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

by Gordon Burn

  As a result, there were few women in the Belle Vue most days that winter other than the disc-jockey with the often consulted fobwatch hanging between her pale, bare breasts and the performers in their gymslips, black leather, gold lamé and feather boas whom, every three quarters of an hour or so, it was her job to introduce. It was at this point that casual visitors would give themselves away by shuffling further into the room and craning their necks, while the regulars half-turned away from the raised stage with its guardrail and its single black plastic-covered chair and ignored ‘Miss Abby Lane’ ‘masturbating’ with a Johnson’s baby oil bottle while squirting oil up on to her stomach and breasts.

  They might look round if, as sometimes happened, she lifted the toupee off the head of a man at the front of the stage or removed somebody’s glasses and placed them between her legs. But, otherwise, they assumed an air of studied indifference. ‘When you’ve had as much cunt as I’ve had, you lose interest,’ was typical of the ‘men’s talk’ that circulated at the Belle Vue; impotence – ‘old man’s disease – I’ve to wind mesen up for three days wi’ mucky books now’ – was another perennial subject.

  Further into 1979, Peter would confide in Mick that he’d ‘caught a dose’ and was trying to get as many overnight trips as possible so that he didn’t have to ‘go near’ Sonia. But in company he rarely ventured far from the tried and trusted subject of motorcars and motor engines and, before the end of the winter, went up even further in the estimation of those who knew him by paying a West Country contact of Robin’s £700 for a brown, K-registration Rover.

  Robin hadn’t found the readjustment to civilian life easy after his years in the army: he liked to drink and one morning John Sutcliffe spotted him slumped over the wheel of his wagon in the car park at the Fisherman, fast asleep when he should have been at the other end of the country. His marriage to Maureen would break up in the autumn of 1979 and he would drift out of Peter’s life in the way that so many others had before him. The move from Tanton Crescent had more or less marked the end of Peter’s association with the Barker brothers, and now he only saw them when, like other friends from his past, he happened to bump into them in a pub.

  The Belle Vue was close to Bradford City’s ground, and Ronnie and his brother often looked in for a game of pool and a few drinks on match days. Peter himself had never shown any interest in football or, for that matter, sport of any kind in the years that they had known him; and so it startled, and then intrigued, Ronnie to see him standing alone on the City terraces on one or two occasions after they had begun to go their separate ways. The black hair and sharply trimmed black beard were unmistakable in the sparsely populated stands on the far side of the pitch, even in the fading light of autumn afternoons.

  Two more women would have been murdered by autumn, 1979. And ‘Ripper eleven, police nil!’ and ‘There’s only one Yorkshire Ripper!’ were among the chants taken up at many football grounds in the North of England in the opening weeks of the 1979–80 season. ‘Leeds United – more feared than the Yorkshire Ripper’ badges could be bought outside Leeds’ Elland Road ground.

  26

  Outside his family, Trevor Birdsall remained Peter’s one link with his Bingley past. Trevor and Melissa had finally split up in 1978, a little over a year after appearing together at Wakefield Crown court on a number of charges, including breaking and entering, theft and attempt to defraud. The general view was that they were just unlucky to have been caught. Few of their acquaintances, including Peter, would have claimed to be entirely innocent of similar ‘baby’ crimes.

  Carl had seen Peter go into an ‘auto shop’ and, under the pretext of buying something worth only a few shillings, slip a carburettor under his coat. He knew he sometimes stole the wheels off cars, leaving them jacked up on bricks. ‘He were always nickin’ stuff. He’d nick owt that weren’t fastened down if it were any good to him. He used to nick all sorts.’

  In the early hours of one New Year’s Eve, ambling towards the high-rise flats in Bingley where Mick was then living with a girl called Lynn, Peter went through the boots of several cars, giggling and showing Carl what he’d found: ‘He got a pair of women’s tall zip-up boots, all sorts of stuff. He got a loada stuff, put it all in woods and collected it on way back up.’

  On that occasion Carl had been about eighteen. Three or four years earlier, not long after Peter got married, Carl had taken him to an unoccupied house that he had come across up in Eldwick and, in the course of a number of trips, Peter had stripped it clean. He had sold a front-loading washing machine to his mother – ‘He was a Jew. Right devious an’ tight’; and the next time Carl saw the yellow Wilton was at Garden Lane, where it was fitted all over the top floor and up the stairs.

  On the frequent occasions when Sonia was staying with her sister and her family in the northern suburbs of London, Trevor would move in and spend a few days with Peter at Heaton. Peter told Carl they had women in, and Carl believed him. ‘I came round one morning on bike and there were Peter an’ Birdsall in house and that little boy of Birdsall’s who then must have been about three. I asked Pete where Sonia were, an’ he said she were at Marianne’s for the week. Then he says, looking round right nervously, whispering, “We just got rid of two birds. Just in time.” An’ they had, because he were telling me what had gone off.’

  There was also the occasion when Peter told his ‘kid’ brother about how Sonia had nearly found him out. ‘This bird he’d had in had taken the number with ’er when she left, and when she phoned up she’d got Sonia. He told me he’d convinced Sonia it were a joke blokes at work were playing on ’im, getting a secretary to phone. He told bird that woman on phone were lunatic woman lodger who lived in room at top of the house, an’ he were right pleased because he said they both believed him.

  ‘He once said to me, “When she goes away, we’ll have a week up there, get some birds round.” But it weren’t my scene, really. Age difference, I suppose. I used to like to go to different places than him. I didn’t like wearing suits … I don’t need to dress up in a suit to get a jump. I just go out an’ get one.’

  Sonia was still doing short-notice ‘relief’ work at the Sherrington nursing home in addition to her supply teaching (and nervously not declaring the extra income to the Inland Revenue). This usually kept her out of the house on Saturdays, although she did work some Tuesday and Wednesday nights, which left Peter at a loose end. On a Wednesday night in the week before Easter, 1979, he collected Trevor and they set off on one of their desultory rounds of the usual pubs.

  It was six months since the death of his mother and almost a year since he had murdered Vera Millward in Manchester, but the Lumb Lane area was still full of ‘undercover’ police officers whose existence, in fact, everyone was aware of: they could be seen at the upstairs windows at the Perseverance and ‘courting’ in strategically parked cars; their ‘secret’ surveillance activities had even been the subject of a phone-in programme on the Bradford independent station, Radio Pennine. Similar schemes were in operation in Chapeltown and all the other red-light areas of the North.

  It was a wet, miserable night at the tail-end of the long winter that, according to the calendar, should have been over, and shortly after closing time, Peter dropped Trevor off outside the place where he was then living. Instead of driving towards his own home, though, Trevor noticed that he had set off in exactly the opposite direction, but he closed the door against the cold and thought no more of it.

  Halifax is the town where Peter Sutcliffe had attacked Mrs Olive Smelt, after identifying her to Birdsall in a pub as a ‘prostitute’, four years earlier. Halifax, in fact, had no prostitute population and no red-light area, and it was a quiet residential district called Bell Hall that he found himself in at 11.30 that Wednesday night. He had gravitated towards the playing fields of Savile Park, on which a few people were walking their dogs, and had made several circuits of it in his car before spotting a young woman walking alone.

  He parked quic
kly and, after hurrying noiselessly to catch up with her, affected a casual approach. He asked her if she had far to go, and she said it was quite a walk. He asked her if she had considered learning to drive and she said she rode a horse which was the kind of transport she preferred.

  She stepped on to the grass of Savile Park at that point to take a short-cut across the playing fields to Free School Lane and Ivy Street where she lived, and he expressed surprise, telling her you didn’t know who you could trust these days. In his pocket were a ball-pein hammer and a seven-inch Phillips screwdriver which he had sharpened to a point on his garage floor.

  When they were out of the range of the street-lamps, he asked her if she could tell him what time it was on a nearby clock-tower and, after she had, he congratulated her on her eyesight. He lagged behind then, pretending to squint at the clock himself but actually freeing the ‘tackle’ from his jacket.

  He had knocked her to the ground before he noticed somebody walking along the pavement where they had been walking themselves only a minute or two earlier. He was also horrified to hear voices close behind and, turning around, saw two figures hurrying across the field; a man with a dog passed within five feet of him while he was crouched over the body, waiting to carry out ‘the inevitable’ in the dark.

  At 7.00 the next morning a thirteen-year-old boy returning from collecting the papers that he delivered before school noticed a knot of men standing over something on one of the pitches. Seconds later, David Whitaker burst through the door of his home, speechless with shock. He had recognised the tan court shoe lying thirty yards from what was obviously a dead body as that belonging to his elder sister, Jo.

  That evening, Peter Sutcliffe, along with the rest of Yorkshire, learned that he had murdered a nineteen-year-old clerk with the Halifax Building Society called Josephine Whitaker. At the time he waylaid her she had been on her way home from her grandparents’ house, where she had gone to show them the wristwatch that had arrived in the post that morning, a gift to herself chosen from a mail-order catalogue.

  Four days later, at the Palm Sunday service at St Jude’s, near Savile Park, the vicar, the reverend Michael Walker, asked a packed congregation to adopt a truly Christian attitude and pray for everyone concerned, including the Ripper. ‘He needs help, he is somebody’s child, husband or father. Pray not only for Josephine and her family, but for the Ripper and his family. They may be unwittingly protecting him.’

  *

  Josephine Whitaker was not a prostitute; she was a ‘decent, blameless’ girl and the first ‘totally respectable’ victim of the Yorkshire Ripper since Jayne MacDonald, the young supermarket worker, in Leeds in the summer of 1977. Jayne had been the fifth woman to be murdered, and they were now dealing with the tenth. These were the points George Oldfield made repeatedly in the days following the discovery of Josephine’s body, and with encouraging results: for the first time in the hunt for the ‘Ripper’, the public responded instantaneously to his appeals for help.

  Details were soon circulated of a number of cars seen in the area around the time of the attack, along with the Photofit picture of a man reported kerb-crawling in Halifax that night. He was described as being ‘of scruffy appearance, with collar-length dirty blond hair, Jason King-style moustache and square-shaped face and jaw’. After being shown the Photofit, Marilyn Moore claimed to recognise the ‘Dave’ with ‘come-to-bed eyes’ who had tricked her by pretending to wave to a neighbour before attacking her with a hammer in Chapeltown, just before Christmas, 1977.

  For the first time, too, there were important forensic clues. Traces of milling oil and tiny metal particles were detected in the many wounds inflicted on Josephine’s body, as a result of which a confident-seeming George Oldfield called a press conference to announce that he now had ‘a considerable impression’ of the man he was seeking: he was ‘white, aged between thirty and fifty-five, at least average to above-average height, an artisan or manual worker, either skilled or semi-skilled, with engineering or mechanical connections’. He was possibly ‘a skilled machine tool-fitter, or an electrical or maintenance engineer’. But there were other reasons to account for George Oldfield’s sense of renewed vigour, almost ebullience, which, for the time being, he was keeping to himself.

  Eleven days before the murder of Josephine Whitaker, a letter had arrived at the Assistant Chief Constable’s office in Wakefield bearing a Sunderland postmark. It was the same postmark, and the envelope was written in the same hand, as two letters which had found their way on to his desk almost exactly a year before. Posted within a week of each other in the Sunderland area and signed ‘Yours respectfully, Jack the Ripper’, they had been routinely checked at the time and dismissed as the work of a crank. There was enough detailed information in the latest one, however, to incline the officers of the ‘Ripper Squad’, and George Oldfield in particular, to the view that they might not be the work of a hoaxer after all.

  In the second letter, sent to the northern offices of the Sunday Mirror, the writer had urged ‘chief constable’ Oldfield to ‘remember Preston 75’, a clear reference to the murder of Joan Harrison, a prostitute addicted to the morphine in cough mixtures, whose body had been found in a lock-up garage in Preston, in Lancashire, in November 1975. Although there were marked similarities – Joan Harrison had been hit over the head with a heavy object; her clothing had been disturbed – her murder hadn’t previously been regarded as the work of the ‘Ripper’.

  A semen test on Mrs Harrison’s body, though, had indicated that the man who killed her, in common with only 6 per cent of the population, belonged to blood group ‘B’; and a saliva test on the envelope containing the most recently arrived of the Sunderland letters showed that the writer of the letters was also a rare ‘B’-secretor.

  A rereading of the second letter, written two months before the murder, in Manchester, of Vera Millward, who at forty-two was the oldest woman in the series, also turned up references to going for an ‘older one’ in ‘Liverpool or even Manchester again’. And then in the third letter the writer had revealed something which, as far as the police were concerned, only the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ could have known: that victim No. 9, Vera Millward, had recently been a patient at the hospital in whose grounds her eviscerated body was found.

  At a special press conference called two weeks after Josephine Whitaker’s murder, George Oldfield made the first public reference to what was to become known as ‘the Geordie connection’. He appealed to engineering firms on Tyneside to contact the police if any of their workers regularly visited West Yorkshire, and vice versa.

  Squads of detectives were despatched to start the work of processing whatever information could be culled from the many thousands of potential sources in both regions. Like much that had preceded it in the previous four years, it was a long, slow, slogging process of elimination, inescapably low-key. And then, two months after the ‘trawl’ of the North East had started, the whole tenor of the operation suddenly – and irrevocably – changed. There was a development which convinced the men leading the search for the modern ‘Ripper’ that, ‘in his arrogance’, he had at last gone too far, and which instantly became not only national, but world, news.

  *

  At 2.00 p.m. on Tuesday, 20 June 1979, George Oldfield walked into the crowded press conference that he had called in the lecture theatre at the Metropolitan Police Academy in Bishopgarth in Wakefield. His cheeks flared as the television lights hit them and then, without a word, he pushed the ‘Play’ button of the portable tape recorder that was on the table in front of him. The hiss from the first few inches of blank tape, and then an unmistakable Geordie voice, filled the room.

  I’m Jack. I see you are having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord [the tone was intimate, gently goading], you are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are let-tin’ you down, George. They can’t be much good, can they? The only time they came near catching me was a few
months back in Chapeltown, when I was disturbed. Even then it was a uniformed copper, not a detective. I warned you in March that I’d strike again. Sorry it wasn’t Bradford. I did promise you that, but I couldn’t get there.

  I’m not quite sure when I’ll strike again, but it will definitely be sometime this year, maybe September, October or even sooner if I get the chance. I’m not sure where, maybe Manchester; I like it there, there’s plenty of them knocking about. They never learn, do they, George? I bet you’ve warned them. But they never listen.

  At the rate I’m goin’, I should be in the book of records. I think it’s eleven up to now, isn’t it? Well, I’ll keep on going for quite a while yet. I can’t see myself being nicked just yet. Even if you do get near, I’ll probably top myself first.

  Well, it’s been nice chatting to you, George.

  Yours, Jack the Ripper.

  No good looking for fingerprints, you should know by now it’s as clean as a whistle. See you soon.’ Bye. Hope you like the catchy tune at the end. Ha-ha.

  Three minutes and sixteen seconds of rehearsed but stilted monologue were followed by twenty-two seconds of a middle-of-the-road ballad called, with heavy irony, ‘Thank You for Being a Friend’.