by Gordon Burn
They quickly embarked on a search of what one of them would later describe as ‘one of the most meticulous – as well as one of the coldest’ houses he had ever seen: ‘There wasn’t a thread out of place. Everything, from the face-cloths in the bathroom to worn-out clothes down to shoe rags, was folded to a sharp crease. There were crochet-covers over the covers over the living-room suite.’
A collection of tools had already been retrieved from Sutcliffe’s Rover, including three screwdrivers found in the glove compartment; and a hacksaw and a yellow-handled screwdriver were among the items that Dick Holland and his colleagues removed from his home. Mrs Sutcliffe accompanied them to police headquarters in Bradford, where they arrived shortly after 10.00 a.m., and started the questioning that would go on until 8.00 that night. After several hours of questions designed to build up a ‘profile’ of her personal life, Sonia, who it was known had alibied her husband on at least three separate occasions, was asked about Peter’s movements on specific dates during the previous two months. She was also shown the knife found in Sheffield and identified it as one she had bought for her ‘bottom drawer’ before she was married.
This information was relayed to Dewsbury, where Sutcliffe had been up since 8.00 and was into his second full day of questioning. Confronting him this time were Inspector John Boyle and Peter Smith, a young detective from the Ripper Squad with an unparalleled knowledge of the background to all the attacks.
Sutcliffe was still polite and composed, and the questions were still of a general nature until, after lunch, Boyle and Smith started to quiz him on his whereabouts on dates relevant to the Ripper enquiry. Bonfire Night, for instance, two months earlier, when Theresa Sykes had been attacked in Huddersfield. He had been at home with his wife at 8.00, he said, when the attack was taking place. Asked how he could be so sure, he said that if he had been out he would have remembered seeing fires. Sonia had already told police in Bradford that she remembered him walking through the kitchen door at 10.00 on 5 November.
Sutcliffe was then asked where he was on 17 November, the night Jacqueline Hill was murdered, and he again replied that he was at home at Garden Lane with Sonia. ‘Every time you have been seen, you always seem to have the same alibi – that you were at home with your wife,’ Boyle said. ‘I find that rather strange. How can you be sure that’s where you were?’
‘I’m always at home every night when I’m not on an overnight stay,’ Sutcliffe said, but his composure was showing the first signs of slipping. Boyle switched his attention to Friday night then, and the arrest in Sheffield. Sutcliffe had claimed he had driven the thirty miles south because three hitchhikers whom he had picked up had offered him £10 to take them there. Boyle told him he thought this was ‘rubbish’. He said: ‘I believe you went to Sheffield on Friday night with the sole purpose of picking up a prostitute.’
Sutcliffe said: ‘That is not true.’
Boyle continued: ‘I believe you put the false number plates on to conceal the identity of the vehicle in the red-light district.’
SUTCLIFFE: ‘That is not true. To be honest with you, I’ve been so depressed that I put them on because I was thinking of committing a crime with the car.’
BOYLE: ‘Why did you leave your car and go to the side of that house?’
SUTCLIFFE: ‘To urinate.’
BOYLE: ‘I think you went for another purpose. Do you understand what I am saying? I think you are in serious trouble.’
SUTCLIFFE: ‘I think you have been leading up to it.’
BOYLE: ‘Leading up to what?’
SUTCLIFFE: ‘The Yorkshire Ripper.’
BOYLE: ‘What about the Yorkshire Ripper?’
SUTCLIFFE: ‘Well, it’s me.’
He remained totally calm and unemotional, as he was to remain throughout the almost sixteen hours that it would take for him to dictate a detailed statement. ‘They are all in my brain, reminding me of the beast I am,’ he said. ‘Just thinking of them all reminds me of what a monster I am.’ He made only one request: that he be the one to tell Sonia.
*
At 5.00, as Inspector Boyle paced around the main CID office at Dewsbury asking questions while Det. Sgt. Smith took down Sutcliffe’s ‘confession’, Sonia was still at police headquarters in Bradford. ‘Has Pete had anything to eat?’ she wanted to know when a policeman brought her a hamburger, and the policeman told her: ‘We’re not inhuman, you know.’
She was driven to Dewsbury at 10.30 and an hour later saw Peter for the first time in two days when he was escorted into the functional, tungsten-lit room in the police station where she was waiting. He was still wearing the blue sweater with a light band at the neck, the white shirt and the grey trousers that he had been wearing when he walked out of the house at 4.00 p.m. on Friday.
‘It’s me …’ he said, and she said: ‘Is it? Is it really?’ The several pairs of eyes monitoring her reaction inhibited her from crying or from saying anything more.
She didn’t break down for an hour and a half after being handed a glass of Scotch by George Smith, her interrogator. She was having ‘a two-minute sob’ on policewoman Crawford-Brown’s shoulder when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw ‘some of the top brass’ slip into the room and then out again.
A quarter of an hour later, at 1.15 a.m. on what was by then Monday, 5 January, George Oldfield returned and sat down next to her, saying, ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ Although no longer concerned with the day-today running of the case, he was still Assistant Chief Constable, and he seemed to her to be working hard at presenting ‘a concerned image’.
‘My priority,’ she said, staring straight ahead rather than at him, ‘is to let my parents know.’ She felt that such news should be broken face to face and not on a telephone and at first couldn’t understand his obvious reluctance to let her do it.
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t advise you to do that,’ he said. ‘The press will get you.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ She looked him straight in the face for the first time. ‘What do you mean?’ And so he spelled it out: ‘We’ve had a press conference. They’re all waiting outside.’
*
As word had spread that a suspect was clearly ‘in the frame’ for the first time, the men who had led the hunt for the ‘Ripper’ for five and a half years had started making their way to Dewsbury police station throughout Sunday afternoon. Ronald Gregory had sent a cadet out for a bottle of Scotch on arrival, and the atmosphere in the second-floor conference room where the rest of the team had assembled around their Chief Constable was already celebratory when, at about 3.00 p.m., Det. Sgt. O’Boyle burst in, beaming. ‘It’s definitely him. He’s started to cough and tell us where the murder weapons are hidden.’
The scene was suddenly like the victors’ dressing room in the minutes following the FA Cup Final at Wembley, with the all-male company playfully punching each other and hugging each other and pumping each other’s hands.
It was a mood that inevitably spilled over into the press conference that was eventually convened in the television lounge downstairs and watched incredulously that evening in millions of homes. Flanked by two rows of florid, chuckling lieutenants, an unashamedly euphoric Ronald Gregory confessed to being ‘absolutely delighted, totally delighted’ with developments and said that the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was now ‘being scaled right down’. They were remarks that, in many quarters, were seen to be flying in the face of the country’s long-established contempt laws and were the cause of immediate concern.
‘It was unnecessary for [the police] to have held a press conference at all. It was irresponsible for them to have done so in the way they did …’, Wednesday morning’s Times concluded. ‘They praised the two young policemen who had carried out the arrest, and those officers then gave press interviews in which they professed their own satisfaction. The police did not quite go as far as saying that they had caught the Ripper. They did not need to.’
The most damaging consequence of
Mr Ronald Gregory’s ‘overenthusiasm’, The Times pointed out, was the example it set for representatives of the press ‘and the media in general’, who, in the forty-eight hours following the announcement of Sutcliffe’s arrest, proceeded, in the words of another observer, ‘to drive a number of coaches and horses through the contempt laws: the popular press seems to have decided that this was such a fantastic story that they would publish what they wanted and let the lawyers pick up the pieces later’.
Believing this to clearly be the case, the Solicitor-General issued an urgent warning to all newspaper, radio and television editors, reminding them of ‘the vital principles embodied in English law that a man accused of a crime, however serious, is presumed to be innocent and is entitled to a fair trial and of the responsibility which the law accordingly places upon editors’. The horse by then, however, had already bolted.
*
It was a matter of some pride to journalists on West Yorkshire’s rival daily papers – the Telegraph and Argus, based in Bradford, and the Leeds-based Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post – that they ‘scoop’ not only each other, but also the ‘big hitters’ and ‘buy-up’ men from Fleet Street responsible for the teams of reporters who, by midnight on Sunday, were invading their ‘patch’ in their hundreds.
The identity of the man assisting police with their enquiries had not been revealed at the Dewsbury press conference. But even before the conference was over, reporters from the Yorkshire Post were finding their way, via the telephone directory, the electoral register and reliable inside information, to a quiet street in the ‘select’ Bradford suburb of Heaton. By midnight, and still many hours ahead of the competition, they had located the neighbour with whom Mrs Sutcliffe, a schoolteacher living at No. 6 Garden Lane, had left a telephone number in case of emergency. And, at 1.15 a.m. on Monday, as George Oldfield made Sonia understand that she wasn’t going to be allowed to break the news to her mother and father in person, two young men walked up the path to the front door of 42 Tanton Crescent and lifted the freshly painted black knocker.
When an elderly woman in a nightdress appeared at the upstairs window they told her they were from the press. ‘We have some news for you. It’s about Peter Sutcliffe, your son-in-law.’ But it was clear from her confused expression that Mrs Szurma still didn’t understand. ‘Has there been an accident?’ she said. And then, in faltering English: ‘You could be anyone. You could be crooks.’ She closed the bedroom window and called the police.
A uniformed constable arrived in a patrol car in a very few minutes and they satisfied him that they were from the Post. ‘They’re all right,’ he told the woman, who by now had put on a dressing-gown, and her husband, who had pulled on a sweater and trousers. ‘You can let them in.’
Squeezed into the small kitchen at the side of the house, the journalists explained to the Szurmas that Peter had been arrested in Sheffield on Friday evening with a girl in his car, and tried to suggest the implications of the arrest. Mrs Szurma, however, remained confused. ‘It must be Sonia, surely?’ she said, adding that she had been expecting both of them over for tea several hours earlier, after Gigi had finished on television. She had spoken to Sonia on Saturday and there had been no mention of the fact that Peter hadn’t come home on Friday night.
Realising that they must by now be only hours, perhaps only minutes, ahead of ‘the pack’, the reporters’ main priority was a picture. After some persuading, Mrs Szurma finally produced a photograph of herself and her son-in-law, taken the previous Christmas: it showed a small woman in a sleeveless embroidered jacket, her features bleached out by the flash, and an unsmiling, rigid young man with both hands plunged deep into the trouser pockets of a three-piece suit, standing either side of a large Christmas tree which looked like a third person in the picture. By 5.00 a.m. it was in the safe at the newspaper’s Leeds offices, although the journalists, determined to maximise their advantage, continued to sit it out with the Szurmas through the night.
At 6.45 a.m. on Monday, the radio news finally confirmed that what the newspapermen had been intimating was true: Peter Sutcliffe, a thirty-five-year-old lorry-driver of Heaton, Bradford, was to appear in court later that day charged with the murder of Leeds University student Jacqueline Hill. At 7.45 a.m. Mrs Szurma was sufficiently recovered to ring Bradford police to ask where her daughter was, and a few minutes later they rang back and put Sonia on the line.
At 2.30 a.m., following her conversation with George Oldfield, Sonia had been given a bed in police accommodation next to Dewsbury police station. Jenny Crawford-Brown, the policewoman who had been with her all day, went to sleep in an adjacent room, but Sonia was assigned another woman constable whose instructions were to sit up with her until the morning: the door had to be left open when she took a shower and a light was left burning all night.
At 6.00 a.m. there was a change of shift and Sonia, who hadn’t been able to sleep, got up and dressed. The day shift officer absently handed her a newspaper but, as soon as she realised what she was reading with such concentration, hurriedly snatched it back. Sonia was incensed. ‘Come on, you’ve just passed me your paper. You’ve just handed it to me,’ she said. ‘Everybody else in the street is able to read the papers. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to.’ She said she thought it was ridiculous. The policewoman said it was orders. Similarly, when she wanted to take some exercise, she was told she couldn’t leave the room.
At 7.45 a.m. she talked on the telephone to her mother and immediately afterwards rang her sister in London in an attempt to save her from having to hear the news from the radio in the same way. ‘Is it true?’ was all Marianne, like Sonia herself, could say at the beginning, and Sonia had to tell her it was. When she asked her how she could be so sure she said: ‘Because Pete said it. Why should he say it if it wasn’t right? And he is honest.’ As they spoke, they kept reverting to their native Czech, and the police, who were monitoring the conversation, kept threatening to cut them off.
At 9.00, the Yorkshire Post reporters were still firmly entrenched in Tanton Crescent and they had the satisfaction, as the day wore on, of picking up the handwritten pleas and offers from virtually every newspaper in the country, as well as many from abroad, as they tumbled through the Szurmas’ front door. By Wednesday, the Post itself would be being accused by its local rival, the Telegraph and Argus, of ‘being thrown out of the home of Bohdan and Maria Szurma, after spending more than twenty-four hours in the house, after a row over a photograph’ (an accusation the Post’s editor was to hotly deny).
An editorial in the same issue of the paper pointed out that ‘chequebook journalism – the buying of people with a special story to tell by an individual newspaper to the exclusion of all others’ had ‘raised its ugly head in Bradford over the past few days’ and was a practice to be roundly deplored. ‘Responsible journalists,’ it went on, in a tone that, to the ‘irresponsible’ journalists whom it was aimed at, smacked of sour grapes, ‘base their case for unimpeded access to information on the people’s right to know. When other so-called journalists come along to corner the market on the basis of how much money they have to spend, they have discarded the basic principles for the morals of the marketplace. We can do without them in Bradford.’
That same Wednesday evening, at the Norfolk Gardens Hotel, fifty yards from where the Bradford Telegraph and Argus was printed, the thirty-two representatives of the Daily Mail, the fourteen representatives of the Sunday People and eight from the Daily Mirror, just a few of the 200-strong press corps who had descended on the city, were recuperating from another day ‘on the knocker’ by laying false trails for one another and ‘bravuraing it out’ in the bars. The Daily Express team were loudly ordering bucket after bucket of champagne to ‘celebrate’ their ‘signing up’ of Sonia. The fee, it was rumoured, was to be £200,000, plus sixty per cent of syndication.
*
There weren’t two women in Yorkshire more interested in the ‘Ripper’, Maureen would say, than her and
Jane. Jane had been reading I’m Jack, a paperback book about the case, over the Christmas holiday and had passed it on to her older sister, who had been halfway through it on Sunday evening when the news came on the television that a man had been arrested. Jane was ecstatic. She told Maureen she would take her out ‘for a big, slap-up meal’ the following night, to celebrate.
Shortly after returning to Bingley from Germany in 1978, Maureen had been startled by a Photofit picture of a man police wanted to interview in connection with the Ripper murders while watching television. ‘That’s Peter’ had been her immediate thought, but she had almost as immediately dismissed it as nonsense. It was Jane who, as Sunday evening started to wear on, and more became known about the man being questioned at Dewsbury police station, started to have misgivings.
The fact that he had been arrested in a Rover V8 saloon instinctively made her think of Peter, and after a while she told Maureen she was going to call Garden Lane. She didn’t, when Maureen pointed out that she would worry even more if he turned out not to be in, and Jane let it drop. Privately though, for some reason she wasn’t able to put her finger on, her thoughts kept returning to Peter all night.
On Monday morning Jane got up early and crossed the road to work at Anderton’s as usual. Stocktaking, weighing out scoops of metal and hearing a male voice somewhere behind her reading aloud from a newspaper – ‘Heaton … lorry-driver … married to a schoolteacher …’ – was the last thing she remembered before passing out. She was carried over to Maureen’s where she was sedated by her doctor and put to bed.
Jane’s father had caught the first bus out of Bingley and had been at work at Drummond’s mill on Lumb Lane by 6.00 a.m. He was on his tea break two and a half hours later when a workmate mentioned that the man they’d got for ‘the Ripper job’ was a Sutcliffe and jokingly asked him if he was any relation. He instantly recognised the tall, detached, pebble-dashed house pictured on the front of the Yorkshire Post as the paper was passed to him, and his works manager quickly drove him home.
