by Gordon Burn
Nevertheless, happy by this stage to try anything, he gave Ridgeway thirty men to work with the thirty he had brought with him from Manchester and set them up in a disused schoolroom in Baildon, on the moors above Shipley and Bingley.
At a press conference to launch the campaign to trace some of the other dozens of £5 notes in the same sequence as the one in their possession, Ridgeway was described as ‘resolute and optimistic’, although ‘still uncommitted on the Ripper connection’. ‘We are attaching great significance to this £5 note,’ he told the assembled reporters. ‘There is no way I will be going back to Manchester before we have traced its source, even if it means interviewing every person in the factories we have on our list.’
His list originally included the names of twenty-three firms, mostly in the engineering and textile industries, but it eventually grew to over thirty, who between them employed nearly 8,000 men. Undaunted, the Manchester team set about the task of interviewing them all.
Most men were seen at their place of work. But in the case of haulage firms like T. and W. H. Clark (Holdings) Ltd., of the Canal Road estate, their employees were usually visited at home. Working steadily through their roster, detective-constables Howard and Smith arrived at the home of Clark’s driver Peter Sutcliffe on the evening of 2 November, a full month after Jean Jordan had been killed.
They knocked on the door of No. 6 Garden Lane at 7.45 p.m. and found both Mr and Mrs Sutcliffe at home. Relaxed and casual, he told them that on the night Miss Jordan had died he had been at home and had retired to bed at about 11.30. His wife confirmed this story.
Questioned about the second crucial date, eight days later, when the murderer had returned to the scene, Mr Sutcliffe said he had been having a house-warming party. The police officers found nothing to arouse their suspicions and subsequently filed a five-paragraph report saying so.
On the evening of 8 November, Mr and Mrs Sutcliffe were again seen, by two different policemen, at home at No. 6 Garden Lane and he was again questioned about the £5 note. Both he and his wife gave the same stories and agreed to the house being searched. Nothing was found.
When police later called on Mrs Kathleen Sutcliffe at 57 Cornwall Road, she confirmed that she had been present at a housewarming party at her son’s home on Sunday night, 9 October, and that afterwards he had run her and her husband back to Bingley.
*
As a result of the spate of murders in Chapeltown, Marilyn Moore didn’t go with just anybody any more, as Peter Sutcliffe realised on the night of 14 December, when he saw her refuse to get into a car in Leopold Street, in the heart of the red-light district. Thinking quickly, though, he parked and jumped out of his and shouted, ‘Bye now, see you later, take care!’ at a nearby building, to reassure her he was ‘all right’. As a result, when he asked her if she was doing business, she climbed quite happily into the front of the Corsair.
She was further reassured by ‘Dave’s’ chatty manner, and by the way he obviously knew his way around. They drove from the centre of Chapeltown to the quiet of Scott Hall Street, and when he suggested that they ‘do it’ in the back seat, she readily agreed.
It was as she got out of the car that he took a swing at her with a hammer, but he lost his balance in the mud and only caught her a glancing blow. He hit her again, and then again a third time, but she was still screaming when he saw some people about forty yards away. He gunned the engine, producing ‘a lot of wheel-spin’, and drove straight home.
*
In February 1978, as he prepared to vacate his schoolroom headquarters at Baildon and return to Manchester, Det. Chief Supt. Jack Ridgeway would tell the press: ‘We have just about exhausted the enquiry. It has drawn a blank.’
‘I personally don’t believe that we have yet met the killer in our multitude of interviews. When we do I am positive we will realise and nail him,’ Mr Ridgeway’s assistant said.
22
John and Kathleen made a point of always waiting until they were asked before visiting Garden Lane, and Peter asked them over with other members of the family during Christmas week, 1977. It was less than three months since the house-warming which had gone off so successfully but, while this second evening faithfully followed the pattern of the first – drinks, a meal, drinks and chocolates in front of the television – a distinct pall hung over the proceedings.
Sonia had lavished all her energies on the house in the short time that they had been in it. ‘Oh Sonia’s been pulling an old fireplace out,’ Peter would say, explaining their late arrival for Sunday tea at his mother’s (and they could always be relied on to be at least an hour and a half late); or ‘Sonia’s papering the attic,’ he would say, rather shamefacedly, apologising for her nonappearance. They were ‘excuses’ that John Sutcliffe took with a pinch of salt. But he had to admit that you could see the amount of work that had gone into the house that first Christmas.
The only trouble was that it was underheated. With the exception of Sonia and her mother, who were wearing layers of cardigans and jumpers and knitted ‘leggins’, everybody was freezing. Kathleen was particularly susceptible to the cold because of the poor state of her health, and John was forced to bend down and switch on the electric fire in the living-room himself when neither Peter nor Sonia volunteered. Within quarter of an hour, though, Kathleen, who had drawn her chair close to the only source of heat, was shivering again: the fire was off and they could only assume the reason it refused to relight was because the power had been turned off at the mains.
Kathleen spent what was left of the evening sitting huddled in her winter coat, and this time even Peter’s customary ‘daftness’ couldn’t rescue the situation. When she got home that night, his mother swore she would never set foot in Garden Lane again, and she never did.
*
1977, in fact, was the last Christmas that Kathleen was to spend in her own house on Cornwall Road. From the mid-1970s on, everybody who knew her had noticed that she was starting to age very fast. Never a woman to complain, despite the fact that she still had to go out cleaning every night at the Teachers Training College, she had put on weight, she seemed less cheery than she had always been, and she sometimes had difficulty drawing breath. By the beginning of 1978, she was starting to look considerably older than her fifty-eight years, and nobody was able to come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why.
‘It’s supposed to be angina, but she’s had all sorts of exploratory treatments and cardiac jobs done on her, and they can’t find anything seriously wrong,’ John would say whenever friends enquired after Kathleen’s health. ‘The doctor’s told her it won’t kill her, that it’s just something you’ve got to live with, but she does let it get her down’
Although two years was all that separated them, John Sutcliffe in late middle age looked many years younger than his wife. His hair was still dark and thick, his body was still lithe and he still turned out every Saturday during the summer for Gilstead and Eldwick second eleven: in the team photograph published in the Bingley Guardian at the beginning of the 1977 season he was to be seen, arms folded across his chest, immaculate in his ‘whites’, conceding at least thirty years to every other player in the picture. That didn’t stop him being his team’s top scorer week after week, though; and if anybody ever had to strip off to retrieve the ball from the stream running along the boundary, it would almost invariably be him.
Dancing is another thing John retained a youthful enthusiasm for and, with Kathleen more or less immobilised by her illness, he started escorting a local widow to dances in Bradford and the surrounding district. He had known Mrs Dean when he worked in the mill alongside both her and her husband. And, because she also knew Kathleen, Marion had refused when John first looked into the mini-cab office where she took calls and asked her to go out with him. But after reassurances that his wife was an invalid she had relented, and they had embarked on what was to become a longstanding relationship.
If Kathleen knew, she never gave Marion any indication
of it whenever they bumped into each other in town, her only conversation being her family and, in particular, Peter and how he’d ‘got on’.
The huge Clark’s wagon had become a common sight in Cornwall Road. Peter had started going out of his way to drop in on his mother, even if it was only for ten minutes; and by the end of 1977, it had become as apparent to him as to the rest of the family that she couldn’t go on living on Ferncliffe Estate very much longer because of the climb: carrying shopping from the new covered ‘precinct’ in the centre of Bingley up a succession of hills to Cornwall Road was now out of the question.
Details of Kathleen’s predicament had been communicated to the Town Hall and, early in 1978, she was offered a two-bedroomed maisonette on the first floor of a post-war council block closer to the centre of town. Rutland House stood across the street from both Mornington Road Methodist Church, known as the ‘Cathedral of the North’ because of its bulk, and the school which John had attended as a boy, and was surrounded by the sort of tightly packed, black stone terraces that had been pulled down to make way for it.
The previous tenants of No. 8 were no strangers to John and Kathleen, being former neighbours from ‘the estate’; nor, as John would occasionally point out to visitors, were they entirely unknown to regular readers of the News of the World: the husband had attempted to strangle the wife after catching her with another man many years earlier and, after being charged with rape, their fifteen-year-old son had gone out and committed suicide by putting his neck on the railway line.
All the new key-holders saw, though, was a suite of small, easily maintained rooms on two levels, and they arranged to move into Rutland House on Sunday, 22 January 1978, Kathleen’s fifty-ninth birthday.
*
After eighteen years on ‘Corny’ Road, there was plenty to get rid of; the ledger of Top Twenty hits that Peter had so laboriously compiled and the green toboggan that he had crashed into a set of railings in, seriously bruising his head, in the course of his ‘delayed’ adolescence, were just two of the pile of objects thrown out as rubbish on the Saturday of the move.
Most members of the family turned up at some point during the day to lend a hand, but it was Peter himself who took charge. Unfortunately, being a Saturday, he almost left it too late to hire the van that they needed to transport his parents’ modest belongings down to the flat in. By the time they drove over to Bramhall’s, on the far side of Bradford, they were closed and, with Mick and his father as passengers, Peter drove for miles trying to find a van-hire firm that was still open. It confirmed everything John had always said about Peter leaving everything he did to the last minute, but finally, around 4.30, they were able to get hold of a box-van from a place in Keighley.
Mick drove Peter’s red Corsair back to Cornwall Road, with Peter following, and they at least managed to get the carpets down in Rutland House by Saturday night. When they were finished, Mick agitated to be allowed to keep the keys to the box-van until the next day, but Peter knew his brother too well. The keys were in his pocket when he climbed into his car and drove away saying he’d see them to finish the work the following morning.
*
Mick and his father both assumed it was because he had to get home to Sonia that Peter wouldn’t stay for a drink. But, driving towards Bradford from Bingley, he bypassed Heaton, and by nine o’clock was in the familiar territory of Lumb Lane. Cruising slowly, he was able to narrowly avoid an accident when another car backed out of a side street in front of him without any warning. But he was obliged to brake and, when he did, a smart, blonde-haired woman in a black sweater and black slacks tapped on the front passenger window and then opened the door.
Yvonne Pearson had two convictions for soliciting and was due to appear before Bradford magistrates again five days later on a third charge. He asked her where she had sprung from so suddenly and she said, ‘Just good timing. You can put it down to fate.’ She told him it was £5 for ‘a good time’ and £10 for ‘more than a good time’ and asked him how much he could afford. Not £10, was the answer, but she got in anyway and accompanied him to a piece of waste ground at the back of Drummond’s, the mill where his father worked.
As soon as she stepped out of the car he beat Yvonne Pearson several times over the head with a heavy walling-hammer that had been under his seat. At that precise moment, though, he was alarmed to see another car pull in alongside his and, ‘to keep her quiet’, he grabbed handfuls of horsehair from an old settee lying nearby ‘and stuffed it into her mouth and down her throat’.
He knelt behind the settee ‘for what seemed like an hour’ and ‘kept holding her nose so that she couldn’t scream out’. He let go after a while ‘to see if she was still making a noise’ and, when she was, grabbed her nose again and held it until the other car was gone.
Alone again, he dragged her trousers down and bared her breasts and started kicking her relentlessly about the head and body. He came down on her chest with the weight of both feet and, before leaving, hid Yvonne Pearson under the upturned settee and scattered clods of earth, which is where she was to lie, undiscovered, for the next two months.
The next morning, a Sunday, he took his mother a small present for her birthday and helped his father and brothers complete the move in to Rutland House which they had started the day before. They were able to do it in just two trips with an hour off in the middle for a lunchtime drink. By bedtime that night, with the curtains hung and the small light glowing on top of the television, it already seemed to John Sutcliffe as if they’d lived there years and years.
He soon made himself known to the young people who had turned the front room of a small terraced house opposite into a health-food shop called ‘Fodder’: ‘I like a touch of garlic in my stews,’ he’d tell them. But he refused to patronise the late-night general dealers two streets away which had been taken over by an Asian family.
*
Although there was a flight of stone steps to climb from the streets to the first-floor landing, and she still had to climb stairs to the bathroom and the bedroom, the new flat, being closer to the floor of the valley, was less demanding on Kathleen’s health. They had only been living there a few weeks, though, when she turned to her husband and told him: ‘I don’t think I’m going to be here much longer.’ He did what he could to reassure her that she was still a comparatively young woman but, at her insistence, arranged for the priest from the Sacred Heart to start coming in to give Kathleen communion every other week.
23
Loneliness is to live in a world
Where people do not care.
Loneliness is to go outside,
To find no one is there, and
You fall down in despair,
Falling on your knees in prayer.
Asking God to rescue you,
From this cruel snare,
But no one comes
No voice is heard …
Unloved is to miss the love
That all parents should give.
Yet they cast you aside
Put you out of their minds.
They put you in care.
There is no love there.
Yet the staff really care
Or they wouldn’t be there.
Yet I know I shall die,
As my years drag by,
Oh, why was it me, Lord?
Why?
As the result of a series on fostering and foster children published in the Yorkshire Post in May 1974, two fifteen-year-old twin sisters living in a children’s home in North Yorkshire had sat down and composed a poem and posted it off to the newspaper with an accompanying letter.
‘Dear Sir/Madam,’ the letter began. ‘If my twin sister and I got fostered out together it would be like winning £1,000 on the football pools … To get fostered out together means to us a place of love and care and it is then that you feel wanted, because someone somewhere realises what love really is and to get fostered out is part of love itself. We can only wait, hope and pray to get fost
ered out together, but some day I hope we will.’
In 1974, Rita and Elena Rytka, who preferred to be called ‘Helen’, had been in St Theresa’s, a Catholic hostel in Knaresborough, for five years. St Theresa’s, though, was just the latest in the long list of institutions the sisters had known since their Italian mother split up with their West Indian father when they were children.
A few years in a rundown house in Leopold Street in Chapeltown was the only ‘home’ life they had previously known. But, within a few days of their letter and poem appearing in the paper, they had been offered a home by a civil servant and his wife in Dewsbury. Helen and Rita had been happy living with their foster-parents in the comfort of their large house for two years but, in September 1976, they had moved in with their brother and sister, Tony and Angela, who were also twins and lived in a tower block close to the centre of Bradford.
After leaving school, Rita had won a place at Batley Art College and Helen had gone to work as a £20-a-week packer at a confectionery factory in Heckmondwike. Helen’s real ambition, though, was to be a singer, and she went out dancing most nights of the week at clubs in Bradford and Leeds. One of her friends during this period was a girl who happened to be related to Peter Sutcliffe’s neighbour, Ronnie Barker, and Helen was a frequent visitor to Tanton Crescent in the years when the Szurmas had their son-in-law living with them: she was a guest next door at the Barkers’ on at least one occasion.