by Gordon Burn
Their arrival in West Yorkshire this time, however, was not accorded the kind of publicity that had marked their earlier visit. The re-enactment one Sunday morning of the day when the note had originally been issued, using the same tellers counting out the same number of ‘dummy’ £5 notes reprinted in exact sequence by the Bank of England, was conducted in comparative secrecy. The result was a whittling down of the number of firms who could have received the note from thirty to three, which included T. and W. H. Clark Ltd., of Canal Road, Shipley; and a whittling down of likely recipients from the high thousands to the lower hundreds. In addition, they also had the picture of a boot-print found close to Josephine Whitaker’s body on Savile Park.
It was these boots that Peter Sutcliffe happened to be wearing on the morning of 13 January 1980 as he jumped down from his cab for questioning by policemen too preoccupied to notice. It was to be the first of three escapes from detection in the space of as many weeks.
On 20 January he was singled out by the police for attention, for the eighth time, when he was among Clark’s employees who were taken home to have their clothes inspected and their wives questioned about their movements on specific dates and about any possible sexual deviations.
By the beginning of February, the Manchester police were showing interest in only two of William Clark’s men. On 2 February, Peter Sutcliffe and another driver were escorted to Bradford police headquarters where they were photographed and obliged to submit to a handwriting examination. Sutcliffe had ‘gone to pieces’ when he was picked up, shaking and perspiring; but he was back at work later in the day, having his leg pulled by the men in the yard.
Although less wholeheartedly committed to it than his opposite number in the ‘Ripper Squad’, Ridgeway still basically felt he was looking for a man with a Geordie accent, which, of course, Peter Sutcliffe didn’t have; and neither did his handwriting match the handwriting on the Sunderland letters. Just as crucially, the Laptew report ‘fingering’ Sutcliffe and submitted six months earlier still hadn’t found its way into the system. The system had also swallowed most of the other relevant information relating to the lorry-driver living at No. 6 Garden Lane in Heaton.
*
It had become clear almost within days that Chief Constable Gregory’s ‘blitz’ on the media had been a major miscalculation which, in the much-quoted words of his press spokesman, had produced ‘one hundred per cent rubbish’. In November, following a visit to West Yorkshire by the then Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, Gregory had asked Scotland Yard to despatch a senior detective to Leeds to ‘review’ the investigation. And in February 1980, as the Manchester team prepared to return home for a second time empty-handed, the publicity machine went into sharp reverse. Information, which had flowed profligately for years, all but dried up; all press facilities were withdrawn.
The thinking behind the new move was that the ‘Ripper’, starved of the attention which he seemed to crave, would be driven to communicate with police ‘again’. It was the only way anybody could see out of the impasse. That, and the unspoken alternative of him killing another woman.
29
With the onset of winter, Carl had finally had to look for an alternative to the forest where he had spent the previous five months. And, thanks to his contact with the Smith family, at the beginning of 1980 he had found one.
Ray Kennan was an ‘estate boy’, a direct contemporary of Peter’s, who had taken the sort of path to prosperity that Carl himself wouldn’t have minded following. After involvements with pop groups and nightclubs in the 1960s and ’70s, he had moved on to become Harvey Smith’s personal and business manager and had property interests which included the large, rather gloomy corner house where Carl moved in to occupy the attic room.
No. 1 Priestthorpe Road was adjacent to Mornington Road Methodist Church, whose Victorian clocktower punctuated the day and night at quarter-hourly intervals, and diagonally opposite Rutland House. From the top-floor window, under which he slept and through which he occasionally threw teabags and jettisoned other rubbish, Carl could see the flats where his father lived. At the bottom of the bed was a small sink and a ‘Baby Belling’ cooker, while a ‘leather-look’ three-piece suite with screwtop lids on the armrests as ash trays accounted for most of the rest of the space. Horse-brasses and black-painted ‘beams’ crisscrossing the fireplace wall were the only decoration.
From the day he moved into it, though, Carl’s ‘flat’ proved unexpectedly popular. Mick, for one, was quick to avail himself of the facilities. If he came round during the day with ‘his bit on the side’ and Carl wasn’t in, he’d force the Yale lock on the attic door. And even if Carl was in, at nights after the pubs closed, Mick didn’t let that stop him; he’d get down on the floor, between the gas fire and the settee, with whoever happened to be with him, while Carl lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.
Odd nights when Mick wasn’t available, Peter would give his brother’s ‘regular knockings’ a lift home from the pub to Eldwick. He seemed to be under the impression that she was a ‘decent’ girl, and when Carl told him what she was ‘really’ like – ‘Right mucky. Really mucky. A right old slag’ – he seemed genuinely shocked and disappointed. It was a reaction which was unexpected in the light of his own behaviour when he spotted a girl whom he thought ‘looked fit’: then, he’d get excited, giggling and wringing his hands up near his face in a way that reminded Carl of ‘a right dirty old man’.
Peter seemed as taken with the idea of Carl having a place of his own as Mick, and was almost as frequent a visitor. He never brought women but, encouraged perhaps by the intimacy of his surroundings, women, unusually, became a favourite topic of conversation. Some months earlier, while making a delivery to the General Motors plant near Motherwell, in Scotland, he had met a ‘cracker’ of a girl in a bar and had managed to ingratiate himself not only with her but with her whole family. Between visits he bombarded Theresa with letters, telling her he ‘missed [her] more than ever’, and she wrote him ‘steamy’ letters, addressed to ‘Peter Logan’, at his father’s flat.
He had shown Mick pictures of ‘Tessa’ and given him glimpses of her letters, from which he had deduced ‘she were mad on him’. By the spring of 1980, though, he gave Mick the impression that he was trying to extricate himself from a situation which was getting out of hand: ‘She wanted to move down to Yorkshire an’ come an’ see him, an’ he were starting to sweat then in case she fuckin’ turned up.’
But if it was a dilemma, it was one Peter was anxious to share with Carl, whom he also kept up-to-date with the progress of an ‘affair’ he said he was having with ‘a blonde girl’ in Bradford whose husband worked nights, and who, again, was ‘mad’ on him: ‘She doesn’t want any other fellers, only me,’ he’d tell Carl, who thought it a strange thing to say.
‘One time he came round and I knew he were after summat, because he used to shift about if he were goin’ to ask you summat. “D’you fancy going out wi’ me an’ that bird I’ve got?” And he were looking round all time as if somebody were listening. “She’s got this mate, a right cracker. You ought to come out with us.” But I didn’t fancy it. Birds he liked were always robbers’ dogs.’
The reason he had asked Carl, Peter told him, was because you ‘couldn’t trust’ Mick to keep his mouth shut. In the early summer, though, when Peter travelled to London to ‘keep an eye on’ the house where Sonia’s sister and her family lived while they were out of the country, it was Mick who went with him. The arrival of Mr Szurma the following day was an unexpected blow, but Mick didn’t allow it to cramp his style: ‘I went into Soho every day and night wi’ our lad. Got pissed out of us heads and went wi’ one or two birds. We used to get ’em in motor, like, an’ tek ’em to this park going back towards Alperton. We just used to drop ’em off after, a few miles out.’
It was Peter’s second visit to his sister-in-law’s within the space of a couple of months. John and Marion had been surprised to receive an invitation from Peter to
spend a few days of the Whitsun bank holiday with him and Sonia at Garden Lane, but they had only been there twenty-four hours when Mrs Szurma called to ask Peter if he would take a washing machine and a few other things down to Marianne in Wembley. He had immediately gone into Bradford to hire a van and, riding in the back on chairs from the house, Marion and his father had travelled down to London with Peter and Sonia.
Marion had been taken aback to find Marianne, who was married to an Asian, wearing a sari, but she had nevertheless been made to feel welcome. She slept with John on blankets on the floor of the living-room, while Peter and Sonia slept in the bed-settee; and the next day, Peter took her on a brief visit to her brother in another part of Middlesex before the return drive to Yorkshire.
By the time they got back to Garden Lane, they had all been feeling hungry. But there had been nothing to make a meal out of in the house – not a packet of soup nor a tin of anything – which Marion thought ‘very queer’. The following night John and Marion had taken the four of them out to a sit-down fish-and-chip supper, which they felt they needed.
After returning Marion and his father to Rutland House the next day, Peter had called on Mick and Susan and suggested a ‘run out’ to Morecambe. At Morecambe, while Susan and Michelle spent some time at Anne’s, Mick and Peter went off for a drink and, on the way back, paid what was to be the first of several visits to Tussaud’s before the end of the 1980 season.
*
Peter seemed to spend most of the time when he was round at Carl’s place, which he tended to be increasingly, complaining about Sonia’s incessant nagging. ‘She’s been on at me again,’ were often his first words after he’d sat down. And it seemed to get worse as 1980 wore on, until Carl got the impression that ‘he were fed up wi’ whole job, fed up wi’ whole affair completely’. He had packed his bags on two separate occasions, intending to leave.
On the evidence of his own experience, Carl had started to feel that maybe Sonia was ‘cracking up’. Always pernickety, by the beginning of 1980 she had started taking her obsession with cleanliness to ‘weird’ extremes: ‘If she come to a chair, in a pub, the pictures, somebody’s house, any chair, she wouldn’t just sit down. She’d blow on it, an’ start brushing and dusting it with her cuff. She’d spend a good two minutes going like that before she’d plonk herself down.’
But it was a single incident at the turn of the year that had resulted in Carl ceasing to go to Garden Lane altogether. ‘I rang up for Pete one Friday and Sonia says: Is Sue with you? So I put her on an’ they had a chat; then she came back to me an’ said, Do you fancy coming up Sunday? She asked us up on Sunday for dinner, then we’d go out in a foursome to pictures … I said, Oh yeah, great.
‘So off we went up to their house, knocked on door an’ Pete come: “All right, Carl!” Then Sonia come, looked at us, and stormed off. So we went and sat down and she just sat in other room. She sat in dining-room and she wouldn’t come in lounge at all. Then Pete kept going in and I could hear them arguing. I heard her say, Well I wish they’d let us know they were coming … She brought Pete his tea an’ sort of slapped it on the table in front of him and stormed off out. She never said a word to us all night. After we left, Sue said, “I’m never going there again,” and we didn’t; we stopped going altogether.’
Peter found Priestthorpe Road a convenient refuge from the tensions at home. Although the landlord was always issuing warnings against it, the front door was left more or less permanently off the latch so that visitors could come and go as they chose. Carl was often surprised by Peter sticking his head around the door of his room to say hello and then disappearing downstairs to the recessed, linoleum-floored bathroom that was shared by everybody in the house: sometimes he would be in there so long Carl would think he must have gone.
Carl knew that Peter would occasionally call when he wasn’t in, but one night he was in his room when he recognised the sound of his brother’s Rover outside and heard Peter climbing the stairs long after most of the house had gone to bed. The footsteps stopped at the bathroom, though, and, after being in there for some time, Peter slipped out of the house again and drove off in his car.
Soon afterwards, towards the end of the summer, he turned up in the middle of the afternoon and asked Carl if he could change his clothes. He took off the clean clothes he was wearing and put on some dirty ones, which in itself wasn’t remarkable: when they were working on engines at Garden Lane, Carl had often done the same himself. What struck him as odd was that Peter put the clean trousers behind the boiler in the bathroom at Priestthorpe and, when reminded that they were still there some months later, replied quietly, but firmly, that it didn’t matter.
The police had always said the ‘Ripper’ would need somewhere to clean up in after the murders. And after letting this gnaw at him for some time, Carl felt he had to tell somebody. The only person he could think of to tell was Mick. ‘I’m sure our Pete’s bloody Ripper,’ he blurted out to Mick one day when he called round, and was relieved by Mick’s automatic, scoffing response. ‘I just laughed at him an’ told him he were stupid. I just said, “You’re bloody daft you.”’ He reminded Carl that Peter didn’t talk with a Geordie accent, and Carl was only too happy to agree that he was probably being stupid.
*
After Tong Park and Richmond Hill, Carl had found it difficult settling back into normal life. He had flitted aimlessly from job to job, and when he had finally found one which seemed to suit him – working in wall-cavity insulation – he had been forced to give it up because of losing his driving licence. Peter had come round intending to be ‘big brotherly’ and tear him off a strip, but instead had ended up lending him the £300 that he still owed on his motorbike. And then, shortly afterwards, much to his family’s amazement, Peter had been breathalysed himself.
He had been out drinking on his own on the night of 25 June, and his last stop had been his old teenage haunt, the Royal Standard, in Manningham. He was spotted speeding on Manning-ham Lane by two policemen in a patrol car who followed him back to the house and approached him as he was getting out of his car at the top of the drive. Aware of the disastrous consequences for his work, he resisted breathing into the plastic bag that they offered him. But voices were raised and the test proved positive. Constables Doran and Melia submitted a report suggesting that Peter Sutcliffe should perhaps be seen by officers connected with the Ripper Squad, but word eventually reached them from the incident room that he had already been seen and eliminated.
Peter decided not to let anybody at Clark’s know about the impending court case, bringing with it what he assumed would be the inevitable ban, because he knew that would result in him getting all the bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. He also didn’t tell his father for some months that he had been breathalysed and, when he did, Marion noticed that Sonia quickly ‘covered up’ for him, saying that he’d drunk his usual modest amount, but that he’d been drinking on an empty stomach that night.
He had got on to the subject by saying that he might lose his job after Christmas, and had said it with his usual nonchalance; but Sonia knew how heavily the possibility had been weighing on him: he had had a couple of ‘panic’ attacks at home, and she had had to bring him round with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
*
On 13 August, Maureen noted in her diary that Peter had called to see if she wanted to go to the MFI furniture warehouse in Bradford with him, but she was in the middle of having the fireplace in her living-room pulled out and replaced with a decorative stone one, plus the house had just been flooded and so she had to tell him it was impossible.
The following Thursday, exactly a week later, he was driving through Farsley, a nondescript suburb of Leeds, on his way to Chapeltown, when the headlights of his Rover picked out the figure of a woman walking towards him. He parked the car and caught up with her over a distance of about four hundred yards. He hit her with a hammer and, looping and tightening a piece of hemp around her throat, dragged her into a high-walled garden
, where he kneeled on her chest while he strangled her. He stripped the body once she was dead and left it partly covered in grass and leaves.
His twelfth victim was a forty-seven-year-old woman called Marguerite Walls, who had been on her way home from the Department of Education and Science’s offices in Pudsey where she had been putting in some extra hours, in preparation for going on holiday the following day, Friday.
Sutcliffe had to scan Friday’s evening paper thoroughly, though, to find this out. He had changed his method of attack in a conscious effort to mislead the police, and the ‘demotion’ of the Walls case by the press was an early indication that he had succeeded: West Yorkshire police had swiftly let it be known that they were not considering this latest murder as an addition to the Ripper series.
30
A week after the murder of Marguerite Walls, Mrs Szurma’s mother, Sonia’s grandmother, arrived in Yorkshire for a holiday from Czechoslovakia and, a further week later, the three women travelled to Morecambe where they had rented self-catering accommodation.
On the Sunday, after they settled in, it had been arranged that Peter was to pay them a visit and, once again, he stopped off in Bingley to collect Mick, Susan and Michelle. In addition, he squeezed in Maureen’s two children, Rachel and Damien, who, since the break-up of their mother’s second marriage, had grown to look forward to their trips to Morecambe with their uncle Peter.
He took them to the funfair and bought them toffee apples and paid for their rides, while Mick added an unintentional touch of light relief. He kept forgetting that Sonia’s grandmother didn’t speak a word of English and persisted in asking her if she was having a good time. ‘How d’you like it in Morecambe?’ he’d ask, raising his voice as if she was simply deaf; and Peter would remind him for the umpteenth time that she couldn’t understand anything he said.
