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

by Gordon Burn

  The evening ended on a sour note, however, when Peter refused to get another round in at last orders, even though it was his turn. They queued up for their fish-and-chips in near silence on the way back to Clayton. Then, although it was turned midnight, Peter dropped the two brothers at the end of the street, as he sometimes had in the past, before slipping back into the traffic on the main road.

  *

  Jayne MacDonald had changed her mind. Instead of going to the Astoria, she had met up with some friends and gone to the Hof-brauhaus, a German-style ‘Bierkeller’ near Leeds city centre. There, over the noise of singalongs and an oompah band, she had fallen into conversation with an eighteen-year-old called Mark Jones and had danced with him until it was time to leave. At 10.30, they had set off in the direction of Briggate, the main shopping street, as part of a crowd, and then Jayne had suggested going for some chips.

  By the time they found somewhere that sold chips and had eaten them, Jayne had missed her last bus, so they sat on a bench outside C & A until about 12.00, when they started walking towards the estate near St James’s hospital where Mark lived. If his sister was in, Mark told her, she’d run her home. But it was a warm night and Jayne gave the impression of not minding either way. When there was no car outside the house, they continued walking up Beckett Road in the general direction of Chapeltown, then lay down in a school field opposite ‘Jimmies’ until well after 1.00 a.m.

  They parted outside the main gates of the hospital, having arranged to meet again in the middle of the week, and Jayne set off with the intention of calling a taxi from the taxi firm’s own kiosk at the corner of Harehills Road. Receiving no reply, however, she turned left down one of the maze of streets that would bring her out near Grandways, the supermarket where she worked, and the Gaiety, the pub where Sydney Jackson had last seen his wife alive.

  *

  At 2.00 a.m., Peter Sutcliffe saw Jayne walking along Chapeltown Road. He parked and got out of his car, equipping himself with a hammer and a kitchen knife. He followed her past Sharma and Son and the Latvian Welfare Fund, past the Hayfield, an enormous pub set well back from the road, and left into Reginald Terrace; and, although the distance between them wasn’t very great, she never once looked round.

  Thirty yards into Reginald Terrace he struck her from behind. Dragging her face-downwards into a playground that had been salvaged from the rubble, he was startled by the noise her shoes made scraping along the ground.

  19

  The murder of Jayne MacDonald, described by the police as the first ‘innocent’ victim of the man coming to be known throughout the North of England as the ‘Ripper’, devastated those who had known her or lived near her, and outraged the rest of Leeds.

  Petitions demanding the return of capital punishment started to circulate independently in several parts of the city; ‘Hang the Ripper’ graffiti started appearing on Chapeltown walls; and an open letter in the Evening Post, pleading with the ‘butcher’ of five women to reveal his identity – ‘How did you feel yesterday when you learned your bloodstained crusade had gone so horribly wrong? That your vengeful knife had found so innocent a target?’ – was picked up by the Manchester offices of most Fleet Street morning papers.

  By the time WPC Susan Phillips dressed up in the clothes resembling those Jayne had been wearing seven nights earlier to retrace her two-mile route from St James’s hospital to Chapel-town Road, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was becoming national – if still not headline – news.

  In October 1975, when Wilma McCann’s body had been found on a playing field in Leeds, there had been nothing to indicate that she was to be only the first of many women to die at the hands of a man believed by the police to have ‘a pathological hatred of prostitutes’, over the next five and a half years.

  The head of Leeds CID had commandeered all the manpower at his disposal in an effort to make an early arrest. Daily press conferences were held for the first two weeks and local newspapers and television news programmes were encouraged to run pictures of the four McCann children in an attempt to elicit the sympathy and co-operation of the public.

  News editors, though, and the majority of their readers, were inclined to regard Wilma McCann’s as just another ‘fish-and-chip murder’, to be forgotten in the space of a week. The police’s only hope was the reappearance of the white plastic purse with the word ‘Mumiy’ written on it that Wilma had been carrying when she left home for the last time.

  The murder of Emily Jackson barely a mile away, three months later, had largely been deemed remarkable for the fact that she had lived in the same village with her husband and children for years without any of their neighbours suspecting that she was ‘on the game’. The news that she had almost certainly been killed by the same man who killed Wilma McCann, and in the same manner, had sustained the public’s interest for a further couple of weeks. But then, with no leads other than the heavily ribbed, size seven or eight wellington bootprints found near the dead woman’s body and on her thigh, the case had quickly ‘died’.

  There was an interval of more than a year before Peter Sutcliffe murdered Irene Richardson. But Professor David Gee of Leeds University’s Department of Forensic Science, who was to perform post-mortems on all the Yorkshire victims, immediately read in Richardson’s injuries the ‘signature’ of the so-called ‘Ripper’.

  Multiple fractures of the skull, displaced clothing and mutilation of the lower abdomen and breasts with a knife or screwdriver gave ‘a clear badge of identity’ to the killings, although exact details were never released while the murderer was still at large, so afraid were the police of ‘copycat’ crimes and hoax ‘confessions’; they also wanted to have something in reserve if and when an arrest was made.

  The conduct of the enquiry was anyway dogged with problems so long as the women being murdered were ‘vice-girls’. Not only were the general public less co-operative than they would have been if the victims had been ‘decent’ women, but the red-light areas of West Yorkshire, like ghettoes anywhere, were in many ways self-contained, self-regulating communities whose members instinctively closed ranks against the police.

  Prostitutes and their pimps were no more likely to come forward with information than their customers, many of them married men with families, were to own up to being in Spencer Place or Leopold Street any night after dark.

  Despite having 120 detectives working around the clock on the Richardson case, the feedback was so disappointing that Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson, head of Leeds CID, took the drastic, and potentially dangerous, step of putting police-women on the streets of Chapeltown disguised as call-girls. Their brief was to use short-wave radios to transmit details of any man who stopped and asked if they were ‘doing business’ to male colleagues parked some distance away in the shadows. As a tactic it proved no more effective than any of the others, and was quickly abandoned.

  But if the gathering of information presented problems, they were nothing compared to the difficulties the police faced when it came to organising and retrieving what they had. A major stumbling-block was that the indexing and cross-referencing work on statements relating to previous murders usually hadn’t been completed when a new set started to flow in. The shortcomings of a system which relied on teams of individuals to process volumes of material that would have kept a computer occupied twenty-four hours a day were especially apparent in the eighteen months from the spring of 1977, when seven women were murdered and another two left for dead.

  Irene Richardson’s murder was still being investigated when news came in, in April 1977, that the ‘Ripper’ had struck for the first time in Bradford. And a surveillance operation was just being set up in the Lumb Lane area as a result of Tina Atkinson’s death when, four weeks later, the mutilated body of his fifth victim was discovered in Chapeltown.

  Jayne MacDonald had been stabbed repeatedly through the same two openings in the front and back of her body. A broken bottle with the screw-top still attached was embedded in her ch
est. Police spokesmen, as usual, gave reassurances that everything possible was being done to catch the ‘maniac’ responsible. But the widespread public concern at this most recent abomination demanded a change in police tactics.

  *

  Up to June 1977, a different investigating officer had been appointed to each case, depending on the area. It had then been up to the ‘Ripper Room’ in Millgarth to establish some common link. Now, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Ronald Gregory, called in his most senior and experienced detective and put him in overall control.

  Invariably described as ‘blunt’ and ‘ruddy-faced’ and looking ‘like a gentleman farmer’ in his bold, Evelyn Waugh-style tweeds, George Oldfield publicly staked his reputation on the success of the investigation and, in typical fashion, showed that he meant business from day one. A mobile police post complete with radio mast and generator was set up only yards from where Jayne MacDonald had been killed, and detectives set about tracing the 400 individuals who had been seen in the area of the adventure playground on the night that she died.

  Before the end of the first week George Oldfield was pleased to announce that, of the 400 people on his list, 380 had been tracked down and cleared. And more figures quickly followed: 152 women had been arrested and reported for prostitution in the Chapeltown area and a further sixty-eight cautioned. A total of 3,780 statements had been taken with regard to the MacDonald murder from 13,000 people. Convinced that a friend or a relative must know or suspect the identity of the Ripper, Leeds Freefone 5050 was open twenty-four hours a day to receive recorded messages, which poured in non-stop for a fortnight.

  After a fortnight, though, as with the other enquiries, information began to dry up. ‘The public have the power to decide what sort of society they want. If they want murder and violence they will keep quiet. If they want a law-abiding society, in which their womenfolk can move freely without fear of attack from the individual we are seeking, then they must give us their help,’ Mr Oldfield was repeatedly quoted as saying, until some observers started to detect a hint of desperation in his daily appeals for information.

  *

  Two weeks after the murder of Jayne MacDonald, the newly formed Debating Society at John Sutcliffe’s local in Bingley, the Ferrands, carried the motion that ‘this house believes that women have always held a privileged position in society and that the women’s liberation movement can only detract from this status’, by a majority of more than two to one.

  That Saturday, Peter was out drinking as usual with Ronnie and David Barker. 9 July 1977 saw them trailing round their usual haunts in Bradford. At the end of an uneventful evening Peter once again deposited them at the end of Tanton Crescent and drove off alone.

  *

  He spotted Maureen Long, a small woman with hair as black as her old-fashioned-looking, floor-length black evening dress, coming out of Tiffany’s on Manningham Lane just after 2.00 a. m., and cruised slowly behind her as she tottered unsteadily towards Hustlergate. He waited until she had passed the long queue of people waiting for taxis before pulling over.

  A well-known figure around the Manningham area, Mrs Long had spent the evening drinking heavily and dancing energetically and, no longer as young as she imagined – she was the mother, in fact, of one of the girls working the Lumb Lane beat – was grateful for the lift. She was living in Bowling, she explained, a rundown area among the railway yards just on the other side of the city centre, with an ex-boxer whom she described as ‘a spoilsport’.

  Reaching Rendle Street, she cautioned her driver not to stop immediately in front of her door. She asked him if he ‘fancied’ her and, when he said he did, she told him they could go inside the house if there was no one in. Within a couple of minutes though she was back and directing him towards some waste ground nearby.

  He struck her with the hammer while she was crouching, urinating in the dark. Ripping her dress to the waist, he stabbed her repeatedly in the chest, stomach and back. He saw lights going on in a nearby caravan belonging to some gypsies, but he didn’t stop.

  He felt certain she was dead when he drove away from her body in the small hours of Sunday morning, and learning from Monday’s papers that she wasn’t gave him a ‘nasty shock’.

  ‘The investigation is beginning to bubble,’ a buoyant George Oldfield told a press conference two days later. ‘I feel we are getting nearer to the man I am looking for … I feel sure we will win.’ But reading the description of the man Maureen Long believed was responsible for the attempt on her life – white, aged thirty-six or thirty-seven, over six foot tall, with puffy cheeks, noticeably large hands and collar-length wiry blond hair – Peter Sutcliffe started to relax.

  The description of a car seen speeding away from the scene of the attack – a white Mark 2 Ford Cortina with a black roof – was the only thing that gave him any cause for worry. A month later he attempted to palm his white Ford Corsair off on Ronnie Barker and, when that didn’t work, stripped the car down and redistributed the spare parts around the red Corsair that he bought as a replacement in September 1977.

  At the end of the summer he drove his parents to Anne and Trevor’s house just off the front at Morecambe, and returned a couple of days later to pick them up.

  20

  Although Peter had always seemed fond of children, and children of him, it was generally assumed by those who knew them that, given Sonia’s marked indifference, they would be unlikely to have any family of their own.

  So it had come as something of a surprise when Peter, during one of his regular visits to Cornwall Road, had explained that the reason Sonia wasn’t with him was because she was at home in bed, recovering from a miscarriage. They had been married a little over a year at that point and so, although sad – and Peter had seemed genuinely upset – it was hardly a disaster. But Maureen got the strong impression that they were unlikely to try again. ‘No, they just keep you poor, do kids,’ was Sonia’s response when her sister-in-law offered her her sympathies the next time they met.

  In 1976, four years after her health had forced her to abandon the course she’d started in London, Sonia had resumed her studies, this time at the Margaret MacMillan Teachers Training College in Bradford. And a year later the chances of her ever having children seemed to become even more remote as she planned to mark the transition to full-time teaching by moving into a house of her own.

  *

  In August 1977, a week after their third wedding anniversary and just a month before Sonia was due to start work as a supply teacher at Holmfield First School, in Bradford, contracts were exchanged on the house in Heaton that she had fallen in love with two months earlier; by the end of September, Mrs Szurma-Sutcliffe, as she signed herself on the purchase documents, and her husband, were the new owners of No. 6 Garden Lane.

  Heaton was the last place Peter’s former friends in Bingley would have expected him to end up living and, when news filtered through that he was buying a house there, it was final confirmation to Eric and the rest that he’d left them standing.

  Although only ten minutes on foot from the ‘foreign’ aromas and cosmopolitan bustle of Manningham and Lumb Lane, there is little sign in Heaton of the kind of life being lived further down the hill. The outside paintwork on the houses, whose large, underheated rooms are furnished with large, dark pieces of furniture, is soberly wood-grained rather than rainbow-coloured, and the food in the shops, if not the Lautrec Bistro, is still ‘traditional’ English. At the heart of Heaton is St Bede’s, the Catholic grammar school where his father had hoped Peter would finish his education; and the glowering formality of Lister Park, home of the Bradford city art gallery and museum.

  The houses on the broad streets fanning out to the north and west of the park are in the style known as Bradford Baroque: stolid, detached stone buildings enlivened with monumental decorative detailing – and, in the 1970s, ‘Rock Against Racism’ and ‘Friends of the Earth’ posters and plants in macrame baskets, a sign of the Art College and University lectu
rers moving in.

  Even by Heaton standards, though, Garden Lane was a backwater, which explained the number of elderly and retired people living there. Built much later than the surrounding stone villas, the houses were for the most part unprepossessing pebble-dashed semis of the type to be found in similar dormitory suburbs the length and breadth of the country. Garden Lane’s one unique feature, which helped keep property values buoyant, was the tract of open land known as Salem Field, used by Bradford Salem rugby football club for their fixtures. The raised field occupied most of the north side of the street and guaranteed that those people living opposite could never be overlooked.

  Only a few houses had been built adjacent to either end of the pitch, and No. 6 Garden Lane was one of them. No. 6, in fact, was the last house before the eastern perimeter, one of a handful which stood at the top of steep concrete drives, looking out over the neighbouring rooftops towards Bradford.

  Tall, pale pink and pot-bellied, like a bow-fronted sentry box, it looked peculiarly out of proportion. ‘It’s just like a half a semi, really. It’s like a semi that’s never had the other one built on to it,’ as John Sutcliffe wasn’t slow to notice. To Peter, though, it was ‘detached’ and, what was more, the only detached house in the street.

  Built in the 1930s, with most of the period fittings, including the leaded lights that cast a soft, ecclesiastical glow on to the hall and staircase, still intact, it had known just two previous owners. Mr Wilcox, the Bradford grocer who had lived there most of his life, first with his wife and then with a housekeeper, had sold it after thirty years to an Asian barrister, which had caused a number of eyebrows to be raised.