when she was sixteen years old, she met her husband, Ramen Mitra, a Pakistani, at a dance hall in the town. She was working as a burler and mender at a mill in Greengates, Bradford. Perhaps it was an omen that they married on All Fools Day – 1 April 1961. They then lived for a short time with her parents before moving to their own home at Girlington, an area of Bradford next to Manningham. During this period both of Tina’s parents died. She and Ramen, known to most people as ‘Ray’, had three daughters during subsequent years and went on to live mainly in the area of Thorpe Edge where Tina had grown up.
In her mid-twenties she was attractive – slim and with long dark brown hair – and she liked a good time. She knew she looked alluring to men whatever she wore. Dressed in tight jeans and a blouse tied at the waist, as she was the night she died, she appeared quite vivacious. Tina – the mother of three and married so young – felt she hadn’t yet done any real living. She enjoyed men’s attention and couldn’t stop herself being unfaithful; the couple separated on a number of occasions, but then got back together for the children’s sake. Finally she left home. In 1975 she had been convicted for prostitution and her husband divorced her on 25 September 1976. He was awarded custody of the children. For a while at least Tina gave up the sex industry. She had met a man called Robert Henderson. They became lovers, but it was a strange, desultory relationship made worse by the fact that she was an alcoholic, and an uncontrollable alcoholic at that. More than that, she got into debt from accumulated fines. A short time before she was killed she went ‘back on the game’ to improve her finances.
Ten days before she was murdered, Tina rented a small flat in a purpose-built 1960s block in Oak Avenue, Manningham, close to the red-light area of Lumb Lane. The block of apartments, which had a flat bitumen and felt roof, was run down and in poor condition. Surrounded by large Edwardian houses, themselves converted into separate flats and maisonettes, the flats were built on sloping ground, two storeys high at the front and three at the back. Atkinson’s was on the ground floor at the back of the premises. To reach it from the Oak Avenue entrance you had to go downstairs.
The Friday night before she died, her boyfriend slept with her. They had sex when the effect of the previous night’s alcohol was beginning to wear off – at about four o’clock on the Saturday morning. On the Saturday night, 23 April 1977, Tina went out determined to have a good time visiting her regular drinking haunts, including the Carlisle Hotel. She had been drinking for most of the day. When the stripper who had been booked for the pub failed to turn up, Tina did an impromptu turn, climbing on to the stage. She knew she was good looking, but she was in no condition to entertain the Saturday-night crowd. Tina was totally out of control and things got rowdy. Instead of stripping down to her bra and pants, Tina took all her clothes off. An argument with the manager ensued and by 10.15 Tina was out of the door and on her way to the International Club in Lumb Lane. The last time she was seen it was by another street girl at about 11.10. Tina was weaving and staggering her way down Church Street towards St Mary’s Road, completely drunk, having consumed the equivalent of twenty measures of spirits.
The next day Robert Henderson became concerned for his girlfriend’s whereabouts and at about 6.30 on the Sunday evening decided to call at her flat. Failing to raise a response for his urgent knocking on the door, he forced his way in and made the appalling discovery of Tina’s body on the bed. She was obviously dead. He rushed to the caretaker’s and urged him to call the police.
During the inquiry, Domaille made time to meet with Tina’s ex-husband and children. ‘She had led him a terrible life,’ he said. ‘He was a Pakistani, an insignificant, ordinary fellow who did his best for her, did everything he could to help her. He wasn’t that hard up, reasonably well off money wise, but she was a bad girl.
‘I thought about why she may have gone that way, I thought about it a lot. She was in the Manningham environment where the girls get together and the girls talk. I’ve met and talked with a lot of prostitutes. They are people who have a great understanding of people in the main, a lot of them are mixed up and are to be pitied. Many girls do it because they have been driven towards it. Every now and then you meet one who is going to make her way out of it and they actually do.’ Yorkshire police officers can be as hard as nails when discussing women who take to the streets. Others working on the Yorkshire Ripper case over the years came to share Domaille’s view of most prostitutes as more sinned against than sinning. ‘Murder is murder,’ said one. ‘Even prostitutes are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, maybe somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother.’
The impressions of the boot print in blood found at the bottom of the bed sheet was later thought to have come from a Dunlop ‘Warwick’ wellington boot. However, since the bed sheet was crumpled it was difficult to determine the exact size, but a match with the boot impression found at the scene of Jackson’s murder was thought possible. The flat was full of fingerprints which then had to be gradually eliminated. The previous occupants were traced and had their fingerprints and palm prints taken for elimination purposes, but no matches were found. One set of prints belonged to a man who had returned to live in Africa, who was then traced and eliminated. A total of nine fingerprints were discovered which could not be eliminated. Domaille’s team began overhauling all the ‘live’ inquiries that were still continuing from the three previous murders. Nothing emerged that assisted their effort, with one exception, and that proved a red herring.
Tina Atkinson was a frequent user of taxis – even for the shortest of journeys. Every known taxi driver in Bradford, some 1,200 of them, was interviewed by Domaille’s murder squad, along with all convicted and known prostitutes in the city. It was during this phase of the operation that the inquiry went off on a false trail. Questioning taxi drivers revealed nothing of value. But a woman called Barbara Kathryn Miller came forward to reveal she had been attacked in Bradford two years previously. The thirty-six-year-old professional stripper was known by police to be an active prostitute in Wolverhampton, Derby and Manningham. She knew Atkinson well and was anxious to help all she could. She told of a man with a beard who picked her up in a pub in Lumb Lane. He drove a Land-Rover with a hard top and a long wheelbase. She could even remember the colour: blue with a dirty cream top. It was in a dirty condition, with a six-inch tear in the black vinyl of the passenger seat and a white square petrol can and sacking behind the driver’s seat. He drove her to a quarry in the Bolton Woods area of Bradford for sex. She believed it happened on either a Wednesday or Friday night at about 9.30 in March 1975. The punter told her to get out of the vehicle, and when she refused, he dragged her out and assaulted her, punching her stomach, chest and face. Then he threw her against the vehicle, banging the back of her head. The man fled after the woman began fighting back.
Putting the experience down as a professional hazard, she failed to tell the police. But now, in answer to the appeal from Domaille for prostitutes who had dealt with violent clients to come forward, she provided detectives with a description of her attacker which in some respects matched the description of the man who tried to kill Claxton and Tracey Browne, but in other crucial areas was wide of the mark. The woman said he was thirty-five to forty years old, five feet eight inches tall, of stocky build with untidy ginger hair, a full ginger beard and moustache, but with the beard cut short under the chin. He had blue eyes, a possible Irish accent with a slight Birmingham dialect, a scar on his left hand, and a blue and red tattoo. The photofit she gave police again bore a good likeness to similar descriptions from other women. However, it was the attacker’s use of a Land-Rover to which police paid most attention. A description of a similar man had been provided by witnesses in an earlier murder. Emily Jackson was said to have been spotted getting into a Land-Rover at about seven o’clock on the night she was killed, at the junction of Roundhay Road and Gathorne Terrace. He too was described as late forties with ginger beard and a scar on his left hand. Nearly 1,250 Land-Rovers registered in West Yorkshire were eliminated, leaving 159 untraced.
During the next three months the ninety officers investigating Atkinson’s murder made 2,300 house-to-house inquiries and 1,924 vehicle checks; completed 3,915 separate actions and took 2,161 statements. All to no avail.
Several years later Domaille ended his police career as an assistant chief constable in the West Yorkshire force. He then had a spell working for the Security Service, MI5. Now long into retirement and living in his native West Country in a town on the edge of Dartmoor, he still feels frustration and passion in equal measures about the Atkinson inquiry: ‘The only thing wrong with the inquiry was the bloody leader of the investigation – me – didn’t catch the man! What can I tell you? I tried and my team bloody tried.’
Four brutal murders and still no conceivable sign of the police catching the man responsible. News of the police investigation was now national headlines, covered extensively in the press and on radio and television. Sunday newspapers dispatched feature writers to Leeds to prepare in-depth stories. The London Weekend Television channel sent its ‘Weekend World’ team to the North to report on what it saw as a compelling story deserving in-depth analysis.
The pressure to solve these homicides was now firmly on George Oldfield and his men. It was the worst kind of professional nightmare for a senior detective. A sadistic maniac was randomly choosing vulnerable women as his prey and then callously slaughtering them. There was no motive as such, only the inner compulsions of a sick and twisted mind wielding a murder weapon. The only connection between the victims was that they were all women down on their luck with absolutely no relationship to the murderer. He appeared to have a burning inner desire to kill loose women. So far the Ripper had made fourteen children motherless, one of the few elements of the media coverage which registered in any emotional sense with the general public. That the victims were all prostitutes seemed to count against them in the public mind. While there could be sympathy for the children they left behind, their mothers received very little simply because of their active role in the oldest profession.
It was even harder for the various murder squads dealing with the separate homicides to persuade the victims’ various clients to come forward so they could be eliminated. Most men naturally feared exposure as clients of streetwalkers. A knock on the door and awkward questions from a police officer inquiring why a particular individual was in the red-light area on a given night would be understandably unwelcome in either the marital home or the workplace. The fact that the victims were selling sex ensured there was no sense of urgency among the public in seeing the killer apprehended. While the compassionate might sympathize with women forced to go on the streets, others with sterner views saw it as a sordid activity and had little empathy. The law-abiding citizens of Leeds and Bradford might have eagerly come forward with potential evidence if an elderly woman or schoolgirl had been murdered. But in the case of the Ripper victims they hung back. Senior investigating officers had to think of ways of keeping the story in the public eye in the hope of jogging a potential witness’s memory. In the red-light areas prostitutes frequented in Leeds and Bradford, actual witnesses seemed few and far between.
Yet again the local police exhausted all the tried and tested methods of solving murders. Yet again there were precious few clues. The only positive evidence was the tyre tracks found in Roundhay Park during the Richardson slaying. The team eliminating all the vehicles in West Yorkshire that could have left such tyre marks continued their foot-slogging work. Thousands and thousands of vehicles were being screened. But such huge and painstaking inquiries brought no returns and it was never easy trying to maintain morale among those given the day-to-day tasks of relentless door knocking.
Each detective taking part in this kind of inquiry has to live with the knowledge that a single false move, a question forgotten, a momentary loss of concentration, might eliminate the killer, passing over the real culprit and rendering the whole exercise futile. Such an error would leave the inquiry team working in vain, without knowing their quarry had already escaped the net. For the conscientious officer wanting to do everything he can to catch a killer, the strain of possibly making such a mistake must be enormous.
The easiest vehicles to screen in the tyre inquiry were done quickly. People who had not moved home and had kept their vehicle since the time of the Richardson murder could be seen and eliminated reasonably swiftly. It was thought unlikely that an owner would have changed all four tyres. The remaining unseen vehicles proved gradually more and more difficult to eliminate. The vehicle may have been sold, scrapped or abandoned. Each generated new lines of inquiry for the beleaguered force. Where someone said they no longer had the car, its current whereabouts had to be checked. There was also a critical need to keep the reason for the tyre operation top secret in case the killer realized the vehicle he owned might trap him. The tyres might be changed and dumped, or the vehicle crushed and turned into a three-foot cube of metal. Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry moved past the half-way stage and before midsummer 1977 more than 30,000 vehicles had been seen. For the Leeds murder squad under Hobson’s command, it seemed the best chance they had of catching the killer – providing he still had his car with him.
The process of recording who had been seen in relation to the Richardson tyre inquiry involved indexing vehicle makes and registration numbers on special cards, but with no separate name index of vehicle owners who had cars with tyres which could have matched those left at the Richardson crime scene. Although Peter Sutcliffe was the owner of one of the vehicles on Hobson’s vast list of over 50,000 potential suspects, his name as yet figured nowhere within the incident room card index system – though a record of the vehicle he owned had yet to be eliminated from the tyre inquiry. If Sutcliffe’s name should arise in connection with some other aspect of the inquiry, no one would be able to tell he had been on the list of potential suspects for the Richardson murder. There were still separate incident rooms for each of the four murders. With no computers available to handle the ever-expanding number of inquiries or the information they produced, the various incident rooms relied on the paper-led system: the keeping of various indexes relating to different aspects of the inquiry and the taking of statements – lots of them. It all took time and manpower.
In any area of Britain the number of police officers and their supervisors is a scarce resource. Precisely how much manpower was needed to devote to a ‘tracking’ inquiry that covered the whole geographical area of West Yorkshire as well as Harrogate in North Yorkshire was highly questionable. The normal pace of life in the region continued unabated, which meant other crimes also had to be tackled. Prostitute victims or not, the existence of a multiple murderer operating in the Leeds and Bradford area raised the stakes for a force CID already burdened with an average twenty-six murders to investigate every year, along with armed robberies, rapes, and sexual assaults as well as routine burglaries and vehicle crimes. Altogether in 1977 West Yorkshire Police had 128,000 crimes reported, including 5,000 crimes of violence. Roughly half these crimes were being solved.
Responsibility for not simply doing something, but being seen to do something rested ultimately with Oldfield’s boss: the chief constable, Ronald Gregory. As chief, he had total autonomy to run the operational side of the force as he thought fit. In legal terms, he alone had ‘direction and control’ of his force. As long as he carried out this task ‘efficiently’ within the terms of the 1964 Police Act, no one could tell him what to do. By tradition and by statute chief constables are independent office holders, a key feature of British democracy. A local police authority or watch committee could oversee the work of the police, but they couldn’t tell the chief constable what to do. The task of overseeing the efficiency of police forces rested with the Inspectors of Constabulary, who reported back to the Home Secretary. For generations in Britain this general rule for the well-ordered preservation of the public good had been observed: no one wanted politicians telling police officers who they could or couldn’t arrest. In 1968, Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, made the legal position of chief constables clear: ‘No Minister of the Crown can tell him that he must or must not keep observation on this place or that; or that he must not prosecute this man or that one. Nor can any Police Authority tell him so. The responsibility of law enforcement lies on him. He is answerable to the law alone.’
However, a massive investigation by one police force into four unsolved murders by the same person had its price. Manpower was stretched, and with it came a rising bill for police overtime. With the costs mounting, Gregory consulted with his local police authority and so ensured that the necessary financial resources to solve the killings were found from within the West Yorkshire Police budget. But it was also clear that something more had to be done for the public to continue to have confidence in their local police service.
De facto, the buck in 1977 stopped at George Oldfield’s first-floor office as assistant chief constable in charge of crime at the Wakefield HQ. For a year he had followed the normal procedure of handing day-to-day responsibility for each individual murder inquiry to the various senior investigating officers. In 1977, as the number of incidents involving the Ripper increased dramatically, there were sensational headlines and public disquiet. How Oldfield dealt with the pressures of the case became the source of considerable controversy over the years. That his response was to overwork himself, drink too heavily and habitually smoke his Craven A cigarettes, was undeniable. The mode of life led eventually to him having two heart attacks.
Later the spotlight would fall on Oldfield’s judgement calls. His management of twentieth-century Britain’s most important criminal investigation became the subject of unique official scrutiny. After a five-year killing spree by the Yorkshire Ripper, the failure to capture him became a national scandal and a group of Britain’s most senior detectives descended on West Yorkshire police. Their orders from the very top of the Home Office were to ‘Sort out what is going wrong’. This unprecedented move came after an outraged Margaret Thatcher herself told the Home Secretary that she was inclined to take personal charge of the Ripper inquiry.
But no one could accuse George Oldfield of being either lazy, uncommitted or a fool. He was typical of many who held similar jobs up and down Britain. He knew about crime, serious crime, and he was a good thief taker. Taking over as ACC (crime) from Donald Craig meant he had a lot to live up to. His predecessor had investigated seventy-three murders and solved every one. It had been Oldfield’s ambition, according to his wife, to become head of CID, and now he was in the hot seat. He had learned the art of mastering internal politics. Indeed, he could never have risen to assistant chief constable had he not understood the value of discretion or been in the habit of making enemies among the force hierarchy. There was, however, a persistent rumour among the higher echelons of the force’s CID that, when offered the job of ACC (crime), he had been warned he had to cut down on his drinking.
Professionally he was an enthusiastically hard worker who took his job very seriously and demanded an equally determined effort from subordinates. Though undoubtedly a leader at local level, he lacked the sophisticated knowledge and intellectually rigorous mind necessary to employ innovative procedures to break the deadlock confronting him. Normally a soft-spoken man, in the latter years of his career he could be mistaken for a country farmer. Rough shooting was his favourite pastime. He presented a bucolic appearance typical among those brought up in rural areas who have improved their station in life. He wore on occasions country tweeds, and his round face and cheeks bore the ruddy features of someone who liked the outdoor life and knew a good quality whisky when he drank it. However easygoing he was at home, his outbursts of temper at work were legendary, though not necessarily understood. He was essentially a private man, rarely speaking about his family, preferring to keep home and professional life separate. When riled by something or someone at work his anger could turn to fury in an instant. He could swear like a trooper, yet he was never one to hold grudges. Once an admonishment was delivered, so far as he was concerned it was over and dealt with, though those who worked for him frequently remembered it for years.
‘He could go bloody mad when he was angry,’ a close colleague and admirer remembered. ‘He would use abusive language and then it was all forgotten. You had had your bollocking. The next job you did for him, you were just as likely to get a pat on the back. Some of the other senior officers bore you malice; if you had dropped a clanger it was with you for life, but it wasn’t so with him.’
Oldfield ran a tight ship. He wanted to know about serious crime when it happened within the force area. A divisional detective chief inspector was expected to let Oldfield have information quickly, rather than keep him in the dark. ‘We had to ring in, he never objected to being told about something at three in the morning,’ said the same officer, who worked closely with Oldfield over many years. ‘He was quite happy, once he got to know you and how you worked, to leave a serious job that happened during the night to you. But you had to contact him before 8.55 the following morning. This was so he had the story when he was asked by the chief constable about it and when the headquarters press conference took place. If ever something came up at either of those two meetings, which he had every morning, without him having been told, you got the mother and father of a bollocking. If it happened a few times, you didn’t keep your job.’
He was born Godfrey Alexander Oldfield in 1924 and grew up in that area of eastern Yorkshire where the terrain of flat, featureless pastureland is strikingly similar to Holland and the Low Countries. He lived in his early years with his brothers, who were twins, amid the farming community on the far eastern fringes of what was then the West Riding at Monk Fryston, a small village tucked away out on its own a few miles from Castleford. His grandfather was the local blacksmith. Like many villages in those days it still had a working windmill where flour was produced. The surrounding farmland hardly rose more than twenty feet above sea level all the way to the Yorkshire Wolds.
Oldfield’s father worked for the LNER (the London and North Eastern Railway). When he was eleven the family moved several miles across the Vale of York to Cawood, where his father became local station master. It was another closely knit rural community, more a small town than a village, but it had its own branch line to the inland port of Selby five miles away. The line halted at Cawood, which had grown in importance historically because of its proximity to the River Ouse, in whose flood plain it lay. Its swing bridge provided the last crossing point on the navigable River Ouse before the ancient City of York ten miles away. Several other rivers fed the Ouse on its journey via the Humber to the North Sea forty miles distant. Formerly Cawood was one of the chief residences of the Archbishop of York, who had a fortified palace-cum-castle built there, and frequently the royal court moved there from Windsor. It was the place where Cardinal Wolsey was arrested and charged with high treason.
The move coincided with Oldfield attending one of Yorkshire’s top boys’ grammar schools, Archbishop Holgate’s in York, where he became known as ‘George’. Indeed, he insisted on the name being used because of his intense dislike of being called Godfrey. The family never used it. At home, and to his future wife, Margaret, who also lived in Cawood, he was always called ‘Goff’.
After leaving grammar school he worked briefly at Naburn Station, just outside York, on the LNER route from London to Edinburgh. His first exposure to iron discipline came as a young naval seaman during the Second World War after he joined the Royal Navy, aged eighteen, in 1942. He hardly ever talked to his family of his war service, either after he got home in 1946 or in later years. He came from that generation of stoical men made brittle by the experience of war who preferred to keep to themselves the awful truth of what they had personally witnessed rather than burden those closest to them.
As a twenty-year-old seaman he saw enemy action aboard HMS Albatross, a much-overhauled former Australian seaplane carrier. In May 1944, she set sail from Devonport and headed up the English Channel in a convoy towards the Goodwin Sands. In darkness, at four o’clock in the morning on the 23rd, she ran aground. ‘We were high and dry,’ Phil Mortimer, then a nineteen-year-old telegraphist from Poole, remembers. ‘It was dark and I think we lost our way. We had to wait for the tide to turn. We came under attack from German shore batteries at Cap Gris Nez. You could see them flashing as they fired, and then the shells landed, splashing in the water around us. It was pretty nerve wracking.’
Two weeks later, the 6,000-ton vessel was positioned off SWORD beach during the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast around Ouistreham. The Albatross had been converted specially for the invasion of France into a repair ship for landing craft. Its cranes could hoist the flat-bottomed boats out of the water so engineers could work on them. She was armed with anti-aircraft and machine guns.
Twice in late June she was hit by shellfire from German coastal batteries, which penetrated the upper deck, though the damage was superficial. Eventually she came under torpedo attack on 11 August, off Courselles, and suffered sixty-nine dead and many seriously injured, at about 6.30 in the morning. The torpedo struck in the forward mess-deck on the port side. Phil Mortimer recalls how the Albatross immediately keeled over to one side. There was a general power failure and the lights went out. In shallow water the surviving crew members managed to shore up the damage. She made her way heavily down in the water to the safety of Portsmouth Harbour, listing badly and towed stern-first by a Dutch tug, with an escort from the minesweeper HMS Acacia. On this difficult journey some twenty of those killed were lashed in their hammocks and buried at sea. Those crew members who were able were mustered aft to witness the skipper reading the prayer to the dead.
In dry dock in the minesweeping section of the naval base the water was pumped out of the Albatross. Another fifty dead lay below decks, most still in their hammocks. Members of HMS Acacia’s crew were among those detailed to go below and retrieve the bodies. They included a nineteen-year-old steward/cook from Blackpool, Frank Roberts. ‘Retrieving the trapped bodies was a really gruesome task,’ he remembered. ‘We were given a mask and a tot of rum and told to get on with it. Some of the dead we found stuck in the portholes as they tried to escape. There was a hole in the side of the ship the size of a bus. We wrapped up those still in their hammocks and brought them out. It was very traumatic and of course we had no such thing as counselling in those days.’ The bodies were then transferred to a landing craft and buried at sea off Chichester. Immediately afterwards George Oldfield was sent home on sick leave to Yorkshire, where he remained for six months with a stress-related illness.
In 1946, after demob from the Navy as a petty officer, he arrived back in Cawood as one of thousands of reasonably educated young men throughout Britain wondering what to do with the rest of their lives. The local village policeman recommended a career in the police, and Oldfield joined the West Riding force the following year. It would, he assured his family, provide him with a good steady job and a pension. It was time to get on with life and forget the awful carnage he had witnessed.
Oldfield was to become living proof that it was possible in Britain gradually to rise from humble origins via a meritocratic police service to hold an important position within the local community. Like Dennis Hoban in Leeds, he spent virtually all his career in the CID gradually rising through the ranks. Unlike Hoban, his postings were far and wide, from one end of the West Riding to the other. Harrogate for one job, Barnsley for another. By 1962 he was a detective chief inspector at Dewsbury. Two years later, he returned briefly to uniform at Keighley before being transferred to the CID staff at the Wakefield headquarters as a detective superintendent and deputy head of CID for the whole of the West Riding. In 1971 he went back into uniform as a chief superintendent for two years. Then, in 1973, he returned to West Yorkshire CID as its head, taking the place of Donald Craig, who had become an assistant chief constable. When the major amalgamation with Leeds and Bradford took place in 1974, Donald Craig held the top job in overall charge of CID. Oldfield was his deputy.
Generally he got on well with his senior colleagues. However, he did have longstanding problems with some senior detectives from the Leeds and Bradford force after amalgamation. Some of the city detectives had no time for Oldfield, nor did he for them. A great deal of the mutual distrust had its origins in an official inquiry Oldfield conducted during the mid-1960s into corruption among some city detectives in Leeds. Called in to investigate as a senior officer from outside Leeds, he was utterly ruthless during this inquiry, often undertaking forceful interrogations in an effort to get to the truth. He had the homes of suspected officers put under intense surveillance, then had their homes searched, and thus put pressure on them through their families.
‘The allegations involved taking backhanders from villains, taking things from people. We are talking about detectives,’ said one officer, familiar with the inquiry at the time. ‘Some of the Leeds lads on the Crime Squad were interviewed and they thought they had had a hard time, that they were treated like villains.’ In short, Oldfield did as he was supposed to do: his investigation was run on the lines of an inquiry into criminal behaviour. But the result was an abiding resentment amongst some officers that he had damaged officers’ careers unjustifiably.
Much of Oldfield’s effort during the corruption inquiry had centred on Brotherton House in Leeds, the City Police HQ and also the home of the local Regional Crime Squad in which some of the suspected officers had served. During the Christmas festivities that year, Oldfield was invited by the local RCS boss to their annual dinner. ‘He [the RCS boss] made a tactical bloomer,’ said one of those present. ‘It was a stupid thing to do because you do not invite someone who is conducting an outside inquiry of that sort to a Christmas dinner. George also made a bloomer in that he came to the dinner … when he came in we all walked out and went to another bar to have a drink. We had arranged that if he turned up, we’d leave as a protest. We left him with the boss.’
The same detective, who was seconded to the RCS, felt no personal animosity to Oldfield. Later he came to realize what Oldfield was up against when he returned to his home force and was subsequently himself asked to conduct an inquiry into a corrupt Leeds officer. ‘It concerned several thousand pounds worth of missing metal and an investigation that went bad,’ he said. ‘This officer tipped off the thieves. He didn’t take money for it, he was crafty enough to have gone on a foreign holiday with his wife and kids, paid for by the criminals.’
Oldfield was by nature a private man and remained very much an enigma. He virtually cultivated the image. Few of his colleagues got really close to him over the years. He and his wife Margaret, his longstanding friend from Cawood, had married in 1954. He was thirty, she twenty-six. Tragedy came seven years later when their six-year-old first born, Judith, developed leukaemia. The doctors told Oldfield that their little girl had just six months to live. Unable to give Margaret such heartbreaking news, he told his wife their daughter would live for another year. In the end she did survive another twelve months. It was a heart-aching period in both their lives. His wife saw Oldfield develop a nervous affliction as a result of the child’s death: a twitch in his shoulder, which never left him.
At work he showed the obsessive behaviour traits familiar in many senior detectives: long hours, a devotion to detail and the ability to sit through the night poring over reports, aided by cigarettes and whisky. But his home life provided an important kind of relief from the stresses and rigours of crime and criminals. He was devoted to his wife, who came from farming stock, and their three other children, two boys and another girl. The youngest, Christopher, was born when Oldfield was forty-one. They put the money aside to have them educated privately in Wakefield and all three offspring took up professional careers in, respectively, the law, accountancy and dentistry.
For a good many years the Oldfield family had to move with his job. They lived in a variety of police houses across the West Riding, in Dewsbury, Keighley and Wakefield. In 1968 they bought their first home, a bungalow high up at Grange Moor on the fringes of Huddersfield, 750 feet above sea level. From there it was a relatively quick journey down to the M62 or M1 motorways, which gave him easy access to most places within the force area. His journey to his office at Wakefield was straightforward: down the A642 and through Horbury into the city.
At home when the children were young he played with them and shared their interests as best he could. In truth the family did not see a good deal of him, but one almost sacrosanct occasion was lunch on Sunday, when the Oldfields ate en famille. Most weeks Oldfield checked the fish in the ornamental pond in his front garden, and at weekends he would poke about in his vegetable patch where he grew some of the family’s produce. At the outbreak of the Ripper killings he had just started work on building a greenhouse behind his garage. ‘He loved getting out of suits and into his old clothes to go out into the garden,’ his wife reflected. He also amused himself with old blacksmith’s and tinsmith’s tools, getting the rust off and restoring them to their original condition so he could display them in the home.
Margaret was a keen cook, and like many women from farming families she was good with the pastry and baking. When a police colleague occasionally visited the bungalow, she would bring out the results of her home baking with coffee on a tray, then discreetly take her leave so as to allow the men to discuss police business. Margaret Oldfield saw her role as keeping things normal at home. ‘If anything came up on television we would just laugh it off. We tried to keep quiet about the things he was involved in, so that he didn’t have to talk about it at home.’
His abiding sense of justice and personal knowledge of the fragility of childhood demonstrated itself in one of his inquiries as a detective chief inspector earlier in his career. He was brought in, again as an outside officer, to investigate criminal allegations of sexual assault against two young girls by a uniformed police officer. He particularly asked for a detective sergeant called Dick Holland to act as his bagman during the delicate inquiry. Holland had three daughters of his own. After some while spent gathering evidence, Oldfield determined that the officer was guilty, but they would have grave difficulty mounting a successful prosecution. He told Holland: ‘If we take this to court these girls will not stand up in court in giving evidence against a police sergeant and they will break down. It might ruin their lives.’ Oldfield had had a long talk with the girls’ parents. He wanted to ensure that the police service was not stuck with an officer who had been acquitted on a technicality of a serious offence against young girls. ‘What we want to do is get rid of this bastard. The girls have suffered enough. If they break down in court and he is reinstated, what are we left with?’
‘His whole attitude was that the police service had to get rid of this bad egg, but he was not having anything adverse happen to these little girls,’ Holland recalled. ‘Another investigator may have done it by the book and it would have gone all the way to court.’
While Oldfield was deliberately reticent at home about the crimes he was investigating, it was impossible for his wife not to see how he could be deeply affected by his work, especially when tragedy struck families with children. One night in 1974 the phone rang at 1.30 a.m. It was at the height of a series of IRA terrorist outrages in England. He answered the call and then put the phone down, telling Margaret: ‘They’ve blown up a bus.’ He got dressed and headed for the nearby M62, where a bomb had exploded on a coach carrying army personnel and their families back to Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire. He then led the major inquiry into the murders of a dozen people. Among the dead were two small children. He had witnessed for himself the horrendous aftermath of the bombing. Body parts were spread all over the carriageway. The carnage sickened him.
During murder inquiries, Oldfield always tried to spend as little time as possible at the post-mortem, perhaps as a result of what he had seen aboard HMS Albatross as a young man. He couldn’t bring himself to spend too long at the autopsies on the coach bombing victims, telling a close colleague that the mortuary resembled ‘a butcher’s shop’. Dick Holland, by now promoted to detective chief inspector, remembered: ‘He didn’t like post-mortems. He didn’t shirk his duty, but he did have the minimum contact with the bodies. He was a bloody good commander and gave the right orders [at the scene of the outrage], things like that came naturally to him. The sight of the children blown apart affected him like it affected all of us.’
Oldfield was to describe the coach bombing as the most horrifying scene of mass murder in his experience. It confirmed his view that terrorists deserved capital punishment. ‘I had the misfortune to see the terrible injuries inflicted on the victims … As long as I live I will never forget the grievous injuries suffered by those two children.’
After the first news of the coach bombing, his family didn’t see George Oldfield for several days. A week or so later he appeared to have developed a phobia about alarm clocks. ‘He told me to get rid of the clock in our bedroom,’ said Mrs Oldfield. ‘I know that incident affected him because he simply couldn’t rest, couldn’t sleep properly if he heard the ticking noise of the clock. He couldn’t stand the sound of the ticking.’
6
A Fresh Start
Several weeks before the midsummer of 1977 a key decision had been made by George Oldfield. If there was another murder in the Ripper series, then he would take command as senior investigating officer and continue with his role of ACC (crime), doing the two jobs back-to-back. He didn’t have long to wait. On Sunday morning, 26 June, nine weeks after the death of Patricia Atkinson, a woman’s body was found on waste ground in Chapeltown, Leeds. The discovery was made by two young children. The fact of the body being found in an area frequented by prostitutes was enough to justify a call to Oldfield. He immediately told the control room at force headquarters to contact Dick Holland at home. By now a detective superintendent, Holland was deputy head of CID for the Western Area, operating out of Bradford. Preparing to don an SIO’s hat, he wanted a senior detective at his side who knew how the old West Yorkshire force investigated murders.
‘He knew me and the way I worked, and he knew I would work the West Yorkshire system,’ says Holland. ‘This wasn’t going to be my murder – it was Oldfield’s, but George would be able to keep nipping off to do his job at headquarters and leave me there, knowing his will would be carried out. He regarded me as an extension of himself. If he had left Hobson in charge, it would have been done Hobson’s way.’ Holland was Oldfield’s protégé – they were West Riding men and there was mutual respect and trust. Holland, then a divorcee, would become one of the few officers invited to Oldfield’s home. The two thought alike. In Holland’s view they were ‘a bit like bookends’. A close colleague once told Holland the only difference between him and Oldfield was that, ‘George’s answer to stress and problems is a bottle of whisky. Yours is to go out and buy a steak or a meal.’ Holland – a giant of a man who turned out rain and shine for the force rugby team – was a non-smoking, non-drinking foodaholic. ‘I knew how to switch off and I enjoy the company of women. George was set in his ways. You weren’t going to change George,’ he said.
He drove to Leeds at high speed down the motorway, to find Oldfield had just beaten him to the murder scene. Oldfield came to greet him, then directed him to a patch of derelict land in front of a children’s adventure playground in Reginald Street, next to a dilapidated factory building scheduled for demolition. It was overlooked by two streets. Three-storey Edwardian terraced houses in Reginald Terrace faced the playground on one side; the rear gardens and outhouses of a row of large semi-detached houses looked across on to the crime scene on the other side of Reginald Street. The playground itself resembled a Wild West stockade, its boundary fencing made of timbered railway sleepers driven several feet into the ground, with sawn lengths of barked timber secured at the top to a height of about seven feet. The equipment in the children’s play area was made from large timbers, including telegraph poles. One half of what had been a pair of hinged timbered gates at the entrance into the stockade remained shut. The other gate was missing.
A mobile police command with a tall radio mast had been positioned in Reginald Street, complete with its own power generator. Roads had been cordoned off and detectives with clipboards were already knocking on doors. Milling around were members of the Leeds murder squad, who had received an early ‘shout’ of possibly another Ripper killing. They did not know Oldfield had decided on a change of tactics. Neither, apparently, did Jim Hobson, who as head of the city’s CID was present and expecting to lead another murder inquiry. He was trying to drive along his Ripper investigation, anxiously following the progress of the tyre inquiry and organizing a small proactive undercover operation in the Chapeltown area using a few women police officers as decoys. His team were starting to gear up for a major investigation when Oldfield announced he was taking charge and bringing in his own team of supervisors.
Oldfield wanted a fresh start, using the West Yorkshire murder investigation system drawn up by his predecessor, Donald Craig. Holland’s most important task would be to indoctrinate the Leeds murder incident room team into using the West Yorkshire system of keeping records. It meant more statements would be taken. The Leeds system relied not on paper but on activity, with paperwork kept to a minimum. Oldfield wanted much more detail, especially in terms of descriptions of people seen around the crime scene at relevant times.
Holland explained the reason: ‘If somebody says, “I was saying goodnight to my girlfriend outside No. 14 Reginald Terrace when I saw a man come past in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, pale blue shirt and dark blue trousers,” you want to be able to consult the index system in the incident room to find out who fits that description and see who has been identified and make sure this person has been properly eliminated.’ The Leeds system was excellent at dealing with murders committed by local people. Most were quickly solved because detectives were not bogged down by paperwork; they could put manpower to better use. But if the inquiry became protracted, Oldfield believed, a more thorough system of record keeping based on detailed statements was essential, especially if they were going to mount a successful prosecution. And that was the ultimate goal: to get the guilty man into court and put away.
Inside the playground area was a single-storey, white-painted clubhouse covered in graffiti. A scenes-of-crime photographer stood on the felt-covered flat roof taking pictures, looking down at the corpse on the ground behind the wooden fence, and at the general area of waste ground towards Reginald Street already marked out in white tape. The senior detectives had to wait until the photographer completed his work on the roof before going to see the body. Near the corpse lay an old spring mattress, dumped alongside a pile of rubbish, including a rolled-up length of disused carpet. One of the woman’s shoes, which bore an impossibly long high heel, lay beside her foot.
Because a local pub was a regular haunt of prostitutes, the automatic assumption was that the victim was a street walker. Oldfield and Holland strolled over a tarmac path crossing the waste land, which contained a considerable amount of rubbish. Oldfield pointed out a woman’s imitation leather handbag lying beside the path, a few feet from Reginald Street. Adjacent to it was a piece of rough paper which appeared heavily bloodstained.
The sandy soil leading to the playground entrance was bone dry. A clear trail, consisting of a line of spots and splashes of blood, together with furrows in the soil that looked like drag marks, led down the gentle slope from Reginald Street towards the gateway. Inside the playground on the right side, close to the boundary brick wall of the derelict factory and lying parallel with the timber fencing, was the body of the young woman. From the street she was completely hidden. She lay face down with her head six feet from the brick wall. The legs were stretched out straight and the feet were crossed, the left over the right; the left arm was bent up with the hand beneath her head, the right arm stretched out beside the body. There were large quantities of rubbish and refuse, old tin cans, broken bottles and other material around the corpse.
The body was clad in a grey jacket which had been partly pulled upwards to the shoulders exposing bare skin in her lower back. Her blue and white checked skirt was rumpled towards the upper part of her thighs. One of her high-heeled pale yellow ‘clog’ shoes was still in place; her black tights had a hole visible in the left heel. On closer inspection, the detectives could see blood soiling her head and left hand as well as her jacket and skirt. Vertical trickles of blood ran downwards from the back of the chest across the sides of her body.
By now Professor Gee had arrived. He walked across the wooden duck-boarding into the playground to join the group of officers behind the fence. A fingerprint officer and forensic scientist were making a superficial examination of the body. Green bottle flies buzzed around the victim who they could now see was a young woman, probably in her teens. As the photographer took his pictures flies appeared on her jacket and hair. After a while Gee himself lifted the skirt to expose her underwear. A pale blue underskirt had been raised slightly upwards. Her tights were in the normal position and beneath them she wore a black pair of pants and an external sanitary pad. Peter Swann, the fingerprint expert, wanted some of the woman’s clothing sent away for special examination. The jacket had obviously been pulled up towards the victim’s head by the killer. To prevent contamination, plastic bags were placed over her shoes and hands. The body was then gently raised, the belt of her skirt and the zip fastener at the side were loosened so the skirt could be removed. Her jacket, held by one button across the front of her chest, was also undone and removed, revealing a blue and white sun top bunched up in the upper part of the back. Beneath it was a single stab wound.
Indications confirmed she had been dragged along the ground. Debris was caught in the centre of the straps at the back of the sun top. A piece of paper was discovered in the folds of the left side of the skirt in front of the abdomen. When the body was turned over and placed on a plastic sheet they saw blood soiling the young woman’s face. She looked very young and wore no bra. Her sun top was displaced, exposing the nipple of her left breast. In the front of the central upper region of her abdomen was a large wound and embedded in it was part of the broken top of a bottle with a screw top. Gee pointed out two irregular wounds to the scalp. After mortuary officials took the body away, two more pools of blood were found – one where the abdomen had lain, the other close to the head.
During a four-hour post-mortem that afternoon Gee found three semi-circular lacerated wounds to the scalp typical of other Ripper killings, along with depressed fractures to the skull. In the chest area, in addition to the large wound containing the bottle top, was a series of long scratches and cuts. A large stab wound in her back had penetrated various organs, including heart, kidneys and lungs. Gee thought a thin-bladed weapon, not less than six and a half inches long, had been thrust through the two openings on the front and back of the body. Multiple thrusts, perhaps as many as twenty, had been made in and out of the same wound, causing it to become much enlarged. The broken bottle top probably entered the chest as the victim was turned over on the ground. She had first been hit on the back of the head at the edge of the waste ground and fallen. She was then struck again on the head and, while still alive, dragged by hands under the armpits from the point where her handbag was found, down the slope and into the playground area.
The body initially lay on its back when the stab wounds at the front were inflicted. Then it was turned on its face and further stab wounds made to the back. Gee knew for sure she was not yet dead when some of these stab wounds were made because he found a large quantity of blood in each chest cavity. The killer had removed the knife from the back wound and then wiped each side of the blade on the skin on the woman’s back. Death had occurred some time between midnight and 3 a.m.
Soon after arriving at the crime scene, Jim Hobson had someone search the handbag found on the waste and her identity was quickly established. She was Jayne Michelle MacDonald, a sixteen-year-old who lived near by in Scott Hall Avenue. Wilma McCann, the Ripper’s first victim, had been a close neighbour in the same road, just six doors away. It seemed probable that Jayne MacDonald was mistaken for a prostitute when she was killed taking a short cut home across the waste ground, probably only a hundred yards from safety. She had gone with a girlfriend to a city centre bar, the Hofbrauhaus, at eight o’clock on the Saturday night, and left in the company of a young man aged about eighteen, with broad shoulders and a slim waist.
Jayne was a singularly pretty teenager with shoulder-length light brown hair; a good-looking girl, according to her friends, always smiling and truly the apple of her father Wilfred’s eye. He collapsed when police told him Jayne had been murdered, and subsequently developed nervous asthma and chronic bronchitis and never returned to his job with British Rail. He spent days on end staring at a photo of his daughter and patiently carving a wooden cross from the ladder of her old bunk bed. It came to mark Jayne’s last resting place. He couldn’t forget what he had seen in the mortuary when he went to identify her body. According to his wife, Irene, all he would say was that there was blood over Jayne’s beautiful hair.
Jayne had left a local high school a few months previously at Easter to work in the shoe department at Grandways supermarket in Roundhay Road. It sounds like a cliché to say she was a happy-go-lucky teenager, but in her case it was true. She loved life, indeed had everything to live for, and liked to spend her money on clothes and going out dancing or roller skating. Hers was a close-knit community, the kind where neighbours and friends did favours for one another and whose children were in and out of each other’s homes. One such family were the Bransbergs, who had a telephone, unlike the MacDonalds. Normally, if Jayne was planning to stay over at a girlfriend’s house, she would call the Bransbergs and they would tell her parents. Wilf MacDonald and Irene were a loving and devoted couple who kept a close eye on all their children, four girls and a son. Recently Jayne had broken off a relationship with a boyfriend, believing he was getting ‘too serious’. In their eyes, she was a bonny girl with a trim figure for her age, who simply drew the boys. They liked to believe their daughter was ‘innocent’, which in 1977 meant they thought she had not yet lost her virginity. In fact she had been having regular intercourse with her two previous boyfriends.
Jack Bransberg worked for British Rail with Jayne’s father. She had called to see him and his wife before going into town on Saturday night. She was going dancing at the Astoria Ballroom, then on to another discotheque. When, later that night, Jayne didn’t phone to say she would be late, both her parents and the Bransbergs assumed she had had a little too much to drink, stayed with a friend and forgot to telephone. Wilf MacDonald was furious Jayne had not called, more concerned about her thoughtlessness than anything else. After the death of Wilma McCann, all local parents had been alarmed the killer might strike again. But that was twenty-one months before and the fear was starting to wear off. Nevertheless Jayne had several times promised her mother she would never walk home alone in the dark.
As with all the relatives of the Ripper’s victims so far, the tragedy had a devastating effect on the family, the more so perhaps because this was a sixteen-year-old, carefree girl about to begin life when she was snatched away in such a brutal fashion. ‘He has killed my Jayne,’ cried a tearful Mrs MacDonald. ‘She was a virgin. A clean-living girl. How many more?’
Her husband was still under sedation, too shocked to be interviewed. The family doctor said the entire family was in a terrible state: ‘The husband is very bad and I have had to give him a sedative injection this morning because he has been in a state of complete collapse. This has been added to because of the fact that he had to go down and identify his daughter and see the terrible injuries she had suffered. This is an awful lot for any man to put up with. The murder itself is something which is a terrible thing to have to accept but to have to go down and identify the body and see the full extent of this is just making it even worse.’
Neighbours and friends of the MacDonalds rallied round to give them support, with several helping around the house. Others vented their feelings in a different way. The day after the murder white painted graffiti appeared on a nearby wall: ‘SCOTT HALL SAYS HANG THE RIPPER!’
Piecing together the last few hours of Jayne’s life took detectives several days of foot slogging. Oldfield wanted a minute breakdown of where she went after leaving the city centre. A detailed surveyor’s street map of the area, showing every house, was blown up and placed on a wall of the incident room on the top floor of Millgarth Police Station. He wanted to flag everyone who had been in the area at the relevant time in the hope someone must have seen the killer and possibly his car.
The Hofbrauhaus in the Merion Centre in Leeds was a Bierkeller and one of the city’s earliest themed pubs. It advertised German beer for only 32p a pint, and although trade could be slow early in the week, come Thursday, Friday and Saturday the place hotted up and the ale began to flow. Chief attraction was an ‘Oompah Band’, a fake German band dressed in leather shorts and Tyrolean hats which played songs like ‘The Happy Wanderer’ and waltzes associated with the Black Forest and Austria. Despite being under legal drinking age, Jayne had no trouble gaining entry. She met a local lad, Mark Jones, whose fair hair was brushed back off his face and who wore a dark velvet jacket, a light coloured shirt and dark flared trousers. There was a clear mutual attraction. She had not drunk any alcohol in the crowded bar, preferring soft drinks on what was already a warm night. When the Hofbrauhaus closed at 10.30 they left to walk into the city centre with his friends. Eventually the others drifted off until he and Jayne were left alone. They stopped for a bag of chips in the city centre, and then realized Jayne had missed her last bus. It was about midnight. They started walking up the York Road towards Chapeltown, Mark promising that his sister, who lived near by, would drive her home. When they reached his sister’s house, he saw her car wasn’t there, and they continued walking towards St James’s Hospital. They went into the garden of the nurses’ home and lay there on the ground for forty-five minutes, having a kiss and a cuddle. Jones later told detectives that Jayne was still having a period. She had promised him they would have sex together if he met her during the week.
The young couple later set off walking towards Harehills, but when they reached Becket Street they parted company. It was now 1.30 a.m. Mark himself had to go to his home on a nearby council estate. Jayne didn’t seem at all bothered. Close by was Grandways, the supermarket where she worked. If she couldn’t hail a taxi, she was used to walking home. So they bade each other farewell and promised to renew their assignation the following Wednesday. She walked off along Becket Street towards Harehills Road. Several people saw her walking along in her ridiculously high ‘clog’ shoes, including two AA patrolmen in their vehicle parked near St James’s Hospital. At about 1.40 she was seen in Bayswater Mount, walking in the direction of Roundhay Road. She was last seen about five minutes’ walk from the murder scene at 1.45 a.m. walking through Chapeltown. A woman living in Reginald Terrace said that around 2 a.m. she had heard a banging and scuffling from the adventure playground, followed by the voice of what sounded like a Scotsman mouthing obscenities.
The murder squad’s attempts to detail individual people’s movements along a few residential streets at 2 a.m. in the morning might seem reasonably straightforward, given the expectation that most people would be tucked up in bed asleep. But not in Chapeltown on a Saturday night. It was a veritable hive of activity. This was a strong immigrant area. There were people here from Eastern Europe, working-class Jews who could not afford to reside in the northern hills around Leeds. There were families from the New Commonwealth, particularly West Indians, many of whom attended illegal drinking clubs, where the sacred brown ‘weed’ was rolled into six-inch joints for mutual recreation and spiritual enlightenment. Oldfield later estimated some two hundred people were out and about in the immediate vicinity of the route Jayne walked once she left Mark Jones. Of these, some fifty were thought to be in or around the Reginald Street/Reginald Terrace area at the crucial time. Oldfield was desperate to identify and eliminate any of these people. Forty revellers were drinking in a West Indian club and left to attend a party in nearby Sholebroke Avenue.
A free-phone telephone service was set up in the incident room in the hope that someone might just have seen Jayne or the killer. But this was a time preceding the inner-city riots of the 1980s by only a few years. There was a recession, with rising unemployment, government cutbacks and little funding for the inner cities or urban renewal. There were tensions between police and some in the immigrant communities, particularly the younger element. They tended to avoid each other if possible, so it was not surprising if witnesses from among this section of the community were not flooding forward to help in the Ripper investigation.
On the blown-up wall map in the incident room were two hundred taggings of people and vehicles from 1 until 4 a.m. Some were individuals, some groups. Each was represented by a flag. Some were positive sightings where police had identified or interviewed a particular person. But there were also blanks. Oldfield was anxious to fill them in: ‘My problem is in identifying those people. Once I can identify them and eliminate them I am hoping I shall be left with one or two or three, or a handful of individuals, who have not come forward and have a reason for not coming forward. The trouble I am having is that we are getting cooperation from certain members of the public who are feeding this information of having seen people there, but some sections of the public, for reasons best known to themselves, are reluctant to come forward and admit they were in that area on this particular night. They are the ones who represent the blank spaces I cannot fill. It is frustrating … I am not interested why they were there. The only individual I am concerned about who was in that area at that time is the killer. Anyone else I want him to come forward so I can eliminate him, and find that killer.’ Oldfield told the local TV news: ‘I believe the man we are looking for has a good knowledge of the Leeds area but he does not necessarily live in Leeds.’
Oldfield began to get more and more desperate in his appeals for help. They had a paucity of evidence. The finger-tip search of the area around the playground revealed absolutely zero. In Jayne’s handbag there were some bus tickets on which the forensic lab found fingerprints that could not be identified. A cigarette packet discovered near the body bore fingerprints which were never eliminated. The Ripper had appeared and disappeared like a phantom, and this in itself added to the gossip-driven mythology surrounding both his identity and the supposed ‘ritual’ slaying of his victims.
Oldfield’s greatest fear was that the killer would strike again – and soon. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that he will strike again. The big questions are when, where and who is going to be his next victim.’ He was convinced there were many people living in the immediate area who had not come forward. He made several urgent public appeals for witnesses before there was another murder, asking local church and community leaders for assistance. The murder squad also began re-examining old files of attacks on women.
Oldfield believed the killer had definitely taken four of his previous victims in his car after picking them up for sex. He was positive other women who probably were not prostitutes may have been propositioned or offered a lift and had turned the killer away. He hoped the man’s face peering out of the car window would still be fresh in their minds. ‘We believe the man we want must have tried it more than once and been turned down.’ One case they focused on closely was a serious assault on a thirty-four-year-old woman in an alleyway in Keighley two years previously in July 1975. Mrs Anna Rogulski had been assaulted and left badly injured. Oldfield told journalists she had been struck over the head with a blunt instrument and had injuries to her body similar to those of the Ripper’s victims. Sadly they failed to listen to Marcella Claxton from Chapeltown, who was convinced it was the Ripper who attacked her. The day after Jayne was killed, she told a reporter she was sure the man who bludgeoned her was also responsible for the girl’s murder.
A ten-year-old boy and a housewife, both living in Chapeltown, contacted the incident room. The woman had started noting down the registration numbers of kerb crawlers after being pestered by a man in a car. The boy had been collecting car numbers – hundreds of them. Officers were detailed to check the owners. Oldfield, by now very much the public face of the police investigation, asked residents to jot down the registration number of any vehicle acting suspiciously or kerb crawling and ring the police. ‘They will not be wasting our time,’ he said. Nothing more clearly reflected the desperate situation he was in as senior investigating officer.
Finally Oldfield made a firm decision to bring the documentation for all five murders under one roof. The paperwork for the four previous killings was integrated into a major incident room on the top floor at Millgarth. A few doors down from the purpose-built incident room, Oldfield shared an office with Dick Holland and another superintendent, Jack Slater. They were working an average thirteen hours a day, arriving at 9.15 a.m. in time for a ten o’clock briefing at which they updated officers conducting house-to-house inquiries. Top priority was trying to maintain their morale. They left to go home between 10 p.m. and midnight. At that stage Holland and Slater were reviewing the paperwork, dispensing actions to the troops on the ground, checking follow-ups. They filtered the stuff Oldfield ought to see, and the paperwork began to pile up. Occasionally his other job at the Wakefield HQ held up his work on the Ripper inquiry. Suddenly he would announce: ‘I’m stopping tonight.’ He would make sure he had half a bottle of decent whisky on hand, taking frequent sips until he had cleared the backlog. Then he would go and bed down in the section house of the police station, where a number of single constables had rooms, so he would be ready and available for work first thing the next morning.
Holland directed that a detective inspector or detective chief inspector trained in the West Yorkshire murder system should work on every shift in the incident room. Their job was to check incoming statements. The Leeds staff hadn’t taken kindly to the changes Holland made. ‘Their reaction was hostile to start with,’ he said. ‘They were moaning and trying to get away. At that stage I actually worked in the incident room seeing that everything that went there was done in the West Yorkshire style. Now that had never been done in Leeds until then.’
The house-to-house inquiries were widened until the occupants of 679 homes in twenty-nine streets were seen and interviewed. Many houses were in multiple occupation. Nearly 3,700 statements were taken. Checks were made on all men taken into police custody for offences of violence, particularly if they involved women. Oldfield also organized a seminar with twenty-five psychiatrists from Yorkshire in an unsuccessful effort to get assistance from mental hospitals about patients who might be suspects.
Prostitutes were questioned in detail about regular clients even as the Leeds police began clamping down on soliciting in Chapeltown. On the one hand, they wanted the women’s cooperation; on the other, they were trying to put them out of business. At the same time Jim Hobson was mounting a covert operation of static observations, with officers recording registration numbers of vehicles trying to pick up women in the red-light district. Lists of registrations numbers could then be examined after any future murder and the drivers traced and interviewed. Over the next few months, 152 women were arrested and reported for soliciting, and sixty-eight more cautioned.
It was a measure of Oldfield’s frustration and desperation that he virtually begged people to support the police effort: ‘The public have the power to decide what sort of society they want. If they want murder and violence then they will keep quiet. If they want a law-abiding society in which their womenfolk can move freely without fear of attack from the likes of the individual we are hunting, then they must give us their help.’
A month after the murder the trail had gone cold, but the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, MP for a Leeds constituency, seemed to have full confidence in the West Yorkshire force. He paid a visit to the incident room in Leeds and was asked how concerned he was that ‘The Ripper’ had been at large so long. ‘I am no more concerned than the chief constable,’ he replied. ‘Often piecing evidence together, considering it, analysing it, does take time unless someone is there with a camera when the murder is committed.’
Considering that five women had been killed by the same hand within a small geographical area, this answer appeared somewhat flippant. But as the law stood, the Home Secretary could have said little else. He simply could not interfere. His own Home Office colleague, Dr Shirley Summerskill, had made the position clear during a debate on the Black Panther case twelve months previously. Britain’s criminal justice system relied on the operational autonomy of the police.
The press at this stage was describing ‘The Ripper’ as Yorkshire’s most wanted killer. No policeman pointed out to the Home Secretary during his visit that this was a national problem rather than a little local difficulty. Neither did they reveal they hadn’t a hope of catching the man – unless he tried to kill again. In such a hopeless situation there were few words of comfort that Oldfield or his colleagues could find for the MacDonald family when they buried Jayne. Those who have never suffered bereavement in such circumstances can have no comprehension of the feelings of the families. Wilf MacDonald later described in a television interview the moment he learned of his daughter’s death:
The police came in and said ‘Are you the father of Jayne MacDonald’, I said ‘Yes’. I said ‘I’ll kill her when she comes home because she didn’t phone last night’. They said you may not have to … and that’s as much as I knew … if she had died of you know illness or accident but when it happens like it did, mutilation and everything, I went to identify her and … I just collapsed there and then. He has murdered the whole family you can almost say.
Oldfield’s surviving daughter was about the same age as Jayne, and a pupil at Wakefield Girls’ High School, hoping to go on to university to study dentistry. His heart went out to Wilf MacDonald, and soon after her murder he made a private visit to the family to pledge he would not rest until the man who killed Jayne was caught. In October 1979, Wilf MacDonald too was dead, aged sixty. He was buried in a grave next to his beloved daughter. His family emphatically believed he never recovered from Jayne’s murder and died of a broken heart.
In the months following the death of Jayne MacDonald, Oldfield’s nightmare scenario, that the killer would go on attacking women again and again, came true. Two weeks after he struck down Jayne, Mrs Maureen Long became his latest victim. She survived the attack but at a terrible cost. Twenty-five years later, in her sixties, she still suffers as a result of the head injuries she received. In conversation she is very nervous, clasping her hands to stop them shaking. She cannot watch anything on television that involves violence. She has bouts of depression and anger.
In July 1977, Maureen was forty-two, the mother of several children and separated from her husband. She hadn’t had an easy life by any means. At various times she had been in trouble with the police. She enjoyed the company of men but was certainly no prostitute. She lived with another man in Farsley on the borders of Leeds and Bradford. According to a police report, although she and her husband were separated, they continued to have a friendly relationship and she still held a good measure of affection for him. On Saturday night, 9 July, they met up in a Bradford pub and she drank four pints of lager in his company. When the pub was closing, around 11.10 p.m., she headed alone in her long black dress for the Mecca Ballroom in Manningham Lane. She was a woman who loved dressing up in her finest and going out for the evening, especially to a night out dancing. Maureen was a regular at the Mecca and well known to many of the staff. The music played, she danced with several men and continued drinking. Her last clear memory was of going to the cloakroom at about 2 a.m. on the Sunday morning. Outside a ‘hot dog’ salesman preparing to close up his pitch for the night saw her leave the Mecca heading for the city centre.
Her recall of subsequent events is hazy. Police believe that, infused with alcohol and in a befuddled state, she may have been going to see her husband, who lived in Reynell Street. Later, at around 3.15 a.m., a security guard, Frank Whitaker, who worked at the Tanks & Drums Ltd factory abutting on Bowling Back Lane, heard his dog bark. He went to the main entrance and looked up the lane. An engine revved up and he saw a car without lights initially drive off at high speed out of Mount Street. He was certain it was a white Ford Cortina Mark II with a black roof. He thought there might have been something heavy in the boot.
Next morning, at around 8.30, the residents of a gypsy caravan site off Bowling Back Lane heard shouts for help coming from near by. Police were called and on a patch of rubbish-strewn open land they found Maureen Long in a deeply distressed condition.
‘All I remember was trying to pick myself up,’ she said. ‘I kept falling and then I wondered what was wrong with me, and I kept falling back and as I were trying to pull myself up, falling back again. Then I was screaming and I heard this dog barking, and someone say: “Oh, you’re all right,” and that’s all I remember. When you get hit over the back of the head you can’t remember things. If I hadn’t had beer that night I’d have died of hypothermia.’
The person who attacked her obviously left her for dead. Her clothing was displaced. Her bra had been pulled down to her waist, her tights and pants pulled to her knees. Suffering very severe head injuries, she was rushed by ambulance to Bradford Royal Infirmary, where doctors saved her life. There was a large depressed fracture of the skull, and five stab wounds to the front and side of her trunk and left shoulder. She also had three fractured ribs. Her head injuries were so severe that she required specialist neurosurgery at the Leeds General Infirmary. Professor Gee examined Maureen in hospital at Bradford a few hours after she was admitted. Accompanied by Oldfield and Holland, he stood beside her bed in a cubicle in the casualty department. Her head had been partially shaved by the neurosurgical senior registrar, revealing the severe lacerations to her skull. A police surgeon took various swabs from intimate areas, searching for potential forensic evidence. One of the stab wounds had penetrated her liver, though she had not suffered from gross bleeding. Gee thought her lucky to be alive.
She spent nine weeks in hospital before being discharged but continued as an out-patient for many years because of fits as a result of her head injuries. Maureen couldn’t provide the police with much help. She had woken up in the intensive care ward of the local hospital. That Maureen’s memory was poor did not surprise Holland. He had recently worked on a stabbing case in Bradford where a (non-Ripper) victim’s memory was impaired because of loss of blood and consequently loss of oxygen to the brain. ‘They got her brain functioning again perfectly, she hadn’t brain damage, but everything that was stored on her “disk”, if you like, to use a computer analogy, prior to the stabbing had gone forever.’
Holland’s belief that extensive head injuries made a surviving victim’s memory unreliable was understandable though tragically mistaken. Yet he eagerly grasped at one clue provided by Maureen Long. She described the man who gave her a lift as being a fair-haired white male, aged about thirty-five, thickset, over six feet tall, and having what could have been a white car …
The Ripper squad had already targeted taxi drivers in Leeds and Bradford as potential prime suspects. Many prostitutes, including Tina Atkinson, used taxis. More than 600 cab drivers were interviewed. A taxi driver called Terry Hawkshaw, whose physical appearance was similar to the description provided by Long, was top of their list. He lived with his sixty-seven-year-old mother in an old terraced house at Drighlington, between Leeds and Bradford. He was thirty-six, six feet tall, weighed fifteen or sixteen stone and had rather long fair hair brushed back, a fresh complexion and a round, almost babyish face – a bit saggy and flabby, as was his whole build. He dressed casually, but not scruffily – a typical taxi driver who did his own repairs. He also drove a white car.
Hawkshaw was one of fifteen men at that stage regarded as strong suspects, whose alibis were to be thoroughly checked for the night Jayne MacDonald was killed. Some were flagged to be kept under observation and taken in for questioning the moment another Ripper incident occurred. Hawkshaw, now dead, had been seen in his taxi near the Mecca Ballroom on the crucial night. He came under close scrutiny because he was a taxi driver who drove a white Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof and made a living ferrying prostitutes and their clients. ‘He allowed them to have it off in the back of his taxi,’ Holland revealed. Oldfield suspected Hawkshaw got sexual thrills out of watching the prostitutes at work on the back seat. A search of his accounts revealed taxi receipts proving that he had the opportunity to have carried out several of the Ripper attacks – he was in close proximity to the red-light area at the material times.
There was not enough evidence to hold him in a police cell, so Oldfield arranged for him to help the police with their inquiries without arresting him. He was virtually kidnapped and held incommunicado. Oldfield took him in as a prime suspect despite the fact that legally the police were not allowed to hold him at a police station. So he was kept for over thirty-six hours at the Detective Training School at Bishopgarth in Wakefield, which has a thirteen-storey accommodation block just across the road from the force headquarters. No student courses were being held and the flats on the top floor were empty.
This was not the first time this had happened. Suspects in other serious cases had previously been questioned at the Detective Training School when there was a danger of leaks to the media. Oldfield was anxious also that other police officers were kept in the dark about the fact that they were questioning a ‘prisoner’ who was not a prisoner. It was a high-risk strategy and could have landed some of West Yorkshire’s most senior detectives in hot water had it backfired. Hawkshaw’s civil rights were clearly denied in the belief they had a strong suspect for five murders. Nowadays, he could probably have sued for wrongful imprisonment; the officers involved would have been disciplined, the Police Complaints’ Authority involved, questions asked in Parliament, with the media becoming self-righteous and the civil rights lobby having a field day. Today, without question, someone’s head would have rolled, probably several. That it was done at all was a measure of the sheer desperation the Ripper’s reign of terror had caused among the senior detectives. The cost of the inquiry so far was approaching £1 million.
‘He was not arrested, and I’m playing with words here,’ Holland admitted. ‘There was a detective who slept at his door to make sure he went nowhere, but he was not arrested. It was a long way down, thirteen storeys, if he’d gone out of the window. We took him there because there wasn’t enough evidence for putting him in one of the cells. We found a way of holding him, without “holding him”. In the euphemism of the day, he was “assisting police with inquiries”. He knew where he was going. I would have defended it to his lawyer by saying he was just being interviewed. The legal test then was that if he had chosen to go, if he had said, “I’m leaving”, would you have stopped him? I would have said, “No.” He agreed to come, so he couldn’t have made a complaint that we had kidnapped him. We did not give him the impression he was under arrest. We didn’t read any caution, but the law was different then. You only had to caution when you had some real evidence, but we felt we had strong grounds for suspicion. We had all day on him verifying his story, verifying what he was doing, forensically checking his car. He really fitted the bill as described by Long, and had the car described by the night watchman, so we hadn’t dreamed his name up. He had also visited the pubs and clubs frequented by Richardson and Jackson. He also had two hammers which were checked – so circumstantially he was a strong candidate. Forensic later gave us a negative report [on the hammers].
‘He didn’t get rough treatment. We’d been going all day and well into the night. This is typical George. Hawkshaw was quite open. He was talking to us and he was saying, “Yes, I do run prostitutes. I get paid, they pay a bit more than the standard fare if they use my taxi. I might help prostitutes, but I am not a murderer.” That was his line and he was quite frank and he was softly spoken. He might have had a kinky streak and I think he was a soft touch for the prostitutes. But he made a bit more money.’
Information provided by Hawkshaw was checked with the files. Oldfield, convinced that he’d got his man, cross-questioned him for hours on end. For Hawkshaw, the whole experience was terrifying: ‘It was a nightmare,’ he said. ‘When George Oldfield sits behind his desk and tells you he thinks you are the Ripper, blimey, it turns your stomach over. They told me: “Come and sit here. Terence, this fellow wants catching. He is not bad, it’s just his mind.” The police nearly convinced me I was out of my head. They said someone with a split personality could be like the killer. He could be normal in the day and all of a sudden his mind goes click and he kills someone.’
After a considerable time – by now it was 3.45 in the morning – Oldfield decided: ‘It’s crunch time.’ Holland was unsure whether Hawkshaw was out of the frame. Looking at his watch, Oldfield decided to defer a decision which wasn’t going his way. He thought they should snatch some sleep in the empty training school study/bedrooms. ‘We will start again at nine o’clock,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, we’ll have an extra half-hour, we’ll start at 9.30!’ He had laid on breakfast and an early call.
‘Now that was the sort of boss he was,’ said Holland. ‘He thought he’d given us the earth because he’d given us an extra half-hour and paid for our breakfast. He hadn’t paid himself, he’d authorized the force to pay for our breakfast. So we got a free cooked meal and an extra half-hour in fucking bed! We had worked all day until a quarter to four in the morning.’
After thorough searches of his taxi and his mother’s home, in the end Hawkshaw was allowed to return home: ‘We had no evidence, forensic had turned up absolutely nothing; because it wasn’t him, they’d done their job. Forensic can be a two-edged sword to the investigator, but it’s a good thing from the point of view of the innocent person. It revealed absolutely nothing to connect him [with the attacks] and we would have expected something. The hammers he had were not of the same dimension and weight we were looking for. We needed time to have those things examined. We had him for the best part of forty-eight hours when the point came when we had to say: “Thank you, Mr Hawkshaw,” and let him go. Then we fixed up a team of detectives to shadow him discreetly night and day. That was done chiefly with crime squad cars supplemented by murder squad detectives. There were twelve men a day on this. Eventually he realized he was being followed. We checked with his books and records of taxi runs and he was in the right area to have the opportunity to have committed eight of the attacks.
‘I don’t think we did anything illegal. In order to do our job, we were deliberately sailing as near to the wind as we could. We were just on the side of legality. We planned to interrogate him and keep him away [from any potential leak of information]. You’ve got to appreciate, it would have been all over the media if we had a suspect in for the Ripper.’ The surveillance on Hawkshaw lasted for some considerable time until he was completely exonerated and alibied for one of the Ripper murders.
John Domaille decided he could not afford to wait for the Ripper to strike again in order to move the inquiry forward. He decided as a new tactic to enlist the help of the latest victim herself. So, several months after the attack, Maureen Long cooperated with the Ripper Squad in mounting an undercover operation to see if she could recognize the Ripper and help them arrest him. For three weeks running she went out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in Bradford, accompanied by a woman detective sergeant, Megan Winterburn. To the uninitiated they were two women out on the town together, and Winterburn, then in her thirties, found Maureen affable and pleasant. ‘She didn’t deserve what happened to her,’ she said. ‘She was very fortunate to have survived the injuries she had. Maureen made no bones about saying she was a Ripper victim and liked to show off her scars.’
To prepare for this undercover assignment in the pubs and nightclubs of Bradford, Megan Winterburn had ceased washing her hair, letting it go lank. She found a seedy outfit, including a rather old Afghan coat. ‘Mr Domaille said that if I dressed up as I normally do to go out, I’d stand out like a sore thumb,’ she said. ‘I had the most smelly Afghan coat, a raw suede coat with this horrible fur round the collar and embroidered sections on the front, and fur round the bottom. I went a little bit over the top with the make-up and tried to blend in with the rest of the clientele.’
During a night out she let Maureen do her own thing. Another detective accompanied them, keeping in the background but maintaining close watch as they drank and danced at West Yorkshire police expense. The pair built up a good rapport. On a few occasions Megan watched her new friend get loaded. She once asked her whether she always got this drunk when she went out. ‘No,’ replied Maureen, ‘it’s just that it makes me feel safe.’
Megan Winterburn, a married detective on plain-clothes undercover duty, handbag slung over her shoulder, was getting an education into the seedier side of life. She visited pubs she would otherwise have avoided and she had never been a night club person. To her Maureen appeared somewhat naïve and lived in an insular world, doing the same things, week in, week out. Going out drinking was part of her social world. But Megan didn’t find any of it the least bit offensive. She had been brought up in the mining village of South Kirkby. Her father was a miner who after he was injured became a steward of a club. Policing was what she had always wanted to do and after a couple of years as a shorthand-typist after leaving school at seventeen, she joined the West Riding force. ‘Maureen was quite funny and entertaining when she had a drink,’ said Megan. ‘She knew everybody in every pub we went into and everyone knew Maureen. It opened my eyes to the sort of person Maureen mixed with. They were the salt of the earth. Everyone was concerned about her. The people she knew didn’t think any the less of her because she had been a victim. They didn’t shun her. She was mortified that [some] people were saying she was a prostitute, which wasn’t true. You had this very naïve and pleasant lady who was leading a normal life, with an active social life, labelled by the press as a prostitute. To have to explain this to your family, who were still coming to terms with you being attacked, must have been horrendous to her and her family.’
On one occasion they were on the Mecca dance floor. Suddenly Maureen stood stock still and stared at a man across the room. ‘I said, “What’s the matter?” She shook her head and said, “Nothing.” I said, “Yes there is, what is it?” She said, “It’s him over there.” I’ll never forget him. He didn’t have a gap in his teeth and it wasn’t Sutcliffe, but he did have a lot of jet-black curly hair. Obviously her subconscious had said: “The hair.”’ The man was checked out and eliminated quickly.
Another time the pair were pub crawling in Manningham Lane, close to where the prostitutes hung out. A young colleague of Winterburn’s, in the dark about the operation, came into the pub. ‘I recognized him and he was looking at me and I was looking away, trying to make him not look at me. Eventually he plucked up courage and walked over to me and said: “What are you doing here, Sarge, dressed like that?” I remember taking the lad out to the toilet to have an appropriate word. I pinned him against the wall and told him to leave. It was serious and I couldn’t afford to let my guard slip.’
The undercover operation with Maureen Long, though it showed commendable courage on her part, went nowhere. She failed to recognize her would-be killer. The rest of the murder squad had plenty of other avenues to explore. The bosses knew proactive policing was working, for the clampdown against prostitutes and the covert operations in Chapeltown were clearly having an effect, the most important being that they appeared to have driven the Ripper back to strike again in Bradford.
Oldfield immediately stepped up the covert observations recording the registration numbers of vehicles in the red-light areas, extending them from Chapeltown to Manningham in Bradford. The attack on Long was treated as attempted murder. A major effort was mounted to find everyone who had been at the Mecca Ballroom on the Saturday night. Thousands were interviewed during the inquiry. It led nowhere. The information provided by the security guard was critical. In response a search was launched for Mark II Ford Cortina owners in West Yorkshire. Three thousand owners were interviewed and no positive evidence obtained.
More crucially, Jim Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry was, over his profound objections, brought to an abrupt halt because the Mark II Ford Cortina was not on the list of vehicles which could have left the tyre marks at the Richardson murder scene. (As we now know, the Ford Cortina inquiry was a complete red herring. The security guard had seen Peter Sutcliffe’s car leaving the scene of Long’s attack, except he was driving a white Ford Corsair – which was on Hobson’s list of ‘tracking’ inquiry vehicles waiting to be eliminated.) But Oldfield was faced with a massive problem – lack of manpower. Eliminating 30,000 vehicles had been a colossal task, and Oldfield felt the remaining 20,000 vehicles would take forever to check. Experience had shown that, as you got nearer the end of such an inquiry, progress on eliminating one vehicle took far longer than the straightforward checks at the beginning. As an inquiry continued, the man hours that went into it got higher and higher in relation to the finished product, while the actual productivity of the investigating team got lower and lower. All the difficult vehicle checks were those that had dragged on and were left to the end. They were cars that had been sold to gypsies six times under false names, had gone through car auctions, had changed owners, had been stolen, written off or not correctly recorded on the fledgling PNC.
Oldfield thus found himself in a complete bind. He had major murder inquiries involving a maniac on the loose going on in Leeds and Bradford, and the tyre inquiry seemed never ending, with no assurance of success. ‘We were desperate for men,’ Holland said. ‘If you were warm and breathing you were on the bloody Ripper case. We had checked roughly 30,000 vehicles and eliminated those, but there were in fact 22,000 to go … Sutcliffe’s vehicle was in there and unfortunately it was missed.’
Hobson took the cancellation of the tracking inquiry very badly. In the incident room for the Long investigation at Bradford police headquarters, a few senior officers, including Holland, Oldfield and Hobson, were standing in a corner late one afternoon when Oldfield broke the news as a fait accompli. Hobson had seen the tyre inquiry as the one good chance to find the killer. They had a positive clue from a murder scene and his inquiry ought to run its course. Now they were suddenly looking for a Ford Cortina. Oldfield believed the Ripper had changed cars. There was a good chance the one which made the tyre tracks in Roundhay Park had been destroyed. Hobson was furious, visibly angry and muttering under his breath. But the decision had been made. The Leeds murder squad believed Oldfield was being deliberately partisan because of his known disagreements with the senior city detectives. It was a fracture in relationships that never really healed.
The Ripper by now had murdered five women: McCann, Jackson, Richardson and MacDonald in Leeds; and Atkinson in Bradford. The police believed he had attacked Long, intending to kill her, and were now casting an eye over several other serious assaults on women. In reality there were eight other women that Sutcliffe had almost certainly attacked in the West Yorkshire area, though the squad had ruled most of them out as Ripper attacks because they could not rule them in for certain. Indeed, they were gripped almost by a phobia of putting an attack into the Ripper series, for fear it would turn out not to be his handiwork and might contaminate the investigation with erroneous evidence. Moreover, if the Ripper was caught and prosecuted for one murder he did not commit, he could escape justice. Thus Tracey Browne and Marcella Claxton along with several other victims were never included in the series, though there was an extraordinary similarity in the photofit descriptions they had given, which now lay unnoticed in police files. Day by day the cost of the investigation was assuming mountainous proportions: 300 officers had worked 343,000 man hours; 175,000 people had been questioned, 12,500 statements taken and 101,000 vehicles checked. The attempt to find the man with a ginger beard said to have been seen by witnesses in the MacDonald and Jackson inquiries was stepped up. Police had 117 tips of men who bore such a description. They traced fifty-six such men and eliminated them; the rest were never found because there was no real clue to their identity. Already inside the mountain of paper were the clues and the evidence that could have identified the Yorkshire Ripper.
7
Punter’s Money
In the mid-1970s the backbone technology of British industry, its businesses and institutions, was still a Victorian invention: the typewriter and shorthand note. Computers were as yet the hugely expensive private tools of government, vast number crunchers gobbling up and spewing out punchcards. They occupied whole floors to do the work a child’s toy can perform today, but the world was still only on the verge of the revolution.
Within a year or two advertisements began to appear in colour supplements offering home computers to be built by hand, whose programming language needed to be learned before simple mathematic problems could be solved and tic-tac-toe games played. Pocket calculators, costing the equivalent of a working man’s weekly wage, were finding their way on to the market. But the white heat of silicon technology was still ten years from our desk tops. The Home Office, the government department primarily responsible for the security and policing of Britain, wanted to be at the forefront of this revolution. The computer, when it arrived, would be a vital tool in the battle against crime, reducing the burden on manpower and budgets and speeding up detection. But the use of computers and the application software would have to be tailor-made to the task, specifically designed to handle, sort, cross-check and deliver information.
In August 1976, the House of Commons learned that the Police Scientific Development Branch at the Home Office was studying the use of computers to assist the investigation of major crimes like murder. Computers, according to the Home Office minister, Dr Shirley Summerskill, would organize the collection of information and the identification of key elements in murder inquiries. Parliament was debating criticism of the police handling of the Black Panther inquiry when Dr Summerskill reiterated a key principle of British justice affecting any criminal inquiry – that overall command in an investigation rested ultimately with the chief constable: ‘It is for him to decide when to call for assistance and help and what to call for.’ So if a chief constable wanted a computer, he had to ask for one. For the overburdened West Yorkshire Police in the summer of 1977 it seemed like a lifeline – or at least a straw to clutch at.
Ronald Gregory therefore set up a working party at his headquarters in Wakefield to look at ways of using computers in the Ripper inquiry. The force’s new Computer Project Unit in turn approached the Home Office to see how close its scientists were to achieving the goal of a computerized incident room which could actually handle a complex murder investigation. They had been working on the problem for three years. After several meetings, the West Yorkshireman learned that more development work was needed by government scientists and the Police Research Services Unit before they could hand over a computer they were certain was reliable. The only experimental working police computer in the country was in Staffordshire, in the Midlands. The working group and Gregory paid a visit, but the project was still in its infancy and the budget for the experiment was prohibitive, already running at more than £1 million.
Breakthroughs were being made in pushing back the frontiers of computerized systems, but in August 1977, when the West Yorkshire force needed one as a matter of desperate urgency, no machine was available. The writing of programs of such complexity was in its infancy. Moreover, three of the most senior Home Office scientists had just departed from the project, leaving only a junior colleague to work on the necessary research.
Then West Yorkshire Police were given the chance to use spare capacity on the mainframe computer at the Atomic Energy Authority Establishment at Harwell in Berkshire. It was a rare opportunity. Even the suggestion of such an offer was a clear indication that at least someone in Whitehall recognized the importance of catching the ‘Ripper’ and the difficulties the police in West Yorkshire were facing. Whether the senior officials in the Police Department of the Home Office appreciated that the murder investigation was not just a little ‘local difficulty’ facing their friends in the north is open to question.
It wasn’t the first time a branch of the Home Office, faced with a major investigation, had received help from atomic scientists with access to the country’s best computer technology. In the early 1960s, the Security Service (MI5) approached the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, which at the time had the biggest computer facility in Britain. MI5, in conjunction with the code breakers at GCHQ, were trying to decipher intercepted Soviet Union espionage messages intended for Eastern bloc agents in Britain. The traffic was known by the code name ‘VENONA’. The AWRE began a top-secret project, with its computer running code-cracking programs for six hours every night for two months.
To help catch a serial killer, the AEAE at Harwell was now willing to allow its mainframe computer to be accessed via telephone lines by the Ripper squad directly from West Yorkshire, with additional information on cassette tapes being sent physically to Harwell by courier. There were huge problems with this imaginative plan. To back-convert existing records held at Millgarth would taken thirteen man years of effort, costing a nominal figure of £25,000, which the Home Office was prepared to fund. But West Yorkshire would have to stump up £3,000 a week to run the system. Finally, Ronald Gregory decided, on the grounds of budget and the experimental nature of the project, to turn the offer down. At this stage the experiment would have involved using equipment not yet proven at the operational level. Gregory was later backed by the hierarchy of the police service for making a brave decision to stick with the manual system of managing information within the incident room. Though the volume of material grew larger every day, it was at least a tried and tested method. The problem was there had been nothing like the Ripper case before.
Gregory authorized his working party to contact the private sector to see whether the nominal index in the incident room could be computerized. IBM suggested a mainframe computer called STAIRS. The quote was in excess of half a million pounds. Again back-record conversion would be a mammoth task. A number of the biggest multinational computer firms and local government agencies in Britain were also approached, but could not come up with a viable scheme to automate the incident room. As the amount of information in the system grew, the problem of back-record conversion became the biggest obstacle to computerization. At that stage no one had designed a full-text retrieval system that could solve the incident room problems. Another worry by some senior officers was that serious money would be wasted if the murderer should be apprehended quickly.
Home Office officials knew the urgency of the West Yorkshire problem, which became worse as the years went by and the toll of yet more Ripper victims began to rise. Yet development of a police incident room computer system was never a priority, and it took several more years before one was available. An increasing number of attacks by the Ripper meant greater information-overload both for the incident room and the men and women having to manage it. The more the documentation piled up, the less likely the chance grew of back-converting it into a computerized system. The West Yorkshiremen seemed to be chasing their tails. And their problems were about to be compounded by the very next, and sixth, Ripper murder, across the Pennines, in Manchester, England’s second largest city. Here he murdered another prostitute on 1 October 1977 – a twenty-year-old mother of two children, Jean Jordan. Then he hid her body under bushes, where it lay undiscovered for over a week. The killer’s decision to strike in a completely different town reflected a pattern of sorts. When the heat was on in Leeds, with Hobson’s undercover teams keeping watch on Chapeltown’s red-light area, he moved to Bradford and found a victim in Manningham. With the pressure on in both Leeds and Bradford, he visited Moss Side, the red-light district of Manchester.
Positioned in the north-west of the country, some two hundred miles from London, Manchester spreads itself over sixty square miles. With local government reorganization in 1974, it had become Greater Manchester, absorbing a number of local towns like Salford. Within five miles of the city centre lived a million people; within ten miles, two and a half million. Manchester dwarfed the Leeds-Bradford conurbation and was the hub of many industries – not least as the northern headquarters of the national newspapers, who all had offices and printing plants there. It was also home to one of Britain’s great liberal institutions, the Manchester Guardian. In the nineteenth century, as in Leeds and Bradford, the manufacture of textiles was a dominant industry, the humid air apparently assisting in the production of cotton products.
In the 1950s and 1960s redevelopment schemes swept away the old and the derelict to produce a modernized city centre. A new road on stilts was built, the Mancunian Way, designed to ease traffic congestion. Piccadilly, a large square in the heart of the city, became a central shopping area, dominated on one side by a towering modern hotel designed to appeal to a fast-moving, international clientele. Around the periphery of the city were arterial road links – the M6 and M62 motorways – taking traffic north and south, east and west. In no time at all, a driver could speed from Bradford and Leeds, over the Pennines and into the heart of Manchester. From there to Moss Side took ten minutes by car. Just like Chapeltown in Leeds, and Bradford’s Manningham, Manchester’s red-light district was a formerly prosperous area fallen on hard times where large terraced houses had long been converted into flats. Together with Hulme, where Jean Jordan lived in a run-down council block, it was, and remains today, among the poorest areas in the country. In twenty-first century Britain, Moss Side and Hulme score first and fifth on the government’s most recent index of urban deprivation. A high concentration of ethnic minorities form a third of the local population. Lone parent households abound and the area has had high levels of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion for years. Sixty per cent of households receive social security and a third of local people are long-term unemployed. Fifty-four per cent of local youngsters leave school without qualifications, and only 3.7 per cent of them manage to get five GCSE passes at grades A–C.
Nine days after Jean Jordan was murdered, her body lay on an old allotment site off Princess Road in the suburb of Chorlton, near Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, two miles from where she had lived. It was found at lunchtime on 10 October. Adjacent to Princess Road was an iron gateway opening on to a track, bordered on both sides by trees. The track led into an area of disused allotments, measuring roughly a hundred yards square. The murder scene was between the cemetery and a new area of ground recently provided for allotment holders by Manchester Corporation. The new allotments had been fenced off from the disused land, which then became quickly overgrown. It was well known as a place where prostitutes took clients for sex. Those among the Greater Manchester Police murder squad who saw the body claim it as one of the most horrific crime scenes they have ever witnessed. And for twenty-three-year-old Bruce Jones, the unfortunate local dairy worker who called the police, the sight left him with nightmares for years to come. He held an allotment on the adjoining land and had merely been looking for disused house bricks with a friend.
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