Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  He worked in a number of jobs over the next few years, but seemed to settle down at the age of twenty when he met Sonia Szurma, a girl of Czech parentage. In 1974, they married and all seemed well apart from the fact that Sonia began to suffer a series of miscarriages. After a while they were devastated by the news that she would never be able to have children.

  Peter Sutcliffe was never what he seemed on the surface to be. He claimed to be devoted to his wife but he frequented prostitutes, often in the company of his brother-in-law, Trevor Birdsall. The two of them would spend evenings drinking and cruising the red-light districts of Yorkshire in Sutcliffe’s beloved white Ford Corsair. By now he was a lorry driver and earning good money.

  He attacked twice before he actually killed. The first was in Keighley. A woman who had fallen out with her boyfriend was angrily banging on the door of his house. Suddenly, Sutcliffe leapt from the shadows and dealt her a crushing blow to the head with a hammer. She crumpled to the ground where he struck her with the hammer twice more before lifting her skirt. When a neighbour emerged from his house to ask what all the noise was, Sutcliffe calmly told him everything was fine and to go back indoors. As the man closed his door, Sutcliffe fled the scene. The police were baffled by the randomness of the attack and by the lack of motive – no money had been taken and she had not been sexually assaulted.

  The second of what could be seen as warm-up exercises came a month later, on Friday 15 August. As usual, he was out drinking in the pubs and clubs of Halifax. Forty-six-year-old Olive Smelt, who had been doing the same with her friends while her husband had stayed home to look after the kids, had been dropped off close to her house. Sutcliffe, seated with Birdsall in the Corsair, spotted her walking along the road. He told his companion he would only be a minute, got out and disappeared into the darkness. As Olive negotiated a dark alley, she heard a voice behind her say, ‘Weather’s letting us down, isn’t it?’ and then all went dark as she was hit on the back of the head by Sutcliffe’s hammer. Hitting her again on the ground, he took out a knife and slashed her lower back. Luckily for Olive, he heard the engine of an approaching car, leapt to his feet and took off back to the Corsair. He climbed in as if nothing had happened.

  Both attacks left police puzzled, but it would be another three years before they would identify them as having been carried out by the same man.

  In the early hours of 30 October, twenty-eight-year-old mother of four, Wilma McCann was very drunk. She had been enjoying herself in Leeds but was struggling to get home. She was seen by a number of people, including a lorry driver who stopped to give her a lift but thought better of it when he saw the state she was in. At 1.30 a.m. someone saw her being picked up. It was the last time she was seen alive. Next morning a milkman found her lying on her back in a recreation ground only a hundred yards from her house. She had been hit twice on the back of the head with something heavy before her assailant had launched a frenzied knife attack on her, stabbing her fifteen times in the neck, chest and abdomen. She had not been raped, but there was semen on her trousers and underwear. As her purse was missing, the officers investigating put it down to a mugging gone wrong. One hundred and fifty officers were thrown at the case but despite thousands of interviews with local people, it remained firmly unsolved.

  The first prostitute Sutcliffe killed was Emily Jackson who lived in Leeds and went on the game periodically when money was hard to come by. She had been having a drink with her husband in the Gaiety pub on 20 January 1976, before leaving him to see if she could drum up a bit of business. He remained there until closing time but when she did not return, he thought she would follow later. Instead, her body was discovered the next morning, a stone’s throw from the Gaiety, her legs spread apart and her breasts exposed. Two shattering blows to the head with a hammer had forced her to the ground where she was subjected to an even more frenzied and horrific knife attack than Wilma McCann, having been stabbed fifty-one times. This time, however, he was using a new implement from his toolbox, a Phillips screwdriver that he had sharpened specially for the task.

  Police knew now that they were dealing with a serial killer. But, at least they finally had a clue. The killer had stamped on her thigh, leaving the imprint of a size seven Dunlop Warwick Wellington boot.

  Around this time, Sutcliffe had a lot of time on his hands, having been sacked from his job as a delivery driver. If his days were empty, however, his nights remained busy. On 9 May, he offered twenty-year-old prostitute, Marcella Claxton, £5 to have sex with him. He drove her to a large, secluded open space where she told him that she had to urinate first. As she crouched down she did not hear him come up behind her and deal her two crashing blows to the head with the hammer. She slumped to the ground and as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she saw him masturbating over her. Inexplicably, however, he did not kill her. When he had finished, he bent down and placed a £5 note in her hand, warning her not to go to the police. He jumped in the Corsair and sped off.

  Claxton crawled to a nearby phone box, blood pouring from her wounds, and dialed 999. She then slumped to the floor of the kiosk to await the ambulance. Just as well she did, because she spotted Sutcliffe drive past a couple of times looking for her, no doubt to finish what he had started.

  Police now had a good description of the man the media were calling the Yorkshire Ripper, comparing him to the killer who had stalked the streets of Whitechapel in London almost a hundred years previously. The same panic that had broken out then, now hit the streets of the red-light districts of Leeds and many of the working girls left town. It was just too dangerous.

  Sutcliffe finally got a job in October 1976, driving a lorry, and all went quiet. On 5 February 1977, however, Irene Richardson was killed in the customary manner. The knife attack was so savage that her intestines spilled out. When officers found tyre tracks they believed they had a major breakthrough in the case, but their mood changed when they learned that these could belong to any one of 100,000 vehicles. They were no closer.

  The size seven Wellington boot made a reappearance on 23 April. It was found on a bed sheet in a flat belonging to a prostitute named Patricia Atkinson. He had stabbed her with a chisel after striking her with the hammer.

  Meanwhile, the Sutcliffes were doing well. His job was paying well and Sonia, who had been training to be a teacher, was likely to start work in a school at the beginning of the autumn term. They became homeowners, spending £15,000 on a property in Bradford. After they had first looked at the house, Sutcliffe dropped Sonia off, telling her he was going for a drink. Instead he drove to Chapeltown, Leeds’s red-light district.

  His next victim was not a prostitute and this fact seemed to make the case more relevant to people. Prostitutes, they reasoned, take a risk every time they climb into a car driven by a stranger. Jayne MacDonald, on the other hand was a sixteen-year-old girl who was merely walking home. Sutcliffe had dragged her into a playground on 26 June after being felled by three savage blows to the head. He stabbed her repeatedly and left her with her breasts exposed.

  There was revulsion and the officers involved in the investigation had to deal with a flood of information. Meanwhile, a huge number of interviews and house-to-house calls were being carried out. There was optimism when a white Corsair kept coming up as having been seen in the area but at the time taxi drivers in the north of England drove Corsairs. There were thousands of them. By the time they started checking, however, Sutcliffe had replaced the white Corsair with a red one.

  On 1 October, Jean Jordan climbed into Sutcliffe’s car in Manchester’s Moss Side area, a down-at-heel suburb of the city. Again he paid her £5 and they drove off to find a quiet spot. Once there, the hammer was produced and he hit her with it no fewer than thirteen times, in a raging frenzy. He left her broken body and drove home. But the £5 note she had slipped in her handbag nagged at him. It had been brand new and could probably be easily traced back to him. Eight days after he had killed her, he returned to her body, which he had conceale
d well enough for it not yet to have been discovered. Her handbag was nowhere to be found, however, and he became enraged, stabbing her corpse repeatedly and attempting to decapitate her. She was found the following day and her handbag and the £5 note were found five days later, a short distance away. The note was traced to a batch that had been distributed to companies in the Bradford and Shipley area. It could have gone to anyone of 8,000 men, every one of whom – including Sutcliffe – was interviewed.

  After attacking and failing to kill a prostitute in mid-December, he murdered Yvonne Pearson on 21 January 1978. She would not be found for two months. He killed another prostitute, Helen Rytka on 31 January, having sex with her as she lay on the ground. On 16 May, he killed Vera Millward who had gone out to the local shops. She was found in the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary, her skull crushed by three hammer blows, her body viciously slashed and stabbed. He had even stabbed her in the eye. Noises had been heard, but it was that kind of area. Once again, tyre tracks were found that matched those found previously.

  There were eleven months when nothing happened, although during that time Sutcliffe’s beloved mother died. In April 1979, however, he murdered Josephine Whitaker while she walked home from visiting her grandparents. He felled her with the hammer before stabbing her twenty-five times in the breasts, stomach, thighs and even her vagina.

  His next victim was a young student who had been drinking in the same Bradford pub as the Ripper earlier on the evening of 1 September 1979. Barbara Leach was killed by one blow of the hammer – he was getting good with it – and then repeatedly stabbed. She was found covered up by an old piece of carpet.

  The police campaign to find the Ripper intensified with £1 million being spent on posters and newspaper adverts. But they were being distracted by a belief that their perpetrator was from the Newcastle area, following a cassette tape they had received that was purportedly from the Ripper. The hoaxer, John Humble, would be jailed in 2006 for eight years for perverting the course of justice.

  Sutcliffe, like many other men, had been interviewed by the police a number of times in connection with the enquiry. Ironically, his workmates started calling him ‘the Ripper’ but Sonia provided him with alibis for every night on which the Ripper had killed.

  His next victim was not attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper until after he was in custody. When he had struck forty-seven-year-old civil servant Marguerite Walls, she had not fallen to the ground but had begun to scream loudly. He had to strangle her and this led police to believe that she had not been killed by the Yorkshire Ripper.

  He failed to kill his next two victims, attacked on 24 September and 5 November, but on 17 November, with a single blow to the head, he murdered Jacqueline Hill, a student at Leeds University.

  He was finally caught on Saturday 3 January as he talked to prostitute Olivia Reivers in his car that was parked on the driveway of the British Iron and Steel Producers Association. Two policemen in a passing patrol car decided to investigate the brown Rover and when they found that it had been fitted with false number plates, Sutcliffe was arrested.

  At Dewsbury police station, they noticed that he resembled very closely many of the descriptions of the Yorkshire Ripper and began questioning him about it. The next day when they returned to where he had been arrested, they found the tools of his murderous trade – the hammer, knife and rope. He had managed to dispose of them somehow during the arrest. Another knife was found hidden behind a toilet cistern at the police station where he had placed it the previous day.

  When he was stripped they also found the uniform of his trade. Under his trousers he wore a v-neck sweater, the sleeves covering his legs and the space for the neck exposing his genitals. There was padding at his knees to make it easier for him when he knelt over his victims’ bodies to mutilate them. Two days later he confessed to being the Ripper and detailed his many attacks. He would later say that God had told him to kill.

  It was over for the women of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, but, sentenced to life, it was just the beginning for Peter Sutcliffe.

  Dennis Nilsen

  It was 8 February 1983 and there was a problem with the drains at 23 Cranley Gardens in the Muswell Hill area of north London. The tenants of the flats, into which the large house was divided, had been having trouble flushing their toilets for the last few days but when a plumber was called he was unable to resolve the situation. A drains specialist was summoned and he arrived that evening. He went straight to the manhole cover over the drains but when he lifted the cover he was almost overcome by the stench that emerged from within. He thought it smelled like decomposing flesh, a suspicion confirmed when he climbed down a few steps and saw what appeared to be piles of rotting white meat. Horrified, his first thought was that this was human flesh.

  He returned next day with a supervisor but discovered that most of the material had been cleared from the drain. A tenant mentioned to them that she had heard constant footsteps during the night as a neighbour who lived above her had continually gone up and down the stairs. When they asked her who lived there, she told them he was a quiet thirty-seven-year-old Scottish civil servant by the name of Dennis Nilsen.

  The police were called and a more thorough investigation of the drain was undertaken. They found a small six-inch square piece of flesh and some material that resembled the bones of human fingers.

  That night when he came home from work at the Jobcentre in Kentish Town, a detective was waiting in the hall for Dennis Nilsen. He asked him if he knew anything about the drains and Nilsen replied by asking him upstairs to his flat. As they entered the flat, the stink of decomposing flesh was almost unbearable. The policeman asked him where the remainder of the body was, at which Nilsen calmly pointed to a cupboard and told him it was in there in a couple of plastic bags. Nilsen was arrested.

  In the car taking him to the police station, the detective asked if the remains belonged to one body or two. Nilsen calmly replied that there had been fifteen or sixteen in total, three at Cranley Gardens and the remainder at the house he had lived in until the autumn of 1981, 195 Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood.

  In the quiet suburbs of London, a mass murderer had quietly been indulging his obsession for killing young men and then keeping their bodies around for a while. Just for the company.

  Dennis Nilsen was born at Fraserburgh on Scotland’s northeast coast in 1945, his father a Norwegian soldier who was frequently drunk. His mother divorced the Norwegian when Dennis was seven and remarried. Dennis, however, formed a close attachment to his grandparents, especially his grandfather. But when his grandfather died, seven-year-old Dennis underwent a traumatic experience that possibly contributed to the direction his life would take. His mother took him in to the bedroom to see the corpse. He has, himself, admitted that it was at that point that his troubles began. According to Nilsen, he suffered a kind of emotional death with the loss of his grandfather. He became a desperate loner.

  Having enlisted in the army in 1961 as a cook, in 1972 he changed uniform to that of a London policeman. He lasted only eleven months, however, and instead found work as a security guard. When he was arrested, he was employed by the Manpower Services Commission.

  He had moved into the Melrose Avenue flat with David Gallichan who was ten years younger than Nilsen. They did not have a homosexual relationship, but when Gallichan tired of London and moved out, Nilsen was devastated. He felt betrayed and very lonely. It was a desperate loneliness would lead to the murders of fifteen young men.

  On 30 December 1978, a year after the departure of Gallichan, Nilsen was drinking in the Cricklewood Arms where he befriended a young man. The two went back to Nilsen’s flat and Nilsen and he climbed into bed together. The next morning, Nilsen realised with a sense of deep dread that the boy would be leaving soon after he woke up and after spending Christmas on his own, it would mean a solitary New Year for him. He strangled the boy with a tie but after a brief struggle he was still alive. Nilsen filled a bucket with water in
the kitchen and, placing the semi-conscious boy on some chairs, dangled his head into the bucket and drowned him.

  He carried the body into the bathroom and washed it, something that would become a signature of his killings. Returning to the bedroom, he put him to bed. Later, he went out to buy an electric carving knife and a large cooking pot but, unable initially to carve up the body which he actually found quite beautiful, he dressed it in clean clothes and underwear, laid it on the floor and went to sleep.

  When he awoke, he ate some dinner and watched television. He thought about how he was going to dispose of the body and came up with an idea. He lifted the carpet, prized loose some floorboards and tried to slide it into the cavity under the floor. Rigor mortis had set in by this time, however, and he had to wait a while, with the body stood up against the wall, before it was again flexible enough to force into the space.

  A week later, becoming curious, he lifted the floorboards, taking the decomposing body out again. It was a little dirty, so he gave it a wash, washing himself afterwards in the same water as he had used for the corpse. He became very aroused and masturbated over it. Then, he once again slid it into the space, nailed down the floorboards and tacked down the carpet. The body would remain there for seven months before Nilsen took it out into the garden and burned it, throwing pieces of rubber into the flames to conceal the rancid smell of burning flesh.

  This young man, unknown at the time, turned out to be fourteen-year-old Stephen Dean Holmes who had been on his way home from a concert when he encountered Nilsen in the Cricklewood Arms. His identity would only become known in 2006, when in November of that year Nilsen confessed to his murder in an extraordinary letter sent from his prison cell to the Evening Standard.