by Gordon Burn
‘Arriving, unslept in the early, dark and frosty hours of the morning, I had to wander the streets, still enveloped in this tense and suspended state of terror. In this helpless and solitary position, my aged mother – a person more vulnerable than myself – had to serve as my bodyguard.’
At 6.00 a.m., Sonia finally called Kerry Macgill at his hotel but, instead of getting her solicitor, was put through to his brother, Ian, a sub-editor on the Sheffield Star and in London for the trial. Ian Macgill arranged to meet her, and that day, and in the days ahead, helped her run the gauntlet of the pressmen eddying around the Old Bailey. He was offered £10,000 for the rights in the article which he was to eventually write for his own paper, and another journalist on The Star was offered £5,000 in the street outside the court in return for the secret address where Sonia was staying in London: he was shown the money in banknotes in a briefcase.
*
Curiously, given the sensational nature of many of the revelations, money was a subject that regularly preoccupied the court in the opening days of Regina versus Sutcliffe.
On 20 February 1981, two and a half months before the trial was due to open, Mrs Doreen Hill, the mother of Jacqueline Hill, Sutcliffe’s thirteenth and final victim, had launched a campaign to outlaw chequebook journalism with a press conference at the offices of her solicitor in Middlesbrough. Mrs Hill had been moved to act by a report in the magazine Private Eye at the end of January, alleging that the Daily Mail appeared ‘to be leading in the squalid race to tie up the Sutcliffe family’. A specific sum of £250,000 had been mentioned in connection with Sutcliffe’s wife.
Hard on the heels of the press conference, Mrs Hill and her husband had written to persons of influence in industry, the trade unions and Parliament, as well as in other areas of public life, and the campaign had quickly gained momentum: a number of petitions were delivered to the headquarters of the Press Council in London deploring the payment of ‘blood money’ to the family and friends of Peter Sutcliffe and, indeed, of anybody accused of any crime.
And on Wednesday, 6 May 1981, the second day of the trial, a Commons motion was tabled by Conservative backbenchers calling for legislation which would make chequebook journalism illegal.
It was another development the same day, though, which grabbed the headlines and had immediate repercussions inside Number One Court at the Old Bailey.
Among those canvassed for support by the Hills had been the Queen. And most newspapers on 6 May, and again the following morning, carried on their front pages the text of a letter, dated 26 February 1981, from the Queen’s deputy private secretary, Mr William Heseltine, to Mr and Mrs Hill expressing the Queen’s ‘sense of distaste’, if, as reported, substantial sums were being paid to members of the Sutcliffe family for their story.
At 4.36 p.m., when Trevor Birdsall, the second witness for the prosecution, took the stand, he was immediately asked by the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, QC, to state whether he had entered into any agreement with a newspaper ‘about your knowledge in the matters concerned with Peter Sutcliffe’; and Birdsall, trembling perceptibly, the artificial sheen of his toupee unhappily reflecting the overhead lights, admitted that he had. He said that the Sunday People had helped pay his bills, had given him £500 and had been paying him £65 a week since the beginning of January. He also said that the People were picking up his hotel bill during his stay in London, and that the woman with whom he lived had an exclusive rights contract with the paper worth £2,000.
The next day, Ronnie and David Barker, and then Olivia Reivers, were all required to declare how much they had received for their stories before giving evidence. Ronnie Barker, well scrubbed behind a walrus moustache and, unlike Birdsall, who had had to be provided with a chair in order to complete his evidence, clearly basking in the attention, said he had received £700 from the Sun for photographs of Sutcliffe’s wedding, and added that he was expecting a further £400 from the Sunday People for pictures they had taken of him at the scene of Jayne MacDonald’s murder in Chapeltown. His brother, who had been brought to the Old Bailey from the prison where he was serving an eighteen-month sentence for grievous bodily harm, said he had received £20 from ITN and £10 from the BBC. Olivia Reivers said she had already received £1,000 of the £4,000 she was expecting under the terms of her contract with the Daily Star.
Sir Michael had made clear his motives for asking these questions by gravely explaining to the jury, none of whom could have been expected to have brushed with this sort of thing, that ‘if money has been paid and more is available, it is one of the considerations which might tempt a witness to gild the lily, to make his story worth more money … The jury must always be satisfied there was not some ulterior motive such as money which might be persuading someone to tell a story which is much worse or much better because of the cheque at the end of it.’
The Attorney-General, Conservative MP for Merton, Wimbledon, was the son of a High Court judge and the father of the actor Nigel Havers, currently enjoying a West End success in the film Chariots of Fire. And in his courtroom demeanour, both elements of the lineage were apparent: although he was quietly authoritative – so quiet, in fact, that halfway through the second week a man in the public gallery would stand up and shout, ‘Excuse me, my Lord, I can’t hear,’ only to be unceremoniously ushered outside for his trouble – Sir Michael gave the distinct impression that, shorn of his robes, he would exhibit the discreet Jermyn Street dandyism characteristic of the upper reaches of the acting profession.
What was faintly astonishing to those who had been in court exactly a week earlier, however, was that Sir Michael should be leading for the Crown against Sutcliffe at all. Shortly before midday on Wednesday, 29 April, Sutcliffe had been brought up into a silent, almost fearful court and, when asked thirteen times how did he plead, had replied thirteen times, occasionally stumbling over the words, ‘Not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.’ Then – that is, just seven days earlier – Sir Michael, as most of those in court had been led to expect him to, had indicated that he was prepared to accept the lesser pleas of manslaughter on the grounds of the defendant’s paranoid schizophrenia.
He had then proceeded to put his case before the judge, Mr Justice Boreham, who had listened politely for two hours, scratching at a ledger with a fountain pen as the Attorney-General gave a resume of the medical evidence which all pointed, he said, one way: ‘that this is a case of diminished responsibility’. The judge had then laid his pen aside and, with the infinite courtesy that would be extended to everybody in Number One Court over the coming weeks, had advised Sir Michael of his ‘grave anxiety’ about the pleas and his belief that ‘it would be more appropriate if this case were dealt with by a jury’.
A ninety-minute adjournment allowed the implications of the decision to sink in. From the conversation drifting out of the many urgently conferring groups in the marble hall outside the Old Bailey’s infamous ‘show’ court, it became clear that, because the facts were not in dispute – Sutcliffe had after all just admitted the manslaughter of thirteen women and the attempted murder of seven others – what a jury was going to be asked to reach a verdict on was his state of mind. Was he ‘suffering from such abnormality of mind as substantially impaired his mental responsibility in doing the killings’, in the words of the 1957 Homicide Act? Or was he a calculated and premeditated killer?
Before lunch, the Attorney-General had seemed in little doubt that the answer to the latter question was ‘no’. When the court reconvened after lunch, however, Sir Michael informed Mr Justice Boreham that the Crown would be prepared to proceed before a jury within forty-eight hours on the thirteen original charges of murder. And, at 11.00 a.m., on Tuesday, 5 May 1981, just six days after arguing the case of the forensic psychiatrists who had examined Sutcliffe and independently but unanimously diagnosed schizophrenia, Sir Michael rose and informed the six men and six women who had just been sworn in as a jury that it was their
job to decide whether these same psychiatrists ‘might in fact have been deceived, whether (Sutcliffe) sought to pull the wool over their eyes, or whether the doctors are just plain wrong’.
It would be emphasised a number of times in the course of the next three weeks, both by Sir Michael and by the judge, that it was not the psychiatrists who were on trial. Few of those in court, however – least of all the doctors themselves, who had never expected to have their diagnoses submitted to cross-examination – were inclined to believe it.
*
Monday, 4 May 1981 was a Bank Holiday in England, and several dozen people chose to spend it on the pavement outside the Old Bailey queueing for a ringside seat at the opening of what was being bruited as ‘the trial of the century’. A retired butcher and his wife from Harrogate, whose boast was that they had attended all Sutcliffe’s appearances in court; a mother and her teenage son from Essex, who told newsmen they were ‘going to come every day if we can get in’, and a twenty-eight-year-old chef from Shepherd’s Bush were among those who camped overnight with stoves and sleeping bags in order to have first claim on the thirty-four seats in the public gallery – a narrow, cramped space wedged in under the ceiling.
They made up what The Times the following morning called ‘a motley rabble … that could have come straight from a Newgate public hanging with only a quick change of costume’. This was in marked contrast to the sweeter-smelling occupants of the VIP benches, directly below them. ‘A succession of well-groomed middle-aged women with Harrods carrier bags and winter suntans sat there with their daughters or their best friends from 10.30 in the morning until the curtain fell at 4 [every] afternoon,’ the Guardian reported.
‘There were free seats for the manager of the hotel where the Yorkshire police were staying, for MPs, councillors, sundry lawyers with their children, the Arsenal goalkeeper, Pat Jennings, and for three men who were commended in another court for tackling a bank robber.’
On the opposite side of what was a vaulted and light but surprisingly small room was the box where the jury sat and, running between, deep in the well of the court, was a long oak table on which Sutcliffe’s ‘killing tackle’ was exhibited: seven ballpein hammers, a claw-hammer, a hacksaw, a long, thin-pointed kitchen knife, several carving knives, eight assorted screwdrivers, a wooden-handled cobbler’s knife and a short rope, all affixed with neat yellow labels, were watched over by a group of impeccably (in a few cases, elaborately) coiffed detectives from West Yorkshire.
(There would be gasps when, in the course of his long opening address, Sir Michael Havers selected a rusty screwdriver painstakingly sharpened to a point – ‘one of the most fiendish weapons you have ever seen’, he called it – and passed it into the reluctant hands of the jury.)
The dock and the bench faced each other across the width of the table at a distance of some thirty feet and elevated at unequal heights above it. The judge sat in a towering oak-and-leather chair, the sword of justice in its jewelled scabbard on an oak panel above him, effulgent in scarlet and silk moiré and white linen. The prisoner, wearing the same outfit every day of the trial – pale blue open-necked shirt, dove-grey suit, bright tan high-sided boots of the kind worn by all the farmlads around Bingley – sat on the same wooden seat sat on by Crippen seventy years before, and in the judge’s direct line of vision.
The minute he stepped into the dock, the effects of imprisonment were already clear on him. His face, familiar already from the papers, had lost the angularity of the early pictures and was turning fuller and more flaccid; he still had the look of the gypsy about him, but being shut up had robbed his skin of its natural greasiness and pigment: it looked stale and unhealthy, like the sole of a recently unbandaged foot.
The extra weight was also noticeable about his body. Each time he stood up to leave the dock the waistband of his trousers would be twisted and buckled, a result of his newly acquired paunch. He was apparently less conscious of this, though, than of his hair which, presumably in an attempt to disguise its decreasing volume, he had started to brush forward in coarse ripples from the crown.
In his first hours in the dock, however, there was a curious reluctance, even among the eighty or so representatives of the world’s press crowded into the court, to scrutinise Sutcliffe at any length. When the clerk of the court rose and called for silence on the first morning and, a few seconds later, Sutcliffe and his five attendant prison officers were heard mounting the stairs from the cells, only the members of the public gallery showed any inclination to gawp. (As word had got around that Sonia was in court, the people in the front row of the gods had started hanging over the balcony in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the small figure in the Alice-band and what the press would call ‘granny shoes’, sitting quietly with her mother.)
Plucked virtually without warning from their normal lives – and the sense of disorientation was clear on many faces – the members of the jury at first stole only shy glances at the man whom even the Attorney-General referred to as ‘the Ripper’, as if afraid of engaging his attention. They need not have worried. In the fourteen working days that the trial was to last, Sutcliffe’s eyes rarely strayed from a spot several feet above the head of Mr Justice Boreham. Even when pictures of the mutilated bodies of his victims were circulated in court, the defendant maintained the unwavering, dissociative gaze adopted by celebrities in public places and passengers on the London Underground.
The jury were required to examine the blue-bound albums of photographs which Sir Michael Havers assured them they would ‘become immune to quite quickly’, in the course of his four and a half hour opening peroration.
‘The reason for this trial is simple,’ Sir Michael had stated within minutes of rising to his feet. ‘There is a marked significant difference between the version [of events] which Sutcliffe gave to the police and the version he gave to the doctors. You have to consider whether, as a clever, callous murderer, he deliberately set out to create a cock-and-bull story to avoid conviction for murder.’
The doctors who had examined him, Sir Michael said, were all agreed that Sutcliffe was suffering from the imbalance of the mind known as paranoid schizophrenia. What Sutcliffe had told them, in effect, was that he had had ‘messages from God’ to kill prostitutes and that what he did was part of ‘a divine mission’, and the doctors believed him.
‘But,’ Sir Michael added, ‘none of that detail was told to the police at all.’ Sutcliffe told the police he had had urges – hallucinations – but of a different kind to the ones he described to the doctors and he didn’t even tell the police that straight away. After his arrest, he had made a statement to the police which it had taken the best part of two days to take down. ‘But that confession is curious, you may think. It is by no means wholly frank. There were twenty murders and attempted murders. He only spoke in his confession of fourteen.’ Sutcliffe, when first arrested, did not in any sense say to the police: ‘I have a divine right to do this. I am responding to God’s orders.’
‘What he did say, he told a whole series of lies as to how he had been caught and why he was in the car with a prostitute and why he had weapons in the car and why he had a rope in his pocket and gave a cock-and-bull story about how he came to be there.’
It may be, Sir Michael told the jury, that the discrepancies between what Sutcliffe told the psychiatrists and what he told the police were going to ‘cause the greatest anxieties in this case and that they will be the most relevant facts to the issue of whether the medical evidence should be accepted by you or not’.
He emphasised that, while the Crown intended to demonstrate that Sutcliffe had ‘duped’ the doctors and was a ‘sadistic killer’, the burden of proving that he was suffering from diminished responsibility lay with the defence. Unless the defence could satisfy them that Sutcliffe genuinely believed that he had heard the voice of God while working at Bingley cemetery, they must find him guilty of murder on all thirteen counts.
The Attorney-General’s opening speech contin
ued late into the afternoon of the second day, when the first prosecution witness was called. Sutcliffe had told the doctors that in his late teens he had been involved in a motorcycle accident in which he suffered a severe blow to the head, implying that this might in some way account for his later actions; and Donald Sumner confirmed that he had been riding pillion behind Sutcliffe on the night the accident happened. ‘We had a puncture while we were going along and came off the bike. Peter went into a lamp-post and I went sliding down the road … Peter hit his head and was bleeding. There was damage to his crash-helmet. He looked a right clown.’ Sutcliffe had since claimed he was ‘knocked unconscious for hours’ and afterwards became prone to ‘hallucination and bouts of morbid depression – my mind was in a haze and I didn’t know what was right or wrong. I didn’t know whether I was acting rationally or not.’ But, Sir Michael had suggested to the jury, ‘you may think he was embroidering this story.’ (No member of his family has any recollection of the episode or can ever remember Peter injuring his head.)
Sir Michael then went on to question Trevor Birdsall and the Barkers about their late-night tours of the red-light districts in Peter Sutcliffe’s car. Birdsall described the ‘rock in the sock’ incident in 1969 in Bradford, and the night when Olive Smelt was attacked in Halifax in 1975, but said that his friend had never indicated a hatred of prostitutes to him.
Consulting a pocket diary for 1977, Ronnie Barker told the court about the visit to York with Peter in May of that year and the detour on the way home to take in Chapeltown. He also looked up the entry for Saturday, 25 June 1977, the night the young supermarket worker Jayne MacDonald was murdered in Chapeltown, and said he had gone on a pub-crawl with his brother and Peter around Bradford.
