by Gordon Burn
But in mid-December, four weeks after Jacqueline Hill’s murder, Carl came across something in the paper that he was idly flipping through which made him say how much he would like to get his hands on the Ripper, and watched a change come over his brother: ‘I were telling him what a bastard I thought Ripper were, about how I’d cut his bollocks off an’ all that if I caught him. And whereas usually, whatever you said to him, he’d laugh right loud an’ crack some sort of joke, this day he went right strange, did our Peter. He got right nervous. Right edgy. Really edgy and uncomfortable.’
He had said he better be off then and, on his way out, halfway down the stairs, turned to Carl, who was immediately behind him, and mumbled something about not wanting to lose Sonia, about Sonia being all he had left, and seemed on the verge of crying. ‘It were like he were goin’ to burst into tears. He were really shekkin an’ his voice were breakin’ when he shut door.’
On 18 November, the day after Jacqueline Hill’s murder but the day before it was confirmed as a ‘Ripper’ murder in the press, Robin Holland had made a similar remark and had watched Peter react in a similar, if less extreme, way, although it had seemed to him at the time to be none of his business. Robin had brought Rachel and Damien back to their mother in Bingley and had been quite pleased to bump into Peter, whom he hadn’t seen for some time. He had appeared more or less his normal self but had then suddenly got up from the armchair where he had been sitting with Robin’s dog in his lap and started walking up and down in front of the window, wringing his hands, which Robin had never seen him do before.
Once again Carl felt stirrings of unease. He would be absent from the various family gatherings over Christmas, giving as his excuse the fact that he couldn’t bear to be with more than two of his family at the same time.
*
Shortly before Christmas, Peter had been shaken to find himself face to face with Maureen Long, a woman he had attacked three and a half years earlier, in the Arndale Centre in Bradford. She hadn’t given him a second glance, however, and had walked straight on.
At around the same time, he had been given a January date for his appearance in court on the drunk driving charge, and had handed his notice in at Clark’s. On Christmas Eve he sat in the cab of his wagon in Clark’s yard, sharing the liver sandwiches that Sonia had made him and discussing his future with one of the other drivers, Allan Wright. He said that he had been to see a cottage in Ripon which they had decided to buy, and that ‘three or four vans’ came with it. He outlined the scheme for selling Sonia’s pots to summer tourists and added that he was also thinking about going into partnership with Carl, doing cavity-wall insulation.
‘If you get up there and you get on your feet, don’t forget me,’ Allan Wright said as he slammed the cab door. He was back in Bingley for morning opening time. Peter, on the other hand, stayed behind ‘rubbing and scrubbing’, putting in the hours.
Christmas Day was a Thursday, and Peter and Sonia, who had delivered their presents personally earlier in the week, spent it quietly at Garden Lane with Mrs Szurma. Sonia’s mother was also with them on Boxing Day when they travelled to Bingley to have lunch with Maureen and the children, plus Jane and her boyfriend, Eddie. At teatime they were joined by Peter’s father and Marion, and then, at about 7.30, Sonia and Mrs Szurma went off with Peter on his traditional ‘duty’ visits to the old people.
They called on Josie London, leaving her a small present and a card, and stayed to have a cup of tea with his Grandmother Sutcliffe after seeing her safely into bed. The atmosphere on the drive back to Heaton, however, was not all that it might have been because of an incident that had taken place before they left Maureen’s: Mrs Szurma later told Carl that his father had ‘groped’ her in an ‘upsetting’ way as she was walking downstairs.
Two days later, Sunday, 28 December, it was Peter’s turn to play host to his family at Garden Lane. But, at lunchtime, he left Sonia preparing the evening meal while he went out for a drink in Bradford with Trevor Birdsall and Birdsall’s girlfriend, Gloria. It was only three weeks since the two of them had walked into Bradford police headquarters and named Peter Sutcliffe as the Yorkshire Ripper, but the fact that he was still free to stand at a bar reassured Trevor. Gloria, however, would later claim that she had had ‘a feeling of apprehension’ and ‘a churning’ in her stomach all the time they were in his company that day.
It took two taxis to bring the members of his family over to Peter’s at the end of the afternoon, and they travelled back to Bingley from Heaton several hours later the same way, so that Peter could drink with a clear conscience. Afterwards, they would be united in their opinion that the ‘foreign’ food Sonia had cooked them was ‘not that nice’, but nobody spoiled the atmosphere by saying so at the time.
It was a pleasant, if not uproarious, occasion and, when it was over, Peter walked them all out to the cars, kissing his sisters and wishing everybody a happy New Year.
The next morning, his first back at work, he was late. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ Willie Clark barked at him when he eventually rolled in and was astonished to see tears welling in Sutcliffe’s eyes. He mumbled that he would be back in the New Year and left the yard saying he had ‘things to do’.
Maureen was surprised to open her door the following afternoon, Tuesday, 30 December, to find Peter standing outside in the gathering dark. When they were at his house a couple of days earlier he had been upset to hear that Anne’s kids hadn’t got their presents and wanted to know whether Maureen felt like ‘going on’ to Morecambe with them now. She piled into the Rover with Jane and Rachel and Damien, ran into Rutland House to pick up her father’s gifts and stayed at Anne’s just long enough to see the Christmas wrappings removed, before turning round and coming home.
Once again Marion was impressed. ‘There’s not many blokes would do that,’ she said to John as they heard the car drive away.
*
Depressed about his job and fed up with Sonia’s ‘constant nagging’ ever since he’d been breathalysed, Peter walked out of the house just after 4.00 p.m. on 2 January 1981, the first Friday of the New Year, saying he was going to collect the key to Jane’s Mini which had broken down again. He didn’t drive to Bingley, though, but to Mirfield, outside Leeds, to a scrapyard, where he picked up a number plate which had fallen off a Skoda and wrenched off the other one to make the pair. He called Sonia at 9.00 from a service station on the motorway to say that he was having trouble with the car and, an hour later, fixed the stolen plates with black electrical tape over the registration plates of his Rover before heading for Havelock Square, the red-light area of Sheffield, thirty miles from home.
A few minutes past 10.00 he drove up to a young West Indian woman in Broomhall Street and asked her if she was ‘doing business’, but after a close look she simply said ‘Sorry’, and walked away. Her friend, though, who was also black, couldn’t afford to wave good-bye to £10 so casually. And when the car reappeared a few minutes later, she climbed in and directed the driver towards, and then through, the stone gateposts of a well-screened private-looking road just half a mile away. He backed into the drive attached to a large stone building, which no other ‘punter’ had ever done in her experience, and turned off both the ignition and the lights.
On the way, ‘Dave’, as he called himself, had talked about his wife, about her miscarriages and about how she nagged him and, even now that they had reached their destination, still seemed more interested in talking than in sex. ‘Sharon’ listened politely for some time but eventually asked him if he would like to pay her now, and passed him a ‘rubber’ once she had taken possession of his £10 note. She removed the pants she was wearing under her dress and, having taken off a black plastic carcoat and laid it carefully across the back seat, he unzipped his trousers, placed one hand on the gearlever and the other behind her head and, with no real enthusiasm, lowered himself across her.
Unlike the ‘big, fat taxi driver smelling of sweat’ whom she told him she h
ad been with earlier, and who, she assured ‘Dave’ in response to his suggestion that they get into the back seat, hadn’t seemed hindered by the dashboard, she sensed that ‘Dave’ was ‘nervous’ and tried reassuring him, insisting that there was ‘nothing to worry about’. But when, after ten minutes, he was still ‘cold as ice’, she stopped and said, ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to do it.’ Rather than being upset or embarrassed as she would have expected, he simply said, ‘It looks like it.’
They had picked up the threads of their earlier conversation and ‘Dave’ was telling her about ‘not being able to go with’ his wife when the interior of the car was suddenly illuminated from in front. Even without clearing the condensation from the windscreen, it was possible to see that it was a police car that had turned into the drive and parked nose-to-nose with the Rover.
Sergeant Bob Ring, twenty-six years with South Yorkshire police, and Probationary Constable Robert Hydes had reported to Hammerton Road police station for the nightshift just over half an hour earlier and, as often happened at weekends, had made Melbourne Avenue one of their first calls.
It was the younger officer who approached the well-maintained car parked in the shadow of Free Trades House, and seeing him coming, ‘Dave’, suddenly galvanised, said, ‘Leave it to me. You’re my girlfriend.’ Winding down the window, he told the constable what he had just said he was going to, plus the fact that it was his car and his name was ‘Peter Williams’. An openly sceptical Hydes sauntered back to rejoin his partner, who, via police headquarters, checked the Rover’s number plates with the national police computer in Hendon. The information came through within a couple of minutes that the plates belonged to a Skoda.
‘Dave’, meanwhile, had asked the woman still sitting next to him whether she felt able ‘to make a run for it’, and she had told him there wasn’t much point, seeing that she was hardly unknown to the local vice squad. The more experienced of the two officers now approached the Rover. He reached through the window and removed the keys from the steering column; PC Hydes, having established that the false plates were only held on with tape, unpeeled the tax disc, and both men escorted the woman, whose true identity was quickly established as Olivia Reivers, currently serving a suspended sentence for soliciting, back to the patrol car.
Sutcliffe immediately saw this as his opportunity. Grabbing the ball-pein hammer and single-bladed knife that were concealed under his seat, he made for the stone porch abutting on to the building some yards behind him and, out of sight of the police, who were prepared to take his word for it when he explained that he had been ‘bursting for a pee’, threw the ‘tackle’ behind a small oil storage tank, on to some leaves. There was a second wood-handled knife in his jacket on the back seat of the car, accessible through a hole in the pocket, but he would get rid of that in a cistern at the police station later.
At Hammerton Road police station, he owned up to being Peter Sutcliffe, of No. 6 Garden Lane, Bradford, without a great deal of pressing, and also admitted that the false number plates on the Rover were stolen. He explained that this was because he was due in court on a drunk driving charge in less than two weeks, and his insurance had lapsed the night before.
He was asleep in his cell by 2.30 a.m. and, at 5.12 a.m., Dewsbury police in West Yorkshire, who, it had been discovered, were responsible for the area where the number-plate theft had occurred, were informed of his arrest. They said they would send somebody to collect him from South Yorkshire after the new shift had come on at 6.00 a.m.
The normal procedure in a case involving the theft of property worth only 50p would have been an immediate remand on bail. But, discomfited by the sloppy groundwork in the hours immediately following Jacqueline Hill’s murder, Ronald Gregory had been at pains to emphasise to the 5,000 members of his force the importance of forwarding all information regarding prostitutes and red-light areas, no matter how apparently inconsequential or trivial, to the Ripper Incident Room at Leeds. Consequently, at 8.00 a.m. on Saturday, 3 January, the station sergeant at Dewsbury police station informed the duty officer with the Ripper Squad of Sutcliffe’s impending arrival. He actually arrived at 8.55 a.m., closely followed by his brown Rover, and was logged in at the station desk at 8.59 before being escorted to the interview area in the basement.
He remained genial and apparently unsurprised by the attention being lavished on such a minor offence, and volunteered the information that he had been interviewed by Manchester police as part of the £5-note enquiry, as well as being questioned as a result of the surveillance operations in red-light areas, inside the first hour. It was also noted that his foot-size matched the size of the bootprint found near Josephine Whitaker’s body, as well as at the scene of two of the other ‘Ripper’ murders. And at 10.00 a.m., the detectives at Dewsbury contacted the Ripper Room to confirm that they might very well be interested in ‘clocking’ the Bradford lorry-driver arrested with a prostitute in Sheffield the night before.
Ten miles away, meanwhile, in Bradford, Sonia, thinking it was Peter, was studiously ignoring the hammering at her door. She did pick the phone up, however, when it rang five minutes later, and a voice on the other end told her that the police were outside her house and that she should open up. When she did, a uniformed officer informed her, wrongly as it turned out, that her husband was being held in custody in Sheffield, which was the first clue she had been given as to where he was. She would hear nothing further for twelve hours, when the police called a second time to say that they would take her to see Peter the following day, Sunday.
At lunchtime on Saturday, Det. Sgt. Desmond O’Boyle arrived at Dewsbury police station to begin questioning the suspect who, on paper, seemed no more likely to be the Ripper than the many dozens of others he had seen already in the course of the enquiry.
Introducing himself as a member of the Ripper Squad, O’Boyle started off slowly, and spent most of the afternoon trying to build up a picture of the ‘pleasant, co-operative’ man sitting across the table from him – education, interests, friends, social life, home life, previous employment, present place of work. One of the things O’Boyle asked Sutcliffe was whether he had been having ‘normal sex’ with his wife and he said yes: ‘The last time was about four days ago.’ Questioned further about having sex with his wife even though they were constantly rowing, Sutcliffe said: ‘We forget about rows when we go to bed.’
By 5.30 p.m. O’Boyle was prepared to write Sutcliffe off as another false alarm and was about to recommend his release when the Chief Superintendent in charge at Dewsbury took matters into his own hands. He ordered O’Boyle to convey to the duty officer at the Incident Room in Leeds his ‘displeasure’ at the lack of rank of the man sent to interview what, to him, was still a major suspect in the Ripper case.
As a result, O’Boyle, who should have finished his shift at 6.00 p.m., was instructed to stay with Sutcliffe and, when he resumed the interview, started ‘going in’ harder. The circumstances surrounding his visit to Sheffield the previous evening were explored at length. Sutcliffe was anxious that his wife should not be told about a prostitute being in the car with him when he was arrested, but O’Boyle informed him that his car had previously been seen in red-light areas and that, as far as he was concerned, Sutcliffe was a ‘regular punter’. Questioned about a previous denial that he had ever been to Manchester, although his Rover had been logged on Moss Side, he said that he had left it in the car park at Bradford Central Library one night after it had broken down in the city centre, and that ‘someone must have used it to go to Manchester and put it back on that spot’.
At about 9.00 p.m. Sutcliffe was asked to give a blood sample, which at first he resisted. ‘What if it’s the same as the one you’re wanting?’ he asked O’Boyle, who simply said to him: ‘Are you the Ripper?’ He co-operated with the police doctor and, once again, the atmosphere lightened. ‘I’d get them, but they might be cold by the time I got back,’ Sutcliffe joked when it was decided to send out for fish and chips. He was bedd
ed down in his cell by 10.00.
At the 10.00 p.m. ‘parade’ at Hammerton Road police station, back in Sheffield, Bob Ring picked up the news that the man he had ‘collared’ twenty-four hours earlier in the company of Olivia Reivers was still in custody at Dewsbury police station, being questioned by Ripper Squad officers.
An hour later, Ring was back in Melbourne Avenue, scene of the arrest, exploring the area beyond the stone porch at Free Trades House where he remembered Sutcliffe had gone to have a ‘pee’. By 11.05 p.m. Hammerton Road were on to the Ripper Room to inform them about the knife and the hammer that had been found lying in a pile of leaves and were told to leave them in situ until a picture had been taken.
As soon as he put down the phone, Inspector John Boyle jumped in a car and was rushed from Leeds to Sheffield, where he ordered a more extensive search to be made and reinterviewed Olivia Reivers. At midnight, he telephoned Dewsbury to tell them the news, and then called the head of the Ripper Squad, Det. Chief Supt. Dick Holland, at home to fill him in on the dramatic developments of the previous twenty-four hours. Sutcliffe was put under constant surveillance throughout the night, with one man inside, and another outside his cell.
*
Sonia rose early on Sunday morning. She was following a German-language series on television and did little to conceal her irritation when she was interrupted by knocking at the door at about 9.30. She opened it to admit Dick Holland, Det. Sgt. O’Boyle, Chief Inspector George Smith, and Detective woman-constable Jenny Crawford-Brown. Then, wearing a green corduroy topcoat over her day-clothes, Sonia picked up an exercise book and went back to watching her programme.
She lowered the sound but declined to give the police her undivided attention until Det. Chief Supt. Holland walked up to the set and turned it off. She would eventually report him to his superiors for ‘discourteous behaviour’.
