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

by Gordon Burn

  That night, John, with Marion and all of his daughters and grandchildren, including those from Morecambe, slept at Stirk House, a country hotel buried in the Dales near Skipton, as guests of the Daily Mail. The following morning, Tuesday, 6 January, John signed an agreement worth £5,000 with what had always been his regular morning paper, by the terms of which he undertook ‘not to speak to any other news organisation or to provide them with photographs or to pose for pictures’, and agreed to ‘use my best endeavours to persuade all members of my family’ to follow suit.

  *

  Following Doreen Hill’s appearance on Newsnight five weeks earlier, a Leeds businessman had paid for 8,000 posters to be printed bearing the legend ‘The Ripper Is A Coward’. A number of these posters, now also scrawled with the words ‘Hang him!’, sprang up among the crowd which started to choke a narrow street at the side of Dewsbury Town Hall many hours before Peter Sutcliffe was due to appear in the magistrates’ court, effortlessly accommodated in the enormous Victorian Gothic building.

  By the time the representatives of the world’s press were admitted to claim their seats in the first-floor public gallery just before 4.00 p.m. on Monday, the crowd had turned into a swaying mob more than 2,000 strong. The TV lights singled out a number of skinhead gangs brandishing oily ropes fashioned into crude homemade nooses; and the arrival of the convoy with the van carrying Sutcliffe at its head was the signal for a riot of jeers and abuse in the suddenly floodlit dark: ‘Hang the bastard!’, ‘Killer!’, ‘Die, die!’ were cries that penetrated the thick stone walls and tall arched windows of the court to spiral round the pastel dome high above the dock.

  At 4.54 p.m. the journalists packed into the public gallery rose to a half-standing, half-sitting position as Sutcliffe’s wife and her father were ushered into court, and a minute later they rose as one and pressed forward excitedly as Sutcliffe himself took his place in the dock below. His curly black hair, thick when viewed from the side or the front, could be seen to be thinning slightly at the crown; his face, which seemed to reflect the courtroom walls, looked pale yellow.

  He stood to be charged by the Clerk of the Court with murdering Jacqueline Hill between 16 November and 19 November 1980 ‘against the peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen’ and with stealing ‘two motor vehicle registration-plates to the value of 50p’ and eight minutes later was gone. Some reporters fancied that he ‘sagged against the wall’ as, still handcuffed to Desmond O’Boyle, he was taken downstairs to the cells.

  *

  Several hours earlier, a local reporter had tracked Kathleen’s sister

  and her husband down at their house in Rotherham. Hearing the name and address of the man being held for questioning on the morning news, she had walked over to where Peter and Sonia’s Christmas card was still standing on the mantelpiece and thrown it into the dustbin. She intended to live her life, please God, as if she had never known the Ripper or any of his family.

  PART THREE

  Other Rooms

  32

  A comment often heard in Bingley in the forty-eight hours after the news broke was that the town had never seen so many men in suits during the day. The reporters, for their own part, advised each other that the best way of avoiding trouble was not to arrive in Bingley wearing a sheepskin coat.

  Whatever they wore, though, they were instantly identified and themselves came to recognise – in many cases too late, and at some cost – ‘the strong sagacity and the dogged power of will which seem almost the birthright of the natives of the West Riding’. As they chased leads and ran down contacts on blowy council estates and in outcropped moorland villages, or hovered uneasily at the bars of local pubs and Working Men’s Clubs in the (usually forlorn) hope of unearthing a retailable anecdote or an unfingered picture, the reporters also learned what Mrs Gaskell had learned about ‘this wild, rough population’ a century and a half earlier: that ‘they have a quick perception of character, and a keen sense of humour’ and that, consequently, ‘the dweller among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true, observations, pithily expressed.’

  By the time of his arrest, Peter Sutcliffe had become an occasional, sometimes only a dimly remembered, presence on the periphery of the lives of those who had once been his closest friends. The last time Eric Robinson had seen him had been from his ladder in Bingley Main Street where he was cleaning the windows of the old library building, soon to become ‘Porky’s Nite Scene’.

  Reading his name in the newspapers and hearing it repeatedly on the radio and television had pulled that, and Eric’s youthful memories of Peter, into sharp focus.

  ‘I just saw wagon, and Peter’s eyes in cab an’ you could see them right plain as he was passing,’ Eric remembered later. ‘His eyes lit up …’ On the morning when he heard ‘who they’d got for Ripper’, Eric had to come down off his ladder and go into the Working Men’s Club ‘for a couple of stiffs’ which he had to steady with both hands.

  Keith Sugden, married for many years to Peter’s former neighbour from Cornwall Road, was no less stunned. ‘Peter bloody Sutcliffe,’ he kept repeating to Doreen after hearing it on the 7.00 a.m. news. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it of him, knowing him as I knew him.’ To his amazement, though, Doreen, whom he had shaken awake, hardly turned a hair. ‘I aren’t bloody surprised,’ was all she said.

  ‘When I went into work, I says to other girl who I knew knew him as well, I says, “Have you heard they’ve got Ripper?” And she says, “Yes, but they haven’t given his name yet.” I says, “They have.” And she says, “Who?” I says, “You know ’im.” And she’s a lot older than me. “John Sutcliffe’s lad. Oldest.” And she goes, “Oh Doreen, it isn’t him.” I says, “It is Nancy, an’ me an’ Keith used to go around with him and I can bet my bloody life now he done it.” She said, “Don’t you ever say that.” But I says, “I don’t care. I know ’im.”’

  When they heard, Laurie Ashton and his wife, Cath, who, like Doreen Sugden, had always had a sixth sense about Peter even in their ‘Gravediggers’ Corner’ days, couldn’t believe that it was the same Peter Sutcliffe they knew, now living in a £35,000 house in Heaton. Within hours, though, the newspaper and television people started finding their way to the modest terraced cottage commanding a spectacular view across the Aire valley to Haworth. Employed part-time as a ‘lollipop lady’ in the village, Cath arrived home to find cameras of all descriptions set up in the garden. Several men and women were peering in through the downstairs window at the rock’n’roll mementoes, the Elvis Presley commemorative plaque and ‘In Memoriam’ mirrors, the Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran photographs and album covers pinned to the Ashtons’ living-room walls to indicate that, even as they entered middle age, they were still ‘keeping the faith’.

  Laurie’s musical tastes were immediately seized on by most representatives of the media as a way of breaking the ice: a surprising number of them had been reduced to tears by the news of Elvis’s death. By Tuesday they were turning up in such droves that Laurie nailed a notice to the gate warning ‘No TV or Press’. But it didn’t stop them sending bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolates with business cards attached, as well as toys for the kids and offers of more money than the out-of-work welder and his family had ever seen – or were ever likely to see – in their lives.

  *

  ‘I imagined him to be an ugly hunch-back wi’ boils all over his face, somebody who couldn’t get women and resented ’em for that. Somebody with totally nothing going for him.’ Carl’s mental picture of the Ripper, largely based, as it was, on information issued by the police, was one shared by many other people in Yorkshire. It was shattered, though, the minute he picked up a newspaper in the reading room at Bingley Library and saw his own brother’s name leap out at him. ‘He had everything going for him,’ Carl found himself thinking obsessively, and then repeating aloud. ‘Nice house, steady job, enough money, good looking … He were totally different to what I imagined this mur
derer to be.’

  By lunchtime on the Monday, it had been borne in on Carl that, overnight, he had turned into something of a ‘property’; and a visit to two Daily Star reporters at their hotel in Bradford hammered the point home. ‘I went to Norfolk Gardens Hotel one night, only a couple of days after they’d caught him,’ Carl later said, ‘and I walked in there and there were hundreds of reporters. I shot off upstairs,’ cause I knew where their room were, and they chased me, brayin’ on door, shoving notes underneath, all scraps of paper … They were fanatical to sign me up.’

  Unlike Mick, who was happy to accept enough ‘readies’ to keep him in drink, Carl insisted on doing everything through a solicitor. The Star bought him a ‘swanky’ new wardrobe before leaving Bingley and then, with Mick in tow, he embarked on what was to be an itinerant existence for the next four and a half months. ‘Nurse-maided’ by the two reporters, they checked into hotels all over England under assumed names, only to check out again the minute it looked as though another newspaper was on their tail, attempting ‘a spoiler’. The hotels were three-and four-star and no expense was spared, and Carl would later claim that the experience had almost turned him ‘into an alcoholic’.

  ‘We’d get up every night an’ leave nine wine bottles on table, then go to a club. When we got back, I’d go to bed with a bottle of Scotch an’ Mick would have a bottle of Southern Comfort. Every morning he’d wake up an’ just throw up everywhere an’ start over again.’

  Within hours of him being ‘spirited’ away from Bingley by the Star, Carl’s room at Priestthorpe Road was broken into and ransacked. His landlord recognised the men responsible through his show-jumping connections and immediately reported them to their editor in London.

  *

  Sonia had vowed to her father-in-law at the outset that ‘Peter pulled me through my trouble and I’m going to pull him through this.’ In fact, by the time a date for the trial had been set – 29 April 1981, an almost unprecedentedly brief three months and twenty-seven days after the arrest – Sonia was the only one still seeing her husband.

  The family’s verdict was that she had always wanted him to herself, and now, by ‘poisoning his mind’ against them, she had got him. No member of his family ever saw Peter while he was on remand in Armley without Sonia also being present. ‘I never got the chance to really talk to him in depth, because she kept this running commentary going all the time,’ John later complained. ‘She’d arrive with probably a dozen headings on a piece of paper, and every one of these headings led to half a page before she’d finished. “Oh, and I must tell you …”, and away she’d go again, leaning across the table, speaking to him in a very pianissimo-type whisper. None of us ever got a chance to say owt to lad because she just kept it going, reading from this little list of nonsense until fifteen minutes visiting were over. I could never take Jane and Maureen, or Mick and Carl and meself could never go because three was the limit and she was always there.’

  What ‘finally killed the pig’ for Peter’s father, though, was the morning he turned up outside Armley with Maureen and Maureen’s two children and waited for an hour and a quarter in the rain, only to be told that Peter had left instructions that he only wanted to see his wife that day. As they turned to leave, Sonia brushed past them without speaking and rang the bell to be let in. ‘That were when I realised she controlled him,’ John said. ‘Controlled his mind. She’d twisted him.’ It was the last time he was to see either Sonia or his son.

  Mick, too, would be dropped from the visitors’ list on Sonia’s insistence, but not before he had had the chance to set his mind at rest about a few things. The first visit to Armley could have been tense and embarrassing for all concerned, but Peter made it easy by smiling and laughing and cracking jokes about trying to escape. As soon as he could, though, Mick said his piece: ‘I says, “I’ve just one thing to ask you first, Pete, before we get goin’. ’Cause they can say what they want in papers an’ that, but I aren’t going to believe it till I hear it from you. When you tell me, then I’ll start tekkin it in. So, have you done it or what?” An’ he says, “I haven’t done ’em all. I’ll tell you that now. But I’ve done six or seven of them, aye.” So I says, “Well, that’s it then,” an’ we sat down.’

  About a year earlier, with the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper at its height, Mick had come across a ladies’ handbag while he was ‘rooting’ on the corporation tip at Dowley Gap. He had disposed of the contents – two Ronson cigarette lighters, a man’s and a woman’s, and about £20 worth of 10p pieces – and, a few weeks later, had surrendered the bag itself, after incautiously mentioning it during a drinking session, to Bingley police. Following Peter’s arrest, stories had appeared in the local papers about Sutcliffe’s brother Michael trying to assist the enquiry by taking a handbag in for examination, and it had since occurred to Mick that perhaps Peter had ‘planted’ it as a roundabout way of putting some money in his pocket. Peter laughed appreciatively, but noncommitally, when Mick put this theory to him, but he was quite positive when Mick enquired, as casually as possible, whether it was him who had ‘topped’ the Bingley bookmaker whose murder the police at one time seemed to suspect Mick himself of having committed: that, he insisted, had nothing to do with him whatsoever.

  After these brief exchanges, Sonia had produced her notebook and taken charge of the conversation but, although it irked Mick to see her ‘still on at him’, he was prepared to make allowances and, in fact, promised Peter before leaving that he would ‘keep an eye on poor lass’.

  The following Sunday Mick drove over to Tanton Crescent in the Cortina Estate that he had on the road at the time and, leaving Susan and Michelle behind in the house with Mrs Szurma, took Sonia and her father for a two-hour walk through the snow on Queensbury Moors. ‘Everything went well. I took ’em back home and had summat to eat an’ a drink of coffee. But next thing I knew when I went in to see Pete was she’d told him I’d had all cameramen hiding in bushes, photographing us both, so I could sell pictures an’ get some money … I said to our lad, “This is bloody stupid, this. I try and do her a good turn and this is the thanks. Well I’m afraid that’s it. Finish. She’s twistin’ everything all time to get family. She’s twistin’ things round her way so we don’t get any visits and she gets ’em all.”’

  Bradford, in the first weeks of 1981, was alive with rumour and counter-rumour, speculation, misinformation and lies, and they all, sooner or later, found their way to Sonia’s ears. She didn’t know how much Peter’s family had been paid – estimates had it as high as £400,000 – but her view was that, by taking any payment at all, they had forfeited their right to continued prison visits.

  Kerry Macgill, a young man with mutton-chop whiskers who described himself as ‘a straightforward provincial solicitor’ and whom Peter had chosen more or less at random to represent him, from a police list, advised Sonia from the beginning that, as a potential witness in her husband’s defence, it would be wrong for her to sell her story to any paper. But the press, in her experience, had anyway shown themselves to be ‘absolutely despicable’:

  ‘They made me endure having my supposed refuge – the home of my parents – totally besieged,’ she later complained to the Press Council. ‘Hordes of reporters clambered one over the other banging at the door, windows and letterbox; shamelessly yelling that they would pay more than the next man or woman for my story. The scene was akin to a frenzied auction, with wild attempts to outbid each other in shouts of “I will top any sum the rest of you care to name …”

  ‘Not only did we have to keep the curtains continuously drawn, but we were not even able to leave the house to do our shopping. Our oppressors fared rather better. To accommodate this media mob some enterprising person found room amongst the streetful of press cars to set up a caravan selling food and hot drinks to provide the said gang with further stamina with which to continue their abysmal performance … On venturing to open the curtains a chink, vigilant photographers were immediately at the ready …
This extremely inhuman harassment resulted in my mother (the only breadwinner) having her nerves so badly shattered that she needed two months off work and still now has to take tranquillisers.’

  In a second written submission to the Press Council, who had promptly announced their intention of conducting an enquiry into the case, Sonia described how she had had to ‘escape’ from her mother’s home on the eve of the trial at the Old Bailey.

  ‘The press, knowing of my intention to travel, and also knowing that I was stranded, cornered and trapped, did not let up in their hectic intense oppression of trying to urge and compel me into going with them – the very people I most wanted to avoid.

  ‘Ultimately, I had to abandon plans going in the comfort of my mother’s car – firstly because I was physically prevented by the hordes and crowds outside the house, and the constant press guard outside Ma’s garage. And secondly, it would have meant a journey fraught by being tracked, monitored, photographed, filmed, and possibly even ending up in a crash.

  ‘The day was wearing on – still the vigil continued. Under this over-powering pressure I was left with no alternative but, come nightfall, to climb out of the back window like a burglar – simply to escape the organised sentry. Then creep furtively through the muddy back garden with only the bare minimum of belongings, in a constant fear of being fallen on at any moment by the multitude of press …

  ‘I had to resort to public transport – that is, the last train, which I just caught by the skin of my teeth. The whole of that night journey was spent in a disturbed sense of continual dread – not only the likelihood of a passenger being press, but also being recognised by a member of the public and being exposed to a barrage of abuse and hatred, and possibly injury …