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

by Gordon Burn

  *

  Carl had to threaten to ‘expose’ them to the other papers before he got his money out of the Daily Star. But he finally received a cheque for £21,500 a year after the end of the trial, in 1982, and immediately invested it in a house in Gilstead that had belonged to Harvey Smith’s uncle, and in a black MGB roadster that he saw as a ‘collector’s item’.

  He shared the house with a succession of punks and other drifters and immediately set out to alienate the neighbours, who he knew resented him moving in. ‘They’re all frightened of me, so I play it up,’ Carl said one morning over the chatter of Derek and Clive on the video and the crackle of a CB receiver dangling from a wire in the middle of the room. ‘When I walk up there, they all shoot inside. So one night I went out and started digging big holes in front garden. Another night I went and just sat there with me arms folded for an hour. When you come home at night you see curtains move, an’ they all look. She spies on me over there. Silly old cow. I can’t stand nosey people.’

  Behind the bravado, though, and the showy good looks, Carl was still essentially withdrawn. He was embarrassed by the attentions of strangers and of ‘females’ eager to ‘go with’ him because of who he was and, for this reason, confined himself mainly to Bingley and a small, well-defined circle of pubs while constantly threatening to take off for South Africa to assume a new identity and start a new life.

  Mick received a ‘pay-off’ of £5,000 from the Daily Star and disposed of it in a little over three months. He finally married Susan, the mother of his five-year-old daughter, in 1982, only to split up with her the following year a few months after being arrested for breaking into the house of the people next door while they were on holiday.

  This, together with his drinking, led the rest of the family to virtually write him off. When she said she thought it would be ‘a bloody miracle’ if he made forty (he was thirty in 1982), Jane spoke for them all. ‘Every time you see him he’s staggering around, even at dinner-times now.’ She felt the turning-point was his months with the Star.

  *

  Jane’s reaction to Peter’s arrest and conviction was perhaps the most conventional of all her family: she had nightmares for months, but in particular a recurring nightmare, which came every time she closed her eyes and had her believing for a long time that she was possibly going mad: ‘I go to the prison and get permission to take Peter out. He’s handcuffed to me and I take him to a cafe, then I bring him home. I cufflink him to the metal arm of the settee when I go to bed and take him shopping when I get up. When we get to the corner, though, the cufflinks suddenly drop, he says, “I’ve got to do it again,” and disappears.’ Her own screams, ripping through Priestthorpe Road, Carl’s old address, where she had herself taken a bedsit, invariably woke her up.

  By the middle of 1982, Jane had recovered sufficiently to take a ‘front-of-house’ job in a local hotel. When the manageress realised that ‘Ellis’ was only her married name, however, she was abruptly dismissed.

  Soon afterwards she was persuaded to pose for some ‘beauty’ shots for a Sunday paper. One of the better prints hangs in a frame on her father’s living-room wall, adjacent to the personally autographed picture of a Page Three girl that Jane acquired for him at the same studio session. The pictures of Jane which the paper chose to run as a centre spread, though, were not the most flattering that they took. She looked ‘like Myra Hindley’ in them, according to Mick.

  *

  Sonia had briefly reappeared in court to hear Mr Chadwin for the defence make his final appeal to the jury and Mr Justice Boreham begin his summing-up. Perched anxiously on the end of the third row of oak benches closest to the dock, she was in the perfect position to catch her husband’s eye in the split second that it became level with hers during his hurried descent to the cells. And at lunchtime, and again at the end of the session, they exchanged shy smiles and shy, minimal waves of the hand which were the only acknowledgement either would make of the existence of anybody else in court. Nobody who witnessed these pathetic demonstrations of affection could question the truth of the ‘I still love him’ and ‘I stand by him’ headlines which followed the verdict.

  Sonia pledged herself to visit Peter for the rest of his life, no matter where in the country he was, and reconciled herself to a future in which she would be an object of curiosity at best and, at worst, an object of fear and derision.

  Quite soon after the trial she moved back into what she had always thought of as her ‘dream house’ on a street now bristling with ‘For Sale’ signs, and defiantly repainted the exterior woodwork a glossy black-and-white and replaced the boards covering the shattered front windows with neat lace curtains. Shunned by her neighbours, she was much sought after by the sightseers who had singlehandedly transformed Garden Lane from a quiet backwater into a busy thoroughfare.

  Trade at the Quarry Arms, the pub in Clayton where the Sutcliffes had held their wedding reception, was also boosted by people wanting to be photographed against the flock-wallpaper and the carriage lamps which had formed a backdrop to the much-reproduced pictures from the ‘Ripper’s’ wedding album.

  The widely anticipated onslaught on Bingley cemetery, however, never happened. Most holiday-makers negotiating the Bingley stretch of the Leeds–Liverpool canal do so without realising that the small, sun-dappled graveyard across the other side of the valley from Five-Rise Locks is the site of the white crucifix-shaped headstone marking what the men now working in the cemetery know as ‘the talking grave’.

  *

  The 1982 season was no better for L. J. Tussaud and G. Nicholson Ltd, of Morecambe, than any other season in recent memory. The bodies still weren’t coming in to see the bodies, as Mr Nicholson would have it, and this despite the addition of a new model which he might have expected to really draw the crowds. The trouble, as with another of his notorious exhibits, was that its delicate nature precluded brash advertisement.

  Unlike Mick, who had discussed it with nobody, Maureen was unaware of the fascination that ‘Madame Tussaud’s’ held for Peter. She was also unaware that a waxwork of Peter had recently gone on display. Coming across it unprepared a little over a year after he had been sent to prison, she stood transfixed for a few seconds, simultaneously fascinated and repulsed, and then ran for her life.

  ‘I was with a friend and she said, “Let’s go in here. They’ve got a Billy Connolly.” She’s from Glasgow. So we went in, saw Billy Connolly, an’ there were this little turnstile … She said, are you all right? Oh it were awful. I just walked round corner an’ it were first room upstairs. I’d only ever been in once before, an’ it were years and years and years ago. I’d no idea they’d got him. And then we just walked round this semi-circle, turned right, an’ there he were. I felt me heart go. I thought I were goin’ to die … I felt right sorry for ’im, though, that were thing.’

  Wearing a black velvet jacket and tan stacked-heel boots, ‘The Ripper’ stands at the entrance to the Chamber of Horrors in a chickenwire-fronted box with front pages from the ‘gutter’ press pasted to the walls. Only two dozen paces and two large antique cabinets separate the effigy of Peter from the images of feculence and moral lassitude that he was so drawn to.

  When Carl made a visit, though, quite independently of his sister, it wasn’t this strange irony which exercised him, or even the fact that he had stood on the exact spot with Peter where Peter was now immortalised in wax. What genuinely fired him was that, with its tight little shoulders and thin little arms and iron-filing hair and beard, the ‘dummy’ seemed such a travesty of the original.

  Carl asked to see the manager, and Mr Nicholson came sauntering cheerfully along, but he took some convincing that the young man running down a piece of work he had only recently spent £1,200 on was who he said he was and not just some joker. He took in the denim jacket with its family of Robertson’s ‘Gollies’ on the pocket and Ban-the-Bomb badge, the jeans and ‘trainers’ and dark, darting eyes, and looked for some sign that might tell him th
is was the brother of the Ripper. He saw instead a lanky youth who, once beyond the doors, would melt invisibly into the holiday crowds shuffling along the prom.

  PART FOUR

  Afterword

  A small boy, Asian, aged about seven, wearing a flat-top hair-cut and bright, baggy clothes in the style known as Manc (after Manchester, their city of origin) or Acid House, is playing on his own in Garden Lane.

  He cycles along the crown of the road, from his own gate to the electricity sub-station abutting No. 6 and back, home and back, over and over. But, either because he has been forbidden to do so by his parents or because he is merely following some childhood superstition, like not stepping on cracks in the pavement, he is careful never to cross the invisible line which would mean entering the space occupied by the Ripper’s house.

  Even on the warmest day, such as today, No. 6 Garden Lane seems to stand in deep shadows of its own making. It projects a cold-field several yards into the road which children are not alone in being reluctant to enter.

  *

  It’s a Saturday. The second Saturday of the 1990 Wimbledon fortnight, drenched in the familiar sights and sounds of an English summer – a traditional English summer, that is, as opposed to the summers-in-spring and summers-in-winter, the freak Februarys and Novembers, of recent years.

  Garden Lane appears almost exaggeratedly still and suburban. The slab hedges, baize lawns and caravans and motor homes waxed and cleaned out ready for the season add up to what may seem an over-emphatic expression of contained and orderly lives, of normalcy and unremarkableness untainted by the grim events associated with the narrow house which still stands sentry at the eastern end of the street.

  The curtains of a number of houses are drawn against the sun; windows are open, and the sounds of Martina Navratilova pounding her way to a record ninth Ladies’ Singles title – grunt-and-pock, grunt-and-pock, punctuated by explosions of applause – reverberate in the nearly empty street.

  (When did she win her first Wimbledon title? 1974? 1975? What stage of her life had Jean Jordan or Yvonne Pearson or Helen Rytka or Jayne MacDonald or Josephine Whitaker or Barbara Leach or Jacqueline Hill reached then? It is the kind of calculation the friends and families of the women murdered by Peter Sutcliffe must find themselves making dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times a year, every time something happens to trigger the recollection that there was another life, once, when such considerations were irrelevant.)

  At the end of Garden Lane furthest away from the Sutcliffe house, two teenagers in formal suits and chafing shirt-collars tape ribbon to the bonnet of a car in preparation for a wedding.

  As they step back to admire their handiwork, a bowler on the elevated playing-field directly opposite makes his short approach and releases the ball. The thunk of wood on leather is followed by a smattering of applause from the spectators sitting in deck-chairs in front of the small, weatherboarded pavilion.

  A timeless Saturday, in other words. A Saturday out of time – tangible evidence of an order that has been violated and yet persists, somehow larger and more enduring than the depraved acts of a single individual. That’s the message.

  It’s a message that has been put across with commendable energy by Bradford city council in the years since Sutcliffe’s arrest, and with positive results. Six million people now apparently visit Bradford every year, to see the National Museum of Photography and Europe’s largest collection of David Hockney paintings, or to join the industrial heritage or ‘culture and curry’ trails, or the TV tours to Emmerdale Farm country.

  Although it wasn’t the sole intention, the promotion of Bradford as a ‘Great British City’ has done some of the work of enhancing the negative image of red-light areas, drug-dealing and bottom-of-the-barrel squalor with a more up-beat one of inner-city regeneration, tourism and enterprise.

  The fact remains, however, that for many – perhaps most – people, Bradford remains the city of the Ripper.

  His father, now retired, his sisters, both remarried, and his brothers (Mick intermittently in trouble with the law; Carl training as a photocopier repair-man) still live within a few streets of each other in Bingley, rarely venturing out into the wider world.

  More problematically, as far as any municipal public relations exercise is concerned, Sonia Sutcliffe continues to live in the house she shared with her husband in the years when he was bringing terror to the whole of the North of England.

  Ten years after his arrest, No. 6 Garden Lane, and no less the woman in it, remains a target of abuse, an object of curiosity and a source of boundless speculation.

  Taxi drivers have been known to make voluntary detours between the city centre and the airport in order to offer their passengers the frisson of ‘the Ripper’s house’. There is a steady stream of tourist coaches throughout the summer, in addition to the year-round traffic of family groups posing for pictures on the steeply raked drive, mugging against a backdrop of scratchy plants and dim-leaved, curtaining trees.

  And yet Sonia stays on. More than stays on – has fought defiantly in the courts over the years for the right to go on living in what she evidently still regards as her ‘dream house’.

  ‘Plainly that is not the ideal place for her to live, and a move to a fresh address, on her own evidence … would be likely to remove some of the continuing strain in which she is obviously living and might well assist in lifting the depression from which she is still suffering through the events which came to light in 1981,’ Judge Gilbert Hartley announced at Bradford County Court in 1986.

  The judge had just ordered that the house in Garden Lane be sold in order that Peter Sutcliffe’s half-share of the proceeds be paid as compensation to Maureen Long, Marilyn Moore and Mrs Irene MacDonald, Jayne MacDonald’s mother, who had been awarded a total of £25,722 in damages against him four years earlier.

  No. 6 Garden Lane was put on the market in January 1987, at an asking price of £45,000. Eight months later it was announced that Sonia had bought the remaining half-share after borrowing £25,000 from ‘a friend’.

  ‘It’s my home, and I have worked to make it beautiful,’ she once had told this same friend – actually a woman journalist with a Sunday paper – who would also be her companion on a much-publicised holiday in Greece. ‘Nothing bad has ever happened to me here. No grisly murders were committed here and no bodies buried. It is not a house of horrors but a very nice home.’

  This, of course, was to ignore the evidence: the knife which had been used to murder Helen Rytka and then returned to the kitchen drawer where her husband had found it; the blood-spattered clothes he washed in the kitchen sink; the screwdriver he worked to a vicious point on the garage floor and introduced into the vagina of Josephine Whitaker – ‘one of the most fiendish weapons you have ever seen’ in the words of Sir Michael Havers; and the trousers Sutcliffe was wearing when he attempted to decapitate Jean Jordan on the night of the house-warming party at Garden Lane, which he later burned in the garden.

  ‘I think the person harbouring the Ripper is as bad as he is,’ the stepfather of Josephine Whitaker told Newsnight in 1980. ‘I can’t understand the mentality of anybody who can co-habit with such a loathsome creature.’

  The mentality of Sonia Sutcliffe is only slightly less of a mystery now than it was on the day almost a decade ago when her husband was revealed as the Yorkshire Ripper. She has vehemently denied any awareness of Peter Sutcliffe’s activities, but otherwise has kept her own counsel, only emerging from her self-imposed seclusion when necessary to defend her position in the courts.

  She tried to get an injunction to stop this book being published in 1984, having already fought Sutcliffe’s case at bankruptcy proceedings, following books borrowed from a lawyer.

  She was awarded an undisclosed sum in damages by a Yorkshire newspaper in 1983 and caused a public outcry in 1989 when she was paid a record £600,000 in damages against the satirical magazine Private Eye. The magazine alleged that she had signed a £250,000 deal with the Daily Ma
il for her story.

  The case eventually went to appeal and Sonia, unemployable on her own admission – ‘No one seems to want to employ anyone who is the wife of someone as notorious as my husband’ – settled for £160,000 plus costs for that and other claims she had against Private Eye.

  In 1984, apparently still hearing voices and said to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, Peter Sutcliffe was transferred from a conventional prison to Broadmoor, the secure hospital for the criminally insane in Berkshire, where his wife still makes regular visits to see him.

  In January 1987, a senior detective from outside West Yorkshire was appointed to investigate allegations that the hoax tapes in the Ripper case were made by a policeman.

  By April, Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Fitzgerald was able to report that he was satisfied that there was no substance to the allegations.

  In September 1988, the Law Lords threw out Mrs Doreen Hill’s application to sue West Yorkshire Police for negligence in not catching Peter Sutcliffe earlier.

  *

  On Saturday, 7 July 1990, the day Martina Navratilova won her record ninth championship at Wimbledon, the front page of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus carried the following story:

  A teenage girl who was savagely battered in the red-light district of Bradford was today fighting for her life in hospital. Doctors say that the 17-year-old girl is drifting in and out of consciousness 48 hours after the attack.

  Julie Baxter, who is from the Meanwood area of Leeds, lay undiscovered for more than seven hours in the alley behind Hallfield Road and Peel Square, Bradford. She was suffering from exposure, serious head injuries and broken cheek-bones.