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

by Gordon Burn

  The first exposure most people outside the North of England had to the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was his voice, which led all news bulletins on television and radio that evening and the following morning, and dominated newspaper headlines for a week. It was also to be heard for the price of a telephone call on a special number which, despite the lines being doubled, was to be almost permanently engaged over the coming weeks and months.

  That the voice on the tape was the authentic voice of the mass murderer, the public had little doubt. The envelope in which the tape cassette arrived at Wakefield bore the same handwriting as the Sunderland letters, it was explained, and the person who licked the envelope was also of the rare blood group ‘B’.

  Voice and dialect experts from the University of Leeds took six weeks to name the small mining community on Wearside that they were virtually certain was the Ripper’s home town. And a Special Notice was soon issued by the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire to all forces advising them that a suspect could be eliminated from their inquiries if, among other things, he did not have a ‘Geordie’ accent.

  Peter Sutcliffe was an almost immediate beneficiary of this directive: his high, flat, but undeniably Yorkshire vowels helped him survive his fifth police interview by the skin of his teeth.

  *

  On 29 July 1979, a month after the tape was released to the public, Detective-Constables Greenwood and Laptew called at 6 Garden Lane to talk to the owner, whose Sunbeam Rapier – swapped only the month before for a Rover – had been seen in the Lumb Lane area of Bradford no less than thirty-six times.

  Like his predecessors, Andrew Laptew had no way of knowing that Peter Sutcliffe had already been questioned both about a red Corsair and in connection with the £5 note recovered near Jean Jordan’s body, because his file in the Incident Room was almost two years out of date. Unlike them, however, Laptew sensed that there was something ‘not quite right’ about the lorry-driver married to the quiet schoolteacher, as he indicated in his report: Sutcliffe was vehement in his denials but at the same time appeared unusually quiet and seemed entirely lacking in a sense of humour – when Laptew joked to Mrs Sutcliffe that now was the time to get rid of her husband if she wanted to, neither of them seemed to find the remark at all funny.

  Mrs Sutcliffe agreed to go out of the room at one point during the questioning, leaving her husband on his own, but he still denied using prostitutes and told the officers he had no need of such women because he hadn’t been married very long.

  Nevertheless, Laptew, continuing to follow his hunch, found out from the Regional Criminal Records Office that Peter Sutcliffe had a conviction for ‘going equipped to steal’ (although there was no mention that he had been equipped with a hammer), in 1969. This information, together with his general suspicions, was passed on to the senior detectives heading up the enquiry, who would finally get to see it nine months later. When they did, on the basis that Sutcliffe had lived all his life in Yorkshire and had produced a handwriting specimen that didn’t tally with the Sunderland letter, Detective-Constable Laptew’s report was routinely marked ‘to file’, where it was to languish with tens of thousands of others.

  A little over a month after being visited at home by Laptew, and five months after murdering Josephine Whitaker, Sutcliffe went out and killed for the eleventh time.

  *

  The area which lies to the west of the twin domes of the Alhambra Theatre in the centre of Bradford contains the University, the Technical College and the Art College and many terraced streets comprised of mainly student accommodation. Where they aren’t occupied by students, the houses of Little Horton are occupied by the Asian families whose shops and restaurants, together with the late-night restaurants owned by Italians, Greeks and Chinese, lend the area the relaxed, rather sophisticated ambience which sets it apart from the rest of the city.

  Although close to his home and on the edge of the red-light district, Little Horton was not somewhere that Peter Sutcliffe often frequented. And yet the first Saturday in September 1979 saw him cruising the streets in the dark brown Rover of which he was so proud.

  A little after 1.00 a.m. he saw a girl detach herself from a small group outside the Mannville Arms on Great Horton Road and go walking off on her own. Putting his foot on the accelerator he quickly overtook her and turned left into Ash Grove. By the time he opened the door to get out of the car she was walking towards him. He let her walk a few steps further before attacking her from behind with the hammer, and then dragged her into a backyard where he stabbed her with the same cross-ply screwdriver with which he had stabbed Josephine Whitaker. The body was found hidden under a piece of weighted carpet thirty-six hours later.

  With the murder of Barbara Leach, a third-year social science student at the University of Bradford, the ordinary women of the towns of West Yorkshire felt themselves to be at risk for the first time. It was with a sense of shock, gradually turning to outrage and anger, that they realised that nobody was immune.

  Warnings to women to keep off the streets, to beware of the dark, came at them from all sides. ‘We cannot stress how careful every woman must be. Unless we catch him, and the public must help us, he will go on and on. I warn all women to use lighted streets and to walk home with someone they know. In no circumstances accept lifts from strangers,’ George Oldfield told the assembled press and television cameras.

  ‘The Ripper could next kill in Bingley …’, cautioned an editorial in the Bingley Guardian. ‘The threat of this maniacal terror is as close as that. Despite the horror of the killings, and despite the frequency of the police warnings, it is still possible to see women walking through the streets alone late at night. The message is clear. The cost of ignoring it could be a hideous assault ending in death.’

  If ever she had to walk along Mornington Road to the launderette or to her father’s on her own in the dark, Maureen, John Sutcliffe’s middle daughter, carried a carving knife up the sleeve of her coat. She warned her brothers never to come up behind her as a joke because, if she had to, she would use it. ‘I’m for self-preservation, me,’ Maureen said, and she was deadly serious, but still they all laughed.

  27

  Carl first heard the Geordie tape on a transistor radio in a wood on the edge of Baildon Moor, where he spent a large part of 1979 sleeping rough. He was nineteen at the time, unemployed and with nowhere to live, his father having kicked him out of the flat in Rutland House.

  As the baby of the family there was almost fourteen years between him and Peter, the oldest of his five brothers and sisters Carl had always been especially close to his mother, who, everybody admitted, spoiled him rotten.

  None of her children had found it easy to come to terms with Kathleens death, but Carl seemed to have taken it particularly hard. Whereas Peter had been able to drive over to Cottingley to pick up Marion, his fathers girlfriend, on Boxing night, 1978, only six weeks after the funeral, and bring her down to the flat, Carl hadnt been able to accept another woman in his mothers place with anything like the same equanimity.

  That New Years Eve he had come back from a party drunk and put the glass panels of the front door in when he found himself locked out and nobody home. John and Marion returned in the early hours to find Carl, still in fancy-dress, lying in the hall, shivering. On another occasion Carl had hung out of the living-room window and been sick all over the windows of the people below; one or two of the dinners his father had served up to him had also gone out of the window and ended up on the patch of grass out at the back.

  He was constantly complaining about what his father gave him to eat, and there were rows about the time he spent talking on the phone and about his fathers attitude towards the girls Carl occasionally brought home. This really nice blonde bird were stoppin in Bingley from Devon. She were really summat else. Everybody in pub fancied her. Anyway, I took her home to Rutland an me dad, to my knowledge, were supposed to be away somewhere, so I were givin this bird one on floor, watching telly, when fuckin door opens an its hi
m stood there.

  Ooop, sorry, he says, has a good look an out he goes. I carried on anyway; I thought, fuck it, Im not going to stop. But afterwards, while I went off on motorbike to get some cigs or summat at shop, he had a go at her as well. Your dad tried to grope me, she says when I get back, so I says, Aye, he will do. Youve got to watch him. You couldnt leave him alone with a female.

  Things finally came to a head in the winter of 1979 when John took to his bed with flu and Carl point-blank refused to carry so much as a cup of tea upstairs to him. It was his way of exacting revenge for the shabby way he believed his father had treated his mother all her life: She had a bad heart, she couldnt even walk, but she still had to go out cleaning while he went to pub wi sixty quid in his pocket. He were always a skinny git with his money. She were always complaining that she never had enough. Every week shed run out three days before next came in, but she would never ask him for any more. She were knackered but he never used to give her any help, so I thought, Why should I fuckin look after him.

  At the heart of the problem, though, was Marion, who became semi-resident at Rutland House from the winter of 79. Although John remained a regular caller on Annie Rhodes after Kathleens death, it was recognised within the family that Marion was the main woman in their fathers life. A sunny, attractive, comfortably garrulous figure in her early sixties, Marion was easy company and quickly became a confidante of both Maureen and Jane. Even Peter seemed to prefer to see his father when Marion was there rather than when she was not.

  It was Carl, though, who had to live with her, and he found it too much to take. Within two weeks of me mum dying he had that Marion woman in, and that really got me. It really vexed me.

  I come home a bit drunk one night just after he recovered from flu an got off me motorbike an he shouted something out of window to me about mekkin less noise. So I told him to piss off an it all happened from there. Id always been wary of him all me life. It were all inside me for years, so I brayed shit out of him and left him on floor.

  Apart from the inky Sutcliffe hair and eyes which they shared, Carl and Peter, physically, didnt have a lot in common: at five feet eight, Peter had always been considered to be slightly on the short side, whereas Carl had passed the six foot mark while he was still at school; in his early thirties, Peter appeared thickset next to Carl, who was underdeveloped and like a lat. In most important respects, however, the two of them were more like each other than they were like any other member of their family.

  As a child, Carl had fallen as far short of his fathers image of a proper lad as Peter and, like Peter, had suffered at the hands of bullies both at the Sacred Heart and at Cottingley Manor Secondary Modern. Jane had come to his rescue at the junior school, much as Anne had acted as Peters protector a generation earlier but, once at Cottingley Manor, he had been on his own. His solution, again like Peters, had been to stop turning up. Unlike Peter, though, his blobbing turned out to be chronic.

  Most of the trouble took place at school-dinners where Carl told Maureen that he had to share a table with boys who ate like pigs and were right uncouth. When he went to investigate, his father discovered that a gang from Shipley were spitting in his water and sprinkling pepper on his puddings, but it seemed to John the kind of thing that could be easily stopped if only Carl was prepared to stand up for himself. He was, after all, taller than many of the teachers. He put it down to Kathleens mollycoddling at home.

  The trouble wi Carl was that he was too soft as a kid. He was ever so shy and soft. He were a pushover for anybody, up to being about fifteen or sixteen. Anybody had done anything like that to Mick when he was there, theyd have felt the weight of the table over their head. But Carl wasnt that sort of a lad. Like Peter, he was a rather gentle-mannered kid who didnt have the inclination to go and smack a kid in the teeth because hed done something to him. He knuckled under to everybody, did Carl. That was his problem.

  Mick did what he could, as he had with Peter, to instil a sense of combativeness into his brother, but to little effect. I told him, once you show em youre going to start tellin tales youll get even more stick. Youre better off just sayin nowt, just acceptin it all. But he were soft as shit, like. He were a right mummys boy.

  Every morning in the months before he was married, Peter would come in from working nights at Anderton International and drive Carl in his car up to Cottingley Manor. And every morning Carl would go in through the main gate only to abscond immediately through a back one. Maureen knew that her mother knew what was going on but had been pressured by Carl into saying nothing: She knew he hadnt been going to school, but she covered up to me dad, which she shouldnt have done. She covered up for him until things got really bad, and then he had to go away.

  Carls first spell in approved school came a few months after his fathers return to Cornwall Road after the episode with Wendy Broughton. He was approaching fifteen, and the only one then still living at home when he was made the subject of a care order by the courts.

  First of all I went to a place called Tong Park, which is in Baildon, and thats really strict. I mean really strict. They treat you like shit; youre just called a number and you sit there with your arms folded until they say you can speak and if you dont they batter you. Oh it were lousy. You polished floors on your hands and knees and everything. They assessed me there for six weeks then decided there were nowt wrong wi me, that I were quite intelligent, that I could do all silly lessons an stuff, and should go back to school. Anyway, they sent me back to school and I went for a month or so and I got pissed off again, so they sent me back there, and they let me off again. Then third time they didnt. I knew theyd send me somewhere but I didnt think that far away.

  Mick dropped by his mothers one night at the beginning of 1975, only to be pounced on by two men who were lying in wait for Carl. I walked in door an this stockyish bloke wi beard grabbed me out of coats on wall. I thought it were our lad pissin about at first. I were just about to plant the bastard when another one come flyin out of other room. I says to me mother, Who are they? an she says, Oh theyre waiting for our Carl. She were right upset about it, but theyd told her there were nowt she could do. And she really believed there were nowt she could do. But I says, Theyll fuckin wait outside, an they did.

  This was the only practical step anybody took to prevent Carls removal to Richmond Hill, a barrack-like approved school standing in isolation on the North Yorkshire moors. Here, dormitoried with nig-nogs and psychopaths, he was sent on cross-country runs, made to march like a silly soldier and put to a trade. He was only allowed home for a weekend visit every four months, but his family could visit him.

  Bloody hell, this is a right place. It looks like Colditz, was Peters reaction the first time he drove his mother and father up, but he was an object of some interest himself: it took Carl weeks to live his brothers car down. He had this Capri then, lime green wi black roof, only about a year old, and all lads in there thought I were right posh after, because most of them were out of real slums, or theyd been in homes and stuff all their lives and they knew nothing else. And to see a car like that arrive, which were posh sort of car, they thought I were right posh after that. They all used to tek piss.

  In the eighteen months he had to brood on it, Carl liked to blame his predicament on his father: Me mum, she didnt want me in there, it were him. She tried to stop him but there was nowt she could do. It was his idea.

  And while his father recognised the unjustness of what had happened The victim got sent instead of the perpetrators he also came round to the view that it had probably worked out best for everybody in the long run. In this he was joined by Jane: Being sent away was the best thing that ever happened to Carl. He needed it. It was awful to see him there, and hed cry, but hes the better for it.

  On his release from Richmond Hill, at the age of seventeen, Carl had acquired a toughened exterior that nevertheless cracked often enough to betray the essentially shy person who was still inside: he blushed easily, constantly gnawed the inside o
f his mouth and found it difficult to look at people when he was talking to them. In all these things, he reminded those who had known him of Peter at the same age.

  His big brother had been so successful in burying his former self that Carl didnt realise until he was quite grown up that Peter had had similar childhood experiences to his own. For many years, Carl just thought of Peter as the big tough thing who roared round on a motorbike, told them ghost stories and walked up and down stairs standing on his hands. Only gradually, by piecing together snippets from elderly relatives at family gatherings, did Carl build up a picture of the weakly, put-upon youth that it was now impossible to detect in his brothers powerful chest and arms.

  Peter had kept up his exercises with the Bullworker until even Mick was impressed with his strength; being left-handed, his left arm was remarkably powerful for a man of his size. He could lift himself the five feet on to the back of his wagon with a single push. Anybody, Maureen would say, would be proud to have a build like he had. He developed great big shoulders and an enormous chest. And you know how body-builders or weightlifters do, he used to walk like that.

  With his brother as an example, Carl set about building himself up. He started running and weight-training and taking part in traditional Bingley pursuits, like ratting on a local pig farm in the dead of night. I shot one fuckin beauty last night, hed tell Peter. A really big, fat mucky-looking smelly rat. It were in these hens food, bent over, an its arse were stuck up, fuckin huge thing, an all rest scarpered when I put torch on, apart from this one that carried on eating. Then poof! Right up ring-piece an out top of head. Carl also became a dab hand at killing with his fist rabbits that hed netted.

  From approved school he had been sent to the technical college to take an electrical engineering course but had soon given that up in order to get a proper job that would enable him to run a motorbike. The fact that he was unemployed when his father gave him forty-eight hours to get out of Rutland House at the beginning of 1979 only reinforced the rebellious image Carl, as a nineteen-year-old not unacquainted with James Dean films and Easy Rider, was coming to have of himself. After seeing out the worst of a memorably severe winter in the homes of friends, he was happy to move into the woods with nothing but a sleeping-bag, a shotgun and his motorbike.