by Gordon Burn
‘Coloureds’ were the last thing Mrs Bowman, who lived diagonally opposite at No. 15, had expected – and, if she was honest, wanted – to move in. But, much to her surprise, the Rahmans had turned out to be very nice people. She had been sorry to see them go when they decided to sell up and return to Pakistan, and was sorrier still when she saw what had taken their place.
The first time she saw him, wearing white wooden clogs with a pale green suit, Peter Sutcliffe startled her. Taken with his ‘Pancho Villa’ moustache and shock of coarse black hair, she thought he must be something to do with show business. Driving a lorry is one thing she never pictured him doing, because he looked too thin and insubstantial, ‘almost unhealthy’, apart from the fact that they had never had a lorry-driver living in the street.
In common with the rest of her neighbours, though, she soon found out that this was precisely what the new arrival did for a living. He had only been living at Garden Lane a few days when Peter brought his 32-ton Ford Transcontinental home with him, churning up the grass verge alongside the rugby field when he parked it. When it happened again the following night, the place was up in arms.
‘This is residential. It’s not one of these new estates,’ Mrs Bowman complained to her husband. ‘We’re not paying high rates on here to have that thing parked on the street,’ the man next door complained to her, and everybody told everybody else that something must be done. It was while the debate was still raging as to who was going to be their spokesman that one of the neighbours, without saying anything, took it upon herself to knock at the door of No. 6. To her surprise and relief, she found Mr Sutcliffe immediately contrite and understanding, and the wagon never appeared in Garden Lane again: whenever he brought it home in future, he always parked it in a layby around the corner in Leylands Road.
*
Living just across the street as she did, Mrs Bowman hadn’t been able to resist watching while the Sutcliffes’ belongings were unloaded and carried up the steep drive. And what she saw – a brand-new Dralon three-piece suite with apple-green and pink reversible cushions; a handsome upright piano, one of many nice old pieces; fitted carpets, a front-loading washer and separate spin-drier – made her wonder how, when the asking price had been more than £15,000 for the house, they could afford it. Her husband was a wool merchant and she worked part-time as a medical secretary and it was still a struggle to meet the payments on a £12,500 mortgage and bring three children up at the same time.
These were thoughts that she shared with her neighbours, who also joined her in speculation about the small black car that turned up outside No. 6 first thing most mornings. When it transpired that it belonged to Mrs Sutcliffe’s mother, a nurse at the nearby Sherrington, the talk then turned to why she should be forever on the young couple’s doorstep. Mrs Bowman volunteered the thought that maybe he had a history of beating his wife up and her mother had come round to make sure she was all right.
From her front lounge, Mrs Bowman also couldn’t help noticing that Mrs Sutcliffe – it would be some time before she came to know her as ‘Sonia’ – retired to bed early with the portable television every night, whether her husband was at home or not.
This kind of inquisitiveness wasn’t all one-way, however. Peter still had a sharp eye for human foibles and, working on cars for hours on the sloping drive at the side of the house, he was able to casually observe his new neighbours. The people next door, whose kitchen window looked straight across a low dividing fence into his, inevitably came in for particularly close scrutiny. He had not only their daily routine but also their mannerisms off to perfection, as Carl discovered one Sunday morning when he was visiting Garden Lane.
Giggling, Peter called Carl over to the kitchen window. ‘He says, “He hasn’t come out yet, they’ve just got up. But watch him: he’ll come out in a minute, he’ll lock door, lock wife and daughter in behind him, an’ he’ll walk round his Volkswagen, have a look at it, rub roof wi’ cuff, then he’ll unlock kitchen door wi’ key again, rub his hands an’ shout: Brrrrrrr! It’s cold this morning, mother! Then he’ll be out later and do it again. Then, between eleven and half-past he’ll be out and give it a right good polishing and waxing, after he’s made sure he’s locked all family in. I bet he does it.” And he did. Exactly as our Pete said.
‘Monday morning he said it would be: Brrrrrrr. Bloody hell. Work again, while he walked round car wi’ wife locked in house. Then when he got home he’d shout: Another day over, mother! Four days left! An’ the same every day until Friday, when he cheered up. Pete thought it were really hilarious, this chap.’
Peter had a natural talent for mimicry and, whenever the family were gathered together, he’d have them in stitches taking individual members off: the little habit his father had of dancing round the room when the World of Sport signature tune came on; Mick’s forward-falling, stooped walk …
It was a facility that never failed to intrigue Carl. ‘You only had to say, Do you remember so-and-so? who he probably hadn’t seen for years, and he’d give you a twenty-minute running commentary on things that they did. Habits and how they walked and what they wore.
‘He’d really tek piss out of everything. He’d turn owt anybody said into a joke. You’d just say summat an’ he’d just bust out in hysterical laughter, really fuckin’ loud, almost rollin’ on floor. He might have been quiet with strangers, but wi’ family he could be right silly. He’d get really excited.’
This was certainly the case on Sunday night, 9 October 1977. Peter had known Sonia for seven years before they were married; they had spent a further three years living with her parents, and now, for the first time, he was able to entertain his own family in a home of his own.
It was a small group who gathered for the house-warming ‘party’ at Garden Lane that Sunday: Jane and her husband, Ian; Mick and Susan, who would eventually become his second wife; John and Kathleen; and, of course, Peter and Sonia. Annie Rhodes, John’s friend with the deformed spine from Bingley, was the only ‘outsider’; she had insisted on giving Peter’s mother and father a lift in her car to Heaton, and Peter had insisted that she stay.
The evening had started off with the men gravitating towards the drink in the kitchen and the women discussing the soft-furnishings and cream satin-look wallpaper in the sitting-room with Sonia. It was only when conversation turned to the most arresting aspect of the decor that both groups finally came together.
Examples of Sonia’s pottery were on display all over the front room and, indeed, all over the house. Gazing at these twisted, abstract cylinders, many of them painted green, Mick didn’t know what to think. He just remembered Peter warning him not to laugh.
‘I hadn’t a bloody clue, me. I’d more appreciate something right, somebody mekkin a dog or some wild-fowl or a fox or summat like that. Summat that looked perfect as it should do. I admire stuff more real, like, instead of that loada bunkum. Our Peter used to talk about them, what she could mek on them an’ that. I couldn’t imagine anybody paying owt for them at all, but I don’t know anything about art.’
Mick had been at a loss for words when Sonia, perhaps mischievously, asked him his opinion of her work. His father, on the other hand, had not. He had volunteered the opinion that they were ‘halfway between pottery and that bloke that does the sculpture with the holes – Henry Moore’.
‘It was incredible to think that those sculptures came out of her. They could’ve looked right nice with a bit of floral art, but really they were individual works of art on their own. She could have been world successful, I reckon.’
More of Sonia’s sculptures stood on top of the piano in the dining-room. And it was only when they sat down at last to the dinner that she had prepared, and the home-made elderflower wine that John had brought with him, that the awkwardness inhibiting everybody had finally disappeared.
Realising that Sonia had underestimated the appetites of the men in his family, Peter had thrown some potatoes into the oven shortly before they arrived. He hadn’t
given them long enough, however, and when Jane tried to stick a fork in hers, it was ‘hard as nails’. Then Peter attacked one of the potatoes on his own plate and it skidded to the floor. What followed was two hours in which Jane thought she had never laughed so much in her life. Peter was quick to recognise the potential of the potato joke and, in his insistent, excitable fashion, wouldn’t let it drop.
Sonia alone remained unamused, prompting her father-in-law’s later remark that she would have made ‘a beautiful Queen Victoria’. Such was the general hilarity, though, that not even disapproving looks from Sonia could bring them down to earth. It was a mood that continued through the group snaps that Jane took with her Instamatic and the short ride home. Annie took Mick and Susan in her car back to Bingley, and Peter took Jane and Ian and his mother and father in his. As usual, rather than just dropping them off, he made a point of walking up the path to the front door with his mother and waiting until both parents were safely in.
Instead of turning round and driving straight home to Heaton, though, although it was already past midnight, he pressed on through the centre of Bradford and out on to the Manchester Road. In less than an hour he was ripping the clothes off the body of the woman he had murdered eight days before.
21
Southern Cemetery serves Moss Side, Hulme and other districts in the southern part of Manchester. It is about a mile from the M63 link with the trans-Pennine motorway direct to Leeds and Bradford, and it is this route that Peter Sutcliffe had followed on the night of Saturday, 1 October, his first Saturday in his new home.
In the course of earlier visits to Manchester in the company of his friends Ronnie and David Barker, he had been able to familiarise himself with the geography of the city, and in particular the exact location of the red-light district; coming off the motorway on 1 October, he had headed straight for it.
Shortly after 9.00 he had stopped and asked a ‘slim and not bad looking girl’ if she wanted business. Jean Jordan, known to the other prostitutes in the Nile and Reno Clubs and the pubs of Moss Side as ‘Scotch Jean’, had been about to get into a car driven by one of the other ‘kerbies’ when she changed her mind and opted for the red Corsair with the smiling, personable young man at the wheel.
They had quickly agreed on the standard charge of £5, to be paid in advance, and she had directed him towards the spot to which she had directed many other drivers in the past. Beyond the gridded acreage of Southern Cemetery in Chorlton, adjacent to the municipal allotments on Princess Road, was a piece of wasteland overgrown with weeds and shielded from the traffic by high hawthorn hedges which had long been a favourite haunt of the prostitutes from Moss Side and local courting couples.
After he parked, Jean had led the way into the deeper darkness some yards from the car. The previous owner of No. 6 Garden Lane had left a hammer lying in the garage beside the house, and it was this that the new owner had weighed in his left hand before crashing it down on to Jean Jordan’s skull. She had fallen, moaning loudly, as a result of the first blow, and he had hit her again and again – a total of eleven times – until the moaning stopped.
At this point the headlights of a nearby car had come on. The car had started up its engine, though, and he had realised that in seconds it would be pulling away. He had pulled her body nearer some bushes to hide, but no sooner had the first car gone than a second one drove up. Crouching behind the Corsair, he had watched the new arrival nose into the allotments and stop exactly where the first car had just been. The chances of him being spotted had now been very high, and his instincts had told him to run. He had scrambled into the driver’s seat and made for the centre of Manchester and home.
*
He had been surprised when there was nothing in Monday’s papers about the murder. And as the news that the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ had struck in Manchester for the first time failed to break, he had grown increasingly perplexed. The reasons, how-ever, were simple: he had hidden the body in the bushes by the cemetery’s perimeter fence too well for it to be easily discovered, and nobody had reported Jean Jordan’s disappearance to the police.
Arriving in Manchester from Motherwell when she was sixteen, five years earlier, Jean had been found wandering around the concourse of Piccadilly Station by a hotel worker called Allan Royle, whose common-law wife she had eventually become. The Royles, as they were known on the ‘problem’ estate in Moss Side where they had been given a flat, had two small sons, but theirs wasn’t a conventional family life: he would occasionally go off on two-and three-day ‘benders’ with his friends, and she would take a bus to the motorway and hitch a lift back to Scotland for a week or two, just as the mood took her.
Jean also had a set of girlfriends whose existence Allan was aware of but whom he had never met. And when he returned from the pub on the night of 1 October to find the children asleep but their mother missing, he had assumed that she’d gone out looking for female company. When Monday arrived and there was still no sign of her, he had taken it for granted that she was in Glasgow. It had certainly never occurred to him to report her as missing to the police.
*
In his haste to escape undetected from the scene of Jean Jordan’s murder, Peter Sutcliffe had not forgotten the hammer with which he had broken her skull like an egg. Driving along the M62 in the direction of Bradford, however, it had suddenly occurred to him that he had left a piece of evidence behind which was potentially every bit as damning. Before setting out for the Southern Cemetery, Jean Jordan had taken possession of the £5 that they’d agreed on as the price for ‘straight’ sex. Freshly minted and included in his Clark’s wage packet only two days earlier, the note was now somewhere on or near Jordan’s body. If found, he believed, it could lead the police straight to him.
There had been two alternatives: he could turn around immediately and go back to Manchester, which carried the obvious risk of being spotted; or he could sit it out. He had decided on the latter course, and had expected every morning to bring news of the killing. When there was still nothing after a week, he took this as confirmation that the body was lying where he had left it, undisturbed. He made up his mind to risk going back to retrieve the incriminating evidence, and the house-warming at Garden Lane on 9 October presented him with the perfect opportunity.
*
Being a Sunday, he made the outskirts of Manchester within three quarters of an hour of seeing his parents safely home. Within another quarter of an hour he was parking alongside the Princess Road allotments on the South Side of the city.
He remembered almost exactly where he had attacked Jean Jordan, and he dragged her rapidly decomposing body roughly out of the bushes. Frantically, he stripped her of everything she had been wearing and examined each garment closely before flinging it into the dark. He even pulled her boots off and searched them, but there was still no sign of the £5 note.
Convinced now that she must have been carrying a handbag, he started running wildly all over the allotments to see if he could find one. When he couldn’t, he returned to the body and vented his frustration on it with a knife. Having stabbed her repeatedly in the breasts and chest, he snatched up a broken pane from a nearby greenhouse and opened a wound from her right knee to her left shoulder. The stench as her stomach blew open made him vomit but, by then, he had already hatched another plan.
He would remove the head and, with it, the hammer-blows characteristic of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, thereby making ‘a big mystery of it’. He set about this with a hacksaw blade he had brought with him, and then with the ragged edge of the glass, but soon gave up. He aimed some heavy blows at the body with his feet before turning his back on it for the last time and, feeling thwarted, started driving home.
Once home he put his trousers, which he had worn to entertain his family in some hours earlier, into the small wood-frame garage at the top of the drive, to be burned with the garden rubbish later.
*
The mutilated remains of Jean Jordan were discovered by an allotment
holder on Monday morning, 10 October. Her handbag, however, with the £5 note folded into an inside pocket, wasn’t found for a further five days; and public confirmation that she was the sixth victim of the Yorkshire Ripper wasn’t forthcoming until early 1978.
Within hours of visiting the Princess Road allotments, how-ever, Det. Chief Supt. Jack Ridgeway, head of Manchester CID, had made contact with members of West Yorkshire police’s ‘Ripper Squad’; and within a very few days the officers of both forces were agreed that they were looking for the same man.
Where there was less unanimity, though, was on the significance to the enquiry of the £5 note which, after drying, had been found to be brand new. The Bank of England had quickly furnished the information that it was one of a large batch issued by a sub-branch of the Midland Bank at Shipley, just outside Bradford, four days before Jean Jordan’s murder. The batch had been split up and paid out to various local factories and businesses in time to go into wage packets on Thursday and Friday, 29 and 30 September.
To Jack Ridgeway, this appeared to be an enormous break: the possibility of the note crossing the Pennines in such a short space of time in any way other than in the original payee’s pocket to him seemed extremely remote. Find the man who handed the £5 note to Jean Jordan, he argued, and you had found the Ripper.
George Oldfield, characteristically, adopted a rather more phlegmatic approach: £5 notes, he kept on saying, were being passed around ‘like ten-bob notes were a few years ago’; the one found in Jordan’s bag could have been through two or three pairs of hands before reaching Manchester, and the assumption that it couldn’t have travelled from Yorkshire to Lancashire so quickly was a weak one in his view.