Ghosts & Gallows (25 page)

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 and 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.

Many of the psychic impressions connected with the Yorkshire killings that Nella Jones relayed to journalist Shirley Davenport over a period of several months, beginning in the summer of 1979, proved to be highly accurate. Like Robert Cracknell she felt the killer lived in Bradford, but Jones went further: the murderer’s name was Peter and the most significant thing about him were his eyes, which were unsettling and dangerous; he worked as a lorry driver for an engineering firm whose name, written on the cab of his vehicle, began with the letter ‘C’; the name Ainsworth was somehow significant with the case, while in the closing months of 1980, she felt the killer would strike again in Leeds on either 17 or 27 November and the victim’s initials would be ‘JH’. All of this would prove to be chillingly accurate following Peter Sutcliffe’s arrest, from T. & H.W. Clark, the haulage company he worked for and in the cab of whose lorry he was photographed for a publicity brochure, to the death of Jacqueline Hill, the thirteenth and final victim; Peter Hainsworth was the name of a local magistrate in the garden of whose house Marguerite Walls was strangled, and several detectives who interviewed Sutcliffe later commented on the soulless quality of his staring black eyes. In her book, published in 1982, Jones notes a comment she made to a reporter from the
Yorkshire Post
in the aftermath of Sutcliffe’s trial that, once in prison, the killer would have problems with his eyes. On 10 January 1983, after her book had gone to press, Sutcliffe was attacked in the hospital wing of Parkhurst Prison and sustained four separate wounds to the side of his face. The psychic’s prediction came fully true fourteen years later when the Ripper was again attacked, this time in Broadmoor on 10 March 1997, when he was blinded in the left eye by prisoner Ian Kay who stabbed Sutcliffe in the face with a pen; his right eye was also damaged.

During the second week of his trial, on 11 May 1981, Sutcliffe described under cross-examination the first instance of him hearing what he considered to be the voice of God that would later, so he claimed, instruct him to begin his mission of murder. This took place in Bingley cemetery, where he worked as a grave digger during the mid-1960s, and Sutcliffe described hearing ‘a voice similar to a human voice – like an echo’ coming from the grave of a Polish man named Bronislaw Zapolski. Sutcliffe was alone at the time and in the Catholic section of the cemetery. In 1986, medium and psychic investigator Rita Goold visited Bingley while carrying out research into her family history. Goold’s grandmother, a Catholic, had been buried at Cottingley two miles to the south-east, a small village now famous to psychical researchers for the fairy hoax that fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At some time in the past, Rita Goold’s grandmother’s coffin, along with a number of others, had been exhumed from Nab Wood cemetery in Cottingley to make way for a new road and had been reinterred at Bingley in the section where Peter Sutcliffe later claimed to have heard disembodied voices. During her visit, Goold spoke with one of the cemetery keepers, who, it turned out, had worked with and knew Sutcliffe twenty years before and who confirmed aspects of his character connected with his employment as a grave digger, notably his morbid fascination with the bones and skulls that they would occasionally unearth during the course of their work. He also claimed that the part of the cemetery where the bodies from Nab Wood had been re-buried had not been consecrated either before or after the burial. Both he and fellow workers had repeatedly heard voices there over the years, often at night, and as such considered it to be a haunted place …

NOTES

1
. Investigative journalist and film-maker Michael Bilton’s definitive
Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
(Harper Collins, London, 2003) contains much background information on all the women mentioned whose lives and tragic circumstances can easily be reduced to mere statistics in a commentary such as the present work.

2
. On 21 March 2006, John Humble, an unemployed alcoholic from Sunderland’s Ford Estate, was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice by carrying out the ‘Wearside Jack’ hoax.

Now, some twenty years after his death, the English psychical researcher Benson Herbert has become one of the twentieth century’s forgotten ghost hunters. Born in County Durham of Irish descent on 16 May 1912, Herbert was a man of many parts whose interests included archaeology, photography, mythology and legends, as well as science and ghosts. An Oxford graduate, he joined the Society for Psychical Research in December 1931 while pursuing a career as a physicist, at the same time undertaking archaeological surveys of historic sites in both Britain and Ireland. Herbert became interested in haunted castles and theorised that the paranormal phenomena that took place there was due to anomalous electrical activity isolated from external radio waves and electromagnetism by the buildings’ massive stone walls that performed like ancient ‘Faraday cages’. It was a line of thinking from which the discipline of ‘paraphysics’, the subject with which Herbert is now most closely associated, would grow in the years following the Second World War – that ghosts and hauntings as well as mediumship are due to natural physical phenomena rather than the activities of spirits and discarnate entities.

Herbert later struck up a friendship with fellow SPR member Richard (R.G.) Medhurst (1920-1971), a British mathematician and electrical engineer with an abiding interest in the paranormal, and the two men held séances together at Herbert’s Chelsea flat, as well as Medhurst’s home in Richmond. Over the course of these experiments, Herbert developed a trance personality and spoke in the voice of a 1,000-year-old Chinese mandarin, although he was disinclined to believe this was a possessing spirit but rather a hidden aspect of his own subconscious mind. Despite believing that mediumship, clairvoyance and healing were subjects based on a hidden and as yet undiscovered faculty of science, Benson Herbert eventually gave up traditional spiritualist-inspired experimentation in favour of a new and radical form of laboratory-based research that drew heavily on his own scientific background as a physicist. In 1966, keen to ensure his experiments were free from the traffic vibration and electrical interference inherent in inner-city environments, Herbert took on the lease of Privett House, a remote farmhouse on a hillside on the edge of the New Forest, near Downton in Wiltshire. There he established the Paraphysical Laboratory, which came to be known informally as the ‘Paralab’, with himself as Director and Egyptian-born psychical researcher, UFO investigator and SPR member Manfred Cassirer as Honorary Research Officer. With the help of visiting students and other enthusiasts who travelled to Downton at weekends, Herbert began a series of unorthodox and original experiments in order to, as he himself described, ‘carry out precise and systematic research into the physics of the paranormal’, something that went against the then fashionable statistics and Rhine-inspired trends of contemporary parapsychology.