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

by Gordon Burn

Violence could, and regularly did, flare up in a matter of seconds in all these places, and women – prostitutes who had ‘crossed’ their pimps, girlfriends turning up late, wives ‘caught’ looking at another man – were not infrequently on the receiving end. The fact that Melissa, Trevor Birdsall’s wife of three years, had lost a leg in a road accident as a child, did not guarantee her any immunity: she was constantly complaining to neighbours in Allerton that Trevor had been ‘braying’ her again, and had the bruises to prove it.

  *

  Late in the summer of 1975, Peter and Sonia joined Mr and Mrs Szurma on a holiday visit to some of their relatives in Czechoslovakia, stopping in Rome on the way. Sonia not only had a grandmother who was still alive but also great-grandparents who were both aged around a hundred and still growing their own tobacco and brewing their own beer in the countryside near Prague.

  On their return at the end of September, Peter joined the Common Road Tyre Company in Bradford as a driver. The work involved short-and medium-distance hauls all over the North and the Midlands, and he used the experience to familiarise himself with the network of motorways and trunk-roads linking his destinations to each other and to West Yorkshire. He also became an authority on the best access routes to many town and city centres, to some of which he was already less than a stranger.

  *

  The rivalry between Leeds and Bradford, two cities whose western and eastern suburbs have long been hopelessly entangled, is so ancient and so fierce as to preclude either place surrendering its identity to the other. Both prospered from worsted and woollen manufacturing throughout the nineteenth century, and vied with each other to erect the grand houses and prestigious civic monuments that, even a hundred and fifty years later, still loaned them the same air of unshakeable Victorian solidity.

  Although geographically less compact than Bradford’s Manningham area, by the mid-1970s Chapeltown in Leeds presented the same picture of ‘inner-city’ dereliction and decay. The red brick villas once occupied by prosperous mercantile families had gone over to multi-occupation; former Methodist chapels had become mosques, and synagogues had been converted for use as drinking clubs and permanently twilight ‘shebeens’, where drugs, jewellery and sexual favours were indiscriminately bartered, wrangled over, sometimes even bought and sold.

  The Chapeltown ethos had taken root in several city-centre pubs such as the Regent, the White Swan, the Scotsman and Bar-Barella’s in Vicar Lane where bar-maids with denim hot-pants gnawing into chapped thighs took orders for ‘the Barbarella Legspreader’, and the disc-jockey, between records, did commercials for amphetamines: ‘Worried that your willie’s two inches too short? Buy a bottle of poppers from behind the bar! Only twelve pound! You won’t know what you’re doing, but it’ll feel like a snake!’

  It was in this milieu that Wilma McCann, after moving to Leeds from Scotland with her husband and four small children in 1970, felt most at home. By 1975, though, Gerry McCann had left her and Wilma was bringing up her children, then aged from five to nine, on what she could earn on the street. Most nights she turned her back on the dirty dishes and unmade beds in the council house where she lived on the edge of Chapeltown and began her tour of the clubs and pubs, leaving Sonje, the oldest, to take care of things until she returned home.

  On the night of Wednesday, 29 October 1975, Wilma, wearing white flared trousers, a blue bolero jacket and a pink blouse, was spotted drinking whiskies in the Regent, the Scotsman and the Royal Oak.

  On her way home she called at the ‘Room and the Top’, a drinking club in Sheepscar, and emerged shortly before 1.00 a.m. carrying a container of curry and chips.

  It was only a short walk back to Scott Hall Avenue but, as often happened, Wilma staggered around recklessly in front of the traffic on Meanwood road in the hope of ‘commandeering’ a lift. A lorry heading towards the M62 did stop, but the driver declined to pick her up. And then Peter Sutcliffe’s green Ford Capri pulled over.

  ‘I was driving through Leeds at night. I had been having a couple of pints and I saw this woman thumbing a lift,’ he would later claim. ‘I stopped and asked her how far she was going, and she said, “Not far. Thanks for stopping,” and jumped in. I was in quite a good mood and, just before we set off, she said, Did I want business? I asked what she meant and, to me, a scornful tone came into her voice. She said: “Bloody hell, do I have to spell it out?”’

  A few minutes later they parked near the Prince Philip playing fields, only a hundred yards from Wilma McCann’s back door. ‘Before we started she said it cost a fiver. I was a bit surprised. I was expecting to be a bit romantic. I couldn’t have intercourse at a split-second. I had to be aroused. But all of a sudden she said: “I’m going. It’s going to take you all fuckin’ day. You’re fuckin’ useless.” I felt myself seething with rage. I wanted to hit her.’

  He asked her to ‘hang on a minute’ and not to ‘go off like that’. ‘She said, “Oh, you can manage it now, can you?” It sounded as though she was taunting me. I said: “Can we do it on the grass?” … and she stormed off up the field.’ Taking a hammer out of his tool-box in the car, he followed her and spread his coat on the damp ground. ‘She sat down on the coat and unfastened her trousers and said, “Come on, get it over with.” I said, “Don’t worry, I will.” I then hit her with the hammer on top of the head. She made a lot of noise and kept on making noise, so I hit her again.’

  In a ‘numb panic’, he sat in his car watching Wilma McCann’s arm jerking up and down. He returned to his tool-box and this time removed a knife, with which he approached her still moving body.

  He ‘shot off’ home once he was quite sure she was dead, and checked his clothes for blood before quietly letting himself into his mother-in-law’s house. Once inside he went straight to the bathroom, washed his hands and climbed quickly into bed.

  Wilma McCann’s body was discovered by a milkman on the Prince Philip playing fields at 7.41 the following morning. She was lying on her back with her trousers around her knees and her brassiere lifted to expose her breasts. She had been stabbed nine times in the lower abdomen and five times in the chest, as the police photographs and the pathologist’s report would testify. But because of the nature of her wounds, the lacerations and dark brown holes perverting her pale body, by the time she was found she was already starting to look like merely the remnant of a person, like an impersonal bundle or a crumpled mannequin; or like something out of what Michael Sutcliffe would come to think of as ‘Peter’s room’.

  PART TWO

  Room

  15

  There is a direct rail link between Bingley and the sea. The journey to Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, takes just under ninety minutes and Bingley people, usually travelling en masse, have been making it for years.

  Smaller, slower and less brash than Blackpool, which lies thirty miles to the south, Morecambe – or ‘Bradford-on-Sea’ as it was known before the mill-hands who used to swarm over the Pennines in their hundreds of thousands discovered Corfu and the Costa Brava – has remained cheerfully, almost resolutely, set in its ways. Few attempts have been made to cater to ‘the younger stream’, and in fact the Mods who took to descending on the town on Bank Holiday weekends were strenuously discouraged.

  Even the illuminations, the traditional destination for generations of school and works outings, ritually acknowledging the fact that the nights have started to set in, have made few concessions to the times; extraterrestrials and characters from the Muppets have failed to oust Gilbert and Sullivan and Silent Comedy Classics as popular tableau themes.

  ‘Health Abounds, Beauty Surrounds’ is a slogan that has sustained many Bingley couples throughout their working lives. And many a coach-clock presented with due ceremony at the Bankfield Hotel has eventually claimed pride of place on a mantelpiece in one of the neat, gaily painted terraced streets situated within gentle strolling distance of Morecambe front.

  Anne Sutcliffe’s parents-in-law, the Stookys, moved to Morecambe from B
ingley shortly after they retired, and Anne and Trevor followed them a few years later. Because she was the closest in age to Peter, Anne grew up understanding him better than her sisters. She had acted as his ‘protector’ at school, defending him against the bullies and, later, in their early teens, Peter had insisted on returning the favour, escorting her to dances and parties ‘to make sure she was all right’.

  After her marriage to Trevor Stooky, a general labourer, in 1966, Anne went on living in Bingley for a number of years. But as work became more and more scarce in the area, and because Trevor was constantly getting into scrapes, usually after being out drinking with his brother, they decided to take his parents up on a generous offer of self-contained accommodation in their house. Their move to Morecambe in the mid-1970s happened to coincide with the storm that was then raging around one of the longest established tourist attractions on the promenade.

  *

  The old Whitehall Theatre at the west end of the town had stood empty and wind-lashed for many years when Mr George Nicholson, late of Tussaud’s, Blackpool, purchased the freehold and converted it into a waxworks ‘in the Tussaud family tradition’, just in time for the beginning of the summer season, 1956.

  Mr Nicholson started off modestly at first, with only twenty-eight models. The exhibition was comprised mainly of historical figures – Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, William Shakespeare, Disraeli – and leading sporting, political and entertainment personalities of the day. Stanley Matthews, Gilbert Harding, Norman Wisdom, Sir Anthony Eden and Sabrina were among those who took their places in the room-sized cabinets that stood where the front-stalls once had and therefore inclined gently with the floor.

  Business, however, didn’t exactly boom. ‘The bodies,’ as Mr Nicholson, a clipper little man with a toothbrush moustache, would say, ‘aren’t coming in to see the bodies.’ But, instead of concentrating on increasing the verisimilitude of his dummies, whose heads were disproportionately large for their uniformly foreshortened trunks, making them look like the victims of some unpleasant stunting disease, the proprietor’s solution was to expand upstairs, into what had once been the dress-circle.

  The glass cabinets and wall-eyed models were duly manufactured and installed, but still the expected crowds failed to flock in. This was largely thought to be because Mr Nicholson had not achieved the vital balance between the ‘respectable’ and the macabre that, a century earlier, had made the original Madame Tussaud a household name. That the scales were tipped heavily in favour of the latter it was possible to sense without even crossing the threshold of Nicholson’s wax museum. The theatrically over-made-up old woman in the ticket booth, the heavy, cast iron turnstile and the effigied ‘commissionaire’ generated an atmosphere all too reminiscent of the Edgar Lustgarten and Edgar Wallace ‘chillers’ that had played as second features at the Whitehall in the years immediately leading up to its demise.

  Twenty years later very little had changed, except that quite unwittingly, in the 1970s, Mr Nicholson’s wax museum had turned into a grotesque, if curiously compelling, period piece. The patterned wallpaper had faded, the ubiquitous black paintwork had grown scuffed and dulled, and the moths had feasted indiscriminately on everything from Pat Smythe’s jodhpurs to Arthur Askey’s shirt. ‘Stalin’ had been reduced to black wellington boots and a lady’s astrakhan coat, and ‘Princess Margaret’ had been graced with a particularly ill-fitting, matted brown wig.

  Upstairs, meanwhile, visitors had to be careful when walking round the Chamber of Horrors not to trip over one of several buckets put down to catch the rain seeping in in large drops through the roof. This was a real possibility in the almost palpable darkness which, together with the ‘murderers’ in their chicken-wire-and-boxwood cages – Dr Crippen, Ruth Ellis, Reginald Christie, Neville Heath – and lurid set-pieces – ‘Murder in the Bath’, ‘The Blood Hook’, ‘Jack the Ripper’ – was guaranteed to make even the hottest blood run cold.

  Even at the height of the season the waxworks would remain deserted for long stretches, and rarely welcomed more than a dozen visitors at any one time. Once inside, the familiar smells of the seaside – frying onions, diesel oil, the sea itself – were instantly blocked out by the smell of floor-polish and dust; the rasp of bingo callers and squeals of riders on the Magic Meteor at the nearby funfair gave way to silence only occasionally punctuated by the sound of rubber soles on lino and the faint clack of the turnstile turning outside.

  By the mid-1970s, a diversity of business interests meant that Mr Nicholson no longer depended on the waxworks for his living. But even as a hobby, which is what it had more or less become by then, he was determined that it should, at the very least, pay its way. To this end he commissioned a smattering of new figures – Billy Connolly, Terry Wogan, whose head, for reasons of economy, was mounted on the body of the ’fifties ‘crooner’ Johnny Ray. More controversially, however, he introduced a whole new room to the exhibition, the contents of which he had acquired from a friend and associate of many years, recently bowed out of the world of wax.

  *

  ‘The Museum of Anatomy’ was discreetly situated on the upper floor of Mr Nicholson’s sea-front premises, its entrance no more than a hole in the wall between two of the big display cabinets; it lay directly behind an ‘African tableau’ featuring a ‘Giraffe Necked Woman’, a ‘Plate Lipped Negress’, and a ‘Witch Doctor’ consisting almost entirely of an ancient black rubber mask and a flaccid pair of black rubber gloves. It was not discreet enough, however, for the local watch committee who tried, and finally failed, to have this ‘obscene’ display closed down.

  An inevitable result of the controversy that raged for weeks in the local press and on television was that Mr Nicholson’s takings reached an all-time high. This upturn in business, though, was shortlived and, within a very few months, the woman in the ticket kiosk could go back to reading her woman’s magazines and paperback romances virtually undisturbed. She certainly never noticed the actually rather striking young man with the frizzy black hair and friendly, gap-toothed smile who was becoming a regular customer.

  *

  With Anne and Trevor and, more importantly, his two nieces living there, and his grandmother Coonan’s sister, Reenee, living in an old people’s home in Morecambe, Peter had all the excuses he needed to stop off and see any or all of them after the middle of 1975, when he was regularly driving a wagon to or from Wales or Scotland, along the M6. Morecambe is only a ten-minute drive from the motorway at Lancaster, and he would drop in on Anne and her family or, less frequently, old Reenee, a couple of times a month. It was a rare visit when he didn’t also find time to call at ‘Tussaud’s’, either on his own or with Mick or Carl, to see ‘if there was owt fresh in’. There rarely was.

  Entering, he would immediately head for the steep wooden staircase on his right. After climbing the stairs to the upper gallery, he would then turn sharp left under the unblinking gaze of a rag-bag of dishevelled dummies, and pass quickly under the sign warning that what lies beyond is not suitable for anybody under the age of sixteen.

  ‘The Museum of Anatomy’ is a grandiose title for the two rather small, dimly lighted and musty chambers that the title embraces. Negotiating the sort of frosted glass ‘modesty’ screen often erected at the entrance to public lavatories, the visitor finds himself standing in a room whose first assault is on the nostrils: being Victorian, and therefore much prized by the Museum’s owner for their ‘antique’ value, the exhibits here are fashioned out of ordinary candle-wax. Deployed in such bulk, it imbues the atmosphere with the warm, slightly sweet smell of animal fat. Candle-wax is also more brittle than the commercial tallow used in modern modelling techniques, and so some of the items on display in the second of the two rooms which make up the ‘Museum of Anatomy’ are held together with Sellotape or merely cratered with irreparable holes and cracks.

  The exhibits hanging in Room One are, by comparison, in excellent condition. The only holes in the chorus of identical figures o
ccupying three of the walls of what Mick would come to think of as ‘the Macabre Torso Room’ are intentional. The torsos are life-size, headless, legless and female. There are nine of them and the cross-sections cut from their lower abdomens betray their function, which was to illustrate ‘The nine stages of pregnancy’ to an audience of Victorian lay people. Time, however, has eroded definition and basted the developing foetuses and the glistening ropes of internal organs to a uniform ox-blood colour; the impression is of gaping wounds around the umbilicus, growing progressively bigger, gorier and more congealed. Their antiquity is highlighted by the paleness of the simulated flesh and the freshness of the butcher’s muslin which provides a ‘bed’ for the bodies and is neatly tucked and trimmed to just above the bare breasts and just below the pubic area.

  But ‘the Macabre Torso Room’ merely serves as an antechamber to the smaller, airless, tunnel-like and infinitely more macabre gallery which leads off it and which is the focus of the exhibition. It is here that Peter used to like to linger.

  ‘In these models you see the awful results of men leading immoral lives before marriage,’ a sign announces at the centre of a room whose walls are crowded with heavy glass-fronted cases of the kind usually associated with the Victorian taxidermist’s art. Here, though, each case is an essay in the terrible frailty of the flesh, rather than a sentimental composition of brightly feathered songbirds or frolicking kittens: the chancred lips of a vagina ooze and fester beneath a grey cloud of pubic hair, which itself is surrounded by male sexual organs in varying degrees of rottenness and putrefaction, like half-eaten sausages, decorously framed in muslin. Four babies’ faces are obliterated by the sort of green scabs and horrible running sores that are an insistent theme, filling the room with images of feculence and pus. A hand is thrust deep into a womb, its fingers closed around a deformed foetus. Diseased scrotums are shown in cross-section then billow and burst …