by Gordon Burn
The centrepiece of this battered collection, however, is the bust of a woman, ‘an allegorical sculpture in wax’, originally inspired by one of the numerous pieces of religious statuary representing the Virgin suckling the infant Jesus. The head is inclined sweetly and enclosed in a muslin ‘wimple’, and the first and second fingers of the right hand gently offer the left nipple. The nipple, though, is discoloured and heavily encrusted, and the bare, waxen white breasts are covered in burning venereal sores and hives.
To this piece, as to all the others, is affixed a faded card on which a homily has been penned in a fussy, Gothic script. ‘Vice is a monster of so hideous a mien/That to be hated needs but to be seen,’ it says on the case illustrating ‘French pox in the female’. ‘Wise men see the evil and avoid it/But fools pass on and are punished,’ it says above the four mutilated children’s heads. ‘His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself. And he shall be holden with the cords of his sins,’ it says above the rotting penises. ‘To thoughtless husbands, this case well deserves their attention. For how many there are who are good husbands and good fathers yet when in their cups fall into temptation and contract a complaint which destroys the happiness of the family’ is the inscription pinned to the bust of the ‘Madonna’.
Stepping out of the ‘Museum of Anatomy’, the visitor is confronted with a full-scale replica of Christ on the cross whose brightness, after the half-dark, and in the half-dark in which it is one of the main sources of illumination, seems almost blinding.
*
Peter Sutcliffe was to claim that he was suffering from venereal disease several times in his life. The first occasion was around the time of the Bankfield Hotel ‘unmasking’ of his mother, and his reconciliation with Sonia, when he was almost twenty-four.
Keith Sugden hadn’t exchanged more than a few words with his former best friend for nearly two years, not since his engagement to Doreen Hawkes, when Peter sought him out in the Ferrands one night to ask his advice on something which seemed to be worrying him. ‘I were stood at bar when he suddenly came over and asked me did I have a minute? I asked him what were up and he said, “I think I’ve got summat. I think I’ve got a dose. Anyway it don’t look right nice.”
‘So I went to toilet with him and he showed me an’ he were right, it didn’t. I mean, he didn’t get it all out; he just showed me offending part. An’ it had all gone white at end, where he hadn’t been circumcised. All end had gone bloody white an’ flaky. So I told him, I says, “You better go up to ’ospital with it, to St Luke’s in Bradford, and get job sorted out.”’
‘Off one of them mucky bitches’ had been Peter’s reply when asked where he thought he’d picked up the infection, which Keith took to mean off ‘a good-time girl’ like the two he’d turned up with the night he’d arranged to go out for a drink with Keith and Doreen in Shipley. ‘So bugger must be getting it somewhere,’ Keith told Doreen when he got home, concluding his account of the incident. ‘I don’t know where though.’
16
Mick Sutcliffe never made any secret of his philandering. He could sleep in a different bed every night in Bingley if he chose to, and he frequently did. In Carl’s eyes, however, this achievement never amounted to much. ‘There’s a wrestler on telly who looks just like an ugly old slag who lives in Bingley, but our Mick’s given her one. Our Mick’s given everybody one. He’d fuck a pig in knickers. He fucks anything that moves.’
From time to time Mick had ‘gone with’ a prostitute on Lumb Lane, and he was no stranger to the Carlisle or any of the other pubs around Manningham. But, on two or three occasions in the years after he was married, Peter insisted on giving his brother a demonstration of his superior knowledge.
‘He used to tek us round red-light districts in motor an’ say, “This is best spot to get ’em.” He thought he were showing me summat new, but I knew already. He’d say, “Look at these here.” So I’d fuckin’ look at them, and that’s all I’d want to do. “Look at this old scraggly cunt,” he’d say, “coming towards us.” Then he’d wind window down and ask how much. “A fiver,” she’d say. “Oh fuck off,” he’d shout, and we’d just drive off.’
This behaviour bore no resemblance to the thoughtful, gentle, courteous Peter whom everybody knew at home, the Peter who was always especially conspicuous at Christmas. Kathleen had made it a tradition at Cornwall Road to hold ‘open house’ on Boxing Day for any old people in the family who lived alone. These included Grandma Coonan’s sister, Reenee; Grandfather Sutcliffe’s sister, Mabel; and an ‘adopted’ aunt, crippled with arthritis, called Josie London. And Peter had taken it upon himself to collect ‘his’ old ladies from their homes every year and run them back again in the evening. In fact, these were the parts of the day that some of them seemed to look forward to with the greatest sense of anticipation.
Even in the late 1970s, long after her own failing health had obliged his mother to withdraw her standing invitation, Peter continued to visit his elderly aunts during the Christmas period. Sometimes with Sonia, sometimes alone, he’d call with a card and a small present, staying long enough for a cup of tea and a chat.
Hand-delivering his Christmas cards and, in the process, reviving friendships that had perhaps been allowed to lie fallow became a regular habit with Peter after he moved away from Bingley. This was one of the ways in which he kept in touch with Arthur Bisby, the insurance agent in Crossflatts; and Christmas 1975 was no exception to this, nor was it in any way exceptional.
Less than four weeks after Peter’s usual protracted visit, though, Arthur Bisby was shocked to read a report in the local paper on the death of the wife of an old school-friend of his. Emily Jackson’s mutilated body had been found by a workman in a Leeds alleyway on a wet January morning. What disturbed Arthur Bisby almost as much as the fact that she had been so brutally murdered, however, was the fact that Sydney Jackson’s wife should have turned out to be a prostitute.
It was a reaction he shared with all the Jacksons’ neighbours in Churwell, a hillside village on the southwestern perimeter of Leeds, who only knew them as a hard-working, middle-aged couple with three children – a fourth, a boy, had died after falling from his bedroom window five years earlier – who seemed to enjoy life. He ran a one-man roofing business; she helped with the paperwork and drove the old Commer van from job to job for him.
Mrs Jackson also drove the van on their jaunts into Leeds which, since the death of their son, had become almost nightly. Having dropped her husband off at a large, cosmopolitan ‘entertainments’ pub on Roundhay Road called the Gaiety, it was her habit to cruise the streets of Chapeltown until closing time looking for ‘business’, although she would sometimes leave the van in the Gaiety car park and go off to have sex with clients in the comparative comfort of their own cars.
That is what Sydney Jackson thought had probably happened on the night of Wednesday, 21 January 1976, when he came out of the pub at around 10.45 to find the van parked in the quickly emptying car park but no trace of his wife. Philosophically, he set off to find himself a taxi. By then, however, Emily was already dead.
Mrs Jackson had been murdered within an hour of leaving the Gaiety. She had been picked up by Peter Sutcliffe some time before 7.00 and had driven half a mile with him in the direction of the city centre, where they parked away from the lights of the main road on a piece of derelict land. He contrived to get the woman, whose ‘overwhelming smell of cheap perfume’ he would later claim had nauseated him, to hold a torch while he raised the bonnet of his car to examine the engine. He had then taken ‘a couple of steps back’ and aimed two blows at her head with a hammer.
Once she was unconscious he had manoeuvred Mrs Jackson’s body further into the shadows where, having pushed her sweater, cardigan and brassiere up to expose her breasts, he had stabbed her a total of fifty-two times, in the breasts, neck, back and lower abdomen, with a cross-ply Phillips screwdriver. He had also taken a piece of wood and thrust it between her legs in order, he said, ‘to s
how her as disgusting as she was’.
Sutcliffe arrived at his mother-in-law’s without a trace of blood on his clothes and suffused ‘with a feeling of satisfaction and justification’.
He couldn’t wake up next morning, the 22 January, and, as often happened, arrived late for work. It was his mother’s birthday and, that night, he made a point of delivering her card personally to Cornwall Road.
*
The murders of Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson in Leeds were front-page news all over Yorkshire. But the murder of an old-age pensioner in Bingley, exactly three weeks before the Jackson killing, had stunned the community and was still the main talking-point in the town.
Bingley Main Street is always at its busiest between the hours of 8.00 and 11.30 on Friday and Saturday nights, when the pedestrian traffic between the pubs at the ‘top of the town’ – the Harvester, the Ferrands – and those at the ‘bottom’ – the Queen’s Head, the Fleece, the White Horse and, across a stone bridge on the other side of the river, the Brown Cow – reaches its peak.
The restless to-ing and fro-ing generates an atmosphere of expectancy and rough vitality that is conspicuously missing during the rest of the week, and this had been the case with a vengeance on New Year’s Eve, 1975. Most people, several Sutcliffes among them, asked to account for their movements that night, later experienced great difficulty recalling precisely where they had been, with whom and when.
But even though she lived virtually next door to the White Horse, Mrs Grace Adamson, an eighty-five-year-old widow, was oblivious to what was going on outside in the street. She was sitting in the small living-room of her terraced cottage opposite the church, knitting and watching television, when a teenager from Shipley, a student later identified as Mark Andrew Rowntree, spotted her through the window and knocked on her door.
When Mrs Adamson opened it, Rowntree lunged at her with a long-bladed, ‘commando-type’ knife and stabbed her a total of seven times. Afterwards, he buried the knife and went for a drink in a pub in Crossflatts, where he also washed the blood off his hands.
Two days later, Rowntree returned to the shop in Bradford where he had bought the original knife and purchased a second one. Packing it in a shoulder-bag, he set off by bus for Sutton-in-Craven where, in the Black Bull, he engaged the landlady on the subject of the Bingley killing. ‘They might have let her live life out properly,’ he said with some feeling, before strolling down to the village and casually stabbing a youth to death at a bus-stop.
On 7 January, a further five days later, Rowntree called at the home of a Leeds prostitute whom he had visited once before, for sex, after getting her address from a contact magazine. This time the knife was taped to his leg and he stabbed the woman with it eighteen times. He also stabbed to death her three-year-old son, who had witnessed the murder, then took the bus to Guiseley, where he again buried the evidence.
Returning to his lodgings in Shipley, however, Rowntree was met by Detective Superintendent Dick Holland, deputy head of Bradford CID, who was perplexed, and more than a little thrown, by his suspect’s disdainful manner and ‘posh’ accent. ‘I will just tell you a little story which may interest you. I did those two killings,’ Rowntree remarked pleasantly and, after a sleep, volunteered a calm and detailed description of all four attacks.
At his trial five months later, Rowntree admitted that he had failed in his ambition to execute girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty, whom he despised, ‘at bus-stops, chewing gum, smoking and who were shallow-minded’. He had been ‘hurt and let down by girls’. This had motivated him to seek revenge on anybody or anything. He admitted experiencing ‘high elation’ after each death, and expressed ‘excitement and regret in shocking the public and making the police work’.
Giving evidence, the senior medical officer at Armley jail told the court that the conclusion he had reached was that, at the material times, Rowntree was suffering from a mental illness, namely schizophrenia. ‘There was a voice commanding and telling him to do it,’ the doctor explained, adding that, in his opinion, the defendant was in need of urgent psychiatric treatment in hospital.
Details of the trial were accorded many hundreds of column-inches both in West Yorkshire and in the national press, with Peter Sutcliffe’s regular morning paper, the Daily Mail, leading the field as usual in the comprehensiveness of its coverage of the case, which was heard throughout the first week of June 1976.
A month earlier, at around 4.00 a.m. on Sunday, 9 May, Sutcliffe had himself attacked another woman, a coloured prostitute called Marcella Claxton, on Soldiers Field, near Chapeltown in Leeds, hitting her twice with a hammer and leaving her needing fifty stitches in the head.
Saturdays and Wednesdays were the nights when Sonia most often worked at the Sherrington Private Nursing Home with her mother. They were usually back at Tanton Crescent in time for an early breakfast, unaware that sometimes the reason Peter went on sleeping so soundly upstairs was because he had spent half the night prowling around the seamier areas of Bradford and Leeds.
Although, outwardly at least, he was his same, casual self, the fact that Marcella Claxton hadn’t died had shaken him and, not for the first time, he spent a few weeks living in fear of the police knocking on the door. Marcella Claxton, however, was an educationally subnormal West Indian with an IQ of only 50 whom the police, privately, regarded as ‘just this side of a gorilla’. They therefore treated her account of what had happened in the early hours of 9 May, and her description of the ‘black and crinkly bearded’ man who had attacked her, with scepticism, and didn’t immediately link it with the other recent attacks on women in the area.
Sutcliffe stayed away from prostitutes and the red-light districts for the rest of 1976. On Saturday, 5 February 1977, though, he was back kerb-crawling in Chapeltown in the white Ford Corsair that he now ran in tandem with the green Capri. He had approached a number of women without success when, with the time coming up to midnight, he spotted the plump, long-haired figure of Irene Richardson dashing from the rooming house where she had managed to reserve a bed for the night to Tiffany’s ‘Supper Disco’ in the centre of Leeds.
Like Wilma McCann, Irene was originally from Scotland; and, also like Wilma McCann, she had fallen on hard times. Separated from her husband, with her two daughters, aged four and five, fostered out, she had spent most of the previous ten days wandering about, homeless and practically penniless, in Chapeltown.
When the smart white car pulled up a few yards ahead of her she jumped in without a word. ‘I might not have wanted you,’ Sutcliffe said once she was sitting beside him, but she told him not to worry, she’d give him a good time. They drove a mile along Roundhay Road past the big houses on the edge of the park to almost exactly the spot where he had attacked Wilma McCann on Soldiers Field. While she was crouching to urinate on the grass, Sutcliffe slipped a hammer from his pocket and hit Irene Richardson three times in the head.
Her body was discovered by a jogger soon after dawn the next morning, only a short distance from the disc-jockey Jimmy Savile’s house.
She was lying face down, with her imitation suede coat that she had been wearing draped over her legs. Her skirt had been pushed up and her knee-length, zip-up boots had been positioned carefully over her thighs. She had been stabbed in the neck and throat, and her stomach had been slashed so violently with a Stanley knife that her intestines had spilled out.
Irene Richardson was the third victim of the man local papers began to call the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. Between looking at houses and tinkering with the engines of cars, Peter Sutcliffe was to attack five more women, killing three of them, before the end of 1977.
17
In October 1976, nine years after being sacked from Bingley cemetery and a full sixteen years after leaving school, Peter had at last found another job which seemed to suit him and which it looked like he might want to keep. Working for T. and W. H. Clark, a small engineering transport firm, took him all over the country and involved a lot of ‘ov
ernights’ which, apart from the few weeks when he joined Sonia in London, represented the closest he had ever come to living alone.
Most of the drivers working out of Clark’s yard on the Canal Road industrial estate between Bradford and Shipley slept in the bunk-beds built into the rear of their cabins in order to pocket the £9.50-a-night accommodation allowance. But it struck many of those who knew him that Peter, although never averse to saving a few shillings, would have preferred to do this anyway.
Having proven himself over several months in one of the firm’s four-and six-ton ‘big rigids’, he had been assigned one of the two articulated lorries owned by Clark’s and this had very quickly become the pride of his life. The Ford Transcontinental was at that time the most advanced truck of its kind on the road in Britain and Peter was like a child with a new toy at the wheel of his £250,000-worth of machinery.
It was something of a mystery to his workmates why he was quite so ‘loopy’ about his wagon. He’d kill the hours it took to load and unload the massive trailer cleaning and polishing, and the cabin in particular was always spotless. He always carried a few ‘nuddy’ books, but of the Playboy and Penthouse variety rather than ‘the right mucky ones’ that the other men tended to pore over, and the pictures always stayed inside their glossy covers rather than finding their way on to the cabin walls. Mick preferred his pin-ups ‘with a few things on – knickers, stockin’s an’ that – better than when they’re wearing nowt’, and Peter seemed to share his tastes.
The Transcontinental had a physical presence that matched its price. The bed of the trailer was a good five feet off the ground and eye-level for the driver was five feet higher than that. This is what Jane remembered, after its ‘immaculateness’, when Peter gave her a lift home in it once. ‘You could see for miles from that cabin. You were up above everything. It were real.’
