Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (11 page)

Chapter 9

The Yorkshire Ripper

Name: Peter Sutcliffe

Nationality: English

Reign of terror: 1975–81

Number of victims: 13 killed, 7 injured

Favoured method of killing: hammer blows to the head

Final note: had been acting on instructions from God to ‘clean the streets’ of prostitutes.

Nearly ninety years after the notorious Jack the Ripper finished his killing spree in the East End of London, the Yorkshire Ripper picked up where he left off. In a reign of terror spanning nearly six years, the Yorkshire Ripper managed to elude the biggest police squad that has ever assembled in the UK to catch one man. By the time he was caught, 20 women had been savagely attacked, 13 brutally murdered and a whole community was virtually under siege.

It started on 30 October 1975 when a Leeds milkman on his rounds saw a shapeless bundle in a bleak recreation ground. With Bonfire Night just a week away, he thought it was only a Guy. But he went over to investigate anyway. He found a woman sprawled on the ground, her hair matted with blood, her body exposed. Her jacket and blouse had been torn open, her bra pulled up. Her slacks had been pulled down below her knees and in her chest and stomach there were 14 stab wounds.

The milkman didn’t see the massive wound on the back of her head that had actually caused her death. The victim had been attacked from behind. Two vicious blows had been delivered by a heavy, hammer-like implement, smashing her skull. The stab wounds were inflicted after she was dead.

The body belonged to a 28-year-old mother of three, Wilma McCann. She regularly hitch-hiked home after nights on the town. She died just 100 yards from her home, a council house in Scott Hall Avenue. Post-mortem blood tests showed that she had consumed 12 to 14 measures of spirits on the night of her death, which would have rendered her incapable of defending herself.

Although her clothes had been interfered with, her knickers were still in place and she had not been raped. There seemed to be no overt sexual motive for her murder. Her purse was missing. So, in the absence of any other motive, the police treated her killing as a callous by-product of robbery.

This changed when a second killing occurred in the area of Chapeltown, the red-light district of Leeds, three months later. Not all the women who worked there were professional prostitutes. Some housewives sold sex for a little extra cash. Others, such as 42-year-old Emily Jackson, were enthusiastic amateurs who did it primarily for fun. She lived with her husband and three children in the respectable Leeds suburb of Churwell. On 20 January 1976, Emily and her husband went to the Gaiety pub on Roundhay Road, the venue for the Chapeltown irregulars and their prospective clientele. Emily left her husband in the main lounge and went hunting for business. An hour later, she was seen getting into a Land-Rover in the car park. At closing time, her husband drank up and took a taxi home alone. His wife, he thought, had found a client who wanted her for the night.

Emily Jackson’s body was found the next morning huddled under a coat on open ground. Like Wilma McCann, her breasts were exposed and her knickers left on. Again, she had been killed by two massive blows to the head with a heavy hammer. Her neck, breasts and stomach had also been stabbed – this time over fifty times. Her back had been gouged with a Phillips screwdriver and the impression of a heavy-ribbed Wellington boot was stamped on her right thigh.

The post-mortem indicated that Emily Jackson had had sex before the attack, not necessarily with the murderer. Once again, there seemed to be no real motive. And the killer had left only one real clue: he had size-seven shoes.

Over a year later, on 5 February 1977, 28-year-old part-time prostitute Irene Richardson left her tawdry rooming house in Chapeltown at 11.30 p.m. to go dancing. The following morning, a jogger in Soldier’s Field, a public playing-field just a short car ride from Chapeltown, saw a body slumped on the ground and stopped to see what the matter was. It was Irene Richardson. She lay face down. Three massive blows had shattered her skull. Her skirt and tights were torn off. Her coat was draped over her buttocks and her calf-length boots had been removed from her feet and laid neatly across her thighs. Again, her neck and torso were studded with knife wounds. The post-mortem indicated that she had not had sex and had died only half an hour after leaving her lodgings.

After the murder of Irene Richardson, the police were able to link the three cases. They were plainly the work of a serial killer and the parallel with the Jack the Ripper case quickly sprang into the public imagination. The murderer of Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson and Irene Richardson soon became known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

The girls of Chapeltown heeded the warning. They moved in droves to Manchester, London and Glasgow. Those who could not travel so far from home began plying their trade in nearby Bradford. But the next victim, Patricia ‘Tina’ Atkinson, was a Bradford girl. She lived just around the corner from the thriving red-light district in Oak Lane. On 23 April 1977, she went to her local pub, The Carlisle, for a drink with her friends. She reeled out just before closing time. When she was not seen the next day, people assumed she was at home, sleeping it off.

The following evening, friends dropped round and found the door to her flat unlocked. Inside, they found her dead on her bed covered with blankets. She had been attacked as she came into the flat. Four hammer blows had smashed into the back of her head. She had been flung on the bed and her clothes pulled off. She had been stabbed in the stomach seven times and the left side of her body had been slashed to ribbons. There was a size-seven Wellington boot print on the sheet.

The man the footprint belonged to was Peter Sutcliffe. Like Jack the Ripper before him, he seems to have been on a moral crusade to rid the streets of prostitutes.

The eldest of John and Kathleen Sutcliffe’s six children, he was born in Bingley, a town just six miles north of Bradford. He had been a timid child and inscrutable young man, who was always regarded as being somehow different. He was small and weedy. Bullied at school, he clung to his mother’s skirts.

His younger brothers inherited their father’s appetite for life, the opposite sex and the consumption of large quantities of beer. Peter liked none of these things. Although he took no interest in girls, he spent hours preening himself in the bathroom. He later took up body-building.

Leaving school at 15, he took a temporary job as a grave-digger at a cemetery in Bingley. He regularly joked about having ‘thousands of people below me where I work now’. He developed a macabre sense of humour during his three years there. Once he pretended to be a corpse. He lay down on a slab, threw a shroud over himself and started making moaning noises when his workmates appeared. They called him ‘Jesus’ because of his beard.

At his trial Sutcliffe claimed that he had heard the voice of God coming from a cross-shaped headstone while he was digging a grave. The voice told him to go out on to the streets and kill prostitutes.

Despite Peter Sutcliffe’s youthful good looks, girls were not attracted to him. His first proper girlfriend, Sonia, was a 16-year-old schoolgirl when he met her in the Royal Standard, his local pub. He was 24. Sonia suffered the same introversion as Peter. On Sundays, they would sit in the front room, lost in their own conversation. Sonia would only speak to other members of the Sutcliffe family when it was absolutely unavoidable.

A devout Catholic, Peter was devastated when it was discovered that his mother was having an affair with a neighbour, a local policeman. His father arranged for the children, including Peter and bride-to-be Sonia, to be present at a Bingley hotel for a humiliating confrontation. His mother arrived in the bar believing she was meeting her boyfriend, only to be greeted by her husband and children. He forced her to show the family the new nightdress she had bought for the occasion. This was particularly painful for Peter who had discovered earlier that Sonia also had a secret boyfriend.

Later that year, 1969, Sutcliffe carried out his first known attack. He hit a Bradford prostitute over the head with a stone in a sock following a row over a ten-pound note. Psychiatrists later said that the discovery of his mother’s affair triggered his psychosis.

Sonia knew nothing of this and on 10 August 1974, after an eight-year courtship, she and Peter were married. They spent the first three years of their married life living with Sonia’s parents, then they moved to a large detached house in Heaton, a middle-class suburb of Bradford, which they kept immaculate.

On the evening of Saturday, 25 June I977, Peter dropped his wife off at the Sherrington nursing home where she worked nights. With his neighbours Ronnie and Peter Barker, he went on a pub crawl around Bradford, ending up at the Dog in the Pound. At closing time, they went to get some fish and chips.

It was well past midnight when he dropped the Barker brothers at their front door. But instead of parking his white Ford Corsair outside his house, Sutcliffe drove off down the main road towards Leeds. At around 2 a.m., he saw a lone girl wearing a gingham skirt in the street light of Chapeltown Road. As she passed the Hayfield pub and turned left down Reginald Terrace, Sutcliffe parked his car, got out and began to follow her down the quiet side street.

The girl’s body was found lying by a wall the next morning by a group of children on their way into the adventure playground in Reginald Terrace. She had been struck on the back of the head, then dragged 20 yards and hit twice more. She was also stabbed once in the back and repeatedly through the chest. The trademarks were unmistakable.

However, the victim was not a prostitute. Jayne McDonald was 16, had just left school and was working in the shoe department of a local supermarket. On the night of her death, she had been out with friends in Leeds. When she was attacked, she was on her way back to her parents’ home, which was just a few hundred yards from where her body was found.

The murder of a teenage girl gave the investigation new impetus. By September, the police had interviewed almost 700 residents in the area and taken 3,500 statements, many of them from prostitutes who worked in the area.

Two weeks after the killing of Jayne McDonald, the Ripper savagely attacked Maureen Long on some waste ground near her home in Bradford. By some miracle she survived, but the description of her assailant was too hazy to help the inquiry.

The staff of the investigation was increased to 304 full-time officers who had soon interviewed 175,000 people, taken 12,500 statements and checked 10,000 vehicles. The problem was that they no idea of the type of man they were looking for. Certainly no one would have suspected Peter Sutcliffe. The 3l-year-old was a polite and mild-mannered neighbour, a hard-working long-distance lorry driver and trusted employee, a good son and a loyal husband. He was the sort of man who did jobs around the house or tinkered with his car at weekends. Nothing about him suggested that he was a mass murderer.

Those who knew him would even have been surprised if they had seen him out picking up prostitutes. But that’s what he did, regularly. On Saturday, 1 October 1977, Jean Jordan climbed into Sutcliffe’s new red Ford Corsair near her home in Moss Side, Manchester. She took £5 in advance and directed him to some open land two miles away that was used by prostitutes with their clients. They were a few yards away from the car when Sutcliffe smashed a hammer down on to her skull. He hit her again and again, 11 times in all. He dragged her body into some bushes, but another car arrived and he had to make a quick getaway.

As he drove back to Bradford, Sutcliffe realised that he had left a vital clue on the body. The £5 note he had given Jean Jordan was brand new. It had come directly from his wage packet and could tie him to the dead girl.

For eight long days, he waited nervously. In that time, there was nothing in the press about the body being found. So he risked returning to Moss Side to find the note. Despite a frantic search, he could not find Jean Jordan’s handbag. In frustration, he started attacking her body with a broken pane of glass. He even tried to cut off the head to remove his hammer blow signature. But the glass was not sharp enough to sever the spine. In the end, he gave up, kicked the body several times and drove home.

The following day, an allotment owner found Jean Jordan’s naked body. The damage to her head made her unrecognisable and there was no evidence to identify her among her scattered clothing She was eventually identified from a fingerprint on a lemonade bottle she had handled before leaving home for the last time.

The police also found the five-pound note. They set about tracing it. In three months they interviewed 5,000 men. One of them was Peter Sutcliffe. But after leaving Sutcliffe’s well-appointed house, detectives filed a short report which left him free to go about his gruesome business.

Sutcliffe’s next victim was 18-year-old Helen Rytka, who shared a miserable room by a flyover in Huddersfield with her twin sister Rita. The two of them worked as a pair in the red-light district around busy Great Northern Street. They concentrated on the car trade.

The Yorkshire Ripper murders scared them, so they had devised a system which they thought would keep them safe. They based themselves outside a public lavatory. When they were picked up separately, they took the number of the client’s car. They each gave their client precisely twenty minutes and then returned to the toilet at a set time. But their system went terribly wrong.

On the snowy night of Tuesday 31 January 1978, Helen arrived back at the rendezvous five minutes early. At 9.25 p.m., a bearded man in a red Ford Corsair offered her the chance of a quick fiver. She thought she could perform her services quickly and make it back to the rendezvous before Rita returned. She could not. Rita never saw her again.

Helen took her client to nearby Garrard’s timber yard. There were two men there, so he could not kill her straight away. Instead, Sutcliffe had to have sexual intercourse with her in the back of the car. When they were finished, the men were gone. As she got out of the back seat to return to the front of the car, Sutcliffe swung at her with his hammer. He missed and hit the door of the car. His second blow struck her on the head. Then he hit her five more times. The walls of the foreman’s shed a few feet away were splattered with blood.