by Gordon Burn
Shortly before Christmas, 1977, however, Rita Rytka had dropped out of her art-school course, left the flat where she was living with her sisters and her brother, and gone to live in a shabby bedsit ten miles away in one of the poorer districts of Huddersfield without offering any explanation.
Elmwood Avenue is in the Highfields area, on a shelf overlooking both the M62 Leeds–Manchester motorway and the town centre, and Highfields is where Helen eventually tracked Rita down after a two-month separation. It was the longest they had ever lived apart and it was immediately understood that Helen would move in and share her sister’s double bed in the damp downstairs room. Inevitably, she also joined her under the viaduct on Great Northern Street in Huddersfield, working the ‘car-trade’ in the hope of one day making enough money to break into the music business.
Although the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, so far as anybody knew, had never struck in Huddersfield, the posters – in Punjabi and Urdu as well as English – appealing for information, the almost daily stories in the press and on television, and the endlessly circulating, increasingly gruesome rumours had had the effect, by the beginning of 1978, of creating an atmosphere of watchfulness and caution.
In their few weeks of walking the streets together, the Rytka twins had evolved a way of working which, although hardly foolproof, was at least designed to frustrate the efforts of any man who might want to harm them: they would accept clients at the same time; they would each give them a precise twenty minutes; and afterwards they would each attempt to rendezvous in the same place – a block of public lavatories, well-known as a homosexuals’ ‘cottage’, at the market end of Great Northern Street.
The prostitutes of Lumb Lane and Chapeltown, many of whom had also started to work in pairs, had taken these precautions a significant step further: one woman would conspicuously take down the number of the car her ‘partner’ was about to go off in and then tear the number up in front of the driver when her friend returned.
To Helen and Rita, though, the looser arrangement seemed to offer sufficient cover and, shortly after 8.30 on 31 January 1978, a wet Tuesday night with snow threatening, they set off on what was becoming their regular ‘beat’.
Aged eighteen, dark-skinned and slim, with unforced smiles and flawless complexions, the Rytkas were, by any standards, strikingly good-looking. Great Northern Street, however, with its railway arches and its abattoir and its general air of rankness and dereliction, was not the best showcase for their youthful attractions. Collars up against the cold, they started patrolling the street, with the motor traffic between them, watching their step on the uneven pavements.
At ten minutes past nine Rita saw a dark-coloured car draw up alongside Helen on the other side of the street and watched her sister get in it. A short time later she was herself picked up in a Datsun by another ‘punter’ and, unaware that they were being followed by a peeping-Tom in a van, drove off to have sex in one of the quiet streets away from the town centre.
When Rita returned after twenty minutes to find no sign of Helen, she was puzzled. She hung around, squinting through the sleet until it became obvious that Helen wasn’t coming, then turned around and trudged back up to Highfields to see if she could find her.
It was ten days since Peter Sutcliffe had murdered Yvonne Pearson, whose body still lay under an old settee half a mile from the centre of Bradford. He spotted Helen Rytka waiting for her sister outside the public toilets near Huddersfield market, and convinced her there was time for a ‘quickie’ over in the timber yard whose piles of wood seemed to shore up the streaming walls of the railway arches which towered above them.
Once inside the yard, he had planned to strike Helen with a hammer while she was getting into the back seat of the Corsair. As soon as he turned the engine off, though, she undid her trousers and indicated that she was ready for him to have intercourse with her straight away. Unusually, and despite himself, he realised that he had achieved an erection, and he got out of the car with the excuse that he wanted to urinate. When he came back she too agreed to get out so that they could have sex in the back.
It was as she stood with her back to him, fumbling with the rear door, that he swung the hammer. The hammer, though, caught the roof of the car and only grazed Helen, who thought he had struck her with his hand.
‘There’s no need for that,’ she said, and he immediately sensed her terror. ‘You don’t even have to pay.’ But he hit her again with the hammer, and again, until he realised that what he was doing was in full view of two taxi drivers parked some little distance away. He grabbed her by the hair then and dragged her into a far corner of the yard. She had stopped moaning but she wasn’t dead: her eyes were open, ‘staring’, and her hands were up in order to ward off further blows.
He told her not to make any more noise and she would be ‘all right’. He had intercourse with her because she had ‘aroused’ him, but also ‘to keep her quiet’, then produced a sharp knife which he plunged ‘five or six times’ into her ribcage and her heart. He tore off what was left of her clothes and hurled her shoes seventy yards up an embankment. He forced her body into the narrow space between a stack of wood and a disused garage and covered it with a sheet of asbestos before leaving.
Back at Garden Lane he sponged off the blood which had spattered his shoes and put the knife back in the kitchen drawer where he had found it.
*
It was three days before Rita Rytka gathered up her courage and reported her sister missing to the police. It took a police dog ten minutes to locate Helen’s battered body in one of the dim recesses of Garrard’s timber yard. The morning after the murder, men working at the yard had noticed a blood-stained patch in the mud, and a lorry-driver had pinned the pair of black lace panties that he’d found to the door of a shed. Such early morning discoveries were nothing new at Garrard’s, however, and tended to be shrugged off with a laugh.
On 9 February, six days after the discovery of what was believed to be the Ripper’s seventh murder victim, George Oldfield appeared on Radio 2’s popular early morning programme, the Jimmy Young Show, and urged the predominantly female audience to search their collective conscience and report any man of their acquaintance whom they suspected of behaving oddly. Husband, father, brother, son – it shouldn’t matter: it was their duty, anonymously or otherwise, to let the police know. Mr Oldfield – ‘George’ to Jimmy Young and his several million listeners – also reiterated his personal commitment to catching the man whose activities were causing increasing numbers of women in the North of England to live in fear.
Within days of the Assistant Chief Constable’s unprecedented advance into the public arena, the Yorkshire Post and its sister evening paper announced a £5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Ripper; and the West Yorkshire Police Authority, flying in the face of official Home Office disapproval, added a further £10,000 (later £20,000) of their own.
The discovery of Yvonne Pearson’s body at the end of March, lying on the piece of waste ground where she had met her death two months earlier, contributed considerably to the gathering disquiet. And, in April, as proof of the hunt being stepped up, Det. Chief Supt. John Domaille was appointed special assistant to George Oldfield and put in charge of a team of twelve ‘crack’ detectives who were to make up a special ‘Ripper Squad’.
At the same time, secret surveillance operations were mounted in Leeds, Bradford and the red-light districts of other towns in West Yorkshire; registration numbers were noted and fed into the central police computer at Hendon: the driver of any car spotted repeatedly in Chapeltown or Manningham, or in more than one of the surveillance areas, was – eventually – contacted and questioned.
By August 1978, the red Corsair belonging to Peter Sutcliffe had been seen in Lumb Lane a total of seven times and, on 23 August, Detective-Constable Peter Smith called at No. 6 Garden Lane to interview the owner. Mr Sutcliffe was in his overalls decorating the kitchen at the time, but he didn’t seem to mind in the
least being interrupted. He explained that he had to travel through the Manningham area every day to get to work, and dismissed as preposterous the suggestion that he used prostitutes. Mrs Sutcliffe confirmed his story, and told the officer that her husband rarely went out at night: when he did, she usually went with him. As confirmation of this, she said that he had taken her to Rockafella’s, a discotheque in Leeds, on the night of one of the murders.
Peter Smith was not the same Constable Smith who had had cause to interview Peter Sutcliffe on a previous occasion; and because that earlier report was still part of the huge backlog of paperwork waiting to be processed at Leeds police headquarters, he didn’t know that Peter Sutcliffe had been seen ten months earlier in connection with the £5 note enquiry. There was also nothing about the interviewee’s behaviour to lead Detective-Constable Smith to suspect that a little more than three months earlier he had gone out and murdered for the ninth time.
On the night of Tuesday, 16 May 1978, two days after buying a grey, H-registration Sunbeam Rapier, Peter Sutcliffe had returned to the same part of southern Manchester in which he had picked up Jean Jordan. Vera Millward’s body was found in a sitting position, slumped against a fence in the car park of Manchester Royal Infirmary in the early hours of 17 May. When her coat was removed, it could be seen that her stomach had been mutilated so badly that her intestines had spilled on to the ground.
*
There were to be no more attacks in 1978. And as the severe winter of 1978–9 receded and there were still no fresh reports, the men leading the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper would find themselves weighing the possibility that the man they were looking for was no longer in circulation: he could be in a mental hospital or a prison; he could be serving with the army in Northern Ireland or with the navy abroad or, like his Victorian namesake, he could have committed suicide: he could be dead.
On the other hand, the drives that had led him to murder nine women in less than three years could simply have played themselves out: he could have settled down and married and might never kill again. This was the theory advanced by Dr Stephen Shaw, a lecturer at Wakefield police training college, in November 1978, in an interview with the Yorkshire Evening Post: ‘I have never felt this was a married man, but it may be that since the murder of Vera Millward he has found a woman and settled down … Someone he can pamper and at whose feet he can worship. Someone who is in his eyes a paragon of virtue.’
Many of the prostitutes of Chapeltown and Manningham had started carrying long-bladed scissors and hat-pins and knives but, reassured by the hiatus in the killings, they had returned to the streets in force. ‘If I thought about the Ripper every time I was on the street, I’d run home and lock the door. I stop myself thinking about him by thinking about money. It always works,’ a twenty-two-year-old called ‘Skip’ was reported as saying in the Halifax Courier.
24
The differences that had been apparent between Mick and Peter in adolescence had become reinforced as they’d grown older. Peter’s evident need for stability and approval bore no relation to the kind of life his brother led, in which nothing was fixed, least of all an address.
For his part, Mick admired Peter’s determination to ‘mek summat of hissen’, but knew it wasn’t for him. He was happy living day to day and, not infrequently, hand to mouth, scratching a living from Dowley Gap tip and the fields, only turning to legitimate – and not-so-legitimate – forms of employment when things were desperate.
Most of his friends had seen the inside of Armley jail at some point in their lives, and Mick was well known for dealing in small firearms, with no questions asked. It was livestock, though, which provided him with a basic income, mainly pigeons and goats, in addition to what he was able to poach. The goats he bought at auction, for selling on to Asian restaurants in Bradford, although he would occasionally slaughter one himself and keep it for feeding to his lurcher; for a short period he sold the same pigeons to the same stall-holder in Bradford market every Saturday, in the firm knowledge that they would be his – and the stall-holder’s – to sell again within hours of being released.
After a shortlived marriage, Mick had been reluctant to commit himself to any one person and had stayed constantly on the move. But in mid-1978 he found himself homeless with a girlfriend and a new baby and was obliged to ask his mother and father to take them in.
John had made little attempt to hide his disappointment in the aimlessness of Mick’s existence, and over the years had subtly dissociated himself from his ‘waster’ son. But Susan was a nice girl – her father was the weakling-turned-wrestler who had once been held up as an example to Peter – and, even if her husband had had the heart for it, Kathleen would never have allowed him to turn them away.
They lived at Rutland House until the early autumn, when they were allocated a house on the far side of the valley, in Cottingley, close to where Mick had spent his early years. It was one of the council’s more run-down properties: the coal fire in the living-room was no match for the draughts sweeping in around the windows and the doors, and the place was infested with mice: Mick would lie on the settee with an air-gun in the evenings, shooting them as they crept out from under the skirting. But it was a roof, and they were out from under his mother’s feet, and they were prepared to put up with it until something better came along.
The move to Rutland House at the beginning of the year had witnessed no dramatic improvement in Kathleen’s condition. She had been forced to give up her job and now rarely got out. On 5 November 1978, though, she wrapped up well and made a special trip over to Cottingley to be with her new granddaughter on her first Guy Fawkes night. It was almost as if she’d had a premonition, Susan would say, because, three days later, Kathleen was dead.
*
Kathleen was noted for the guileless way she’d believe anything anybody told her, and Carl, like his two brothers before him, enjoyed stringing his mother along. ‘Why don’t you ever bring girls home?’ she’d asked him, and Carl would tell her it was because he didn’t like girls. ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’ she’d want to know anxiously, and he would solemnly tell her that he was.
It was this kind of game Carl started off playing on the morning of 8 November, as his mother attempted to push a vacuum cleaner around the maisonette in Rutland House. But it became clear very quickly that she wasn’t up to his usual teasing; she was in obvious pain and gasping for breath and Maureen told her brother that he had better bloody well cut it out.
After three years as an army wife in Germany, Maureen had returned to Bingley in the summer and was living in a council house a few minutes’ walk away, at the end of Mornington Road. She had taken Rachel and Damien to school that morning and then looked in to check that her mother was all right.
Kathleen, in fact, was to see several members of her family that Wednesday, given that it wasn’t one of the Wednesdays when Father Roncetti from the Sacred Heart was due to pay a visit. Mick, with a baby to feed and bills to pay, had swallowed his dislike of working indoors and had gone labouring at Wilkinson’s mill on the canal. And, rather then traipsing back up to Cottingley, he went round to his mother’s for his lunch.
His father was just about leaving when Mick arrived, because he was on the late shift, two to ten, so they only had time for a quick hello. Kathleen hadn’t said much in front of John but, as soon as he was gone, she started complaining to Mick about the pains in her chest. ‘I says, “Well, do you want me to stop off work, like? I’ll stop in with you this afternoon instead of going back.” She said, “No, don’t lose your job; stick to it. I’ll be all right.” She took a pill then, for angina.
‘I said, “I’m not going back if you’re not really all right.” She said, “Oh, I’ll be all right; get back.” So I went back to work, and it was only five minutes from where she lived, so all they had to do was ring up an’ I’d have come straight over an’ gone on.’
It was when Maureen looked in again around 4.00 p. m., after picking the childr
en up from school, that she found her mother collapsed on the bed. The handful of tablets that she had been trying to take had dissolved in her mouth, leaving a white residue caked on her lips. Kathleen was conscious by the time the doctor arrived, but he immediately called for an ambulance.
Maureen telephoned her father at Drummond’s to tell him that her mother had been rushed into Airedale General, and he telephoned the hospital himself straight away, only to be told that, although his wife was in intensive care, he would be of more use staying where he was. When he called again at 5.30, however, he was advised to get there as quickly as possible. While he was on his way to Steeton, Kathleen died.
Peter broke the news to Maureen, who had got in touch with him earlier at home. ‘She’s dead, Mo,’ he said when she opened the door, and kept repeating it as if that would make it real. But being ‘more used to death, working in a cemetery an’ that’, as Maureen later reasoned, he quickly collected himself and drove straight to the hospital, to be there when his father arrived.
Hurrying through the dusk towards the modern glass buildings, John was relieved to see Peter standing in a doorway under a lamp. ‘He was the only one there, but he hadn’t been there long. He’d only been there about quarter of an hour before me. And he said, “Well, Dad,” he said, “sit down.” And I thought, Oh my God, what’s up? Then he reached out and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “She’s gone.”
‘He’d probably had time to get over the shock by the time I got there. And I think he was probably more concerned for me, so he put a very brave face on at the time. I went into the hospital and they let me go in and see her. They had her all laid out, and he came in with me. He was all right. He took my arm and sort of led me out.’