The dentures were an important find. The team could now go to Mrs Durand-Deacon’s dentist to see if they had a match. Mrs Durand-Deacon’s gum shrinkage problems had sent her to her dentist, Helen Mayo, on many occasions. Mayo kept a cast of her patients’ upper and lower jaws. She knew that she had supplied Mrs Durand-Deacon with the dentures found at Crawley.
Simpson took the bones to his laboratory and discovered evidence of osteoarthritis in the joints. He soon determined that Mrs Durand-Deacon had suffered from this bone ailment. The police made a plaster cast of the left foot and it proved to fit perfectly into one of her shoes. Bloodstains were also found on the Persian coat, which was traced back to Durand-Deacon from repairs made to it, and blood was found on the cuff of one of Haigh’s shirtsleeves. The handbag strap was identified as having belonged to a bag owned by Durand-Deacon, the one she had carried when she drove to Crawley with Haigh. Later, the rest of the bag was found in the yard, apparently thrown there casually by Haigh, and matched to the strap.
Dr Turfitt, the police scientist on the forensic team, decided to experiment with sulphuric acid to test Haigh’s theories. He used an amputated human foot, a sheep’s leg and other organic materials, finding that the acid worked at varying speeds, depending on how much water was present. Fat proved highly resistant, and it had been Mrs Durand-Deacon’s weight that had preserved those items found in the sludge.
Haigh’s trial opened on 18 July 1949 and he pleaded not guilty. His defence team was hoping for him to be found insane. However, after hearing all the evidence against him it took only 15 minutes for the jury to find him guilty of murder.
The judge asked if he had anything to say for himself. He cocked his head and said, ‘Nothing at all.’ The judge donned a black cap and sentenced Haigh to be hanged.
After Haigh’s trial, two more medical officials observed him in Wandsworth Prison and they found no sign of insanity. To their mind, he was shamming. The Home Secretary, under the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1884, ordered a special medical inquiry, just to be sure. Three eminent psychiatrists examined Haigh’s case thoroughly. All believed that Haigh was malingering. He was not insane and did not suffer from a mental disease or defect that would free him of moral responsibility for his actions. There was no reason to interfere with the course of the law. Haigh insisted that he was not afraid to be hanged. Madame Tussaud’s requested a fitting for a death mask, which Haigh was more than happy to provide.
On 6 August 1949, at Wandsworth Prison, Haigh was executed. He bequeathed his clothing to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, where a wax figure of him was erected. He sent instructions that it must always be kept in perfect condition, the trousers creased, the hair parted, his shirt cuffs showing. Among other murderers cast in wax, Haigh received his place in history.
PETER SUTCLIFFE, AKA THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER
Peter Sutcliffe was born in Bingley, West Yorkshire, in 1946, the son of a mill worker. He was described as being a loner throughout his school years. On leaving school at the age of 15, he moved from job to job over the next few years before meeting his wife Sonia Szurma in 1966. They married in 1974. Shortly after his marriage, he was made redundant from Anderton International, a spring manufacturer where he was working night shifts. He used the pay-off to buy a goods vehicle and obtained his HGV licence in June 1975. Shortly after this, his wife Sonia suffered a number of miscarriages, and eventually they were told that she would not be able to have children. After this, Sonia returned to a teacher-training course. When she completed the course in 1977 and began teaching, they started to save the extra money to buy their first house.
Sutcliffe’s first known attack was in September 1969. Sutcliffe and his friend Trevor Birdsall were sitting in Trevor’s minivan in St Paul’s Road, near Manningham Park, Bradford. Sutcliffe had been looking for a prostitute he had a grievance with, but had not found her. He suddenly left the vehicle and began to walk up St Paul’s Road and out of sight. He came back about 10 minutes later, and was out of breath, as if he had been running. He told Trevor to drive off quickly. As they began heading towards Bingley, Sutcliffe claimed that he followed an ‘old cow’ to a house somewhere and said he had hit her on the back of the head with a stone in a sock. He removed a sock from his pocket and dumped its contents out of the window.
The next day, two police officers visited Peter Sutcliffe at his home at 57 Cornwall Road, Bingley. The woman whom Sutcliffe had attacked had noted the number of Trevor’s minivan. Sutcliffe readily admitted to the police that he had struck the woman, but claimed it was only with his hand. He was given a stern lecture by the police, but also was told that he was ‘very lucky’ as the woman, for her own reasons, did not want to press charges for assault. Besides being a known prostitute, her common-law husband was serving a sentence for assault. Apparently, she wanted nothing more to do with the incident.
The events that it was later suggested turned Sutcliffe against prostitutes went back to when he had first started dating Sonia Szurma. She had been his regular Saturday-night date and a serious girlfriend. However, Sutcliffe’s brother Mick had spotted her with an Italian boy who was a local ice-cream salesman. Sutcliffe, feeling betrayed and utterly devastated, decided to confront her, but Sonia refused to answer any of his questions about the situation, or comment on whether their relationship was over or not.
That night, Sutcliffe decided to take his revenge by going with a prostitute. Driving up Manningham Lane, he went past the Royal Standard pub and at a petrol station he saw a prostitute waiting for customers. Having confirmed that she was ‘doing business’, they agreed on a price of £5. He’d given her a £10 note and she told him she would give his change later. They got to her house and went inside. She started going upstairs and he realised he just didn’t want to go through with it. He felt disgusted with her and himself. He went upstairs behind her and into the bedroom, and even unzipped her dress, but told her straight out that he didn’t want to do anything with her. She could keep the money, but he asked for his change. She told him they would have to go back to the garage where he’d picked her up, to get some change, so he drove her there. He felt worse than ever about Sonia. They went back to the garage by car and she went inside; there were two men in there. She didn’t come back out. One of the men came banging on his car roof when he refused to go away, then produced a wrench and threatened him. Then he saw the girl come out with another heavily built man. They walked off together laughing; the men were obviously her minders. Sutcliffe felt stupid. He drove home angrier than ever. He felt outraged, humiliated and embarrassed.
Three weeks later, Sutcliffe saw the same prostitute in the Lumb Lane pub, and approached her. He told her that he hadn’t forgotten about the incident and that she should put things right so there would be no hard feelings. He was giving her the opportunity to give back the money owed to him. She thought this was a huge joke and, as she knew everybody else in the pub, went round telling them all. Soon everyone was laughing at Sutcliffe. He left, but was now determined to seek out the woman again.
On 29 September 1969, Sutcliffe again went out looking for a prostitute to attack. This time he took a hammer and a long-bladed knife. He was arrested in the garden of a house in the Manningham area of Bradford after a policeman on patrol had spotted his car with its lights on and the engine running. The policeman discovered Sutcliffe hiding behind a hedge with a hammer. He claimed that a hubcap had flown off his front wheel and that he had been looking for it – the hammer was to help secure the hubcap again. Sutcliffe was charged and fined £25 for ‘going equipped for theft’, but his real reason for being out – to attack a prostitute – remained secret. Sutcliffe managed to slip the long-bladed knife down a gap between the side of the police vehicle and the mudguard cover inside the police van that came to collect him.
On 4 July 1975, in Keighley, 36-year-old Anna Patricia Rogulski decided to walk across town to her boyfrend’s house, after having an argument and parting with him earlier that night. As she fruit
lessly banged on his front door, Sutcliffe stood in the shadows nearby, watching. Finally, in frustration, Rogulski removed one of her shoes and broke the glass of a downstairs window. As she knelt to put her shoe back on, Sutcliffe quickly emerged from the shadows and struck a savage blow to her head with a hammer. Rogulski had not seen or heard anything and was unconscious as he dealt her another two hammer blows. He paused momentarily to catch his breath as the blood from Rogulski’s wounds seeped across the cobblestones. He lifted her skirt and pulled down her knickers. As he returned the hammer to his pocket and took out a knife, his anger, under control until now, found expression with each slashing cut across her stomach. A neighbour who had heard the noises came out. As the neighbour stood peering out into the alley, trying to focus in the poor light, Sutcliffe pulled himself together and spoke calmly as he reassured the man that all was well and to go back inside. In a moment, Sutcliffe was gone as quickly as he had come. Miraculously, Rogulski survived, but her life would never be the same again. After her discharge from hospital she returned to her home, where she would live alone, barricaded behind a network of wires and alarms. She was terrified of strangers and rarely went out. When she did, she walked in the middle of the street, as she was afraid of the shadows and terrified of people approaching her from behind. There was no boyfriend now, and no prospects of marriage. The £15,000 she received from the Criminal Compensation Board could not buy back her life. She died on 17 April 2008 of natural causes.
Olive Smelt, a 46-year-old housewife, was to be Sutcliffe’s next victim. On Friday, 15 August 1975, Peter drove his friend Trevor Birdsall to Halifax where they drank in a number of pubs. It was in one of these pubs that Peter had first seen Smelt. She had followed her usual Friday-night pattern of meeting her girlfriends for a drink. Sutcliffe and Birdsall were known to her and her friends and gave them all a lift home. Smelt was dropped off in Boothtown Road, a short walk from her home, at about 11.45pm.
At the same time, Sutcliffe got out and left Trevor alone in his car. As Smelt took a short cut through an alleyway, Sutcliffe walked up behind her and overtook her, inflicting a heavy blow on the back of her head with a hammer. He hit her again as she fell to the ground then slashed at her back with his knife just above her buttocks. However, he was again prevented from completing his task. He saw a car approaching, so he left Smelt and returned to the car where Trevor was waiting and they drove off. All of this occurred in the space of 10 minutes. Like Sutcliffe’s first victim, Smelt also survived the horrifying attack.
The attack left a lasting impression on Smelt. She suffered from severe depression and memory loss. For months, she wished that she were dead. She took no interest in her life and lived in fear, especially of men, sometimes even of her husband. Their relationship was permanently altered and she rarely felt like having sex. Her past enjoyment of homemaking and cooking was lost and she now completed these tasks in a robotic fashion. Her oldest daughter suffered a nervous breakdown, which doctors were sure was a direct result of the attack, and, for many years, her son would continue to lock the door whenever he left his mother alone in the house. Despite the similarities between the two apparently motiveless attacks on Anna Rogulski and Olive Smelt, it would be three years before police would link them and be able to prove that they had both been committed by Sutcliffe. A similar attack was also committed by Sutcliffe that August: Tracy Browne, aged 14. She was struck from behind and hit on the head five times while walking in a country lane. She, like the other two women, survived.
Sutcliffe committed his first murder in October 1975. His victim was Wilomena McCann, known as Wilma. She was 28 years old and a mother of four. Her body was found on the morning of 30 October 1975, lying face up on a sloping grass embankment of the Prince Philip playing fields, off Scott Hall Road, just 100yd from her council home in nearby Scott Hall Avenue. McCann had been struck twice on the back of the head and then stabbed in the neck, chest and abdomen 15 times. There were traces of semen found on the back of her trousers and knickers.
On the night of McCann’s death, she had left her three younger children in the care of her eldest daughter, nine-year-old Sonja, to go out drinking. She was drinking heavily until closing time at 10.30pm and then she made her way home. Along the way, a lorry driver stopped when Wilma flagged him down, but continued on his way when he was greeted with a mixture of incoherent instructions and abuse, leaving her by the side of the road. A West Indian man saw her being picked up at about 1.30am; he was the second last person to see her alive. Soon after 5am, a neighbour found Wilma’s two eldest daughters huddled together at the bus stop. They were cold, confused and frightened, and waiting for their mother, who hadn’t come home.
A team of 150 police officers was set up. They interviewed 7,000 householders and 6,000 lorry drivers. They painstakingly took hundreds of statements from anyone with even the remotest connection to Wilma, but still they never came close to finding her killer.
Sutcliffe did not kill again until Tuesday 20 January 1976. His victim on that night was Emily Monica Jackson, 42, who was working as a prostitute to get extra money for her husband and family. Emily and her husband Sydney would drive their blue Commer van into Leeds where Sydney would wait for his wife in one of the bars while she used the van to work. On the night of Tuesday, 20 January 1976, they parked their van in the car park of the Gaiety pub and went inside. They had a drink together then Emily went outside to look for business. Sydney was to wait inside until she returned at closing time. When she wasn’t there to meet him, he took a taxi home, expecting her to follow in the van shortly after – but she never returned home.
Emily’s mutilated body was found just after 8am the following morning, only 800yd from the Gaiety. After murdering her, Sutcliffe had left her lying on her back with her legs apart. She was still wearing her tights and knickers, but her bra was pulled up, exposing her breasts. Peter had struck Emily on the head twice with his hammer and then stabbed her lower neck, upper chest and lower abdomen 51 times with a sharpened Phillips screwdriver. Sutcliffe’s need to vent his anger on the already-dead Emily caused him to make a slip, though; he stomped on Emily’s right thigh, leaving the impression of a heavy ribbed Wellington boot. The boot was further identified as a Dunlop Warwick, probably size seven, definitely no larger than an eight. Another print was found in the sand nearby.
Sutcliffe lost his job as a lorry driver, curtailing his travelling. However, his need to kill was becoming unbearable, as Marcella Claxton, a 20-year-old prostitute, would soon discover. At around 4am on 9 May, she was walking home from a drinking party held by friends in Chapeltown, an area of Leeds. A large white car pulled up alongside her. She wasn’t working that night but she asked the driver for a lift. That driver was Sutcliffe. Instead of driving her home, he drove her to Soldier’s Field just off Roundhay Road. He offered Marcella £5 to get out of the car and undress for sex on the grass, but she refused the offer. As they both got out of the car, Marcella heard a thud as Sutcliffe dropped something and it hit the ground. He told her it was his wallet. Marcella then went behind a tree to urinate. Sutcliffe walked towards her and the next thing she felt was the blow of Sutcliffe’s hammer as he brought it down on the back of her head, and then she felt the second blow. She lay back on the grass, looking at the blood on her hand from where she had touched her head. Sutcliffe stood nearby. She remembered vividly that his hair and beard were black and crinkly and that he was masturbating as he watched her bleeding on the ground. He went back to the white car with the red upholstery to get some tissues to clean himself up. When he finished, he threw the tissues on the ground and placed a £5 note in Marcella’s hand, warning her not to call the police as he got back into his car.
Marcella, her clothes now covered in blood, managed to half-walk, half-crawl to a nearby telephone box where she called for an ambulance. As she sat on the floor and waited for help, she saw Sutcliffe drive past many times looking for her, probably to finish the job and rid himself of a vital witness. The gap
ing wound in the back of her head required 52 stitches and a seven-day stay in hospital. For months after the attack, she would hate men, barely able to be in the same room with them. Years after the attack, she was still plagued by depression and dizzy spells and was unable to hold down a job. The birth of her son Adrian coincided with Sutcliffe’s subsequent arrest in 1981.
The senseless attacks were, by now, the main topic of conversation among prostitutes and the patrons of the many pubs in the Leeds area, and they were compared to the notorious crimes of Jack the Ripper in the previous century. Prostitutes, in an attempt to protect themselves, were seen working in groups, making it very clear to their clients that the details of their cars and registration numbers were being recorded. Increased police activity in the area put further pressure on the already strained relationship between the prostitutes and officers of the law, creating a formidable barrier to the police enquiry.
On Saturday, 5 February, 28-year-old Irene Richardson left her lodgings in Cowper Street, Chapeltown, at 11.30pm to go to Tiffany’s Club. En route she met Sutcliffe, who drove her to Soldier’s Field, the scene of a previous attack. After attacking her savagely, he left her lying face down, placing her coat over her inert and bloodied body. He had fractured her skull with the three blows he inflicted with his hammer. One of the blows had been so severe that a circular piece of her skull had actually penetrated her brain. He had stabbed her in the neck and throat, and three more times in the stomach, savage downward strokes that had caused her intestines to spill out. When her coat was removed, police found that while her bra was still in place, her skirt had been lifted up and her tights pulled off the right leg and down. One of the two pairs of knickers she had been wearing had been removed and stuffed down her tights, while the other pair was still in place. Her calf-length brown boots had been removed and placed neatly over her thighs. A vaginal swab showed the presence of semen but it was considered to have been from sexual activity prior to the attack.
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