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

by Gordon Burn

  The height, combined with the sense of mass and speed, seemed to invigorate Peter and fill him with the confidence he normally lacked. It was Peter who taught Carl to drive, and Carl, like Mick, would often go off with his brother on overnight runs. ‘He were just like a normal lorry-driver wi’ arm out window, shouting and hooting horn at birds.

  ‘He used to feel right powerful in that truck, though. If any cars got in way of him, he’d get right close behind them going downhill and frighten them to death if they couldn’t get a move on. He liked going fast. He used to go fast everywhere.’

  Working at Clark’s, Peter got into the habit of dropping in on his mother whenever his route took him along the Aire valley past Bingley, which was usually once or twice a week. Although for a long time her doctors couldn’t find anything specifically wrong with Kathleen, her general health, in the years leading up to her fifty-ninth birthday, started to gradually deteriorate. Peter himself traced it back to the Bankfield Hotel confrontation orchestrated by his father, and saw it as part of his job to cheer his mother up during his brief visits. The way he attempted this was by making light of her various complaints, and it was a rare visit when he didn’t leave her with at least the trace of a smile on her face.

  Although things could never be the same between them after the break-up, John and Kathleen had settled back into an uneventful, if rather uneasy, domestic existence. They were seen slightly more often in each other’s company, but John was reluctant to drop any of his outside interests and she seemed content to let him go his own way. John’s crowd had never been Kathleen’s, and she was happier sitting at home with the television than struggling to keep her end up among people whom she considered her natural social and intellectual superiors.

  The rigid class divisions, status rivalries and petty snobberies that characterised ‘Warnley’, the thinly disguised portrait of Bingley drawn by John Braine in his 1950s’ novel Room at the Top, were still very much in evidence twenty years later, as Carl Sutcliffe could hardly help noticing. Socially, to say you were from Ferncliffe Estate was the kiss of death, and Carl therefore would never admit to it. ‘The people up Gilstead and Eldwick really look down on the people from “the estate” as they call it. They’re in another bracket. They always seemed totally different to us. They always seemed really posh. So we used to say we lived somewhere else.’

  John Sutcliffe, however, not only chose to ignore the social barriers that had been erected but was pleased to call the bank managers and schoolteachers and other backbones of the amateur dramatic and operatic societies and the Musical Union – in other words, the very people singled out by Braine as the embodiment of small-town bourgeois values in his book – his friends.

  ‘He likes to think of himself as a bit of a toff,’ Carl would say. ‘He’s always like that: allus trying to prove summat. Everybody on estate thought he were a nutter. We used to build dens out of old wood in back garden an’ he went in once an’ liked it so much he slept in there two nights running. I were tempted to throw a match on it. I were always tellin’ me mother I thought he were puddled.’

  John celebrated his return to Cornwall Road by turning the downstairs dinette into a ‘bar’, complete with pub counter, piano and home-brewed wines and beer. Carl, by then the only one still living with his parents, used to live in dread of the Saturday nights when it was his father’s turn to bring some of his ‘cronies’ home with him from the pub. The trouble he went to, baking sausage-rolls and pies and cutting sandwiches, was confirmation in Mick’s eyes of him ‘allus trying to mix a bit higher up than anybody else’.

  There was no mistaking the pleasure it gave John to be able to say that he had entertained what, to him, were some of the pillars of the community, in his own house. ‘One night I had a headmaster, a bank manager, the area manager from the telephone department, a chap who had a radio and television business, a detective-sergeant who got made up to an officer later, the theatre critic from the Telegraph and Argus and his wife …

  ‘I always had a few friends that were capable of giving a nice entertainment on the piano and always a few who could sing a bit. And that particular night the Musical Union had had a concert somewhere in Bingley and I just threw an open invitation to anybody that wanted to come back. There was about twenty-odd of us in that room and we supped and we sang and we had a real do.’

  The ladies, meanwhile, ‘who couldn’t quite bustle theirselves into hullabaloo’, sat in the front room with Kathleen. This kind of overflow, however, wasn’t often a problem because the usual Saturday crowd didn’t normally exceed ten, including Peter, who, with Sonia at work, would regularly look in for a drink for half an hour. His arrival was always particularly welcomed by the wives of his father’s friends to whom, unlike his brothers, he was unfailingly charming, and who, as a result, considered him ‘a proper gentleman’.

  The popular view of Mick and Carl as ‘rough diamonds – you know, a bit scattish’ was reinforced one Friday night just after Easter 1977 when they were both arrested following a ‘riot’ at the Granby. Carl, who was only seventeen at the time, was eventually acquitted after being remanded in custody for nearly a week. But Mick was fined £225 for hitting a police sergeant and, because he was already the subject of an eleven-month suspended sentence for burglary, ended up in Armley jail for three months.

  The running battle, which it had eventually taken forty policemen to contain, was given extensive coverage in the next day’s local papers. Nobody would be able to remember whether Peter looked in at Cornwall Road that Saturday night, 23 April 1977. But his car was travelling away from Bingley in the early hours of Sunday morning. As it passed Cottingley Bridge, a heavy object was thrown from the driver’s window of the white Ford Corsair into the grounds of Harrison’s Printers. It was the claw-hammer that had been used to beat Tina Atkinson to death, just over an hour earlier.

  *

  Patricia Atkinson had been given the name ‘Tina’ by the Asian immigrant whom she had married in Bradford in the early 1970s, and who had been awarded custody of their three daughters when the marriage broke up a few years later, because of Tina’s unruly way of life.

  The remarkable thing was that time hadn’t been as unkind to Tina as it had to many of the other prostitutes whom she walked the streets with and drank with in the pubs on Lumb Lane. These were the women whom John Sutcliffe, now working for Stroud, Ridley, Drummond, owners of the huge mill whose black chimney and slab walls overshadowed everything else in the Lane, thought of as ‘the old hags who’ll do it for a packet of fags and a pint from the old black men, who live from hand to mouth’.

  Tina’s features hadn’t become coarsened like most of theirs, nor her flesh slack, and her long, dark hair had kept its natural colour. Tina was also unusual in that she had somewhere to go with her ‘punters’ that wasn’t open to the elements. She had a bedsit on the ground floor of a modern building only a few minutes’ walk away, near the southern boundary of Manningham Park.

  The death of Irene Richardson in February, the third prostitute murdered in Leeds in fifteen months, had had a dramatic effect on activity in the city’s red-light area, at least in the short term: what prostitutes there were left on the streets had started to go about ‘team-handed’, working in twos and threes; but the real professionals had decamped to Manchester, the Midlands and London until such time as they felt it was safe to return.

  Despite their geographical proximity, however, the mood of fear and suspicion gripping Chapeltown hadn’t descended on Manningham by the spring of 1977. By 2.00 p.m. when the early shift at Drummonds mill let out, ‘the girls’ were already starting to appear on Lumb Lane; and by 4.30 they were out in sufficient numbers to provide a constant diversion for the commuters returning to the outlying towns and villages and to the western suburbs of Bradford.

  Standing at one of the busiest intersections in the area, on a corner between an Asian second-hand clothes shop and a West Indian social club, the Perseverance is a natural meeting pla
ce and trading centre for people from all parts of the community. The persistent muzak reflects the cosmopolitan nature of the clientele: the tape of a northern comedian telling jokes that almost anywhere else in the country would be considered both tasteless (‘So I says to the doctor, me dick’s like a friggin’ walnut-whip …’) and racist (‘I saved a Paki from drowning the other day. I took me foot off his head’) is followed by high-decibel selections of soul music and reggae.

  The Perseverance was full as usual on the night of Saturday, 23 April, and Tina Atkinson, as she usually was, was in the thick of it, shouting to make herself heard above the din. In the middle of the evening, though, wearing the short leather jacket, blue jeans and largely unbuttoned blue shirt that everybody in the area was used to seeing her in, she left the ‘Persie’ and tottered up Lumb Lane to another of her regular haunts, the Carlisle, in Carlisle Road. After three quarters of an hour, the manager there decided that she had had enough to drink and, around 10.30, she set off again in the direction of the International – ‘the Nash’ – a mainly black after-hours drinking club standing on its own in an acre of rubble back on the Lane.

  It was en route to the International that she fell into the orbit of Peter Sutcliffe. He noticed her banging on the roof of an unoccupied car, obviously the worse for drink and using the sort of ‘foul language no decent woman would have been using’. When he stopped, she jumped in beside him without any coaxing, and they drove the few hundred yards to Oak Lane where she lived.

  He retrieved a claw-hammer from under his seat as he got out of the car and hung his coat up in Tina’s flat with the hammer still in it. He waited until she was sitting on the bed with her back to him before he struck her, and the four blows knocked her to the floor. Having hoisted her back on to the bed and exposed her breasts and the lower part of her body, he continued hitting her with one end of the hammer and clawing her with the other and watched the marks appearing on the flesh.

  When he stuck a knife in her stomach, the blood looked red to him for the first time rather than the dark colour it had always looked in the dark, and he threw the sheets over her before leaving, to conceal it. She was still making ‘horrible gurgling noises’ when he closed the door, but he was satisfied that she ‘would not be in any state to tell anyone’ what had happened.

  *

  Discovering it thirty-six hours after it had been thrown there from a passing car, the groundsman at Harrison’s Printers in Cottingley Bridge happily appropriated the claw-hammer and used it for the next three years as he went about his business.

  18

  The Saturday following the murder of Tina Atkinson in Bradford, Peter had company on his rounds of the pubs which, that week, included one or two in Bingley.

  The Barker family had been the Szurmas’ next-door neighbours for as long as they had lived in Tanton Crescent. And, although she couldn’t claim to have actually broken down their reserve, Mrs Barker had got to know the people on the other side of the wall well enough to buy a set of photographs of Sonia’s wedding.

  Ronald, Mrs Barker’s younger son, had grown up alongside Sonia Szurma. But it was only after she became Mrs Sutcliffe, and her new husband moved into number 42, that ‘Ronnie’, an awkward, overweight young man with one overactive and one lazy eye, established any kind of significant social contact.

  As at Cornwall Road, messing about with engines continued to be Peter’s main source of recreation, and most evenings found him in the road in front of his father-in-law’s fiercely well-tended garden: Mr Szurma never allowed so much as a leaf to settle in the guttering around his copperplate-shaped lawn, and the same vigilance was extended to the outside of the house – the doorknocker had received so many coats of shiny black paint that it only produced a soft, muffled thud.

  Ronnie Barker earned his living as an insurance agent, and his social life centred around the church choir, of which he had been a member for some years, the local Liberals, and Bradford City football club. As a result of getting to know Peter, though, through a mutual friend who lived in the children’s home directly opposite, he developed an interest in cars which his new neighbour was happy to encourage.

  Ronnie’s experiences at the wheel, however, were not happy ones. His first car was a ‘sported-up’ Cortina with rally wheels, custom sprayed with streaks of lightning which Peter and his brother Mick had been happy to look over for him. The next time Mick saw Ronnie, though, in Bingley a week later, he had ‘two right shiners and a bust nose and stitches and dark glasses on, which our lad thought were hilarious’. After a few lessons from Peter, Ronnie had ventured out on his own and smashed the car straight into a brick wall.

  Ronnie’s next purchase, in August 1977, was the white Corsair with the black roof that Peter had been running for the previous two years. Peter’s reluctance to return what had been paid for it when it failed to go strained their relationship almost to breaking-point. But he relented when it was obvious that Ronnie intended to make a fuss, and the split that for a short time had seemed inevitable never happened.

  As a consequence, though, both Barkers, Ronnie and his older brother, David, were happy to leave the driving to Peter on the pub crawls with which they whiled away Saturday nights throughout 1977. Their usual route took in the towns and pubs that Peter was used to visiting with Trevor, but occasionally he insisted on travelling further afield, beyond the boundaries of the old West Riding.

  Manchester, thirty miles away on the M62, was one such destination, although Peter didn’t seem to know which part he was looking for when they arrived, and they ended up wandering aimlessly around the deserted business area on foot. But wherever they got to, the likelihood was that Peter would decide to make a detour through the red-light districts of Leeds or Bradford on the way home.

  Cruising in the dark, he would regale the Barkers with the stories, so familiar to Trevor, of how he went with prostitutes without paying and of the sort of things he got up to in the Corsair. ‘Last night, two birds followed me back to the car. I had one of them in the back seat and the other over the bonnet,’ he told them in the small hours of one Sunday in 1977.

  On 28 May, exactly a month after the murder of Tina Atkinson, Peter wanted to make a return visit to Manchester, but Ronnie persuaded him that it was too far and they eventually ended up in York. They called in at a handful of pubs but, tired of traipsing and of Peter’s pointed jibes at Ronnie about it being time he fixed himself up with a girl, the Barkers gave each other a game of pool. It was only at closing time that they realised they hadn’t seen Peter for nearly an hour. Later he told them that he’d ‘followed a lass’ out of the pub.

  Ronnie fell asleep in the back seat, as he often did, in the course of the drive home to Bradford. The next thing he knew they were in Chapeltown and Peter had disappeared again. He didn’t say where he’d been or what he had been doing in the twenty minutes or so that he was away from the car, but four Saturdays later, having shed the Barkers, he returned to Chapeltown alone.

  *

  By the summer of 1977, Wilma McCann, the first of the four women Peter Sutcliffe had murdered, had been dead for nearly two years. It was impossible to pass the house where she had lived with her four children, or the spot a few minutes’ walk away where her body had been found, without recalling some of the details of her death. But the lives of her neighbours in and around Scott Hall Avenue on the western edge of Chapeltown were crowded with more pressing concerns.

  Because of his asthma, Wilf MacDonald, a railway worker who lived within hailing distance of the McCanns, was often ‘on the sick’. By the end of June, though, the money worries that were a constant preoccupation seemed to have receded slightly because Jayne, at sixteen the third of his five children, had been one of the lucky ones who had been able to walk out of school straight into a job.

  A confident, attractive, sweet-natured girl, she had quickly become as popular with the staff at Grandways supermarket in Leeds, where she sold shoes, as she had always been in the streets a
round where she lived. The Birnbergs were particularly fond of her and, because they were on the phone, she knew she could rely on them to pass the message on to her parents if she was going to spend the night at a friend’s house or get home particularly late.

  This only ever happened on Saturdays, when Jayne went out roller skating or to the Merrion Centre, to a disco. On the night of Saturday, 25 June, though, she had decided to have a change. Wearing a blue flared gingham skirt, a blue-and-white halter-neck sun top, a waisted summer jacket and ‘cloggy’ platform-soled shoes, the outfit that had recently replaced her younger Bay City Rollers look, she was going to the Astoria ballroom and then on to a club on Roundhay Road, she told the Birnbergs when she looked in on them on her way past.

  *

  Earlier that Saturday, with no great enthusiasm, Peter had accompanied Sonia and her mother to view a house belonging to a barrister in Heaton, the residential area of Bradford north of Manningham Park. Sonia was at last on the point of qualifying as a teacher and was hoping to have moved out of Tanton Crescent before taking up her first post at the beginning of the autumn term, then only a matter of a few weeks in the future. That night, though, she was working at the Sherrington nursing home and, having collected the Barker brothers from next door, Peter dropped her off there on their way into town.

  In fact, that night, they bypassed the city centre and made their first stop in Allerton, near to where Trevor Birdsall lived, at the Jack and Jill. From the Jack and Jill they drove to the Hare and Hounds in Heaton, which would be Peter’s local if he bought the house he’d been to see earlier, and which Sonia had obviously set her heart on, in Garden Lane. From the Hare and Hounds it was a short hop to the Flying Dutchman, down towards the centre of Bradford on Lumb Lane. They finished the evening on Leeds Road, at ‘a disco-place-cum-queers-pub’ called the Dog in the Pound which Ronnie in particular reckoned to be ‘a bit of a laugh’: apart from the ordinary ‘puffs’, there was a big ex-sailor behind the bar who always wore drag.