Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper

by Gordon Burn

  Mrs Szurma was especially taken with his earnest, endearingly awkward manner, and by his willingness to ‘do anything’ for her. He would drop everything and drive her to the nursing home where she worked; he was prepared to stand outside in all weathers tinkering with the small car that she ran. He was as happy to fetch and carry for her as he had always been for his own mother. She only had to say the word.

  Sonia’s recovery was a slow process, demanding a great deal in perseverance and patience from the people closest to her. Not until May 1976, exactly four years after her initial breakdown, would her doctor be able to issue a clean bill of health and recommend that she be allowed to resume full-time teachers’ training. But she was intermittently well enough to tackle some student-teaching; and, with the proviso that she went on living under their supervision at Tanton Crescent, her parents agreed that Peter and Sonia should be married on 10 August 1974, Sonia’s twenty-fourth birthday.

  *

  Peter had had religion ‘pumped into’ him all his life at school but, unlike Mick, had never resisted or particularly seemed to resent it. Mick was constantly being singled out by Father O-Sullivan on his Monday visits to Cottingley Manor Secondary Modern for having failed to turn up at Sunday Mass, and was always getting into hot water for daring to answer back. ‘I mean,’ he’d say, unable to resist the impulse to show off in front of the class, ‘I were baptised an’ brought up as a Catholic from when I were six months old. I had no say in it. I don’t think owt about it. I’d rather be rabbiting.’

  He submitted to wearing ‘all them bloody white dresses an’ stuff’ when his turn came around, but limited his appearance at the Sacred Heart to once a year – Christmas Eve – as soon as he left school. Peter, on the other hand, had continued as an altar-server up to the summer when his grandmother Coonan had died, and the priest stopped coming to the house, around the time of his eighteenth birthday. After that he seemed to turn his back on the Church and struck Carl, then still in the throes of a Catholic education, as ‘a complete atheist – anti-religious completely’.

  The choice of Clayton Baptist Chapel for the wedding was Sonia’s: built of local stone and picturesquely situated at the heart of the old Clayton village, only a quarter of a mile from where she had been brought up, the church offered the perfect backdrop for the kind of traditional, romantic, white wedding that she was envisaging. Peter, though, was deputed to go and see the Reverend William Nelson alone. He explained that Sonia was too shy to come and talk about the marriage herself, but Reverend Nelson told him that, because they were strangers to the church, he needed to see them both. When he did, the only reason he could get out of Sonia for wanting to marry at the Baptist’s was that she had been to a friend’s wedding there and she liked the service and the building. They seemed a nice, intelligent young couple and he could see no reason to turn them away.

  A cold buffet lunch for forty was ordered at the Quarry Arms, a homely pub backed on to a field halfway between Tanton Crescent and the church; and John Sutcliffe, as his contribution, started work on a three-tiered iced cake topped with a silver heart. The only part of the arrangement that foundered was Peter’s search for a best man. Mick was out for obvious reasons, and would have refused even if he had been asked, he let it be known, ‘because of what he’s marrying’. Trevor and Eric and everybody else who might have been considered were too daunted by the thought of wrestling with the etiquette involved, especially standing up to make a speech.

  Just in time, however, a mild-mannered former classmate from Cottingley Manor called Ronnie Wilson was recruited and even inveigled into wearing the same two-toned, platform-soled shoes for the occasion as the groom. But on the ritual stag night pub crawl around Manningham, Ronnie fell down on the first of his duties: he let Peter get hopelessly drunk.

  Mick, in fact, had decided in advance that this was how the evening was going to end and had been slipping large measures of Pernod into his brother’s glasses of Guinness. When he realised, too late, what had been happening, Peter attempted to butt Mick with his head and, as a result, was married with a bruised lower lip. This, together with the red roses and the silver wedding dress that Maureen would remember as the most beautiful she had ever seen, was faithfully captured in colour by the cameraman hired to record the proceedings on cine-film.

  When they returned from a short honeymoon in Paris, the new Mr and Mrs Sutcliffe started their married life in the back bedroom at Tanton Crescent that had been prepared for them. Almost from the beginning, though, things proved difficult. Peter’s relationship with his in-laws was cordial enough, and they adapted to each other easily. But Sonia could still be temperamental and erratic, and the atmosphere around her was frequently explosive. Sonia was often the subject of rows between her mother and father, whom she rowed with herself independently, and neighbours would occasionally hear her raised voice at nights through the bedroom window. Her relations with her father before she left Tanton Crescent would eventually deteriorate to the point where they only communicated in writing or through a third party; but Mrs Szurma was insistent that they went on living there until they could afford the deposit on a house of their own, even if, as it did, this took a number of years.

  For the first six months after they were married, Peter went on working on the night shift at Anderton’s in Bingley, only a short walk from Cornwall Road. He was a regular caller at the house on his own on weekdays, and at weekends with Sonia. On these visits he took to elaborating on a habit so familiar that Mick, in common with the rest of the family, had stopped commenting on it years earlier.

  ‘Me mother used to keep his dinner in oven till he came in from work, then it were straight on to table. It’d be cold and back on to table again, though, by the time he came down to get it. I don’t know what he were up to, but he’d come in door and go straight up steps an’ she’d be shouting of him to come down for his dinner for long enough or it’d be ruined.

  ‘He wouldn’t have changed or had a wash or owt. He’d come down same as he were. But you could hear him in one bedroom, then another an’ sort of going right round house. You could hear doors opening an’ shutting an’ that, so you could tell he were rootin’.

  ‘Even after he got married he were same. Even when he weren’t living at home, he used to come in an’ sneak about. If he came wi’ Sonia he’d stick her in living-room or kitchen an’ slope off.’

  As with his other idiosyncracies, this had come to seem so routine that nobody in his family bothered to bring it up with Peter. Carl though, as he entered his teens, became curious about what his brother got up to upstairs, and from time to time attempted to find out.

  ‘It’s just a thing we’d got used to, because he’d done it for years and years. He were always rooting. We used to look on it as a bit of a joke. We used to say, “Oh, he’s at it, creepin’ about again. We’ll just ignore him.”

  ‘Every time he’d come, he’d pop his head round door and say, “I’ll not be a minute, I’ll just go to toilet.” And you’d hear him upstairs, moving about from room to room. Many a time I’ve crept up and caught him at it. I used to do it a lot on purpose, creep up, then say, “Hello, Pete!” He’d be stood in bedroom looking in drawers, wardrobes, all over the place; under beds. “Oh, I’m just looking for a screwdriver,” he’d say, trying to look all relaxed. He liked to know what we all had.

  ‘Other times, I used to walk up steps an’ hear him run from bedroom into toilet and shut door. He used to do it all the time.’

  A shirt, though, is the only possession of his that Carl ever noticed had actually gone missing. ‘He had a really funny taste in clothes. Loadsa colours. He liked really jazzy ties an’ things. An’ I remember getting this shirt new, about two years earlier, an’ Pete mekkin a right fuss about colour. He thought it were fuckin’ superb.

  ‘Anyway, one day about a month after he’d been round rooting he appeared in this shirt, which were fucked by then: all collar were frayed, ’cause I just used to wear it for work
ing in. So I says to him, “Hey, that’s my shirt,” which seemed to right surprise him. “It’s a real colour, isn’t it?” he said. An’ that were all.’

  Peter’s father, less aware than the rest of the family of the extent of the ‘rooting’ ritual, had a rational explanation. ‘A lot of times he’d come down and, if he wanted to do a job on his car and he didn’t have the equipment to do it, he’d go up and have a look at what I had in my drawer upstairs. I had a big bottom drawer that I kept a collection of various tools and things in … I remember a time when I had three pairs of pliers and eventually I finished up not having any at all.’

  John Sutcliffe was more bemused by Peter’s habit of isolating himself in the bathroom or the toilet for hours, which showed no signs of diminishing even as a married man. Carl observed him once through the hole made by an airgun pellet in the bathroom door: ‘He were stood wi’ scissors, trimming his beard, then he’d stop and look at it for ages and comb it. Then he’d sort of snip in thin air, not touching owt. Then he’d cut right neat little patterns on it. He were up there ages.’

  The pleasure that Peter seemed to derive from being on his own in a confined space for long periods suggested, to a few of those who knew him, that he would be perfectly suited to earning his living driving a car or a ‘wagon’. Although he had only got round to equipping himself with a full licence in his early twenties, he had never been without ‘wheels’ from the age of seventeen and was generally considered to be a ‘brilliant’ driver. By the time he got married the ‘bangers’ of his youth had given way to a wide-wheeled, lime-green K-registration Ford Capri GT, and he was constantly on the lookout for cheap motors to do up and sell at a small profit. Friends, even friends of friends, only had to mention that they were having engine trouble for him to be immediately under the bonnet.

  To Mick, his tinkering at times seemed to verge on the obsessive: ‘If they were all right he’d have to tek ’em to bits. He were never satisfied. If he’d have got a brand spanking new ’un out of a shop and it hadn’t even done one mile, he’d still have been probin’ about, tekkin summat off it.’

  He often seemed to live not only for, but in, his cars, and sometimes owned two or three at once. They afforded a degree of privacy which, until he had his own house, it was impossible to find anywhere else. So when, in February 1975, Anderton’s asked for voluntary redundancies, Peter leaped at the opportunity as a way of realising what by then had become an ambition. He invested half the £400 pay-off money in a course of HGV driving lessons at the APEX School of Driving (giving ‘Cornwall Road’ as his address, rather than Tanton Crescent). And, two days after his twenty-ninth birthday, in June that year, he passed his Heavy Goods Vehicle test at Steeton, earning himself a class-1 licence.

  *

  To get to Steeton, it is necessary to skirt the centre of Keighley which, by the summer of 1975, had been Anna Rogulskyj’s home for more than a dozen years. Despite her name, Mrs Rogulskyj was originally from a rural part of southern Ireland, which was largely thought to account for her open, warm, almost childlike manner. In a tall, attractive ash-blonde in her early thirties, however, a divorcee and therefore frequently seen around town alone, her friendliness was felt to invite misinterpretation, and she was often accosted by men unaccustomed to seeing women leading happy, independent lives of their own.

  She didn’t pay much attention, therefore, when she was approached in the Town Hall square one day by a dark-haired man with a springy black beard who wanted to know if he could come home with her for a cup of tea. She was slightly more perturbed when he started following her up Highfield Lane to where she lived, but she eventually managed to throw him off.

  A few weeks later the same man followed her into Wild’s coffee bar in the town centre where she used to work and, sitting across the table from her, offered to buy her a drink. This time she was aware of his large, ‘racing’ eyes and his ‘dainty’ hands. When it became obvious she was about to make a fuss, he disappeared, only to re-enter her life after a gap of a further few weeks.

  On the evening of Friday, 4 July 1975, Anna Rogulskyj had a row with the Welshman who was her current boyfriend. It ended with him hiding every pair of shoes that she owned to stop her going out that night, which was the sort of behaviour she was coming to expect from Geoff: shortly after she had met him, he had grabbed her head and plunged it into a full bucket of water, in the house in the centre of Keighley where he lived. She later learned that he had been a long-term patient in a mental hospital and, on release, had been advised ‘to keep away from women for five years’.

  But Geoff had bought her a colour television that week, and Anna was ‘made up’ with it. She eventually discovered where he’d hidden her shoes – on the seats of chairs pushed under the kitchen table – and couldn’t resist calling on him on her way to the bus station to let him know that she’d ‘escaped’.

  The television apart, though, she was becoming frightened of Geoff, and that Friday night was feeling ‘a bit tearful’. She took the bus to her sister’s in Heaton and, finding her out, went on to the bar at the Victoria Hotel near Bradford’s bus and rail ‘Interchange’, which enjoyed a reputation for being ‘select’ compared to the many other ‘places of low renown’ in the vicinity.

  After last orders she was given a lift home to Keighley by a taxi-driver friend who dropped her at her front door. It was a warm, pleasant night, and she found herself playing Elvis Presley’s ‘Crying in the Chapel’ over and over while she brought some sheets in that had been drying and folded them in the kitchen. It was then that she noticed that ‘Dum-dum’, her deaf kitten, was missing, and she convinced herself for some reason that Geoff had been and taken him.

  It was now after 1.00 a.m., but where Geoff lived was no more than a five-minute walk away and she set off purposefully, walking downhill in the direction of the Town Hall and the police station.

  She had left the police station behind her and was approaching the largely vacated and boarded up North Queen Street when she heard a man’s voice in a darkened doorway asking whether she ‘fancied it?’ ‘Not on your life,’ she said, and hurried on to Geoff’s house where even her knocking and pounding, however, couldn’t raise him. Turning on her heels, having first put one of the downstairs windows in with her shoe in a fit of pique, she heard the same man asking the same question and again she rebuffed him.

  Unable to find anybody to go with him, Peter Sutcliffe had been out doing the rounds of the pubs alone all night. He allowed Mrs Rogulskyj to walk a few paces further before levelling three blows at her head with the balled end of a ball-pein hammer. He had raised her blouse and made exploratory slashes and was about to plunge a knife into her stomach when a man living in Lord Street, calling out to ask what was happening, panicked him and he fled.

  Anna Rogulskyj wasn’t discovered for an hour, and after being admitted to Leeds General Infirmary was given the last rites. A twelve-hour operation, in the course of which splinters of bone were tweezered out of her brain, saved her life. But the description of her attacker, whom she had in fact encountered twice before, was effectively erased.

  *

  Living in Clayton, Peter had once again become a near neighbour of his old friend Trevor Birdsall and, after a two-year lull while he was working constant nights, they had resumed their late night tours of the red-light district. By 1975, though, they were starting to broaden their horizons and had added Hudders-field and Leeds, as well as smaller towns like Skipton and Halifax with no known prostitute populations, to their itinerary.

  On the night of Friday, 15 August 1975, five weeks after the attempted murder of Anna Rogulskyj in Keighley, and the week of Peter’s first wedding anniversary, they went drinking together in Halifax where, in the Royal Oak, their path crossed that of Olive Smelt. Mrs Smelt, a forty-six-year-old office cleaner, looked forward to her Friday nights on the town with a woman friend as both a break from the tedium of work and the occasional turbulence of her family life, and she was a familiar fig
ure around the pubs.

  Peter, however, singled her out immediately as a ‘prostitute’. ‘I bet she’s on the game,’ he said to Trevor, and he said much the same straight to Mrs Smelt’s face when he passed her on his way to the toilet. Mrs Smelt was capable of giving as good as she got, though, and emerged the clear winner of this exchange.

  Later, less than a mile into the ten-mile drive back to Bradford, Sutcliffe pulled his car sharply over. ‘That’s the old bag who was in the pub,’ he said, indicating Olive Smelt, who had just turned into an alleyway two or three hundred yards from her home. Slipping out of the car, he quickly caught up with her and mumbled a pleasantry about the weather before striking her twice on the back of the head with a hammer. He had had time to drag a hacksaw blade once or twice across the small of her back when approaching headlights disturbed him. Back in the safety of his own car, he appeared ‘unusually quiet’ to Birdsall; when asked what had taken him so long he replied that he had been ‘talking to that woman’.

  Next day, reading about the apparently motiveless attack on Olive Smelt in his local paper – she ‘had not been sexually assaulted’; nothing had been stolen – Birdsall had little doubt that it was the same woman. But misplaced loyalty prevented him from doing anything about it. Violence aimed at women was, in any case, a commonplace in the circles in which he moved, both in Allerton, where he lived, and around the Manningham area where his face was becoming increasingly familiar in the pubs and between-hours ‘dives’, and in the cafes where the ‘pot-dogs’ sat in the windows touting for business.