A further examination of the crime scene revealed tyre tracks from which casts were taken. The tracks indicated that the killer had used a medium-sized car or van. Checks with tyre manufacturers established that the vehicle had been fitted with two ‘India Autoway’ tyres and a ‘Penman’ brand on the rear offside, all of them cross-ply. With the assistance of tyre manufacturers, a list of 26 possible car models was drawn up. It seemed that a genuine break had finally been made in the investigation. Police officers, without the benefits of computerisation, had moved into local vehicle taxation offices each night to hand-check all the vehicles in West Yorkshire compatible with the list. The final list contained 100,000 cars – an overwhelming investigative task for the police.
On Saturday, 23 April, Patricia Atkinson became Sutcliffe’s next victim. By the time he came across her, she was drunk. Together, they walked to his car and then drove back to her flat. As they entered through her front door, Sutcliffe struck the back of Atkinson’s head with the same hammer he had used on all of his previous victims. Before her unconscious body hit the floor, he struck her three more times. As the blood poured from her wounds, he began to remove her overcoat. He then lifted her, carried her to the bedroom and threw her down on the bed. There, he ripped open her black leather jacket and blue shirt. Pulling up her bra to reveal her breasts, he then pulled her jeans down to her ankles. With a chisel he had removed from his pocket, he began to stab at her now-exposed stomach. He turned her over and stabbed her in the back but did not penetrate the skin. Then he quickly turned her back over to stab her stomach again, leaving a total of six stab wounds. Before he left her, he pulled her jeans back up and, without realising it, he left a size seven Dunlop Warwick wellington boot print on the bottom bed sheet.
His next victim was the youngest, 16-year-old Jayne McDonald, who met her untimely death at the hands of Sutcliffe on 25 June 1977. She was going out dancing and was in a happy mood. She kissed her father goodbye before she left their home in Reginald Terrace, Chapeltown, for the last time. After the dance, Jayne had gone with friends to buy chips in the city centre, but missed the last bus home.
At 11.50pm, she began walking home with Mark Jones, a young man she had met earlier that night. He was to organise a lift home for her with his sister, but the sister wasn’t home when they got there. Jayne and Mark continued walking together, stopping for a brief kiss and cuddle, as far as the Florence Nightingale public house. It was 1.30am when they went their separate ways. At a kiosk near the Dock Green pub, near the corner of Beckett Street, Jayne stopped at 1.45am to call a taxi, but there was no answer. As she approached the playground, she did not see Sutcliffe lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce on her as she passed by.
Two children found her body at 9.45am on Sunday, 26 June, near a wall inside the playground where Sutcliffe had dragged her. She was lying face down, her skirt was in disarray and her white halterneck top was pulled up to expose her breasts. He had struck her three times on the back of the head with his hammer and then stabbed her repeatedly in the chest and once in the back.
Following McDonald’s murder – an ‘innocent young woman’ rather than a prostitute – the police were inundated with information from the public. People who might before have been interested only in hearing the gory details of the attacks now felt personally affronted and threatened by the man they dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper. Where previously witnesses had been reluctant to admit to any connection with the murdered prostitutes, people from the surrounding area were now readily volunteering information to help the police in their attempts to catch Jayne’s killer. Despite extensive enquiries, Sutcliffe evaded detection and was undeterred.
On Saturday, 9 July 1977 Sutcliffe headed off to the red-light district in Bradford. As he trawled the streets at 2am, he saw Maureen Long waiting in a long queue at a taxi rank. He was driving his white Ford Corsair. He pulled alongside her and offered her a lift. Long foolishly accepted and got in. Sutcliffe drove her to Bowling Back Lane, where he struck a massive blow to the back of her head. As she lay on the ground, he stabbed her in the abdomen and back. The barking of a dog nearby interrupted his frenzied attack and he left Maureen for dead and fled the scene. His car was seen leaving the area by a night watchman who was working nearby, at 3.27am. He described the car as a Ford Cortina Mark II, white with a black roof. The next morning, two women living in a nearby caravan heard cries for help, went to investigate and found Long lying seriously injured on the ground. The injuries she sustained would have killed most people, but somehow she survived. She described her attacker as being white, with a large build, about 35, with light brown, shoulder-length hair. He was about 6ft tall, with puffy cheeks and big hands. She wasn’t sure about the colour of the car; it might have been white or yellow, or blue.
Sutcliffe carried on with his life as normal; it was really beginning to improve. On Monday, 26 September, he and his wife moved into their new home and he bought himself another second-hand Ford Corsair, a red one to replace the white Corsair he had sold on 31 August.
The following Saturday, 1 October 1977, after spending the day working on his new car, Sutcliffe decided to take it out for a test drive and finished up in Manchester. By 9.30pm, he had selected his next victim, Jean Bernadette Jordan, aged 20. She got into his car near her home in Moss Side. She took Sutcliffe to a quiet area of vacant land between some allotments and the Southern Cemetery, where she had sexual intercourse with him for £5. Before getting out of the car, she put the £5 note in a hidden compartment of her handbag. Once out of the car, Sutcliffe used his hammer to hit her over the head a total of 13 times. He then hid her body in undergrowth near the fence between the cemetery and the allotments.
Sutcliffe then returned home but began to worry about the £5 note he had given Jean Jordan. It was a brand-new note and it might be possible to trace it back to him. By Sunday, 9 October, there still had been no word of the discovery of Jean’s body in the papers. Sutcliffe drove back to the body and found it exactly as he had left it, but her handbag was missing. As he searched the area, he became frantic at the prospect of the police finding the £5 note. When his frustration and fury were at their peak, he dragged the lifeless and already rotting body away from its hiding place. He tore Jean’s clothes from her body, and then stabbed her over and over again. Eighteen times he stabbed at her breasts, chest, stomach and vagina. They were fierce slashing swipes, some 8in deep. One extended from her left shoulder down to her right knee. When the rage subsided, Sutcliffe thought again of the £5 note, and attempted to cut off Jean’s head. His intention was to divert police attention by disposing of her head somewhere else.
When he realised that it was an impossible task with only a small hacksaw and a broken pane of glass, he gave up and went home. The unrecognisable body of Jean Jordan was found on 10 October. She was later identified from her fingerprints.
On Saturday 15 October, Jean Jordan’s handbag was found only 100yd from where her body had lain the week before. The £5 note Sutcliffe had given her that he so desperately wanted to retrieve was found in the hidden pocket where she had placed it. The note, with the serial number AW51 121565, was brand new, issued only a couple of days before she was killed. The Bank of England established that the note was part of a consignment sent to the Shipley and Bingley branches of the Midland Bank, right in the heart of the Yorkshire Ripper area.
It was quickly established that the note in question had been part of a bundle of £500 and had been the fifth-last note in a sequence of 69. The note had been part of a batch of £17,500 that had been distributed to a number of firms in the Bradford and Shipley area which employed almost 8,000 men in total.
A team of officers concentrated on tracing the note for a total of three months. They interviewed 5,000 of those 8,000 men. One of the firms they concentrated on was T & WH Clark (Holdings Ltd) in Canal Road, Shipley. They interviewed the men who worked there, including Peter William Sutcliffe of Garden Lane, Heaton. There had been nothing about Peter, or
the other 5,000 men, that had seemed suspicious. They had even spoken to his wife, Sonia, who had not contradicted Sutcliffe’s movements in any way on the nights in question.
Despite the high police presence and activity in the areas where the murders had taken place, Sutcliffe could not resist the urge to seek out another victim. However, this victim was later able to provide a strong identification of him and his car. On 14 December, a prostitute named Marilyn Moore, aged 25, left a friend’s home in Gathorne Terrace, near the Gaiety pub, at 8pm. As she walked along, she noticed a dark-coloured car drive slowly towards her, and was sure that the driver was a potential client. She was proved correct and saw the car parked near a junction known as Frankland Place. The driver was leaning against his door. He was about 30, with a stocky build, around 5ft 6in tall with dark, wavy hair and a beard. He was wearing a yellow shirt, a navy blue or black zip-up anorak and blue jeans, and appeared to be waving to someone in a nearby house. This was none other than Peter Sutcliffe.
Sutcliffe asked Moore if she was ‘doing business’ and they agreed a price before she got into the car with him. As they drove off to a secluded location about a mile and a half away, he told her that his name was Dave and that the person he had been waving to was his girlfriend. When they arrived at their destination, Sutcliffe suggested that they have sex in the back seat, but when Moore got out of the car she found that the back door was locked. As Sutcliffe came behind her to open the door, Moore felt a sickening blow to the top of her head. She screamed loudly and attempted to protect her head with her hands. She fell to the ground, frantically grabbing her attacker’s trousers as she fell, then felt further blows before losing consciousness. A dog barked at the sound of her screams and Sutcliffe left before he could finish. Moore remembered hearing him walk back to his car and slam the door, and then she heard the back wheels skid as he hurriedly drove away. Slowly, Moore managed to get herself to her feet and stumble towards a telephone. Before she reached it, a man and woman, noticing the blood running from her head, stopped to help and called an ambulance. She was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary and underwent an emergency operation. Moore stayed in hospital until just before New Year’s Eve, but it was a long time before she could face returning to Leeds, with a hole in the back of her head and scars all over her scalp.
The police now knew that Marilyn had been another of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims. This was confirmed when the tyre tracks left by his car were matched to those found at the site of Irene Richardson’s death. Despite this new evidence, the hunt for the Ripper continued without success. The senior police officer leading the investigation decided to pull his officers out of Bradford, accepting that they had probably met the killer and failed to recognise him.
By the end of January 1978, police were beginning to wonder whether the Ripper had been scared off by his unsuccessful attack on Marilyn Moore. What they did not know at the time was that Sutcliffe had, in fact, killed again on the night of 21 January. However, his victim, Yvonne Pearson, would not be found until the end of March, when her severely mutilated body was discovered under an old sofa on waste ground off Arthington Street, Bradford. She had been bludgeoned with a large blunt instrument, presumed to have been a rock. This caused police to wonder. This was not the Ripper’s usual method, but many of the other characteristics of this murder were similar to the earlier deaths.
Yvonne Pearson had left her two girls, aged two years and five months, in the care of a babysitter on the night of 21 January 1978 to see if she could earn some money. Her first stop that night had been the Flying Dutchman pub, which she was seen leaving at 9.30pm. Soon after that, Sutcliffe invited her to get into his car to do ‘some business’. When they parked, he hit her repeatedly on the head with a lump hammer. When she was dead, he hid her body under the sofa and jumped on her chest until her ribs had broken. Fear of discovery by people in the area had cut short his time with Yvonne and he had not stabbed her. A newspaper, dated one month after her death, was placed under her body, leading police to believe that the killer had later returned to the scene of the crime.
Any hopes police may have had that the killer had stopped were soon shattered. On Tuesday, 31 January 1978, in the red-light district of Huddersfield, Sutcliffe was again trawling the streets. He came across Helen Rytka, who was soliciting. She had previously been working in company with her sister and both had been careful to take the registration numbers of each other’s clients. However, there was a short time gap during which they became separated and when Helen got into Sutcliffe’s car her sister was not around to take down the details. Sutcliffe drove to a timber yard near the railway, a common haunt of prostitutes and their clients. He convinced her to get into the back seat and, as she did so, he struck her with the hammer. He missed and hit the car door instead, alerting Helen to the danger she was in, but before she had a chance to scream he had hit her again. She immediately crumpled to the ground. It was then that Sutcliffe realised they were in full view of two taxi drivers, who stood talking nearby. Taking Helen by the hair, he dragged her to the back of the wood yard. Still alive, she vainly attempted to protect herself from the hammer as Sutcliffe crashed it down onto her head again. Scared that the taxi drivers would notice them, Sutcliffe lay on top of Helen and covered her mouth with his hand, then had sex with her as she lay bleeding. Finally, the taxi drivers left and Peter got up to find his hammer, which he had dropped. While he searched, Helen attempted to escape. As she ran from him, Peter hit her several more times on the back of the head. Still alive, she was dragged to the front of the car, where Sutcliffe stabbed her through the heart and lungs with a kitchen knife he had hidden in his car.
Helen’s sister arrived at their meeting point only five minutes after Helen had left with Sutcliffe. After waiting for some time in the freezing cold, she gave up and went home, assuming that Helen would be waiting for her there. Fear of the police prevented her from reporting Helen’s disappearance until Thursday. On Friday, 3 February, a police dog located Helen’s body where Sutcliffe had left it on the previous Tuesday.
It was another two months before Sutcliffe killed again. His next victim was 41-year-old Vera Millward. She left her home on Tuesday, 16 May, to buy some cigarettes and pick up some painkillers from the nearby hospital. Sometime after purchasing her cigarettes, she met Sutcliffe. In the grounds of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, in a well-lit area, Sutcliffe struck Vera on the head three times, then, undressing her in his usual manner, he slashed her so viciously across her stomach that her intestines spilled out. He also stabbed her repeatedly in the one wound on her back, just below the lower left ribs, and punctured her right eyelid, bruising her eye. Her screams for help were heard and ignored by a man and his son entering the hospital at the time of her attack. People in this area were well accustomed to such cries in the night. When he had finished with her, Sutcliffe dragged her body 4yd away and dumped her by a chain-link fence, on a rubbish pile in a corner of the car park. She was found at 8.10am the following morning, lying on her right side, face down with her arms folded beneath her and her legs straight. He had placed her shoes neatly on her body. Tyre tracks were found nearby. They matched those left at the murder site of Irene Richardson and at the site where Marilyn Moore had been attacked. But still the police were no nearer catching the killer.
It was then a further 11 months before Sutcliffe killed again. During that period, his mother died, at the age of 59. He had always been close to her and he was grief-stricken. In this time, he had replaced the red Corsair with a metallic-grey Sunbeam Rapier. At work, he was a conscientious driver who kept immaculate logs and repair records. His workmates saw him as a bit of a loner who kept very much to himself and never showed any signs of violence – nor did he swear or speak crudely about sex or women. When police interviewed him again because his registration number had been noted in red-light areas, he was not noticeably concerned. He explained that driving to and from work regularly took him through those areas.
During th
e time of the murders, police had received a number of letters from people claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper. Two of these had originated from Sunderland in the northeast of England, and the police had looked at them in great detail but doubted their authenticity. However, on 23 March 1979 they received a third letter, also from Sunderland, which contained a reference to the Vera Millward murder. This made them wonder. Saliva samples from the envelope were tested and this time they got a result; they indicated the rare blood group B, the same as that of Joan Harrison’s killer. Forensic tests now confirmed that all three of the letters were from the same source. The writer predicted that the next victim would be ‘an old slut’ in Bradford or Liverpool.
This prediction was to prove incorrect when on Wednesday, 4 April 1979, the killer struck again. Josephine Whitaker, aged 19 and a building-society clerk, had walked the short mile to her grandparents’ home in Halifax to show them the new watch she had bought. Her grandmother had been out when she arrived, so she watched television with her grandfather to await her grandmother’s return at 11pm. Tom and Mary Priestley always enjoyed their granddaughter’s weekly Sunday visits, and had been pleasantly surprised by this extra midweek visit. When Jo, as they called her, decided to go home, her grandparents tried to talk her into staying the night. It was only a 10-minute walk home, which she had done many times before.
It was almost midnight by the time Whitaker reached Saville Park, an area of open grassland surrounded by well-lit roads. As she walked across the damp grass in the park, she met Peter Sutcliffe, who stopped her to ask the time. She looked towards the town clock in the distance and Peter took the hammer from his jacket, crashing it down on her head. As she lay on the grass, he hit her again, and then dragged her 10yd back into the darkness, away from the road. He pulled her clothing back and stabbed her 25 times, in her breasts, stomach and thighs; even in her vagina. He left her lying like a bundle of rags. One of her tan shoes still lay at the roadside where his attack had begun. She had been almost in sight of her home when she was murdered. The next morning, at 6.30am, a woman waiting at a bus stop found the body and called the police.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 39