The pathologist’s report revealed that there had been traces of a mineral oil used in engineering shops in Josephine Whitaker’s wounds. It was soon confirmed that the particles were similar to those found on one of the envelopes of the mysterious letters from Sunderland. The letters were seen as credible evidence that could lead to the capture of the elusive Yorkshire Ripper.
The police then dispatched a team of detectives to carry out enquiries in Sunderland. Two months later, they received a cassette tape from the writer of the letters, which sent them on a wild goose chase as they then searched for a killer with a Geordie accent. While police officials debated whether or not to go public with the tape, news of its arrival and contents were leaked to the press. The decision was made and a press conference, at which the tape was played, was called on Tuesday, 26 June 1979. Despite public appeals and extensive enquiries, the man whose voice was on the tape and who is believed to have written the three letters was not traced. In the end, police had serious doubts about whether the tape and the letters were actually genuine.
Then Peter Sutcliffe struck again, throwing the police enquiry wide open once more. On the night of 1 September 1979, Barbara Janine Leach went to the Manville Arms in Bradford with five of her closest friends. Barbara was a student at Bradford University and lived with a group of students in a house in Grove Terrace, just across Great Horton Road from the university. Also at the Manville Arms that night was Peter Sutcliffe. He had seen Barbara from across the other side of the room and had watched her continuously. At closing time, 11pm, he left and waited in his car outside. Barbara, along with her five friends, had stayed behind to help clean up and have a drink with the landlord. When they finally left at 12.45am, Sutcliffe was watching nearby as the group walked towards Great Horton Road. As they were about to turn left into Grove Terrace, Barbara decided to go for a walk and invited her friend, Paul Smith, to join her. When he declined the offer, she asked him to wait for her, as she didn’t have a key. He agreed and they parted company.
As he watched Barbara walk down Great Horton Road alone, Sutcliffe started the car and drove down to Back Ash Grove, where he parked. Armed with the hammer and knife, he got out of the car and walked quickly along the alleyway, knowing that Barbara would soon be walking past at the other end. He waited for her in the shadows of Back Ash Grove, listening to the echo of her boots on the pavement as she walked towards him. As she passed, he sprang, smashing the hammer into her head. With just one blow she was dead.
Sutcliffe then dragged the lifeless body back into the shadows of the side entrance towards Back Ash Grove. In the yard behind number 13, he dropped her body and tore at her clothing, exposing her breasts, abdomen and knickers. He stabbed her eight times, then dragged her body close to some rubbish bins and covered her with a piece of old carpet lying nearby. When Leach was reported missing the following day a search began, and her body was found that afternoon. Professor Gee, the pathologist who had worked on all of the Yorkshire Ripper cases, believed that the knife used to stab Leach was the same one used on Josephine Whitaker. With the deaths of two victims who were not prostitutes in non-red light areas in a six-month period, the West Yorkshire public now began venting its anger on the police. All this time, Peter Sutcliffe was living only five minutes away from the police headquarters in Bradford.
By 1979, police were able to use their new national database. By entering the makes and registration numbers of vehicles sighted in the areas of the attacks, the computer could chart precise flow patterns of individual vehicles. It was hoped that witness information about a particular type of car in the area of an attack could be matched with vehicle registration numbers recorded in the area and then cross-checked against other records. Through this process, the police were able to eliminate 200,000 vehicles – including the one driven by Sutcliffe.
While the use of the computer saved thousands of man-hours in some way, it also created an avalanche of new information that had to be checked. By the beginning of 1980, the police were faced with millions of facts – five million in the case of car registration numbers alone – and they were now swamped, barely able to keep up.
Since January 1979, when police had searched for the owner of the £5 note found in Jean Jordan’s handbag, they had returned many times to interview employees of firms such as the haulier Clark’s, where Peter Sutcliffe worked. Sutcliffe had been interviewed on a number of occasions and his workmates had taken to calling him the Ripper because of the apparent police interest in him. Even as late as 1980, Sutcliffe was never considered to be a strong suspect, despite the fact that he had a gap in his front teeth, his car had been spotted in red-light districts a number of times, his blood type was of the B group but he was not a secretor, he had the right boot size and his name was on the now dramatically shortened list of 300 possible recipients of the £5 note.
Another vital error the police made was that none of the men interviewed at this time were given blood tests, nor were any placed under surveillance or their boot sizes checked. The overwhelming reason for Sutcliffe not being considered a viable suspect, even after a total of nine interviews with police, was that he had provided alibis verified by Sonia, and because he did not have a Geordie accent – a frightening indication of how assumptions can prejudice an investigation to the point where vital clues are missed.
In April 1979, during his travels, Sutcliffe met and had an affair with a woman from Glasgow, Theresa Douglas, whom he visited on many occasions. Sutcliffe was also stopped by police for drink-driving around this time, an offence for which he was likely to lose his licence. But he was nervous for a far more important reason than this. What if the arresting police were to find that he had been interviewed many times in the Yorkshire Ripper investigations? Would he be revealed as the killer, wanted in what had become known as the crime investigation of the century? However, luck was on his side yet again; there were no cross-checks done and he was soon free to go home.
As he waited for his impending court appearance, due in January 1981, Sutcliffe attacked four women, killing two of them. The first attack occurred in the respectable suburb of Farsley, Leeds. His 47-year-old victim, Marguerite Walls, was a civil servant who worked at the Department of Education and Science at Farsley. She worked late on the night of 20 August 1980, as she had wanted to clear her desk before she started her holiday the following day. She left her office building at 10.30pm to begin the short walk home, taking the longest but safest route along well-lit streets. In New Street, as she walked past the entrance to a local magistrate’s house, Peter Sutcliffe jumped out from behind the fence where he had waited for her and hit her on the head with his hammer. Marguerite did not fall to the ground as he expected her to. Instead, she began to scream, and a second blow to the head still did not stop her screaming as she held her now-bleeding head. To stop her screaming, he grabbed her by the neck and strangled her. As he did so, he dragged her into the driveway and through the overgrown bushes of a property called Claremont. By this time, Marguerite was dead. Sutcliffe ripped at her clothes, tearing them from her and scattering them around the garden. His anger and frustration at his failure to bring his knife rose; he rained blows on her body with his hammer. Before leaving her, he covered her body with leaves. As he left the garden, he checked that the street was quiet before stepping out from the darkness. Fifteen minutes later, he was safely home. When Marguerite was found the following morning, only 400yd from her home, it was soon determined that, although she had been bludgeoned with a hammer, her strangulation ruled her out as a victim of the Ripper.
Sutcliffe’s next attack was also in Leeds, in Headingley. It was 24 September when Dr Upadhya Bandara was walking home after visiting friends in Headingley. As she walked past the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop, she noticed a man inside staring at her. She walked on past North Lane, and then turned right into St Michael’s Lane. As she turned into Chapel Lane, an alley that cut through to Cardigan Road, she was hurled to the ground. Sutcliffe slammed his hammer
into her head, rendering her unconscious. He held her around the neck with a ligature to prevent her escape. Bandara lay bleeding on the ground as Sutcliffe picked up her shoes and handbag and took them several yards away. Before he could resume his attack, he heard footsteps and fled. The footsteps belonged to Valerie Nicholas, whose house backed onto the lane. She had heard noises at 10.30pm and had gone out to investigate. Her actions saved the life of Bandara, who later recovered from the attack. The police in Headingley, for whatever reason, did not believe that the Yorkshire Ripper had attacked Dr Upadhya Bandara, despite the fact that she described her attacker as having black hair and a full beard and moustache.
Sutcliffe’s next attack, on 5 November 1980, was in Huddersfield, but at the time this was not looked on as the work of the Ripper. Theresa Sykes, a 16-year-old who lived with her boyfriend and their three-month-old son, was followed by Sutcliffe from the Minstrel pub. She was walking across grassland not far from her home when he attacked her with his hammer, hitting her three times about the head. One of the blows was so severe that it penetrated her skull. Theresa screamed as Peter struck her. Her boyfriend watched in horror from their living-room window. Within seconds, he was running towards Theresa and Sutcliffe. When Sutcliffe saw him, he ran off into the darkness of the night. Theresa miraculously survived the brutal attack. After spending several weeks in hospital, she returned home but was never the same again. She was now afraid of men; her whole personality had changed, and she was quick to flare up in anger over the smallest thing. Sutcliffe had left his mark on yet another family.
On the night of 17 November 1980, Sutcliffe again was in the Headingley district of Leeds as he ate at the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. He sat looking out of the window, and at 9.23pm he saw student Jacqueline Hill get off a bus. He began to follow Jacqueline after she passed the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. He was behind her as she entered the dimly lit Alma Road towards the Lupton Flats, where she had recently moved. She was almost home when Sutcliffe struck her on the back of the head. He dragged her lifeless body onto some vacant land, which was hidden from view by trees and bushes, and stabbed her repeatedly. He stabbed her in the eye that had stared up at him accusingly as her tore at her clothes and slashed her naked body. When he had finished, he left her body and headed for home. However, he forgot that her handbag and glasses still lay on the pavement in Alma Road where she had dropped them when he initially attacked her. The bag was found by a member of the public and, due to blood spots found on it, handed to the police. They carried out a search of the area but failed to find the body. It was not until daybreak that the body was found where Sutcliffe had left it.
By now the public response was overwhelming and one report the police received came from the friend of Peter Sutcliffe, Trevor Birdsall. He actually named Peter Sutcliffe to the police, telling them that Sutcliffe was a lorry driver from Bradford. When police had still not questioned Sutcliffe two weeks later, Birdsall went to Bradford police station, where he repeated his allegations to the officer on the reception desk. The report was fed into the system but Peter Sutcliffe continued to roam free. Trevor had been suspicious of Peter for some time before he went to the police, even as far back as Olive Smelt’s attack, but Peter was his friend and he didn’t like to think he was capable of killing. The police insistence that the Yorkshire Ripper was from Sunderland and spoke with a Geordie accent had allayed Trevor’s suspicions for a long time. When Birdsall heard nothing more from the police, he assumed that they had followed up his allegations but that he had been wrong about Sutcliffe. What he didn’t know what that his letter had never reached the murder incident room. It had been lost under a mountain of uncollated paperwork.
On Friday, 2 January 1981, Peter Sutcliffe decided to go to Sheffield; it was the first time he had ventured this far away from home in search of prostitutes. He was in his own car and was armed with his hammer. It was not long before he came across another unsuspecting prostitute. Twenty-four-year-old Olivia Reivers had met with another prostitute, Denise Hall, 19, to ply her trade in Sheffield’s red-light district. It was around 9pm when Denise met her first potential client, Peter Sutcliffe. He was driving his brown Rover 3500 and had pulled up to the kerb, but there was something about his eyes that had disturbed her. Despite his good looks, with a neatly trimmed beard and dark wavy hair, he had frightened her, so she declined his offer of £10.
Sutcliffe continued to cruise the area and an hour later came across Olivia Reivers. When Olivia looked into Peter’s eyes she did not see what her friend Denise had seen. Sutcliffe offered her £10 and she got into his car. They drove a short distance to a quiet location where Olivia had often taken her clients. After attempting to have sex, Sutcliffe had been unable to become aroused, despite Olivia’s many attempts to help him, so they had sat and talked for a while. She did not know that he had a hammer and a knife in his pocket.
Olivia Reivers was saved from an attack by Sutcliffe by the arrival of two uniformed police officers on patrol who had seen the parked car and decided to check it out. They pulled up behind the Rover and questioned the couple sitting in the car. Sutcliffe said his name was Peter Williams. Reivers said she was his girlfriend. One of the officers remembered her face and believed she was a convicted prostitute. He told her to get into the police car. Sutcliffe told them he needed to go to the toilet. He wanted to dispose of the hammer and the knife, and walked further along the dark driveway. There was an oil storage tank nearby. It was behind this tank, well out of view of the policemen, that Sutcliffe disposed of his hammer and knife; he hoped that the police had not seen or heard him.
In the meantime, one of the officers did a check on Sutcliffe’s car and found that the registration number on his vehicle belonged to a Skoda and not a Rover 3500. The officers examined closely the plates on Sutcliffe’s car, which were held on with black tape. They found the correct plates underneath. Sutcliffe confirmed this and admitted that his real name was Peter William Sutcliffe and that he lived at Garden Lane, Heaton, Bradford. He said he had lied because he didn’t want his wife to find out that he had been with a prostitute.
Both Sutcliffe and Reivers were taken to the local police station. They were placed in separate interview rooms. Sutcliffe told them that he had stolen the plates from a car in a scrapyard in another police district, Dewsbury, which meant he should be taken back to the district where the crime was committed. The police, however, failed to make a thorough search of him when he arrived at the police station and so didn’t notice that he was still in possession of a second knife. He asked to go to the toilet, where he hid the knife in the cistern. When Sutcliffe was stripped of his clothing at the police station, he was discovered to be wearing a V-neck sweater under his trousers; the arms had been pulled over his legs, so that the V-neck exposed his groin; the elbows were padded to protect his knees as, presumably, he knelt over his victims’ corpses. The sexual implications of this outfit should have been obvious, but the police did not pick up on it at that time.
A routine call to the Dewsbury police was made from the incident room because of a recent directive that any man found with prostitutes in suspicious circumstances was to be reported. At 8.55am, Peter Sutcliffe arrived at Dewsbury police station, where he was transferred to the station’s interview room. Just after 9am, Sonia called and was told that her husband was being interviewed in relation to the theft of car number plates. In the interview room, Sutcliffe chatted with officers about his work as a lorry driver and his love of cars. They noted that he had dark frizzy hair, a beard and a gap between his teeth.
The officers were familiar with the five points of reference for the elimination of suspects in the Yorkshire Ripper case but were not fazed by the lack of a Geordie accent. Peter Sutcliffe lived in Bradford in the heart of Ripper country and had told them that he had driven to Sunderland many times in his work as a lorry driver. The list of possible cars did not include the brown Rover that Sutcliffe was driving at the time of his arrest, but he had told them abo
ut his white Corsair with the black roof. While being questioned, Sutcliffe openly admitted that he had been questioned on a number of other occasions in relation to the Yorkshire Ripper case. Detective Sergeant Des O’Boyle, an officer working on the murders and well versed in the Yorkshire Ripper case, had left for Dewsbury at lunchtime on Saturday, 6 November, to question Sutcliffe himself. During the afternoon, a blood test revealed that Sutcliffe was of the rare B group. That night, Sutcliffe remained in the police cells at Dewsbury.
Back in Sheffield, one of the arresting officers Police Sgt Robert Ring came back on duty at 10pm. He was told that Sutcliffe was still being held at Dewsbury police station and being questioned by Yorkshire Ripper squad officers. This officer then made a decision that had a momentous impact on the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Sutcliffe had left his car to go to the toilet; maybe he had left something at the scene – the officer recalled hearing a clinking noise. So he returned to the driveway on Melbourne Avenue to have a look around. When he shone his torch on the ground by the wall behind the oil storage tank, Sgt Ring found the hammer and knife that Sutcliffe had left there the night before.
The police now believed they might have finally caught the Yorkshire Ripper. They executed search warrants at Sutcliffe’s house, and recovered a number of tools, including hammers. Sonia Sutcliffe accompanied them back to Bradford where she was extensively questioned for 13 hours. The officers attempted to obtain as many details of Sutcliffe’s movements at the times of the attacks as possible. At the same time, officers behind the scenes were working to gain as much information about Sutcliffe’s movements over the past five years as they could, including visits to past employers and making other enquiries in the Bradford area.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 40