‘That isn’t the hallmark of a schizophrenic. It is the hallmark of the normal criminal,’ was the crushing retort.
One of the explanations for his behaviour given by Sutcliffe was that in 1969, before they were married, in an attempt to get even with Sonia whom he suspected of seeing someone else, he had gone with a prostitute and been duped, not only out of the ‘business’, but also of the £10 that he paid her. Significantly, it was in September that same year, while being driven through Bradford’s red light district, that he asked his friend Trevor Birdsall to stop the car while he got out. He came back a little later, looking excited and as if he had been running. He told Birdsall that he had followed a woman and hit her on the head. He pulled a sock from his pocket and threw away the small brick or stone that it had been holding. Both men were subsequently interviewed by police but the matter was dropped as the woman did not press charges.
Later that same month Sutcliffe was arrested and charged with going equipped for theft. He was in possession of a hammer. It was in his mind to kill prostitutes.
Birdsall was with him again six years later when he brutally attacked 51-year-old Olive Smelt in Boothtown Road, Halifax on 15 August 1975. Sutcliffe again stopped the car on the pretext that he was going to see somebody. He seemed to reach down for something by the side of his seat as he got out. He was gone about twenty minutes and unusually quiet when he got back. Next day Birdsall read about the murderous attack on Olive Smelt the previous evening and it crossed his mind then that the two incidents might be linked. Smelt was walking home down an alleyway when she was hit about the head with a hammer fracturing the skull in two places. She remembered nothing until she woke up in hospital. On her back were two slash marks, twelve and four inches long respectively. Her attacker had been disturbed by a motorist who had driven up to the spot with his headlights full on.
Although Birdsall was suspicious he did nothing and, four years later, when he heard the Ripper tape, those suspicions disappeared completely only to reappear in 1980, after the final killing, when he thought that Sutcliffe’s dark red Rover might belong to the Ripper. He was worried enough to send an anonymous note of his suspicions to the police before finally going to them in person.
Police subsequently linked the attack on Olive Smelt with one that Sutcliffe had carried out the previous month, on 4 July, on a 37-year-old divorcée named Anna Rogulsky. Sutcliffe attacked her as she tried to waken her boyfriend at his home near Keighley town centre. When there was no answer she took off a shoe and broke the ground floor window. Sutcliffe attacked her as she tried to get into the house. He had already seen her and spoken to her but when he asked her if she ‘fancied it’ he was rebuffed. Rogulsky was found in a nearby alleyway. Sutcliffe had hit her three times with a hammer and, lifting her clothes, had slashed her stomach with his knife. He was disturbed before he could finish her off and had to escape.
Later, when questioned about his compulsion to kill, he blamed it on a motorbike accident in which, he alleged, he had run into a telegraph pole and struck his head, telling some friends that it had caused him to lose consciousness for several hours and others for only half an hour. Since then, he said, he had suffered severe bouts of morbid depression and hallucinations. At his trial the Attorney-General commented that the jury should note that he made no mention of any directions from God but only of hallucinations and depressions.
Sutcliffe killed Wilma McCann on 30 October 1975. A milkman found her partly clothed body lying on a grass embankment about one hundred yards from her home in Leeds. Sutcliffe had intercepted her in the early hours of the morning and offered her a lift. She was separated from her husband, sexually promiscuous, drank too much and neglected her home and three children. Sutcliffe gave her the impression that he wanted to have sex. In reality, he wanted to kill a prostitute. As she got out of the car he hit her twice with the hammer, one of the blows being so hard that it penetrated the full thickness of the skull. She made a lot of noise after the first blow and so he hit her again. This did not silence her and so he stabbed her fourteen times in the chest and abdomen and once in the neck. None of the stabbings would have been fatal if they had occurred singly. It was the cumulative effect which killed her.
Asked why he disarranged her clothes after the murder Sutcliffe explained: ‘When they find them [the prostitutes] they will look as cheap as they are.’
According to her husband, 42-year-old Emily Jackson had an insatiable sexual appetite and had numerous affairs. The Jacksons were in monetary difficulties and so, about four weeks before she was murdered and with her husband’s agreement, she went to work as a prostitute. He would drive her to the Chapeltown Road area of Leeds and park while she solicited for business. If the client did not have a vehicle of his own she would take him back to the van. Her body was found in a works yard on 21 January 1976. Her head had been battered with a hammer and she had died of multiple stab wounds, those in the back being inflicted by a Phillips-type screwdriver. Altogether there was a total of fifty-two wounds in five groups. On her thigh and in some sand nearby was a bootmark which eventually matched a pair of Wellington boots found in Sutcliffe’s Bradford home.
Four months later, he bungled a killing when on 9 May he picked up a twenty-year-old West Indian girl named Marcella Claxton on the Chapeltown Road. She had been to a party and had had a bit too much to drink. She suggested that they go to the Soldier’s Field where he told her to strip off. Sutcliffe dropped his hammer as they got out of the car but attacked her with a knife until her screams forced him to run. Incredibly he stumbled across his hammer in the dark and so was able to retrieve it while the girl crawled to a telephone box and dialled for help. In hospital over fifty stitches were needed for the injuries to her head. She was able to give the police an accurate description of both her attacker and his car but, because of the change of weapon, they did not immediately make the connection with the other attacks and she was only added later as a ‘possible’.
It was almost a year before Sutcliffe killed again. When asked why it was so long, he answered that it was because of his state of mind. ‘I was having a battle in my mind. My mind was in a turmoil whether I should kill people.’
Almost as though seeking to wipe out the memory of the previous failure, Sutcliffe went back to Soldier’s Field and chose a spot not far from where he had attempted to kill Marcella Claxton the previous year. The body of 28-year-old Irene Richardson was found on Sunday, 6 February 1977. She was out of work, separated and living in a bedsitter in Leeds. The cause of death was massive fractures to the skull – one of the blows had driven the skull three-quarters of an inch into the brain – and stab wounds to the throat and stomach.
Ten weeks later he murdered again. Like the 1888 murders, this was the only crime committed indoors. Patricia Atkinson, aged thirty-two, was last seen alive on Saturday, 23 April 1977 as, drunk and staggering, she made her way back to her flat in Oak Avenue, Bradford. Sutcliffe later commented: ‘It was obvious why I picked her up. No decent woman would have been using language like that at the top of her voice.’ Separated from her husband and three children, she lived alone, had convictions for prostitution and was probably alcoholic. Sutcliffe hit her from behind and, when he had killed her, hoisted her body onto the bed. He left his bootmark on the bottom sheet and this was identified as being possibly of the same size as that found at the scene of Emily Jackson’s murder.
Now there was barely a pause between killings. Sixteen-year-old Jayne Macdonald was murdered on Saturday, 25 June 1977. She was a totally respectable young girl and her death was described by the Attorney-General as ‘typically tragic’. She had been out for the evening and was quite prepared to walk home. The way home took her through the vice area of Chapeltown. Next morning her body was found by two small children in an adventure playground. She had been hit three times with a hammer, and stabbed some twenty times.
Two weeks later Sutcliffe attacked 42-year-old Maureen Long as, unsteadily, she left the Mecca ball
room in Bradford. Instead of a taxi she accepted a lift in Sutcliffe’s car. Next morning, about 8.30 a.m., two women heard her cries for help coming from some waste ground not far from her husband’s home. She had been attacked about five hours before and suffered a fractured skull and stab wounds to her back and abdomen. Not only was she able to describe Sutcliffe but a night watchman had seen his car driving away shortly after the attack. On a piece of broken kitchen sink the police found part of a bloodstained palmprint.
Slowly the police were building up details of the man they wanted – boot size, car makes, physical description and tyre treads. They came closer still following the murder of 21-year-old Jean Jordan. She was unemployed and had two cautions for soliciting. It was a disturbing story, said the Attorney-General; ‘because she was not reported missing, no search was mounted for her’. She was last seen alive on Saturday, 1 October 1977. Her body was not found until Monday 10 October; it was lying on a disused allotment site at Chorley in Manchester – a favourite spot for prostitutes. Sometime during the previous twenty-four hours the murderer had gone back to the scene and dragged it out of hiding, stripped it and mutilated it. The reason for this was in the prostitute’s green handbag, which was also found by the allotment holder. Inside was a brand new £5 note which had been given to Sutcliffe in his wage packet. There was a chance that it could be traced back to him, so he had gone back to search for the note, and in sheer frustration at not finding it had tried to cut off the victim’s head.
At this point in the trial the judge intervened and asked if there was any particular reason why he had tried to do that?
‘Yes,’ Sutcliffe had answered, ‘because she was in league with the Devil and between them they had hidden the £5, and I was going to do the same thing with her head. I felt great anger.’
‘You are saying that she and her colleague, the Devil, had beaten you and your God.’
‘It seemed very much so.’
The note was actually hidden in a small concealed compartment on the front of the handbag. Strenuous efforts were made to trace the note. Six thousand people were interviewed by the police. One of them was Sutcliffe. Like the others he denied ever having been paid it.
Just before Christmas, on 14 December, Sutcliffe attacked 25-year-old Marilyn Moore. She had been a prostitute for six years and was soliciting in the Chapeltown area when she was picked up by Sutcliffe who was cruising for business. They agreed on a price of £5 and drove away to some spare ground about a mile and a half away. Sutcliffe suggested that they get on the back seat. As she got out and tried the back door he came up behind her and hit her a savage blow on the head. She screamed in pain and put her hands on her head for protection as he beat her to the ground. The last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was trying to catch hold of his trousers. Fortunately her screams were heard by someone nearby and Sutcliffe was forced to run for cover. The hospital operated to release the pressure on her brain caused by a depressed fracture behind the left ear. She was able to give the police a good description of her attacker, including the fact that he wore a beard and had a drooping moustache like the television character Jason King.
Nineteen seventy-eight began with two fresh killings, although this was not realized right away. The body of the first victim lay hidden for two months. She was murdered in January. In February Sutcliffe murdered a pretty, eighteen-year-old Jamaican half-caste named Helen Rytka. She worked the streets in Huddersfield with her twin sister Rita. Both had been in care for most of their lives. Working together they evolved a safety routine. Punters were allowed no more than twenty minutes. If one went away in a car the other took down its number. On 3 February they missed each other by five minutes: while Rita was waiting for her sister, Sutcliffe was killing her in a timber yard close by. A police dog found the body two days later under some timber and corrugated asbestos, naked except for a jumper and bra pushed up above the breasts in the Ripper’s familiar modus operandi. Sutcliffe later confessed that after she had got him aroused he persuaded her to get out of the car to have sex in the back. He mistimed his swing with the first blow of the hammer, catching it on the door; when she asked what it was, he said, ‘Just a small sample of one of these’ and hit her again. Seeing that two taxi drivers had come into the yard and were talking nearby he dragged her by the hair to the other end, jumped on top of her and covered her mouth with his hand, telling her that she would be all right if she kept quiet. As she had already got him aroused he had sex with her. ‘She didn’t put much into it,’ was his incredible comment. As she staggered to her feet, he attacked her again with the hammer before finishing her off with the kitchen knife that he had taken from the car.
The Attorney-General asked him, ‘How did you manage, with your hatred of prostitutes, seething with rage, to bring yourself to have sexual contact with them?’
‘I didn’t have sexual hatred for them,’ Sutcliffe explained.
He was reminded that he had been taunted and embarrassed by prostitutes, then came God’s intervention and his deadly mission began. But ‘Surprise, surprise, pretty little Helen Rytka, you went and had sex with her. Why?’
‘I didn’t have sex. I entered her, but there was no action. It was to persuade her everything would be all right.’
‘God didn’t tell you to put your penis into that girl’s vagina. You had a choice.’
Reverting back to January 1976, the Attorney-General then asked why he had placed a piece of wood against Emily Jackson’s vagina, which led in turn to the suggestion that he had stabbed his victims against their genital areas to obtain sexual gratification. Sutcliffe denied this.
On Sunday, 26 March, two months after she had been murdered, the body of 22-year-old Yvonne Pearson was found on a piece of waste ground in Bradford. She had last been seen alive on 21 January when she had left the Flying Dutchman pub to see if she could get some business. She was reported missing two days later. Her body was found underneath some debris, including an upturned settee; her right arm was entangled in the springs which showed that it had been put there after rigor mortis had set in. Sutcliffe had shattered her head with a walling hammer and then dragged her over to the settee from which he had stuffed filling down her throat to keep her quiet.
Sutcliffe murdered again on Tuesday, 16 May 1978, behind the Manchester Royal Infirmary. A man taking his son to Casualty thought he heard Vera Milward’s dying screams as Sutcliffe battered her with his hammer. Next morning she was found lying in a compound behind the hospital, legs straight, fully clothed, and with her shoes on top of her body. She had one savage slash in her abdomen, so deep that her intestines had spilled out; she had then been rolled over and stabbed in the back before her killer had straightened her clothes. The combination of tyre tracks found nearby showed that the same car had been used for the murder of Irene Richardson and the attack on Marilyn Moore in 1977.
Sutcliffe’s last six victims have a special significance. None of them were prostitutes, all were respectable women. This brought a change in the modus operandi employed. None of them could be picked up in the red light districts and taken away to a deserted spot as had happened with the other victims. As the Attorney-General said: ‘You can’t pick them up and it is rather difficult to drive them to a quiet spot and it is unlikely, if you succeeded in that, that you could get them into the back of the car.’
Josephine Whitaker, nineteen, a building society clerk, had visited her grandparents’ home in Halifax about a mile away from her own on Wednesday, 4 April 1979. One of the reasons for this impromptu visit was to show them the new watch that she had bought from a mail order club. At about 11.30 p.m. she said goodnight and left. Her way home took her through Savile Park in a well-lit residential area. A man walking his dog saw a man and a young woman walking side by side towards the park. Sutcliffe was chatting to her. Shortly before killing her he said, ‘You can’t trust anyone these days.’
Cross-examining, the Attorney-General asked: ‘Can you think of a more horrible a
nd cynical thing to say to someone you were just about to murder?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you say it?’
‘Because I couldn’t trust myself.’
‘You were trying to convince her she was safe with you?’
‘Yes, in a sense.’
‘Did God tell you to do that?’
‘No.’
‘It was a bit of private enterprise on your part?’
‘It was what I thought.’
Sutcliffe had stopped and, feigning poor eyesight, had asked her to look at the church clock to get her to stand still while he jockeyed her into position.
‘Did God tell you to tell that poor girl to look at the church clock?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you just standing there telling us deliberate lies?’
‘No.’
Sutcliffe hit her twice, fracturing the skull from ear to ear, before dragging her back into the park. He had specially sharpened a giant Phillips screwdriver before coming out. He stabbed her twenty-five times. A man walking in the park heard a noise, the type of noise that makes your hair stand on end.
The same terrible weapon was used to murder Barbara Leach, a twenty-year-old student living in Bradford. On Saturday, 1 September 1979 she had been to a pub party and when it broke up decided to go for a short walk to clear her head. She was wearing a pair of jeans with a ‘Best rump’ patch on the back pocket. Her body was not found until the Monday afternoon. It had been squashed into a dustbin recess and was covered with a carpet weighted down by bricks. As with two of the other victims her cheesecloth shirt and bra had been pushed up to expose her breasts. She had been hit with the hammer once and stabbed with the Phillips eight times.
The murder precipitated an unprecedented million-pound police publicity campaign to swamp the public with information. There were mobile exhibitions, continuous broadcasts of the Ripper tape, newspaper challenges (‘The Ripper is a Coward’), two million copies of a four-page newspaper devoted solely to the killer, freefone telephone lines to hear the mocking tape and police Project R, ‘Help us Catch the Ripper’. A quarter of a million people were interviewed, there were 17,000 suspects, 26,000 homes were visited, 175,000 vehicles were checked, and reward money offered totalling £30,000.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 36