Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

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During a four-hour post-mortem that afternoon Gee found three semi-circular lacerated wounds to the scalp typical of other Ripper killings, along with depressed fractures to the skull. In the chest area, in addition to the large wound containing the bottle top, was a series of long scratches and cuts. A large stab wound in her back had penetrated various organs, including heart, kidneys and lungs. Gee thought a thin-bladed weapon, not less than six and a half inches long, had been thrust through the two openings on the front and back of the body. Multiple thrusts, perhaps as many as twenty, had been made in and out of the same wound, causing it to become much enlarged. The broken bottle top probably entered the chest as the victim was turned over on the ground. She had first been hit on the back of the head at the edge of the waste ground and fallen. She was then struck again on the head and, while still alive, dragged by hands under the armpits from the point where her handbag was found, down the slope and into the playground area.

The body initially lay on its back when the stab wounds at the front were inflicted. Then it was turned on its face and further stab wounds made to the back. Gee knew for sure she was not yet dead when some of these stab wounds were made because he found a large quantity of blood in each chest cavity. The killer had removed the knife from the back wound and then wiped each side of the blade on the skin on the woman’s back. Death had occurred some time between midnight and 3 a.m.

Soon after arriving at the crime scene, Jim Hobson had someone search the handbag found on the waste and her identity was quickly established. She was Jayne Michelle MacDonald, a sixteen-year-old who lived near by in Scott Hall Avenue. Wilma McCann, the Ripper’s first victim, had been a close neighbour in the same road, just six doors away. It seemed probable that Jayne MacDonald was mistaken for a prostitute when she was killed taking a short cut home across the waste ground, probably only a hundred yards from safety. She had gone with a girlfriend to a city centre bar, the Hofbrauhaus, at eight o’clock on the Saturday night, and left in the company of a young man aged about eighteen, with broad shoulders and a slim waist.

Jayne was a singularly pretty teenager with shoulder-length light brown hair; a good-looking girl, according to her friends, always smiling and truly the apple of her father Wilfred’s eye. He collapsed when police told him Jayne had been murdered, and subsequently developed nervous asthma and chronic bronchitis and never returned to his job with British Rail. He spent days on end staring at a photo of his daughter and patiently carving a wooden cross from the ladder of her old bunk bed. It came to mark Jayne’s last resting place. He couldn’t forget what he had seen in the mortuary when he went to identify her body. According to his wife, Irene, all he would say was that there was blood over Jayne’s beautiful hair.

Jayne had left a local high school a few months previously at Easter to work in the shoe department at Grandways supermarket in Roundhay Road. It sounds like a cliché to say she was a happy-go-lucky teenager, but in her case it was true. She loved life, indeed had everything to live for, and liked to spend her money on clothes and going out dancing or roller skating. Hers was a close-knit community, the kind where neighbours and friends did favours for one another and whose children were in and out of each other’s homes. One such family were the Bransbergs, who had a telephone, unlike the MacDonalds. Normally, if Jayne was planning to stay over at a girlfriend’s house, she would call the Bransbergs and they would tell her parents. Wilf MacDonald and Irene were a loving and devoted couple who kept a close eye on all their children, four girls and a son. Recently Jayne had broken off a relationship with a boyfriend, believing he was getting ‘too serious’. In their eyes, she was a bonny girl with a trim figure for her age, who simply drew the boys. They liked to believe their daughter was ‘innocent’, which in 1977 meant they thought she had not yet lost her virginity. In fact she had been having regular intercourse with her two previous boyfriends.

Jack Bransberg worked for British Rail with Jayne’s father. She had called to see him and his wife before going into town on Saturday night. She was going dancing at the Astoria Ballroom, then on to another discotheque. When, later that night, Jayne didn’t phone to say she would be late, both her parents and the Bransbergs assumed she had had a little too much to drink, stayed with a friend and forgot to telephone. Wilf MacDonald was furious Jayne had not called, more concerned about her thoughtlessness than anything else. After the death of Wilma McCann, all local parents had been alarmed the killer might strike again. But that was twenty-one months before and the fear was starting to wear off. Nevertheless Jayne had several times promised her mother she would never walk home alone in the dark.

As with all the relatives of the Ripper’s victims so far, the tragedy had a devastating effect on the family, the more so perhaps because this was a sixteen-year-old, carefree girl about to begin life when she was snatched away in such a brutal fashion. ‘He has killed my Jayne,’ cried a tearful Mrs MacDonald. ‘She was a virgin. A clean-living girl. How many more?’

Her husband was still under sedation, too shocked to be interviewed. The family doctor said the entire family was in a terrible state: ‘The husband is very bad and I have had to give him a sedative injection this morning because he has been in a state of complete collapse. This has been added to because of the fact that he had to go down and identify his daughter and see the terrible injuries she had suffered. This is an awful lot for any man to put up with. The murder itself is something which is a terrible thing to have to accept but to have to go down and identify the body and see the full extent of this is just making it even worse.’

Neighbours and friends of the MacDonalds rallied round to give them support, with several helping around the house. Others vented their feelings in a different way. The day after the murder white painted graffiti appeared on a nearby wall: ‘SCOTT HALL SAYS HANG THE RIPPER!’

Piecing together the last few hours of Jayne’s life took detectives several days of foot slogging. Oldfield wanted a minute breakdown of where she went after leaving the city centre. A detailed surveyor’s street map of the area, showing every house, was blown up and placed on a wall of the incident room on the top floor of Millgarth Police Station. He wanted to flag everyone who had been in the area at the relevant time in the hope someone must have seen the killer and possibly his car.

The Hofbrauhaus in the Merion Centre in Leeds was a Bierkeller and one of the city’s earliest themed pubs. It advertised German beer for only 32p a pint, and although trade could be slow early in the week, come Thursday, Friday and Saturday the place hotted up and the ale began to flow. Chief attraction was an ‘Oompah Band’, a fake German band dressed in leather shorts and Tyrolean hats which played songs like ‘The Happy Wanderer’ and waltzes associated with the Black Forest and Austria. Despite being under legal drinking age, Jayne had no trouble gaining entry. She met a local lad, Mark Jones, whose fair hair was brushed back off his face and who wore a dark velvet jacket, a light coloured shirt and dark flared trousers. There was a clear mutual attraction. She had not drunk any alcohol in the crowded bar, preferring soft drinks on what was already a warm night. When the Hofbrauhaus closed at 10.30 they left to walk into the city centre with his friends. Eventually the others drifted off until he and Jayne were left alone. They stopped for a bag of chips in the city centre, and then realized Jayne had missed her last bus. It was about midnight. They started walking up the York Road towards Chapeltown, Mark promising that his sister, who lived near by, would drive her home. When they reached his sister’s house, he saw her car wasn’t there, and they continued walking towards St James’s Hospital. They went into the garden of the nurses’ home and lay there on the ground for forty-five minutes, having a kiss and a cuddle. Jones later told detectives that Jayne was still having a period. She had promised him they would have sex together if he met her during the week.

The young couple later set off walking towards Harehills, but when they reached Becket Street they parted company. It was now 1.30 a.m. Mark himself had to go to his home on a nearby council estate. Jayne didn’t seem at all bothered. Close by was Grandways, the supermarket where she worked. If she couldn’t hail a taxi, she was used to walking home. So they bade each other farewell and promised to renew their assignation the following Wednesday. She walked off along Becket Street towards Harehills Road. Several people saw her walking along in her ridiculously high ‘clog’ shoes, including two AA patrolmen in their vehicle parked near St James’s Hospital. At about 1.40 she was seen in Bayswater Mount, walking in the direction of Roundhay Road. She was last seen about five minutes’ walk from the murder scene at 1.45 a.m. walking through Chapeltown. A woman living in Reginald Terrace said that around 2 a.m. she had heard a banging and scuffling from the adventure playground, followed by the voice of what sounded like a Scotsman mouthing obscenities.

The murder squad’s attempts to detail individual people’s movements along a few residential streets at 2 a.m. in the morning might seem reasonably straightforward, given the expectation that most people would be tucked up in bed asleep. But not in Chapeltown on a Saturday night. It was a veritable hive of activity. This was a strong immigrant area. There were people here from Eastern Europe, working-class Jews who could not afford to reside in the northern hills around Leeds. There were families from the New Commonwealth, particularly West Indians, many of whom attended illegal drinking clubs, where the sacred brown ‘weed’ was rolled into six-inch joints for mutual recreation and spiritual enlightenment. Oldfield later estimated some two hundred people were out and about in the immediate vicinity of the route Jayne walked once she left Mark Jones. Of these, some fifty were thought to be in or around the Reginald Street/Reginald Terrace area at the crucial time. Oldfield was desperate to identify and eliminate any of these people. Forty revellers were drinking in a West Indian club and left to attend a party in nearby Sholebroke Avenue.

A free-phone telephone service was set up in the incident room in the hope that someone might just have seen Jayne or the killer. But this was a time preceding the inner-city riots of the 1980s by only a few years. There was a recession, with rising unemployment, government cutbacks and little funding for the inner cities or urban renewal. There were tensions between police and some in the immigrant communities, particularly the younger element. They tended to avoid each other if possible, so it was not surprising if witnesses from among this section of the community were not flooding forward to help in the Ripper investigation.

On the blown-up wall map in the incident room were two hundred taggings of people and vehicles from 1 until 4 a.m. Some were individuals, some groups. Each was represented by a flag. Some were positive sightings where police had identified or interviewed a particular person. But there were also blanks. Oldfield was anxious to fill them in: ‘My problem is in identifying those people. Once I can identify them and eliminate them I am hoping I shall be left with one or two or three, or a handful of individuals, who have not come forward and have a reason for not coming forward. The trouble I am having is that we are getting cooperation from certain members of the public who are feeding this information of having seen people there, but some sections of the public, for reasons best known to themselves, are reluctant to come forward and admit they were in that area on this particular night. They are the ones who represent the blank spaces I cannot fill. It is frustrating … I am not interested why they were there. The only individual I am concerned about who was in that area at that time is the killer. Anyone else I want him to come forward so I can eliminate him, and find that killer.’ Oldfield told the local TV news: ‘I believe the man we are looking for has a good knowledge of the Leeds area but he does not necessarily live in Leeds.’

Oldfield began to get more and more desperate in his appeals for help. They had a paucity of evidence. The finger-tip search of the area around the playground revealed absolutely zero. In Jayne’s handbag there were some bus tickets on which the forensic lab found fingerprints that could not be identified. A cigarette packet discovered near the body bore fingerprints which were never eliminated. The Ripper had appeared and disappeared like a phantom, and this in itself added to the gossip-driven mythology surrounding both his identity and the supposed ‘ritual’ slaying of his victims.

Oldfield’s greatest fear was that the killer would strike again – and soon. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that he will strike again. The big questions are when, where and who is going to be his next victim.’ He was convinced there were many people living in the immediate area who had not come forward. He made several urgent public appeals for witnesses before there was another murder, asking local church and community leaders for assistance. The murder squad also began re-examining old files of attacks on women.

Oldfield believed the killer had definitely taken four of his previous victims in his car after picking them up for sex. He was positive other women who probably were not prostitutes may have been propositioned or offered a lift and had turned the killer away. He hoped the man’s face peering out of the car window would still be fresh in their minds. ‘We believe the man we want must have tried it more than once and been turned down.’ One case they focused on closely was a serious assault on a thirty-four-year-old woman in an alleyway in Keighley two years previously in July 1975. Mrs Anna Rogulski had been assaulted and left badly injured. Oldfield told journalists she had been struck over the head with a blunt instrument and had injuries to her body similar to those of the Ripper’s victims. Sadly they failed to listen to Marcella Claxton from Chapeltown, who was convinced it was the Ripper who attacked her. The day after Jayne was killed, she told a reporter she was sure the man who bludgeoned her was also responsible for the girl’s murder.

A ten-year-old boy and a housewife, both living in Chapeltown, contacted the incident room. The woman had started noting down the registration numbers of kerb crawlers after being pestered by a man in a car. The boy had been collecting car numbers – hundreds of them. Officers were detailed to check the owners. Oldfield, by now very much the public face of the police investigation, asked residents to jot down the registration number of any vehicle acting suspiciously or kerb crawling and ring the police. ‘They will not be wasting our time,’ he said. Nothing more clearly reflected the desperate situation he was in as senior investigating officer.

Finally Oldfield made a firm decision to bring the documentation for all five murders under one roof. The paperwork for the four previous killings was integrated into a major incident room on the top floor at Millgarth. A few doors down from the purpose-built incident room, Oldfield shared an office with Dick Holland and another superintendent, Jack Slater. They were working an average thirteen hours a day, arriving at 9.15 a.m. in time for a ten o’clock briefing at which they updated officers conducting house-to-house inquiries. Top priority was trying to maintain their morale. They left to go home between 10 p.m. and midnight. At that stage Holland and Slater were reviewing the paperwork, dispensing actions to the troops on the ground, checking follow-ups. They filtered the stuff Oldfield ought to see, and the paperwork began to pile up. Occasionally his other job at the Wakefield HQ held up his work on the Ripper inquiry. Suddenly he would announce: ‘I’m stopping tonight.’ He would make sure he had half a bottle of decent whisky on hand, taking frequent sips until he had cleared the backlog. Then he would go and bed down in the section house of the police station, where a number of single constables had rooms, so he would be ready and available for work first thing the next morning.

Holland directed that a detective inspector or detective chief inspector trained in the West Yorkshire murder system should work on every shift in the incident room. Their job was to check incoming statements. The Leeds staff hadn’t taken kindly to the changes Holland made. ‘Their reaction was hostile to start with,’ he said. ‘They were moaning and trying to get away. At that stage I actually worked in the incident room seeing that everything that went there was done in the West Yorkshire style. Now that had never been done in Leeds until then.’

The house-to-house inquiries were widened until the occupants of 679 homes in twenty-nine streets were seen and interviewed. Many houses were in multiple occupation. Nearly 3,700 statements were taken. Checks were made on all men taken into police custody for offences of violence, particularly if they involved women. Oldfield also organized a seminar with twenty-five psychiatrists from Yorkshire in an unsuccessful effort to get assistance from mental hospitals about patients who might be suspects.

Prostitutes were questioned in detail about regular clients even as the Leeds police began clamping down on soliciting in Chapeltown. On the one hand, they wanted the women’s cooperation; on the other, they were trying to put them out of business. At the same time Jim Hobson was mounting a covert operation of static observations, with officers recording registration numbers of vehicles trying to pick up women in the red-light district. Lists of registrations numbers could then be examined after any future murder and the drivers traced and interviewed. Over the next few months, 152 women were arrested and reported for soliciting, and sixty-eight more cautioned.

It was a measure of Oldfield’s frustration and desperation that he virtually begged people to support the police effort: ‘The public have the power to decide what sort of society they want. If they want murder and violence then they will keep quiet. If they want a law-abiding society in which their womenfolk can move freely without fear of attack from the likes of the individual we are hunting, then they must give us their help.’

A month after the murder the trail had gone cold, but the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, MP for a Leeds constituency, seemed to have full confidence in the West Yorkshire force. He paid a visit to the incident room in Leeds and was asked how concerned he was that ‘The Ripper’ had been at large so long. ‘I am no more concerned than the chief constable,’ he replied. ‘Often piecing evidence together, considering it, analysing it, does take time unless someone is there with a camera when the murder is committed.’

Considering that five women had been killed by the same hand within a small geographical area, this answer appeared somewhat flippant. But as the law stood, the Home Secretary could have said little else. He simply could not interfere. His own Home Office colleague, Dr Shirley Summerskill, had made the position clear during a debate on the Black Panther case twelve months previously. Britain’s criminal justice system relied on the operational autonomy of the police.

The press at this stage was describing ‘The Ripper’ as Yorkshire’s most wanted killer. No policeman pointed out to the Home Secretary during his visit that this was a national problem rather than a little local difficulty. Neither did they reveal they hadn’t a hope of catching the man – unless he tried to kill again. In such a hopeless situation there were few words of comfort that Oldfield or his colleagues could find for the MacDonald family when they buried Jayne. Those who have never suffered bereavement in such circumstances can have no comprehension of the feelings of the families. Wilf MacDonald later described in a television interview the moment he learned of his daughter’s death:

The police came in and said ‘Are you the father of Jayne MacDonald’, I said ‘Yes’. I said ‘I’ll kill her when she comes home because she didn’t phone last night’. They said you may not have to … and that’s as much as I knew … if she had died of you know illness or accident but when it happens like it did, mutilation and everything, I went to identify her and … I just collapsed there and then. He has murdered the whole family you can almost say.

Oldfield’s surviving daughter was about the same age as Jayne, and a pupil at Wakefield Girls’ High School, hoping to go on to university to study dentistry. His heart went out to Wilf MacDonald, and soon after her murder he made a private visit to the family to pledge he would not rest until the man who killed Jayne was caught. In October 1979, Wilf MacDonald too was dead, aged sixty. He was buried in a grave next to his beloved daughter. His family emphatically believed he never recovered from Jayne’s murder and died of a broken heart.

In the months following the death of Jayne MacDonald, Oldfield’s nightmare scenario, that the killer would go on attacking women again and again, came true. Two weeks after he struck down Jayne, Mrs Maureen Long became his latest victim. She survived the attack but at a terrible cost. Twenty-five years later, in her sixties, she still suffers as a result of the head injuries she received. In conversation she is very nervous, clasping her hands to stop them shaking. She cannot watch anything on television that involves violence. She has bouts of depression and anger.

In July 1977, Maureen was forty-two, the mother of several children and separated from her husband. She hadn’t had an easy life by any means. At various times she had been in trouble with the police. She enjoyed the company of men but was certainly no prostitute. She lived with another man in Farsley on the borders of Leeds and Bradford. According to a police report, although she and her husband were separated, they continued to have a friendly relationship and she still held a good measure of affection for him. On Saturday night, 9 July, they met up in a Bradford pub and she drank four pints of lager in his company. When the pub was closing, around 11.10 p.m., she headed alone in her long black dress for the Mecca Ballroom in Manningham Lane. She was a woman who loved dressing up in her finest and going out for the evening, especially to a night out dancing. Maureen was a regular at the Mecca and well known to many of the staff. The music played, she danced with several men and continued drinking. Her last clear memory was of going to the cloakroom at about 2 a.m. on the Sunday morning. Outside a ‘hot dog’ salesman preparing to close up his pitch for the night saw her leave the Mecca heading for the city centre.

Her recall of subsequent events is hazy. Police believe that, infused with alcohol and in a befuddled state, she may have been going to see her husband, who lived in Reynell Street. Later, at around 3.15 a.m., a security guard, Frank Whitaker, who worked at the Tanks & Drums Ltd factory abutting on Bowling Back Lane, heard his dog bark. He went to the main entrance and looked up the lane. An engine revved up and he saw a car without lights initially drive off at high speed out of Mount Street. He was certain it was a white Ford Cortina Mark II with a black roof. He thought there might have been something heavy in the boot.

Next morning, at around 8.30, the residents of a gypsy caravan site off Bowling Back Lane heard shouts for help coming from near by. Police were called and on a patch of rubbish-strewn open land they found Maureen Long in a deeply distressed condition.

‘All I remember was trying to pick myself up,’ she said. ‘I kept falling and then I wondered what was wrong with me, and I kept falling back and as I were trying to pull myself up, falling back again. Then I was screaming and I heard this dog barking, and someone say: “Oh, you’re all right,” and that’s all I remember. When you get hit over the back of the head you can’t remember things. If I hadn’t had beer that night I’d have died of hypothermia.’

The person who attacked her obviously left her for dead. Her clothing was displaced. Her bra had been pulled down to her waist, her tights and pants pulled to her knees. Suffering very severe head injuries, she was rushed by ambulance to Bradford Royal Infirmary, where doctors saved her life. There was a large depressed fracture of the skull, and five stab wounds to the front and side of her trunk and left shoulder. She also had three fractured ribs. Her head injuries were so severe that she required specialist neurosurgery at the Leeds General Infirmary. Professor Gee examined Maureen in hospital at Bradford a few hours after she was admitted. Accompanied by Oldfield and Holland, he stood beside her bed in a cubicle in the casualty department. Her head had been partially shaved by the neurosurgical senior registrar, revealing the severe lacerations to her skull. A police surgeon took various swabs from intimate areas, searching for potential forensic evidence. One of the stab wounds had penetrated her liver, though she had not suffered from gross bleeding. Gee thought her lucky to be alive.

She spent nine weeks in hospital before being discharged but continued as an out-patient for many years because of fits as a result of her head injuries. Maureen couldn’t provide the police with much help. She had woken up in the intensive care ward of the local hospital. That Maureen’s memory was poor did not surprise Holland. He had recently worked on a stabbing case in Bradford where a (non-Ripper) victim’s memory was impaired because of loss of blood and consequently loss of oxygen to the brain. ‘They got her brain functioning again perfectly, she hadn’t brain damage, but everything that was stored on her “disk”, if you like, to use a computer analogy, prior to the stabbing had gone forever.’

Holland’s belief that extensive head injuries made a surviving victim’s memory unreliable was understandable though tragically mistaken. Yet he eagerly grasped at one clue provided by Maureen Long. She described the man who gave her a lift as being a fair-haired white male, aged about thirty-five, thickset, over six feet tall, and having what could have been a white car …

The Ripper squad had already targeted taxi drivers in Leeds and Bradford as potential prime suspects. Many prostitutes, including Tina Atkinson, used taxis. More than 600 cab drivers were interviewed. A taxi driver called Terry Hawkshaw, whose physical appearance was similar to the description provided by Long, was top of their list. He lived with his sixty-seven-year-old mother in an old terraced house at Drighlington, between Leeds and Bradford. He was thirty-six, six feet tall, weighed fifteen or sixteen stone and had rather long fair hair brushed back, a fresh complexion and a round, almost babyish face – a bit saggy and flabby, as was his whole build. He dressed casually, but not scruffily – a typical taxi driver who did his own repairs. He also drove a white car.

Hawkshaw was one of fifteen men at that stage regarded as strong suspects, whose alibis were to be thoroughly checked for the night Jayne MacDonald was killed. Some were flagged to be kept under observation and taken in for questioning the moment another Ripper incident occurred. Hawkshaw, now dead, had been seen in his taxi near the Mecca Ballroom on the crucial night. He came under close scrutiny because he was a taxi driver who drove a white Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof and made a living ferrying prostitutes and their clients. ‘He allowed them to have it off in the back of his taxi,’ Holland revealed. Oldfield suspected Hawkshaw got sexual thrills out of watching the prostitutes at work on the back seat. A search of his accounts revealed taxi receipts proving that he had the opportunity to have carried out several of the Ripper attacks – he was in close proximity to the red-light area at the material times.

There was not enough evidence to hold him in a police cell, so Oldfield arranged for him to help the police with their inquiries without arresting him. He was virtually kidnapped and held incommunicado. Oldfield took him in as a prime suspect despite the fact that legally the police were not allowed to hold him at a police station. So he was kept for over thirty-six hours at the Detective Training School at Bishopgarth in Wakefield, which has a thirteen-storey accommodation block just across the road from the force headquarters. No student courses were being held and the flats on the top floor were empty.

This was not the first time this had happened. Suspects in other serious cases had previously been questioned at the Detective Training School when there was a danger of leaks to the media. Oldfield was anxious also that other police officers were kept in the dark about the fact that they were questioning a ‘prisoner’ who was not a prisoner. It was a high-risk strategy and could have landed some of West Yorkshire’s most senior detectives in hot water had it backfired. Hawkshaw’s civil rights were clearly denied in the belief they had a strong suspect for five murders. Nowadays, he could probably have sued for wrongful imprisonment; the officers involved would have been disciplined, the Police Complaints’ Authority involved, questions asked in Parliament, with the media becoming self-righteous and the civil rights lobby having a field day. Today, without question, someone’s head would have rolled, probably several. That it was done at all was a measure of the sheer desperation the Ripper’s reign of terror had caused among the senior detectives. The cost of the inquiry so far was approaching £1 million.

‘He was not arrested, and I’m playing with words here,’ Holland admitted. ‘There was a detective who slept at his door to make sure he went nowhere, but he was not arrested. It was a long way down, thirteen storeys, if he’d gone out of the window. We took him there because there wasn’t enough evidence for putting him in one of the cells. We found a way of holding him, without “holding him”. In the euphemism of the day, he was “assisting police with inquiries”. He knew where he was going. I would have defended it to his lawyer by saying he was just being interviewed. The legal test then was that if he had chosen to go, if he had said, “I’m leaving”, would you have stopped him? I would have said, “No.” He agreed to come, so he couldn’t have made a complaint that we had kidnapped him. We did not give him the impression he was under arrest. We didn’t read any caution, but the law was different then. You only had to caution when you had some real evidence, but we felt we had strong grounds for suspicion. We had all day on him verifying his story, verifying what he was doing, forensically checking his car. He really fitted the bill as described by Long, and had the car described by the night watchman, so we hadn’t dreamed his name up. He had also visited the pubs and clubs frequented by Richardson and Jackson. He also had two hammers which were checked – so circumstantially he was a strong candidate. Forensic later gave us a negative report [on the hammers].

‘He didn’t get rough treatment. We’d been going all day and well into the night. This is typical George. Hawkshaw was quite open. He was talking to us and he was saying, “Yes, I do run prostitutes. I get paid, they pay a bit more than the standard fare if they use my taxi. I might help prostitutes, but I am not a murderer.” That was his line and he was quite frank and he was softly spoken. He might have had a kinky streak and I think he was a soft touch for the prostitutes. But he made a bit more money.’

Information provided by Hawkshaw was checked with the files. Oldfield, convinced that he’d got his man, cross-questioned him for hours on end. For Hawkshaw, the whole experience was terrifying: ‘It was a nightmare,’ he said. ‘When George Oldfield sits behind his desk and tells you he thinks you are the Ripper, blimey, it turns your stomach over. They told me: “Come and sit here. Terence, this fellow wants catching. He is not bad, it’s just his mind.” The police nearly convinced me I was out of my head. They said someone with a split personality could be like the killer. He could be normal in the day and all of a sudden his mind goes click and he kills someone.’

After a considerable time – by now it was 3.45 in the morning – Oldfield decided: ‘It’s crunch time.’ Holland was unsure whether Hawkshaw was out of the frame. Looking at his watch, Oldfield decided to defer a decision which wasn’t going his way. He thought they should snatch some sleep in the empty training school study/bedrooms. ‘We will start again at nine o’clock,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, we’ll have an extra half-hour, we’ll start at 9.30!’ He had laid on breakfast and an early call.

‘Now that was the sort of boss he was,’ said Holland. ‘He thought he’d given us the earth because he’d given us an extra half-hour and paid for our breakfast. He hadn’t paid himself, he’d authorized the force to pay for our breakfast. So we got a free cooked meal and an extra half-hour in fucking bed! We had worked all day until a quarter to four in the morning.’

After thorough searches of his taxi and his mother’s home, in the end Hawkshaw was allowed to return home: ‘We had no evidence, forensic had turned up absolutely nothing; because it wasn’t him, they’d done their job. Forensic can be a two-edged sword to the investigator, but it’s a good thing from the point of view of the innocent person. It revealed absolutely nothing to connect him [with the attacks] and we would have expected something. The hammers he had were not of the same dimension and weight we were looking for. We needed time to have those things examined. We had him for the best part of forty-eight hours when the point came when we had to say: “Thank you, Mr Hawkshaw,” and let him go. Then we fixed up a team of detectives to shadow him discreetly night and day. That was done chiefly with crime squad cars supplemented by murder squad detectives. There were twelve men a day on this. Eventually he realized he was being followed. We checked with his books and records of taxi runs and he was in the right area to have the opportunity to have committed eight of the attacks.

‘I don’t think we did anything illegal. In order to do our job, we were deliberately sailing as near to the wind as we could. We were just on the side of legality. We planned to interrogate him and keep him away [from any potential leak of information]. You’ve got to appreciate, it would have been all over the media if we had a suspect in for the Ripper.’ The surveillance on Hawkshaw lasted for some considerable time until he was completely exonerated and alibied for one of the Ripper murders.

John Domaille decided he could not afford to wait for the Ripper to strike again in order to move the inquiry forward. He decided as a new tactic to enlist the help of the latest victim herself. So, several months after the attack, Maureen Long cooperated with the Ripper Squad in mounting an undercover operation to see if she could recognize the Ripper and help them arrest him. For three weeks running she went out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in Bradford, accompanied by a woman detective sergeant, Megan Winterburn. To the uninitiated they were two women out on the town together, and Winterburn, then in her thirties, found Maureen affable and pleasant. ‘She didn’t deserve what happened to her,’ she said. ‘She was very fortunate to have survived the injuries she had. Maureen made no bones about saying she was a Ripper victim and liked to show off her scars.’

To prepare for this undercover assignment in the pubs and nightclubs of Bradford, Megan Winterburn had ceased washing her hair, letting it go lank. She found a seedy outfit, including a rather old Afghan coat. ‘Mr Domaille said that if I dressed up as I normally do to go out, I’d stand out like a sore thumb,’ she said. ‘I had the most smelly Afghan coat, a raw suede coat with this horrible fur round the collar and embroidered sections on the front, and fur round the bottom. I went a little bit over the top with the make-up and tried to blend in with the rest of the clientele.’

During a night out she let Maureen do her own thing. Another detective accompanied them, keeping in the background but maintaining close watch as they drank and danced at West Yorkshire police expense. The pair built up a good rapport. On a few occasions Megan watched her new friend get loaded. She once asked her whether she always got this drunk when she went out. ‘No,’ replied Maureen, ‘it’s just that it makes me feel safe.’

Megan Winterburn, a married detective on plain-clothes undercover duty, handbag slung over her shoulder, was getting an education into the seedier side of life. She visited pubs she would otherwise have avoided and she had never been a night club person. To her Maureen appeared somewhat naïve and lived in an insular world, doing the same things, week in, week out. Going out drinking was part of her social world. But Megan didn’t find any of it the least bit offensive. She had been brought up in the mining village of South Kirkby. Her father was a miner who after he was injured became a steward of a club. Policing was what she had always wanted to do and after a couple of years as a shorthand-typist after leaving school at seventeen, she joined the West Riding force. ‘Maureen was quite funny and entertaining when she had a drink,’ said Megan. ‘She knew everybody in every pub we went into and everyone knew Maureen. It opened my eyes to the sort of person Maureen mixed with. They were the salt of the earth. Everyone was concerned about her. The people she knew didn’t think any the less of her because she had been a victim. They didn’t shun her. She was mortified that [some] people were saying she was a prostitute, which wasn’t true. You had this very naïve and pleasant lady who was leading a normal life, with an active social life, labelled by the press as a prostitute. To have to explain this to your family, who were still coming to terms with you being attacked, must have been horrendous to her and her family.’

On one occasion they were on the Mecca dance floor. Suddenly Maureen stood stock still and stared at a man across the room. ‘I said, “What’s the matter?” She shook her head and said, “Nothing.” I said, “Yes there is, what is it?” She said, “It’s him over there.” I’ll never forget him. He didn’t have a gap in his teeth and it wasn’t Sutcliffe, but he did have a lot of jet-black curly hair. Obviously her subconscious had said: “The hair.”’ The man was checked out and eliminated quickly.

Another time the pair were pub crawling in Manningham Lane, close to where the prostitutes hung out. A young colleague of Winterburn’s, in the dark about the operation, came into the pub. ‘I recognized him and he was looking at me and I was looking away, trying to make him not look at me. Eventually he plucked up courage and walked over to me and said: “What are you doing here, Sarge, dressed like that?” I remember taking the lad out to the toilet to have an appropriate word. I pinned him against the wall and told him to leave. It was serious and I couldn’t afford to let my guard slip.’

The undercover operation with Maureen Long, though it showed commendable courage on her part, went nowhere. She failed to recognize her would-be killer. The rest of the murder squad had plenty of other avenues to explore. The bosses knew proactive policing was working, for the clampdown against prostitutes and the covert operations in Chapeltown were clearly having an effect, the most important being that they appeared to have driven the Ripper back to strike again in Bradford.

Oldfield immediately stepped up the covert observations recording the registration numbers of vehicles in the red-light areas, extending them from Chapeltown to Manningham in Bradford. The attack on Long was treated as attempted murder. A major effort was mounted to find everyone who had been at the Mecca Ballroom on the Saturday night. Thousands were interviewed during the inquiry. It led nowhere. The information provided by the security guard was critical. In response a search was launched for Mark II Ford Cortina owners in West Yorkshire. Three thousand owners were interviewed and no positive evidence obtained.

More crucially, Jim Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry was, over his profound objections, brought to an abrupt halt because the Mark II Ford Cortina was not on the list of vehicles which could have left the tyre marks at the Richardson murder scene. (As we now know, the Ford Cortina inquiry was a complete red herring. The security guard had seen Peter Sutcliffe’s car leaving the scene of Long’s attack, except he was driving a white Ford Corsair – which was on Hobson’s list of ‘tracking’ inquiry vehicles waiting to be eliminated.) But Oldfield was faced with a massive problem – lack of manpower. Eliminating 30,000 vehicles had been a colossal task, and Oldfield felt the remaining 20,000 vehicles would take forever to check. Experience had shown that, as you got nearer the end of such an inquiry, progress on eliminating one vehicle took far longer than the straightforward checks at the beginning. As an inquiry continued, the man hours that went into it got higher and higher in relation to the finished product, while the actual productivity of the investigating team got lower and lower. All the difficult vehicle checks were those that had dragged on and were left to the end. They were cars that had been sold to gypsies six times under false names, had gone through car auctions, had changed owners, had been stolen, written off or not correctly recorded on the fledgling PNC.

Oldfield thus found himself in a complete bind. He had major murder inquiries involving a maniac on the loose going on in Leeds and Bradford, and the tyre inquiry seemed never ending, with no assurance of success. ‘We were desperate for men,’ Holland said. ‘If you were warm and breathing you were on the bloody Ripper case. We had checked roughly 30,000 vehicles and eliminated those, but there were in fact 22,000 to go … Sutcliffe’s vehicle was in there and unfortunately it was missed.’

Hobson took the cancellation of the tracking inquiry very badly. In the incident room for the Long investigation at Bradford police headquarters, a few senior officers, including Holland, Oldfield and Hobson, were standing in a corner late one afternoon when Oldfield broke the news as a fait accompli. Hobson had seen the tyre inquiry as the one good chance to find the killer. They had a positive clue from a murder scene and his inquiry ought to run its course. Now they were suddenly looking for a Ford Cortina. Oldfield believed the Ripper had changed cars. There was a good chance the one which made the tyre tracks in Roundhay Park had been destroyed. Hobson was furious, visibly angry and muttering under his breath. But the decision had been made. The Leeds murder squad believed Oldfield was being deliberately partisan because of his known disagreements with the senior city detectives. It was a fracture in relationships that never really healed.

The Ripper by now had murdered five women: McCann, Jackson, Richardson and MacDonald in Leeds; and Atkinson in Bradford. The police believed he had attacked Long, intending to kill her, and were now casting an eye over several other serious assaults on women. In reality there were eight other women that Sutcliffe had almost certainly attacked in the West Yorkshire area, though the squad had ruled most of them out as Ripper attacks because they could not rule them in for certain. Indeed, they were gripped almost by a phobia of putting an attack into the Ripper series, for fear it would turn out not to be his handiwork and might contaminate the investigation with erroneous evidence. Moreover, if the Ripper was caught and prosecuted for one murder he did not commit, he could escape justice. Thus Tracey Browne and Marcella Claxton along with several other victims were never included in the series, though there was an extraordinary similarity in the photofit descriptions they had given, which now lay unnoticed in police files. Day by day the cost of the investigation was assuming mountainous proportions: 300 officers had worked 343,000 man hours; 175,000 people had been questioned, 12,500 statements taken and 101,000 vehicles checked. The attempt to find the man with a ginger beard said to have been seen by witnesses in the MacDonald and Jackson inquiries was stepped up. Police had 117 tips of men who bore such a description. They traced fifty-six such men and eliminated them; the rest were never found because there was no real clue to their identity. Already inside the mountain of paper were the clues and the evidence that could have identified the Yorkshire Ripper.

7

Punter’s Money

In the mid-1970s the backbone technology of British industry, its businesses and institutions, was still a Victorian invention: the typewriter and shorthand note. Computers were as yet the hugely expensive private tools of government, vast number crunchers gobbling up and spewing out punchcards. They occupied whole floors to do the work a child’s toy can perform today, but the world was still only on the verge of the revolution.

Within a year or two advertisements began to appear in colour supplements offering home computers to be built by hand, whose programming language needed to be learned before simple mathematic problems could be solved and tic-tac-toe games played. Pocket calculators, costing the equivalent of a working man’s weekly wage, were finding their way on to the market. But the white heat of silicon technology was still ten years from our desk tops. The Home Office, the government department primarily responsible for the security and policing of Britain, wanted to be at the forefront of this revolution. The computer, when it arrived, would be a vital tool in the battle against crime, reducing the burden on manpower and budgets and speeding up detection. But the use of computers and the application software would have to be tailor-made to the task, specifically designed to handle, sort, cross-check and deliver information.

In August 1976, the House of Commons learned that the Police Scientific Development Branch at the Home Office was studying the use of computers to assist the investigation of major crimes like murder. Computers, according to the Home Office minister, Dr Shirley Summerskill, would organize the collection of information and the identification of key elements in murder inquiries. Parliament was debating criticism of the police handling of the Black Panther inquiry when Dr Summerskill reiterated a key principle of British justice affecting any criminal inquiry – that overall command in an investigation rested ultimately with the chief constable: ‘It is for him to decide when to call for assistance and help and what to call for.’ So if a chief constable wanted a computer, he had to ask for one. For the overburdened West Yorkshire Police in the summer of 1977 it seemed like a lifeline – or at least a straw to clutch at.

Ronald Gregory therefore set up a working party at his headquarters in Wakefield to look at ways of using computers in the Ripper inquiry. The force’s new Computer Project Unit in turn approached the Home Office to see how close its scientists were to achieving the goal of a computerized incident room which could actually handle a complex murder investigation. They had been working on the problem for three years. After several meetings, the West Yorkshireman learned that more development work was needed by government scientists and the Police Research Services Unit before they could hand over a computer they were certain was reliable. The only experimental working police computer in the country was in Staffordshire, in the Midlands. The working group and Gregory paid a visit, but the project was still in its infancy and the budget for the experiment was prohibitive, already running at more than £1 million.

Breakthroughs were being made in pushing back the frontiers of computerized systems, but in August 1977, when the West Yorkshire force needed one as a matter of desperate urgency, no machine was available. The writing of programs of such complexity was in its infancy. Moreover, three of the most senior Home Office scientists had just departed from the project, leaving only a junior colleague to work on the necessary research.

Then West Yorkshire Police were given the chance to use spare capacity on the mainframe computer at the Atomic Energy Authority Establishment at Harwell in Berkshire. It was a rare opportunity. Even the suggestion of such an offer was a clear indication that at least someone in Whitehall recognized the importance of catching the ‘Ripper’ and the difficulties the police in West Yorkshire were facing. Whether the senior officials in the Police Department of the Home Office appreciated that the murder investigation was not just a little ‘local difficulty’ facing their friends in the north is open to question.

It wasn’t the first time a branch of the Home Office, faced with a major investigation, had received help from atomic scientists with access to the country’s best computer technology. In the early 1960s, the Security Service (MI5) approached the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, which at the time had the biggest computer facility in Britain. MI5, in conjunction with the code breakers at GCHQ, were trying to decipher intercepted Soviet Union espionage messages intended for Eastern bloc agents in Britain. The traffic was known by the code name ‘VENONA’. The AWRE began a top-secret project, with its computer running code-cracking programs for six hours every night for two months.

To help catch a serial killer, the AEAE at Harwell was now willing to allow its mainframe computer to be accessed via telephone lines by the Ripper squad directly from West Yorkshire, with additional information on cassette tapes being sent physically to Harwell by courier. There were huge problems with this imaginative plan. To back-convert existing records held at Millgarth would taken thirteen man years of effort, costing a nominal figure of £25,000, which the Home Office was prepared to fund. But West Yorkshire would have to stump up £3,000 a week to run the system. Finally, Ronald Gregory decided, on the grounds of budget and the experimental nature of the project, to turn the offer down. At this stage the experiment would have involved using equipment not yet proven at the operational level. Gregory was later backed by the hierarchy of the police service for making a brave decision to stick with the manual system of managing information within the incident room. Though the volume of material grew larger every day, it was at least a tried and tested method. The problem was there had been nothing like the Ripper case before.

Gregory authorized his working party to contact the private sector to see whether the nominal index in the incident room could be computerized. IBM suggested a mainframe computer called STAIRS. The quote was in excess of half a million pounds. Again back-record conversion would be a mammoth task. A number of the biggest multinational computer firms and local government agencies in Britain were also approached, but could not come up with a viable scheme to automate the incident room. As the amount of information in the system grew, the problem of back-record conversion became the biggest obstacle to computerization. At that stage no one had designed a full-text retrieval system that could solve the incident room problems. Another worry by some senior officers was that serious money would be wasted if the murderer should be apprehended quickly.

Home Office officials knew the urgency of the West Yorkshire problem, which became worse as the years went by and the toll of yet more Ripper victims began to rise. Yet development of a police incident room computer system was never a priority, and it took several more years before one was available. An increasing number of attacks by the Ripper meant greater information-overload both for the incident room and the men and women having to manage it. The more the documentation piled up, the less likely the chance grew of back-converting it into a computerized system. The West Yorkshiremen seemed to be chasing their tails. And their problems were about to be compounded by the very next, and sixth, Ripper murder, across the Pennines, in Manchester, England’s second largest city. Here he murdered another prostitute on 1 October 1977 – a twenty-year-old mother of two children, Jean Jordan. Then he hid her body under bushes, where it lay undiscovered for over a week. The killer’s decision to strike in a completely different town reflected a pattern of sorts. When the heat was on in Leeds, with Hobson’s undercover teams keeping watch on Chapeltown’s red-light area, he moved to Bradford and found a victim in Manningham. With the pressure on in both Leeds and Bradford, he visited Moss Side, the red-light district of Manchester.

Positioned in the north-west of the country, some two hundred miles from London, Manchester spreads itself over sixty square miles. With local government reorganization in 1974, it had become Greater Manchester, absorbing a number of local towns like Salford. Within five miles of the city centre lived a million people; within ten miles, two and a half million. Manchester dwarfed the Leeds-Bradford conurbation and was the hub of many industries – not least as the northern headquarters of the national newspapers, who all had offices and printing plants there. It was also home to one of Britain’s great liberal institutions, the Manchester Guardian. In the nineteenth century, as in Leeds and Bradford, the manufacture of textiles was a dominant industry, the humid air apparently assisting in the production of cotton products.

In the 1950s and 1960s redevelopment schemes swept away the old and the derelict to produce a modernized city centre. A new road on stilts was built, the Mancunian Way, designed to ease traffic congestion. Piccadilly, a large square in the heart of the city, became a central shopping area, dominated on one side by a towering modern hotel designed to appeal to a fast-moving, international clientele. Around the periphery of the city were arterial road links – the M6 and M62 motorways – taking traffic north and south, east and west. In no time at all, a driver could speed from Bradford and Leeds, over the Pennines and into the heart of Manchester. From there to Moss Side took ten minutes by car. Just like Chapeltown in Leeds, and Bradford’s Manningham, Manchester’s red-light district was a formerly prosperous area fallen on hard times where large terraced houses had long been converted into flats. Together with Hulme, where Jean Jordan lived in a run-down council block, it was, and remains today, among the poorest areas in the country. In twenty-first century Britain, Moss Side and Hulme score first and fifth on the government’s most recent index of urban deprivation. A high concentration of ethnic minorities form a third of the local population. Lone parent households abound and the area has had high levels of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion for years. Sixty per cent of households receive social security and a third of local people are long-term unemployed. Fifty-four per cent of local youngsters leave school without qualifications, and only 3.7 per cent of them manage to get five GCSE passes at grades A–C.

Nine days after Jean Jordan was murdered, her body lay on an old allotment site off Princess Road in the suburb of Chorlton, near Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, two miles from where she had lived. It was found at lunchtime on 10 October. Adjacent to Princess Road was an iron gateway opening on to a track, bordered on both sides by trees. The track led into an area of disused allotments, measuring roughly a hundred yards square. The murder scene was between the cemetery and a new area of ground recently provided for allotment holders by Manchester Corporation. The new allotments had been fenced off from the disused land, which then became quickly overgrown. It was well known as a place where prostitutes took clients for sex. Those among the Greater Manchester Police murder squad who saw the body claim it as one of the most horrific crime scenes they have ever witnessed. And for twenty-three-year-old Bruce Jones, the unfortunate local dairy worker who called the police, the sight left him with nightmares for years to come. He held an allotment on the adjoining land and had merely been looking for disused house bricks with a friend.