The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (47 page)

Sutcliffe committed his first murder in October 1975. His victim was Wilomena McCann, known as Wilma. She was 28 years old and a mother of four. Her body was found on the morning of 30 October 1975, lying face up on a sloping grass embankment of the Prince Philip playing fields, off Scott Hall Road, just 100yd from her council home in nearby Scott Hall Avenue. McCann had been struck twice on the back of the head and then stabbed in the neck, chest and abdomen 15 times. There were traces of semen found on the back of her trousers and knickers.

On the night of McCann’s death, she had left her three younger children in the care of her eldest daughter, nine-year-old Sonja, to go out drinking. She was drinking heavily until closing time at 10.30pm and then she made her way home. Along the way, a lorry driver stopped when Wilma flagged him down, but continued on his way when he was greeted with a mixture of incoherent instructions and abuse, leaving her by the side of the road. A West Indian man saw her being picked up at about 1.30am; he was the second last person to see her alive. Soon after 5am, a neighbour found Wilma’s two eldest daughters huddled together at the bus stop. They were cold, confused and frightened, and waiting for their mother, who hadn’t come home.

A team of 150 police officers was set up. They interviewed 7,000 householders and 6,000 lorry drivers. They painstakingly took hundreds of statements from anyone with even the remotest connection to Wilma, but still they never came close to finding her killer.

Sutcliffe did not kill again until Tuesday 20 January 1976. His victim on that night was Emily Monica Jackson, 42, who was working as a prostitute to get extra money for her husband and family. Emily and her husband Sydney would drive their blue Commer van into Leeds where Sydney would wait for his wife in one of the bars while she used the van to work. On the night of
Tuesday, 20 January 1976, they parked their van in the car park of the Gaiety pub and went inside. They had a drink together then Emily went outside to look for business. Sydney was to wait inside until she returned at closing time. When she wasn’t there to meet him, he took a taxi home, expecting her to follow in the van shortly after – but she never returned home.

Emily’s mutilated body was found just after 8am the following morning, only 800yd from the Gaiety. After murdering her, Sutcliffe had left her lying on her back with her legs apart. She was still wearing her tights and knickers, but her bra was pulled up, exposing her breasts. Peter had struck Emily on the head twice with his hammer and then stabbed her lower neck, upper chest and lower abdomen 51 times with a sharpened Phillips screwdriver. Sutcliffe’s need to vent his anger on the already-dead Emily caused him to make a slip, though; he stomped on Emily’s right thigh, leaving the impression of a heavy ribbed Wellington boot. The boot was further identified as a Dunlop Warwick, probably size seven, definitely no larger than an eight. Another print was found in the sand nearby.

Sutcliffe lost his job as a lorry driver, curtailing his travelling. However, his need to kill was becoming unbearable, as Marcella Claxton, a 20-year-old prostitute, would soon discover. At around 4am on 9 May, she was walking home from a drinking party held by friends in Chapeltown, an area of Leeds. A large white car pulled up alongside her. She wasn’t working that night but she asked the driver for a lift. That driver was Sutcliffe. Instead of driving her home, he drove her to Soldier’s Field just off Roundhay Road. He offered Marcella £5 to get out of the car and undress for sex on the grass, but she refused the offer. As they both got out of the car, Marcella heard a thud as Sutcliffe dropped something and it hit the ground. He told her it was his wallet. Marcella then went behind a tree to urinate. Sutcliffe walked towards her and the next thing she felt was the blow of Sutcliffe’s hammer as he brought it down on the back of her head, and then she felt the second blow. She lay back on the
grass, looking at the blood on her hand from where she had touched her head. Sutcliffe stood nearby. She remembered vividly that his hair and beard were black and crinkly and that he was masturbating as he watched her bleeding on the ground. He went back to the white car with the red upholstery to get some tissues to clean himself up. When he finished, he threw the tissues on the ground and placed a £5 note in Marcella’s hand, warning her not to call the police as he got back into his car.

Marcella, her clothes now covered in blood, managed to
half-walk
, half-crawl to a nearby telephone box where she called for an ambulance. As she sat on the floor and waited for help, she saw Sutcliffe drive past many times looking for her, probably to finish the job and rid himself of a vital witness. The gaping wound in the back of her head required 52 stitches and a
seven-day
stay in hospital. For months after the attack, she would hate men, barely able to be in the same room with them. Years after the attack, she was still plagued by depression and dizzy spells and was unable to hold down a job. The birth of her son Adrian coincided with Sutcliffe’s subsequent arrest in 1981.

The senseless attacks were, by now, the main topic of conversation among prostitutes and the patrons of the many pubs in the Leeds area, and they were compared to the notorious crimes of Jack the Ripper in the previous century. Prostitutes, in an attempt to protect themselves, were seen working in groups, making it very clear to their clients that the details of their cars and registration numbers were being recorded. Increased police activity in the area put further pressure on the already strained relationship between the prostitutes and officers of the law, creating a formidable barrier to the police enquiry.

On Saturday, 5 February, 28-year-old Irene Richardson left her lodgings in Cowper Street, Chapeltown, at 11.30pm to go to Tiffany’s Club. En route she met Sutcliffe, who drove her to Soldier’s Field, the scene of a previous attack. After attacking her savagely, he left her lying face down, placing her coat over her inert and bloodied body. He had fractured her skull with the
three blows he inflicted with his hammer. One of the blows had been so severe that a circular piece of her skull had actually penetrated her brain. He had stabbed her in the neck and throat, and three more times in the stomach, savage downward strokes that had caused her intestines to spill out. When her coat was removed, police found that while her bra was still in place, her skirt had been lifted up and her tights pulled off the right leg and down. One of the two pairs of knickers she had been wearing had been removed and stuffed down her tights, while the other pair was still in place. Her calf-length brown boots had been removed and placed neatly over her thighs. A vaginal swab showed the presence of semen but it was considered to have been from sexual activity prior to the attack.

A further examination of the crime scene revealed tyre tracks from which casts were taken. The tracks indicated that the killer had used a medium-sized car or van. Checks with tyre manufacturers established that the vehicle had been fitted with two ‘India Autoway’ tyres and a ‘Penman’ brand on the rear offside, all of them cross-ply. With the assistance of tyre manufacturers, a list of 26 possible car models was drawn up. It seemed that a genuine break had finally been made in the investigation. Police officers, without the benefits of computerisation, had moved into local vehicle taxation offices each night to hand-check all the vehicles in West Yorkshire compatible with the list. The final list contained 100,000 cars – an overwhelming investigative task for the police.

On Saturday, 23 April, Patricia Atkinson became Sutcliffe’s next victim. By the time he came across her, she was drunk. Together, they walked to his car and then drove back to her flat. As they entered through her front door, Sutcliffe struck the back of Atkinson’s head with the same hammer he had used on all of his previous victims. Before her unconscious body hit the floor, he struck her three more times. As the blood poured from her wounds, he began to remove her overcoat. He then lifted her, carried her to the bedroom and threw her down on the bed.
There, he ripped open her black leather jacket and blue shirt. Pulling up her bra to reveal her breasts, he then pulled her jeans down to her ankles. With a chisel he had removed from his pocket, he began to stab at her now-exposed stomach. He turned her over and stabbed her in the back but did not penetrate the skin. Then he quickly turned her back over to stab her stomach again, leaving a total of six stab wounds. Before he left her, he pulled her jeans back up and, without realising it, he left a size seven Dunlop Warwick wellington boot print on the bottom bed sheet.

His next victim was the youngest, 16-year-old Jayne McDonald, who met her untimely death at the hands of Sutcliffe on 25 June 1977. She was going out dancing and was in a happy mood. She kissed her father goodbye before she left their home in Reginald Terrace, Chapeltown, for the last time. After the dance, Jayne had gone with friends to buy chips in the city centre, but missed the last bus home.

At 11.50pm, she began walking home with Mark Jones, a young man she had met earlier that night. He was to organise a lift home for her with his sister, but the sister wasn’t home when they got there. Jayne and Mark continued walking together, stopping for a brief kiss and cuddle, as far as the Florence Nightingale public house. It was 1.30am when they went their separate ways. At a kiosk near the Dock Green pub, near the corner of Beckett Street, Jayne stopped at 1.45am to call a taxi, but there was no answer. As she approached the playground, she did not see Sutcliffe lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce on her as she passed by.

Two children found her body at 9.45am on Sunday, 26 June, near a wall inside the playground where Sutcliffe had dragged her. She was lying face down, her skirt was in disarray and her white halterneck top was pulled up to expose her breasts. He had struck her three times on the back of the head with his hammer and then stabbed her repeatedly in the chest and once in the back.

Following McDonald’s murder – an ‘innocent young woman’
rather than a prostitute – the police were inundated with information from the public. People who might before have been interested only in hearing the gory details of the attacks now felt personally affronted and threatened by the man they dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper. Where previously witnesses had been reluctant to admit to any connection with the murdered prostitutes, people from the surrounding area were now readily volunteering information to help the police in their attempts to catch Jayne’s killer. Despite extensive enquiries, Sutcliffe evaded detection and was undeterred.

On Saturday, 9 July 1977 Sutcliffe headed off to the red-light district in Bradford. As he trawled the streets at 2am, he saw Maureen Long waiting in a long queue at a taxi rank. He was driving his white Ford Corsair. He pulled alongside her and offered her a lift. Long foolishly accepted and got in. Sutcliffe drove her to Bowling Back Lane, where he struck a massive blow to the back of her head. As she lay on the ground, he stabbed her in the abdomen and back. The barking of a dog nearby interrupted his frenzied attack and he left Maureen for dead and fled the scene. His car was seen leaving the area by a night watchman who was working nearby, at 3.27am. He described the car as a Ford Cortina Mark II, white with a black roof. The next morning, two women living in a nearby caravan heard cries for help, went to investigate and found Long lying seriously injured on the ground. The injuries she sustained would have killed most people, but somehow she survived. She described her attacker as being white, with a large build, about 35, with light brown, shoulder-length hair. He was about 6ft tall, with puffy cheeks and big hands. She wasn’t sure about the colour of the car; it might have been white or yellow, or blue.

Sutcliffe carried on with his life as normal; it was really beginning to improve. On Monday, 26 September, he and his wife moved into their new home and he bought himself another second-hand Ford Corsair, a red one to replace the white Corsair he had sold on 31 August.

The following Saturday, 1 October 1977, after spending the day working on his new car, Sutcliffe decided to take it out for a test drive and finished up in Manchester. By 9.30pm, he had selected his next victim, Jean Bernadette Jordan, aged 20. She got into his car near her home in Moss Side. She took Sutcliffe to a quiet area of vacant land between some allotments and the Southern Cemetery, where she had sexual intercourse with him for £5. Before getting out of the car, she put the £5 note in a hidden compartment of her handbag. Once out of the car, Sutcliffe used his hammer to hit her over the head a total of 13 times. He then hid her body in undergrowth near the fence between the cemetery and the allotments.

Sutcliffe then returned home but began to worry about the £5 note he had given Jean Jordan. It was a brand-new note and it might be possible to trace it back to him. By Sunday, 9 October, there still had been no word of the discovery of Jean’s body in the papers. Sutcliffe drove back to the body and found it exactly as he had left it, but her handbag was missing. As he searched the area, he became frantic at the prospect of the police finding the £5 note. When his frustration and fury were at their peak, he dragged the lifeless and already rotting body away from its hiding place. He tore Jean’s clothes from her body, and then stabbed her over and over again. Eighteen times he stabbed at her breasts, chest, stomach and vagina. They were fierce slashing swipes, some 8in deep. One extended from her left shoulder down to her right knee. When the rage subsided, Sutcliffe thought again of the £5 note, and attempted to cut off Jean’s head. His intention was to divert police attention by disposing of her head somewhere else.

When he realised that it was an impossible task with only a small hacksaw and a broken pane of glass, he gave up and went home. The unrecognisable body of Jean Jordan was found on 10 October. She was later identified from her fingerprints.

On Saturday 15 October, Jean Jordan’s handbag was found only 100yd from where her body had lain the week before. The £5 note Sutcliffe had given her that he so desperately wanted to
retrieve was found in the hidden pocket where she had placed it. The note, with the serial number AW51 121565, was brand new, issued only a couple of days before she was killed. The Bank of England established that the note was part of a consignment sent to the Shipley and Bingley branches of the Midland Bank, right in the heart of the Yorkshire Ripper area.