by Gordon Burn
Seventeen days later, on the 24 September, he found himself alone again, in Headingley, which, thanks to the University and the Test cricket ground, was regarded as one of the smarter districts of Leeds. At around 10.30 he followed a woman taking a shortcut through a dimly-lighted ‘snicket’ and hit her twice over the head with a hammer after looping a length of rope around her neck. He was hiding the shoes and handbag which she had become separated from in the course of the struggle when a noise disturbed him and he fled.
Upadhya Bandara, a thirty-four-year-old doctor from Singapore visiting Yorkshire under the auspices of the World Health Organisation, later recovered in hospital and was not regarded, the police said, as ‘a Ripper job’.
*
A few Sundays after their last visit to Morecambe, Mick was standing at the bar of the Harvester attempting to drown the hangover of the night before. He had had four pints within half an hour of the doors being opened when Peter strolled in and asked him if he wanted to go to Morecambe again.
Parked outside was a ‘smart’ red Mini with wide wheels and antiroll bars that Mick had never seen before and which Peter, trying to appear nonchalant but not succeeding, said he’d been doing up over the last few months. As a demonstration of how souped up the engine was, they ‘screamed’ to Morecambe in not much more than an hour. Their first stop was Anne’s house, but Anne and her family were out which, by Mick’s reckoning, meant they should just be in time for last orders. Peter, however, had other plans. He headed ‘promptly’ for Tussaud’s wax museum.
‘Steve Davis – Picasso – Jimmy Savile’, a faded and rain-soaked poster announced over the door, but, once through the turnstile, Peter only gave a cursory glance to the models of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath in the downstairs gallery before ushering Mick with some urgency towards the staircase and onwards through the upper ‘hall’ towards ‘the Macabre Torso room’. There, as his brother pored over the ancient exhibits with a more than usually ‘salacious’ grin on his face, it occurred to Mick for the first time that the purpose of these visits might be to show him the error of his ways: ‘He seemed to me to be enjoying what he was trying to show me. He gave me the shivers. I’ve never seen a grin like it, pointing out each detail of what happens to a man when it’s too late to control his self. Half-rotted penises … And all I wanted was to get back to the pub and have a good time.’
*
Tussaud’s closed for the season on the last Saturday in October and, a few days later, on Bonfire Night, Peter clocked off work just after 5.00 but called Sonia to say he would be home late. By 8.00 he was in Huddersfield, shadowing a sixteen-year-old girl across a piece of open land close to her home. Theresa Sykes had reached the pavement of New Hey Road before she realised somebody was following her; as the shadow came level, she was hit with a hammer and, as she fell, she saw a man with dark hair and a beard. Her screams were heard by her boyfriend and father of her three-month-old baby, who tore after a figure rapidly melting into the dark. Sutcliffe hid under a hedge in a nearby front garden for some time until he felt it was safe to emerge.
*
In the summer, when it started to look certain that Peter was going to be banned from driving, No. 6 Garden Lane had been advertised for sale in the local paper, at an asking price of £37,500. The idea, as Sonia told Mrs Bowman opposite and Peter told various members of his family, was to buy a country property where Sonia could make pottery to sell to visitors in the summer and he could find a temporary labouring job until he got his licence back.
Returning from her holiday with her grandmother in Morecambe, Sonia had told her neighbour that she was undergoing tests at the hospital to see if she could have a baby. If the answer was ‘no’, and she had already had one miscarriage, then they were going to explore the possibility of adopting one or more Vietnamese ‘boat children’.
The fact that no estate agent’s board had gone up outside No. 6 had struck Barbara Bowman, who happened to be selling her own house at the same time, as odd. But then she rationalised that Peter probably didn’t want people calling round at the house when he was away. How their respective sales were progressing was the main topic of conversation between Sonia and Mrs Bowman throughout the summer; and then Sonia suddenly announced in November that she had taken No. 6 off the market.
This coincided with a change in her appearance that left Barbara Bowman feeling stunned: Sonia came out of the house one day with the ‘long, beautiful hair’ that she had always worn down her back crudely hacked off: ‘I said at the time, “That wasn’t done by any hairdresser.” She’d obviously done it herself. All that natural curl was gone, and there was just odd bits sticking up in different directions. She looked like one of these punks. I think she saw from the expression on my face that I was shocked.’
To Carl, Peter too seemed to be less and less himself as 1980 drew to a close. Seeing him talking to girls in the pub, he’d take Carl to one side and, seeming genuinely curious, ask him, ‘What do you see in her?’ He was always telling him that Sue was ‘a nice girl’.
He also seemed concerned about ‘the reputations’ of Jane and Maureen, who, at the time, were living together, with Rachel and Damien, in Maureen’s house on Ferncliffe Estate. He had dropped in one day and ‘a bloke’ was there having a meal, Peter told Carl, which to him didn’t seem right.
At twenty-four, ‘Janey’ looked so much like her mother as a young woman that a former suitor of Kathleen’s found it ‘frightening – terrifying really’. ‘A cracker. Beautiful big brown eyes. Beautiful smile. Real page-three material’ was John’s proud assessment of his youngest daughter, and few in Bingley would have want to contradict him: Jane could be seen with fairy-lights playing round her green plastic visor on Bingley Show night, surrounded by a crowd of admirers in the Fleece.
Legally separated and working full-time at Anderton’s, where Peter had worked on the night shift for two years, Jane had made a conscious decision to carve out an independent life for herself, and this included, in her own mind, owning a car. She had fallen in love with the sporty red Mini that Peter had driven Mick to Morecambe in the minute she saw it and had quickly agreed to buy it from her brother.
It was transferred from Sonia’s name to Jane’s on the 1 November, and on 9 November, four days after attacking Theresa Sykes, Peter delivered the Mini to her door. It was a Sunday, and Mrs Szurma followed Peter in her own car to Bingley to give him a lift back to Garden Lane.
The following Saturday, though, on her first attempt at a long run, the Mini broke down. Jane and Maureen had set out to visit Anne in Morecambe and had broken their journey to do some shopping in Blackburn on the way. They had only been back in it a few minutes when the engine spluttered and refused to start again. They got on the phone to Peter and, although he had just returned from a delivery in Lincolnshire, he agreed without hesitation to come and see to the car and ferry his sisters home. Forty-eight hours later he went out and murdered for the thirteenth time.
*
As far as the public was concerned in November 1980, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ had been dormant for fifteen months; and, inevitably, speculation that he had ‘retired’ or, as seemed more likely, ‘topped’ himself, was once again rife. The mood of indignation following Barbara Leach’s death in September 1979 had abated, the police were maintaining their ‘tactical’ silence and the public’s defences, with Christmas approaching, were down.
Peter Sutcliffe had had to make a delivery to Kirkstall Forge in Leeds on Monday, 17 November; and Leeds is where he returned in the evening, although he called his wife to say that he was still in Gloucester and not to expect him until late.
At 9.30 he was sitting in his car outside the Arndale Centre in Headingley, a quarter of a mile from where he had attacked Dr Bandara seven weeks before, eating a carton of Kentucky Fried Chicken and chips. He saw a young woman get off a bus at the bus stop opposite and watched her cross and turn into Alma Road, a left turning off the busy main road, straight ahead. He switched on
the ignition and quickly overtook her and sat waiting in the Rover until she walked past. When she did, he got out and followed at a short distance and waited until she drew level with an opening before springing forward and delivering a crippling blow to her head.
Seconds later another woman walked into the well-lit street and he had to hoist the unconscious victim into a standing position before dragging her thirty yards over a piece of waste ground, where he stabbed her repeatedly with a screwdriver in the lungs and once in the eye.
At 10.00, a male student found a cream raffia handbag on the pavement just beyond the entrance to the spare ground and, two hours later, having noticed what appeared to be spots of blood on one side of it, put in an emergency call to the police. The name ‘Jacqueline Hill’ had been found on a banker’s card inside the bag and, when the Panda car arrived, the student suggested that they try to find out where Jacqueline Hill lived and establish that she was unharmed. Instead, the two constables satisfied themselves with a cursory search of the area; the beams from their torches failed to fall on an undamaged pair of spectacles or a woollen mitten, or Jacqueline Hill’s body which was lying just thirty yards from where she had first been separated from her bag. Back at the station, it was logged as ‘lost property’ and shelved.
The following day, at teatime, eight hours after their daughter’s body had been discovered only yards from where she lived in Headingley, eighteen hours after the first telephone call summoning the police, uniformed officers called at the home of Mr and Mrs Jack Hill in Ormesby, near Middlesbrough, and asked them to accompany them to Leeds.
They were back in Lealholme Crescent by Wednesday, 19 November, when it was announced that Jacqueline had been murdered by the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’; and, following the announcement, they uncomprehendingly found themselves under siege: cameras started nosing at their back windows, notes offering ‘a considerable sum’ for their ‘story’ followed each other through the door, the telephone had to be left off the hook.
The Hill family expressed their revulsion through a family friend who also happened to be a solicitor, and a policeman was posted at the front gate. They didn’t venture out of the house for two weeks in case West Yorkshire police called wanting information about Jacqueline’s life and background, but they heard nothing at all. Finally, just over a week after her daughter’s murder, and on the understanding that their film would be made generally available, Doreen Hill invited BBC television cameras in to record her grief.
A second-year student reading English at Leeds University, ‘Jackie’ had moved out of the flat where she used to live on the outskirts of the city into a hall of residence nearer the city centre in order to reassure her parents, who had expressed concern about her safety. She had made her mind up to become a probation officer and, on the night of 17 November, had been on her way home from a seminar which she attended on the probation service, in Leeds.
It was Doreen Hill’s hope that, by demonstrating what ‘a decent person’ Jacqueline had been, and the anguish that her death had brought to her family, whoever was ‘shielding’ the man who killed her might be shamed at last into contacting the police.
The edition of BBC2’s late-night news magazine Newsnight which went out on Thursday, 27 November also carried ‘messages’ spoken directly ‘to camera’ by some of the women who had survived attacks by the ‘Ripper’ and the families of other women who had died.
Olive Smelt, attacked in Halifax in the summer of 1975 said: ‘Doesn’t it bother you to think people hate you for doing this? It is nothing to be proud of, the things you do.’
The mother of Jayne MacDonald, murdered in Chapeltown in the summer of 1977, said: ‘I think you are the Devil himself. You are a coward. You are not a man, you are a beast. I hate you and I believe the population hates you.’
Maureen Long, attacked in Bradford two weeks after Jayne MacDonald’s murder, said: ‘Someone wants to get hold of you and do some of the same things to you. If they come face to face with you, you had better kill yourself before someone else does.’
The stepfather of Josephine Whitaker, murdered in Halifax in April 1979, said: ‘You are an inadequate person, physically and mentally. I think the person harbouring the Ripper is as bad as he is. I can’t understand the mentality of anybody who can cohabit with such a loathsome creature.’
The mother of Barbara Leach, murdered in Bradford five months later, said: ‘Look over your shoulder – many people are looking for you. They hate you.’ And her husband added: ‘You are an obscenity on the face of the earth. When they catch you, they should lock you away and throw away the key.’
A few hours before the programme was broadcast, Trevor Birdsall, believing that the brown, ‘square-shaped’ car spotted in Alma Road at the time of Jacqueline Hill’s murder might be his friend’s Rover, had sat down to scribble an anonymous letter to the police. ‘I have good reason to now [sic] the man you are looking for in the Ripper case,’ he began. ‘This man as dealings with prostitutes and always had a thing about them … His name and address is Peter Sutcliffe, 6 Garden Lane, Heaton, Bradford. Workes [sic] for Clarkes Transport, Shipley.’
When nothing happened in the next twenty-four hours, Birdsall’s girlfriend persuaded him, on the strength of a few drinks, to go with her to Bradford police headquarters. There he repeated what he had said in the letter, adding that he had been with Sutcliffe when he got out of his car to go after a woman in Halifax on 16 August 1975, the night Olive Smelt was attacked. He was thanked for his co-operation but heard nothing more from the police; his statement, if it was ever transcribed by the young constable on the desk who took it, was never seen again.
*
The familiar warnings to women, reiterated in the wake of Jacqueline Hill’s murder, to stay off the streets after dusk led to a series of demonstrations by the ‘Reclaim the Night’ and allied movements in the towns of the North whose aim was to shock, and they succeeded.
Two hundred women marched on the Plaza cinema in Leeds, where The Beast and Climax were showing, chanting, ‘Get men off the streets’; a screening of Dressed to Kill at the Odeon was terminated when several dozen women started throwing rotten eggs and ‘paint-bombs’ at the screen; a sex shop in Chapeltown, close to where Josephine Whitaker had been murdered, had its windows smashed and the slogans ‘Women are angry’ and ‘No men after dark’ daubed on the walls, and was later burned to the ground.
In a letter to The Times at the beginning of December, Professor Hilary Rose of the University of Bradford articulated the thinking behind these apparently spontaneous eruptions: ‘It is important to stress that the “Ripper” only makes public and unavoidable that which, as a whole, society tries to avoid thinking about, namely the high level of violence against women whether within the home or on the streets,’ she wrote.
‘Meanwhile the commercial pretence that sex and violence go together only in fantasy is reflected in the cinemas and the bookstalls. Almost the entire media persist in speaking of “prostitutes” and “innocent” women. Murder is murder regardless of the occupation of the victim. The “Ripper” hunt is not only an urgent matter in its own right, but it has become part of a long battle against the sexual violence which deforms our society.’
Professor Rose added that, far from women giving in to intimidation, she saw ‘a tremendous number of support networks springing up, of shared cars, telephone links, shared journeys on foot’, all of which made for ‘something of that sense of community which was shown in the “blitz”.’
But the centres of Bradford and Leeds, even as Christmas approached, were deserted every night by 7.00. Every man out alone was suspect, and any Geordie asking for a drink in a pub was likely to feel a tap on his shoulder before he had drained the glass. In the climate of suspicion that the murders engendered, countless marriages faltered and relationships fell apart.
West Yorkshire police had been willing to try anything that might help run the ‘Ripper’ to ground, including clairvoyants from all over the
world: Mrs Doris Stokes had advised them through the medium of the Sunday People that the man they were looking for was likely to be called Ronnie or Johnnie, while a Dutchman said the murderer would turn out to be a twentyseven-year-old washing-machine mechanic living in Aberdeen.
But as 1980 drew to a close, there was enormous public pressure on Ronald Gregory to produce concrete results. A week after Jacqueline Hill’s murder he announced the formation of a ‘think tank’ of senior officers drawn from outside his own demoralised force, which the papers quickly dubbed the Super Squad. George Oldfield’s deputy, Jim Hobson, was to be in charge of this ‘unique’ new team. Oldfield himself was quietly dropped from the case.
31
A couple of days before Christmas, Carl climbed the stairs to his bedsit at Priestthorpe Road to find that Peter had called while he was out: a bottle of Brut aftershave, which is what he always got from Peter and Sonia for Christmas, plus some Hai Karate soap-on-a-rope and a card were lying on the bed.
Carl hadn’t seen Peter for nearly two weeks, and on that occasion they had parted on an unsettling note. Carl had always found it difficult to draw Peter on the subject of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’: ‘I’d say, “What d’you think then, Pete? D’you think he’s a Geordie?” An’ he’d just go, “Oh no,” but he would never discuss it. He used to always nip to next subject, like “How’s bike coming on?”’
There was a Geordie who lived at the top end of Priestthorpe Road, for instance, who Carl was convinced must have been ‘tapped’ by the police ‘dozens’ of times: ‘He just talked like that tape an’ I’d never seen him with any women or any friends or owt; he lived in a flat on his own an’ he used to walk with one of them Adidas bags all time, an’ I were sure it were him. I were going to follow him about.’ Carl had mentioned this man to Peter and, one afternoon in October, had pointed him out from the top-floor window. As usual, though, Peter hadn’t shown much interest.