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

by Gordon Burn

  People used to see me. I were sat there one day cooking some beans on this fire, unshaved an all scruffy like a tramp, when these girls came up and said, What are you, a Hells Angel? No, not really. I live here. They didnt believe me but they said, Oh well, well come and see you tonight then, and bring you some food. So they all came, wi big bags of food. They were from Baildon, all rich people. They buy in bulk, dont they, these snobs. And they just come down wi big carrier-bags each, full of grub, tins an I were in me element.

  After a few months in the woods, Carl moved into the higher, denser forest surrounding a derelict mansion once occupied by the Victorian industrialist and philanthropist, Sir Titus Salt. Police cars used to patrol occasionally along the cobbled drive at night, but Carl would be able to hear them a mile away from where he was sitting in the ruins smoking dope. Occasionally, though, it wouldnt be the police, but Peter, who would abandon his car and come walking through the trees out of the dark. Carl would emerge into the light cast by the fire once he had identified who it was.

  You shouldnt live here. Theres loadsa nutters about these days, Peter would warn his brother, who would nod at his gun and reassure him that he was capable of looking after himself. One night, though, when Peter called on him at about 11.30, Carl did take him up on his invitation to go back to Garden Lane for a bath, and returned to the woods the following day with some new red tee-shirts and other odds and ends of clothing that Peter had insisted that he take.

  In these months, and in the months ahead, a bond was established between the two of them that hadnt been possible before because of the difference in age. But as Carl entered his twenties and the discrepancy in their ages started to matter less, they were able to do more things, and talk about more things, together.

  Socially, Carl was less of a liability than Mick, whose idea of chatting up a girl was to eye the front of her dress and tell her, You wouldnt get many of them in a bucket. In fact, Carl, if anything, was more aware of social nuance and more ambitious than Peter; he was certainly just as aware of the importance of money as his brother.

  It was of no little importance to Carl that his best friend was Robert Smith, show-jumping son of the horseman Harvey Smith, who was, without a doubt, the wealthiest man in Bingley. Carl helped out at the Smith stables at High Eldwick and went riding on the Smith farm and was a guest at parties which, in addition to numerous well-heeled daughters, invariably included a number of minor show-business names. It gave Carl particular pleasure to be in the VIP enclosure on Bingley Show days when his father was confined to the bar on the other, public side of the fence. He used to like to say that he thought his family were peasants, doing peasanty jobs, going to peasanty pubs, leading peasanty lives.

  Although it irritated her that their only conversation was cars and they always seemed to be up to their elbows in grease, the fact that Carl was less gauche than his middle brother had helped lubricate his relationship with Sonia. Things improved noticeably while he was going around with a girl called Sue, the product of a good Eldwick family, who was studying graphic design and so shared Sonias interest in art. Sonia would always disappear upstairs with Sue to show her her latest work whenever they called.

  About once a month the four of them would go out to a film together, but there was usually a certain amount of friction because Carl resented the way they almost always had to see what Sonia wanted to see. Me an Peter either wanted a right good comedy or a horror film, Alien or summat. But she were into really heavy sorts of films. Crap. Things like Kramer Versus Kramer, which to me was just boring, just about a couple getting divorced and the everyday routine that everybody goes through. She apparently saw that four times.

  Carl, like the rest of his family, was unaware that, by the autumn of 1979, Peter had been seen by the police on five separate occasions in connection with the Ripper inquiry. Once, when Mick had been up at Garden Lane, Peter had ignored the telephone twice, saying it would only be the police, but adding, If they come up here, Ill get em in other room. Theyre coming to see us about something to do wi motoring job. He never mentioned to Mick that Clarks was one of the firms where the police thought the 5 note could have gone.

  The Yorkshire Ripper was something Peter never alluded to until it was the main talking-point in Yorkshire, and Carl remembers the first time: We were walking in this dark street in Bradford, me an Pete, Sonia an Sue. Wed parked Petes car and we were walking down towards pictures and Pete says to Sonia, he got hold of her and said, Oh hell be lurking in here somewhere, Sonia. That Ripper. Hell be lurking in one of these alleys.

  The Odeon was a few hundred yards from where Barbara Leachs body had been found in a dustbin alcove, only a few weeks before.

  28

  By the late summer of 1979, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper had turned into the biggest police investigation in British criminal history: upwards of 150,000 people had been interviewed and eliminated from the enquiry: 27,000 house-to-house searches had been completed, 22,000 statements had been taken, more than £3 million had already been spent and George Oldfield, after working sixteen hours a day, six days a week for two years without let-up, was near to breaking point.

  Since the arrival of the tape at the beginning of June – ‘I reckon your boys are lettin’ you down, George’ – ‘collaring’ the man responsible had become a personal obsession, a fact which Oldfield himself was among the first to admit. ‘Every time the phone rings I wonder if it’s him,’ he had told the Yorkshire Post in July. ‘If I get up in the middle of the night I find myself thinking about it … I feel I know him already.’

  The Assistant Chief Constable didn’t set much store by the theories of psychologists. ‘If we do get him, we’ll probably find he’s had too long on the left breast and not enough on the right. But it keeps the public happy,’ he was overheard to remark characteristically at the end of one press conference. But after adopting a hard-line approach – ‘This has become something of a feud. He obviously wants to outwit me but I won’t pack it in until he’s caught’ – Mr Oldfield had slowly but significantly altered the tone of his public statements, in the hope of establishing the same sort of rapport with the murderer that kidnap and hostage victims were being advised to establish with their captors.

  ‘I don’t regard [the tape] as taunting or boastful. The voice is almost sad, a man fed up with what he has done, fed up with himself. A man who feels he knows me enough almost to take me into his confidence, confide in me,’ was the sort of thing he started to say now. ‘I’m sure he would like to cry on somebody’s shoulder, but obviously can’t. I am probably an obvious person for him to feel he has something in common with … I would like to talk to this man. And I feel he wants to talk to me.’

  The fact that most of these statements were made on television and that George Oldfield had become, in the words of the same Yorkshire Post article, ‘the most famous detective in the land’, only served to increase the pressure. Behind the ‘bucolic’ public image, he had begun smoking heavily, eating and drinking too much and missing sleep and, one morning in the middle of August, was suddenly rushed to hospital. The official explanation was that he was suffering from ‘pains in the chest’ brought on by exhaustion, but it was an open secret within the police force and among the reporters assigned to the case that he had in fact suffered an almost fatal heart attack. Although he insisted on trying to make an early return, he was told to stay away from his post until at least the end of the year.

  George Oldfield’s emphasis on the search for the Ripper being ‘a personal thing between him and me’ had removed any remaining doubt members of the public might have felt about the authenticity of the tape and the letters, and the enquiry had proceeded on the basis that the man they were trying to track down was a ‘Geordie’. When nobody was ‘in the frame’ by the end of the week of blanket interviews in the mining community which they had singled out on Wearside, though, the voice experts at Leeds University began to have their doubts. When Barbara Leach was murdered a few
days later, they became virtually convinced that the tape had to be a hoax.

  Three weeks after the Leach killing, at the beginning of September, the phoneticians put their views to the men who had inherited the responsibility of flushing out the Ripper: they were convinced that the person responsible for sending the tape had been interviewed within days of the police arriving in Castle-town, they said, but had been eliminated because he had been able to come up with a cast-iron alibi and therefore couldn’t have done the murders; more basically, none of the women who had survived attack had detected even the hint of a Geordie accent in the man who had attacked them.

  These anxieties were shared by many of the officers in charge of the North-east operation, and in particular Detective Chief Inspector David Zachreson, who had taken the precaution of reviewing everything that had been reported about the Yorkshire Ripper in newspapers in the North and had come to the conclusion that everything in the Sunderland letters had appeared at one time or another in the press. The fact that Vera Millward had recently been a patient at Manchester Royal Infirmary, the scene of her murder, which the West Yorkshire police maintained was something known only to the Ripper and to themselves, had actually been published at around the time of her death, in the Daily Mail.

  Zachreson also pointed out the striking similarities between the Sunderland letters and letters sent by the original ‘Jack the Ripper’ to Scotland Yard in 1888, and drew what, to him, seemed the obvious conclusion: that the writer was a crank obsessed with the Ripper legend.

  The Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Ronald Gregory, however, was not impressed by these arguments and, at the time they were put to him, was in fact about to embark on a course of action that was to unwittingly fuel the myth of the modern ‘Ripper’. Far from back-peddalling on the issue of the tape and stressing that the chances now were that the Ripper only might be a Geordie, Gregory committed himself one hundred per cent, and in the most public fashion, to the North-east connection.

  At the beginning of October, against the advice of some of his own senior officers, including the still ailing George Oldfield, he launched an unprecedented media ‘blitz’ designed to ensure that nobody in the North of England could claim ignorance of the voice or the handwriting that he was personally convinced could lead them straight to the ‘vicious, deranged maniac’ who had already killed eleven, maybe twelve, women and could strike again at any time.

  The head of a Leeds-based advertising agency volunteered his services, and a battalion of other professionals – printers, designers, site proprietors, photographers and distributors – were similarly persuaded to waive their normal fees. The slogan ‘The Ripper would like you to ignore this …’ went up on billboards on more than six hundred prime sites; a special four-page newspaper was delivered to every home in Yorkshire, Lancashire and the North-east; national newspapers donated advertising space; BBC local radio and local commercial stations ran tapes of the ‘Ripper’, along with police messages, sometimes as often as eight times a day … The tape was also played in pubs and working-men’s clubs around the country, and over the loudspeakers at football grounds, where it was invariably drowned out by the derisory chanting of the crowd.

  Mr Gregory had said that he was looking for ‘dramatic impact’ and the ‘Flush out the Ripper’ campaign achieved that. The result, as many had predicted, however, was pandemonium. The ‘Ripper Room’, still struggling to get to grips with information relating to murders committed as much as eighteen months before, was deluged with enquiries and offers of information. Many of the ‘tip-offs’ came from people with honourable motives, but it was also the perfect opportunity to settle old scores and, by mid-November, the list of possible suspects had shot up to 17,000.

  The atmosphere in the cities of West Yorkshire as the nights started to draw in, meanwhile, was, for a time, one of near-panic. American observers – the Yorkshire Ripper was no longer a purely local phenomenon – likened Leeds and Bradford in the autumn of 1979 to Boston in the early 1960s, during the ‘reign’ of the ‘Boston strangler’. Then, hospitals, universities and shop-and factory-owners had organised door-to-door transport for women who had to leave after dark; attendance at night classes, bingo sessions and any other activity that required women to be out on their own at night had plummeted; many previously crowded bars and restaurants had gone to the wall.

  And, while all of this was duplicated in the North of England – the pupils of Leeds Girls’ High School were given lessons in judo and karate; some women journalists covering the case asked for their by-lines to be omitted – there was one significant difference: the refusal of an increasingly vocal minority of women, who saw the Ripper as merely an extreme manifestation of men’s everyday violence towards members of their sex, to be intimidated.

  A notice from the Vice Chancellor of Bradford University, posted in university buildings in the week following Barbara Leach’s murder, warning ‘all women students that, until the person responsible for recent murders is brought to justice, they should under no circumstances be out alone after dark’, quickly attracted the kind of slogans that were to be the rallying-cries of the ‘Women Against Violence Against Women’ and ‘Reclaim the Night’ movements in the coming months.

  The students’ union pledged itself to support any woman arrested for carrying an offensive weapon and, later, eleven women were arrested after picketing the Bradford cinema where a film called Violation of the Bitch was showing.

  Women on their own, meanwhile, were left to cope with their fear as best they could. ‘I walk the baby-sitter home, then I run back along the middle of the road carrying my little knife and wearing running shoes,’ ‘a single mother’ told the Guardian in December 1979; and the wife of a Leeds University lecturer said she supposed there wasn’t a woman in Yorkshire who didn’t think about ‘him’ every single day.

  Most women had to rely on male relatives to escort them if they wanted to go anywhere after dark, and requests for volunteers didn’t always elicit a sympathetic response. The women of the Sutcliffe family, however, didn’t have this problem.

  Calling on her one night and finding that she was about to go out on her own, Peter not only insisted on giving Jane a lift to the pub in Shipley, but ‘made a big drama’ of going in to give the ‘once-over’ to the man whom she was supposed to be meeting. She got the definite impression on the way there that, had he decided he didn’t the look of him, he would have taken her straight home.

  Mick, too, never ceased to be impressed by his brother’s regard for Sonia’s safety: ‘If I were up his house, he’d say, “I’ll just nip out. I’ve to pick wife up and bring her back here from hospital. You don’t know who’s who wi’ him walking about.” An’ I allus thought, Well you’re doin’ right, round here.’ It was the kind of thoughtful act that had earned Peter his reputation as a ‘gentleman’ and the sort of thing Mick would have liked to have thought of himself doing.

  *

  Although marred by a bad timekeeping record, Peter’s conscientiousness at Clark’s, where he worked, was almost a legend. At the end of 1979, he had been employed by the father and son firm for three years, which made him the longest-serving driver on their books. He was the sole survivor of a recent ‘purge’ resulting from complaints made by Kirkstall Forge in Leeds, one of the Clarks’ best customers, that drivers had been ‘fiddling’ their loads.

  Peter’s status as the firm’s ‘star’ driver would soon be confirmed by having his picture taken at the wheel of his wagon and hung, enlarged and in full colour, in the small, otherwise unfurnished vestibule where visitors pressed a bell and waited to be attended to by the managing director’s secretary.

  Despite this close identification with ‘the bosses’, however, he was well liked by the other drivers, to whom he had been only too willing to show the ropes. He was recognised to be ‘brilliant’ at roping-and-sheeting large and often difficult loads, and was the person everybody turned to when they got a ‘delivery ticket’ for an unfamiliar town
: he had ‘A–Z’ street-maps for every possible destination neatly stacked in his cab, and would happily draw anybody who needed one a map.

  His patience, in fact, often staggered the other men. He didn’t seem to mind how long it took to unload and, whereas they would be cursing and kicking the wall during any hold-up, he would sit quietly or ‘rub and scrub’ his wagon and not even want to know the cause. The thing about him, though, that they found even harder to understand was his ‘neutrality’ in the face of what, to drivers like Allan Wright, seemed provocation: ‘He would be all tarpaulined and roped and about to leave the yard when Clark would come out an’ tell him to change the load. And, even on a right rotten day, he’d meekly obey.’

  From this, Allan Wright and others drew the conclusion that Peter was probably ‘a bit of a “Right” man’. They always suspected that, while he might declare himself to be on their side whenever they had a grievance, ‘He used to shovel shit then jump on shovel.’ In other words, confronted by the Clarks, he would back down.

  Like everybody on the payroll, Peter had been seen by Manchester police, who were trying to trace the recipient of the £5 note found in Jean Jordan’s handbag, and was, therefore, assumed to be in the clear. Nothing more had been heard about this line of enquiry for almost two years when, at the beginning of 1980, Detective Chief Superintendent Ridgeway and his team from Manchester suddenly reappeared.