Ghosts & Gallows

by Paul Adams

  Around the same time, Sergeant Robert Ring came on duty for the nightshift at Hammerton Road in Sheffield. Learning that the man he had picked up the previous evening for car theft was still in custody and had been interviewed all day by the Ripper Squad in Leeds, Ring decided to take a trip back to Melbourne Road. The sergeant recalled that while he and Constable Hyde had been waiting for their vehicle check to come through, the driver had gone off on his own for a brief time to relieve himself behind a wall a short distance from where the two cars had been parked. It was to prove a crucial decision and a pivotal moment in the long search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Ring took a patrol car and drove up to Broomhill. Searching around by torchlight in the area where Peter Sutcliffe had slipped away, he found a ball-pein hammer and a knife lying on a pile of leaves over a grating in a gap between the stone wall and an oil storage tank. Some time later a check was made in the lavatory that Sutcliffe had used just prior to his initial interview at the Hammerton Road station, and another knife was found submerged inside the toilet cistern. When told of the discoveries, Sutcliffe immediately confessed and over the next fifteen hours dictated a thirty-four page statement admitting to a string of violent attacks and murders: a half-decade campaign of evil had finally come to an end. Protected by a police cordon from a huge crowd baying for his blood, Sutcliffe appeared at Dewsbury Magistrates Court on 5 January 1981 charged with thirteen murders and was remanded in custody in Armley Gaol. Four months later, on 5 May, his trial began in Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey in London. Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility, claiming he had been on a mission from God to rid the world of prostitutes by a campaign of organised murder. The jury were unconvinced and on 22 May 1981, Peter William Sutcliffe was jailed for life with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of thirty years.

  Much has been written since that time concerning the Yorkshire Ripper and what drove him to carry out his crimes. Sutcliffe, a ‘manipulative psychopathic liar’, clearly derived powerful sexual satisfaction during the act of killing, unobtainable during normal intercourse – a sweater worn under his trousers with the V-neck exposing his genitals allowed him to kneel and masturbate over his victims as they lay dead or dying, and he furthered a morbid fascination with red-light areas and the world of the street-worker. Sutcliffe was also able to live a double life: his wife Sonia, five years his junior and the daughter of Czech and Ukrainian immigrants, was completely unaware that she was living with a killer. They first met in 1967 and later married in August 1974, but although the relationship was at times stormy and marred with arguments and the problems associated with Sonia’s schizophrenia, Sutcliffe never laid a finger on his wife during all the time they were together. This parallels the life and crimes of Peter Kürten, the sadistic ‘Monster of Dusseldorf’, who carried out a similar series of sex crimes directed at women and young children during the 1920s, and whose wife at no time suspected her husband’s vile and hidden perversions. Unlike the Yorkshire Ripper, Kürten went to the guillotine on 2 July 1931. Sutcliffe had in fact been interviewed a staggering nine times in connection with the Ripper murders, but he was one of thousands and had evaded detection on each occasion, his file buried under the vast information overload that afflicted the West Yorkshire police’s investigation in the days before extensive computerisation and DNA technology would revolutionise crime detection. During the early months of 1979, the investigation took a dramatic turn when the Ripper Squad received a number of letters and a cassette tape recording that purported to come direct from the killer, a man with a distinctive Geordie accent that was narrowed down by phonetic experts to the Castleton district of Sunderland. As the West Yorkshire police concentrated a proportion of their enquiry in the hunt for ‘Wearside Jack’, anyone not from the region was dismissed as a suspect and Peter Sutcliffe, who was born in Bingley, later admitted that he felt safe during this period2. In the dark days of the late 1970s, with police unable to make the breakthrough that would trap the vicious perpetrator of a seemingly endless series of killings, the psychic angle offered by clairvoyants and mediums may have appeared to some to be able to succeed where the forces of the Ripper Squad were failing.

  The psychic search for the Yorkshire Ripper was one that was driven by both local and national newspapers. During the second half of the 1970s, one medium who became firmly established in the public eye as one of the country’s major psychics was Essex housewife Doris Stokes. Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire in 1920, Stokes claimed to have had paranormal and mediumistic experiences from childhood. During the Second World War she enlisted in the WRAF and in 1943 married John Stokes, a sergeant in the paratroops who became a prisoner of war following the raid on Arnhem in 1944. Their son, John Michael, died in infancy and the Stokes later adopted a young orphan, Terry, who they subsequently brought up as their own. The Stokes household was a poor one, due in no small part to the head injuries that John Stokes had received during his time in Holland and which affected his ability to work throughout his life. Inspired by the Scottish materialisation medium Helen Duncan, who supplemented her husband’s income as a postman by giving séances throughout the country, and one of whose sittings she attended around the time that they adopted Terry, Doris decided to train as a medium and support the family in the same way. Developing her natural ability as a clairaudient at a local spiritualist church, she eventually passed a ‘test séance’ at Nottingham and in 1949 was registered as a practising medium by the Spiritualists’ National Union. Stokes later became a State Enrolled Nurse but continued to give séances privately and, in 1975, at the age of fifty-five, became one of the resident mediums at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain’s headquarters at Belgrave Square in London.

  Doris Stokes’ major fame outside of the Spiritualist movement was precipitated by a visit to Australia in 1978, when she took part in The Don Lane Show on television. This generated a huge public interest in her platform work and, like Estelle Roberts before her, Stokes began to give large scale demonstrations of her mediumship before capacity audiences at prestigious venues such as the London Palladium and Barbican Hall in England and Australia’s Sydney Opera House. Assisted by her invisible spirit guide, a Tibetan lama named ‘Ramanov’, Stokes seemed to be able to provide and pass on convincing evidence for survival after death to people from all walks of life around the world: she issued a number of autobiographical volumes – beginning with the 1980 book Voices In My Ear: The Autobiography of a Medium – that chronicled much of her psychic work, and on her death, following an operation for a brain tumour in London on 8 May 1987, Stokes had easily been the public face of mediumship in Britain throughout the 1980s up until that point.

  On 1 July 1979, just over three months after the murder of Josephine Whitaker in Halifax, the Sunday People newspaper ran a dramatic front page story entitled ‘Face of the Ripper’ featuring Doris Stokes’ attempts to identify the unknown killer following the broadcast of the ‘Wearside Jack’ tape recording on television. The article was accompanied by a prominent sketch of the murderer drawn by the tabloid’s resident artist Bob Williams, who had been guided by the medium’s psychic description as he drew his portrait, and the clairaudient’s profile was passed on by the newspaper to West Yorkshire police. Through a link with the spirit world, Stokes revealed the Ripper was aged between thirty-one and thirty-two, five feet eight inches tall, was slightly built and lived on Tyneside or Wearside in a street named Berwick or Bewick. His name was either Johnny or Ronnie and his surname began with the letter M, while Edwards’ portrait showed a clean-shaven man with collar-length straight hair parted on the right with ‘a small bald patch which he tries to cover up’. Stokes also felt that the killer had at some point received mental treatment at the Cherry Knowle psychiatric hospital at Ryhope, just outside Sunderland. At one point it seemed that the police might have got their man in the shape of Ronnie Metcalf, a long-distance lorry driver from Berwick Avenue in Sunderland’s Downhill neighbourhood, but Metcalf was quickly
eliminated and, with hindsight, it is plain to see that the voices in Doris’ ear were hopelessly wide of the mark: as well as the complete inaccuracy of the name, Peter Sutcliffe was thirty-four at the time of Doris Stokes’ sitting for the People, wore a distinctive full beard and lived at 6 Garden Lane, Heaton in Bradford, and, not surprisingly, detectives acting on her information got nowhere.

  Like many television and celebrity psychics, Doris Stokes remains a controversial figure nearly twenty-five years after her death, with sceptics putting much if not all of her mediumistic abilities down to ‘cold reading’ and luck. Ian Wilson, a historian and writer on paranormal subjects from Bristol, attended one of Stokes’ sell-out platform demonstrations at the London Palladium in November 1986, not long before the medium’s death, while researching for a book on the evidence for life beyond the grave, and together with two television journalists, Beth Miller and Siobhan Hockton, came away unimpressed. In his The After Death Experience (1987), Wilson notes that the reality of the medium’s performance that night (split into two parts separated by an interval) was not all that it seemed: members of the audience who in the first half received lengthy messages, ostensibly from beyond, were known to the medium and had been invited to attend the performance, while enquiries with the Palladium management revealed that Stokes booked the front three rows, where some of these people were sitting, ‘for her own purposes’. ‘No longer was there need to believe that Doris’s information in any way came from the dead,’ Wilson concludes. ‘All the hard and really impressive material Doris produced during the show had been known or available to her beforehand … It was no accident that Doris’s second-half free-for-all messages for non-pre-arranged individuals were much less convincing. For these she had to rely on intelligent guesswork and “fishing”.’ For those working at the CSICOP level of scepticism these kind of revelations are grist to the mill, but to explain away the entire mediumship of Doris Stokes (and platform mediums in general) in this way is giving the subject only superficial consideration. The workings of mediumship, whether it be clairvoyance, clairaudience or even materialisation, are a subtle and seemingly unknowable, but ultimately real, process and the experiences of Ian Wilson and his colleagues go to show that when this process is elevated to the level of ‘psychic entertainment’ the pressures for a medium or sensitive to deliver the goods at every sitting are enormous, particularly as in this case at such a prestigious and sold-out venue as the London Palladium. We have already discussed ‘mixed mediumship’ in this context, and, as there exists many supportive testimonials to the genuine psychic abilities of Doris Stokes that the people involved were adamant could not have been picked up or effected by trickery or ‘cold reading’, it is best to leave the medium, and the subject, there for the moment.

  Another psychic who turned detective in an attempt to bring the Yorkshire Ripper to justice was none other than the ‘wizard of Utrecht’, Gerard Croiset. Working with The Sun newspaper, the Dutchman gave a profile of the killer which was passed on to West Yorkshire police and also appeared in the paper on 28 November 1979. Croiset said the Ripper lived in the centre of Sunderland in a block of flats over a garage. He wore his hair long and cut straight across the neck, had a squashed nose and, due to a damaged right knee, walked with a limp. Like Doris Stokes, Croiset felt that the murderer had received some form of psychiatric treatment in the past, possibly in a children’s home; he was also fooled by the ‘Wearside Jack’ hoaxer and his pronouncement was one of several high-profile late-career failures that were to give Piet Hein Hoebens the ammunition he needed to shoot down the clairvoyant’s posthumous reputation not long afterwards. Where the Yorkshire Ripper was concerned, Croiset was no more successful than medium Patrick Barnard, who had stated four days before in the Southend Evening Echo that the killer was a crewman on a submarine, clairvoyant Flora MacKenzie who was certain the Ripper lived in Barnsley, Wim Virbeck, an engineer from Holland who claimed he was a washing-machine repair man from Aberdeen, Dutch psychic Dono Meijling who felt he was related to the temporary head of the West Yorkshire CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson, and occultist Alex Sanders, the self-styled ‘King of the Witches’ from Notting Hill Gate who, through magical divination, described him as a single man living alone near railway arches in South Shields.

  Amidst all the conflicting statements and false leads were two psychics, however, whose contemporary pronouncements on the Ripper case cannot, with what we now know in hindsight about the murderer Peter Sutcliffe and his crimes, be dismissed so easily. Robert Cracknell, a private detective and former finance company investigator at that time in his mid-forties, has been described as ‘the leading psychic detective of the 1980s’. Much of this notoriety is based on his involvement, during the autumn of 1980, with the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. An illegitimate and unwanted child, Cracknell’s father died before he was born and he was brought up in London by foster parents. Evacuated to Nottingham to escape the Blitz, Cracknell spent the war years lonely and unhappy, being beaten and ill-treated for bedwetting. Later, at fifteen, he joined the RAF but was discharged in 1956 aged twenty-one on medical grounds and suffered a nervous breakdown. After spending time living in London as a down and out, Cracknell managed to pull his life around and began working as a case assessor for an insurance company and later went on to found his own detective agency. Throughout this time, Cracknell had nurtured and developed a natural clairvoyant ability that had made itself apparent even before he enlisted in the air force.

  During the 1970s, Robert Cracknell’s psychic abilities came to the attention of Kevin McClure, then the President of the Oxford University Society for Psychical Research, who arranged a series of controlled experiments, the so-called ‘chair tests’, in front of an audience of university students. Cracknell was able to predict, with a high degree of success over and above what would be considered as achievable by chance, the details of occupants of certain seats in the audience of future university meetings, a form of ESP experiment that Tenhaeff had undertaken on a number of occasions with Gerard Croiset. Later, he provided evidential information when a homosexual friend of McClure’s was murdered by a partner, data which was later confirmed by police working on the case. McClure introduced Cracknell to Colin Wilson and the two men became involved for a short time in the still unsolved disappearance of thirteen-year-old Aylesbeare schoolgirl Genette Tate, who vanished while on a paper round on 19 August 1978. Ultimately, despite some early impressions which had impressed the Devon police, Cracknell was unable to say who had abducted Genette and his prediction that her body would be found within ten days of her disappearance proved to be wrong. The following year Robert Cracknell became drawn into the case of the Yorkshire Ripper.

  Cracknell was convinced that the Ripper was from Bradford. Soon after the murder of Barbara Leach, the Daily Mirror pre-empted the Sunday People’s investigation with Doris Stokes by asking Cracknell if he was able to pick up anything in connection with the Bradford student’s death. Despite living in London, the investigator stated the killer was a local man and although having not visited the city before, correctly described several landmarks that he felt were on the route that the Ripper would have passed on his way back to his own home. Subsequently the Yorkshire Post invited Cracknell to come to Bradford, where he was driven around the area in an attempt to identify the location of the murderer’s house. Cracknell felt that the killer had some past connection with a terrace of latterly demolished houses in Rayner Terrace in Pudsey, Leeds and at some point had lived there, but this has proved not to be the case. However, when driving around Bradford, Cracknell, following his own psychic intuition, took the reporters to within 100 yards or so of Peter Sutcliffe’s house in Garden Lane, but was unable to pinpoint the actual address. He did, however, provide the newspaper with a description of the house.

  In his book The Psychic Detectives (1984), Colin Wilson describes the final stages of Robert Cracknell’s involvement with the Ripper case. On 11 November 1980, both he an
d Bob Cracknell were invited to lunch by Christopher Watkins, the sales director of the Hamlyn publishing house, who had accepted the psychic’s autobiography Clues to the Unknown – Wilson had assisted in placing the manuscript and had agreed to contribute a foreword. During the course of the luncheon, Cracknell made a prediction that the Yorkshire Ripper would commit his last murder in a fortnight’s time, after which he would soon be caught. The murder of Jacqueline Hill took place six days later but the rest of his statement, including the description of the killer’s house in Bradford, proved to be correct. Robert Cracknell was present in Colin Wilson’s house in Cornwall when a television newsflash announced the arrest of the Ripper on 5 January 1981.

  The second psychic who it later transpired delivered accurate information about the Yorkshire murderer, and in fact was the most successful of them all, was clairvoyant medium Nella Jones. Born in a shack on Belvedere Marshes in Kent on 4 May 1932, she tells in her autobiography Ghost of a Chance (1982) of her impoverished upbringing as one of six children to casual farm labourers. Her mother was a Romany gypsy of fairground stock while her father, a violent man, had worked in the past as a miner. The family was poor and lived at various times in a gypsy encampment, a wartime Anderson shelter, and a derelict bus parked on the edge of a golf course. Nella married at the age of seventeen and had two children, but the relationship broke down and she moved to Abbey Wood, supporting herself by selling rags and later working in a lampshade factory. Later, another relationship produced a second daughter, Gaynor, but this also failed and she moved to Charlton where she started her own house-cleaning business, which ran successfully before ill heath forced her to close in the early 1970s. Aware of her own natural psychic abilities from the age of seven, Nella describes many experiences of premonition, of seeing apparitions, and her ability to work as a successful healer. Following the failure of her cleaning business, Nella Jones became a professional clairvoyant medium. Her reputation as a successful psychic detective began in 1974 when an oil painting, ‘The Guitar Player’ by the Dutch master Jan Vermeer, was stolen in a £2m art raid on Kenwood House in London. Jones was able to guide police to where the painting’s frame, together with a limpet alarm, had been discarded in the estate’s grounds by the thieves, who later demanded both a £2m ransom and the release of the IRA terrorist sisters Dolours and Marion Price, for its return. Jones told detectives the painting was being hidden in the catacombs of Highgate Cemetery, which at that time had been closed to the public following vandalism associated with recent incidents of vampire-hunting and sightings of ghostly figures, a controversy fuelled in no small part by two feuding ghost hunters, David Farrant and Sean Manchester. Police searched the cemetery but found nothing and Jones informed them that it had been moved to another London cemetery, where it would soon be found. On 6 May 1974, ‘The Guitar Player’ was recovered from a churchyard next to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The same year, Jones offered help in finding missing youngster Alison Chadwick and, like psychic detective Robert Cracknell, later attempted to find schoolgirl Genette Tate and track down the Yorkshire Ripper.