The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (48 page)

It was quickly established that the note in question had been part of a bundle of £500 and had been the fifth-last note in a sequence of 69. The note had been part of a batch of £17,500 that had been distributed to a number of firms in the Bradford and Shipley area which employed almost 8,000 men in total.

A team of officers concentrated on tracing the note for a total of three months. They interviewed 5,000 of those 8,000 men. One of the firms they concentrated on was T & WH Clark (Holdings Ltd) in Canal Road, Shipley. They interviewed the men who worked there, including Peter William Sutcliffe of Garden Lane, Heaton. There had been nothing about Peter, or the other 5,000 men, that had seemed suspicious. They had even spoken to his wife, Sonia, who had not contradicted Sutcliffe’s movements in any way on the nights in question.

Despite the high police presence and activity in the areas where the murders had taken place, Sutcliffe could not resist the urge to seek out another victim. However, this victim was later able to provide a strong identification of him and his car. On 14 December, a prostitute named Marilyn Moore, aged 25, left a friend’s home in Gathorne Terrace, near the Gaiety pub, at 8pm. As she walked along, she noticed a dark-coloured car drive slowly towards her, and was sure that the driver was a potential client. She was proved correct and saw the car parked near a junction known as Frankland Place. The driver was leaning against his door. He was about 30, with a stocky build, around 5ft 6in tall with dark, wavy hair and a beard. He was wearing a yellow shirt, a navy blue or black zip-up anorak and blue jeans, and appeared to be waving to someone in a nearby house. This was none other than Peter Sutcliffe.

Sutcliffe asked Moore if she was ‘doing business’ and they agreed a price before she got into the car with him. As they drove off to a secluded location about a mile and a half away, he told her that his name was Dave and that the person he had been waving to was his girlfriend. When they arrived at their destination, Sutcliffe suggested that they have sex in the back seat, but when Moore got out of the car she found that the back door was locked. As Sutcliffe came behind her to open the door, Moore felt a sickening blow to the top of her head. She screamed loudly and attempted to protect her head with her hands. She fell to the ground, frantically grabbing her attacker’s trousers as she fell, then felt further blows before losing consciousness. A dog barked at the sound of her screams and Sutcliffe left before he could finish. Moore remembered hearing him walk back to his car and slam the door, and then she heard the back wheels skid as he hurriedly drove away. Slowly, Moore managed to get herself to her feet and stumble towards a telephone. Before she reached it, a man and woman, noticing the blood running from her head, stopped to help and called an ambulance. She was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary and underwent an emergency operation. Moore stayed in hospital until just before New Year’s Eve, but it was a long time before she could face returning to Leeds, with a hole in the back of her head and scars all over her scalp.

The police now knew that Marilyn had been another of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims. This was confirmed when the tyre tracks left by his car were matched to those found at the site of Irene Richardson’s death. Despite this new evidence, the hunt for the Ripper continued without success. The senior police officer leading the investigation decided to pull his officers out of Bradford, accepting that they had probably met the killer and failed to recognise him.

By the end of January 1978, police were beginning to wonder whether the Ripper had been scared off by his unsuccessful attack on Marilyn Moore. What they did not know at the time
was that Sutcliffe had, in fact, killed again on the night of 21 January. However, his victim, Yvonne Pearson, would not be found until the end of March, when her severely mutilated body was discovered under an old sofa on waste ground off Arthington Street, Bradford. She had been bludgeoned with a large blunt instrument, presumed to have been a rock. This caused police to wonder. This was not the Ripper’s usual method, but many of the other characteristics of this murder were similar to the earlier deaths.

Yvonne Pearson had left her two girls, aged two years and five months, in the care of a babysitter on the night of 21 January 1978 to see if she could earn some money. Her first stop that night had been the Flying Dutchman pub, which she was seen leaving at 9.30pm. Soon after that, Sutcliffe invited her to get into his car to do ‘some business’. When they parked, he hit her repeatedly on the head with a lump hammer. When she was dead, he hid her body under the sofa and jumped on her chest until her ribs had broken. Fear of discovery by people in the area had cut short his time with Yvonne and he had not stabbed her. A newspaper, dated one month after her death, was placed under her body, leading police to believe that the killer had later returned to the scene of the crime.

Any hopes police may have had that the killer had stopped were soon shattered. On Tuesday, 31 January 1978, in the
red-light
district of Huddersfield, Sutcliffe was again trawling the streets. He came across Helen Rytka, who was soliciting. She had previously been working in company with her sister and both had been careful to take the registration numbers of each other’s clients. However, there was a short time gap during which they became separated and when Helen got into Sutcliffe’s car her sister was not around to take down the details. Sutcliffe drove to a timber yard near the railway, a common haunt of prostitutes and their clients. He convinced her to get into the back seat and, as she did so, he struck her with the hammer. He missed and hit the car door instead, alerting Helen to the danger she was in, but
before she had a chance to scream he had hit her again. She immediately crumpled to the ground. It was then that Sutcliffe realised they were in full view of two taxi drivers, who stood talking nearby. Taking Helen by the hair, he dragged her to the back of the wood yard. Still alive, she vainly attempted to protect herself from the hammer as Sutcliffe crashed it down onto her head again. Scared that the taxi drivers would notice them, Sutcliffe lay on top of Helen and covered her mouth with his hand, then had sex with her as she lay bleeding. Finally, the taxi drivers left and Peter got up to find his hammer, which he had dropped. While he searched, Helen attempted to escape. As she ran from him, Peter hit her several more times on the back of the head. Still alive, she was dragged to the front of the car, where Sutcliffe stabbed her through the heart and lungs with a kitchen knife he had hidden in his car.

Helen’s sister arrived at their meeting point only five minutes after Helen had left with Sutcliffe. After waiting for some time in the freezing cold, she gave up and went home, assuming that Helen would be waiting for her there. Fear of the police prevented her from reporting Helen’s disappearance until Thursday. On Friday, 3 February, a police dog located Helen’s body where Sutcliffe had left it on the previous Tuesday.

It was another two months before Sutcliffe killed again. His next victim was 41-year-old Vera Millward. She left her home on Tuesday, 16 May, to buy some cigarettes and pick up some painkillers from the nearby hospital. Sometime after purchasing her cigarettes, she met Sutcliffe. In the grounds of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, in a well-lit area, Sutcliffe struck Vera on the head three times, then, undressing her in his usual manner, he slashed her so viciously across her stomach that her intestines spilled out. He also stabbed her repeatedly in the one wound on her back, just below the lower left ribs, and punctured her right eyelid, bruising her eye. Her screams for help were heard and ignored by a man and his son entering the hospital at the time of her attack. People in this area were well accustomed to such cries
in the night. When he had finished with her, Sutcliffe dragged her body 4yd away and dumped her by a chain-link fence, on a rubbish pile in a corner of the car park. She was found at 8.10am the following morning, lying on her right side, face down with her arms folded beneath her and her legs straight. He had placed her shoes neatly on her body. Tyre tracks were found nearby. They matched those left at the murder site of Irene Richardson and at the site where Marilyn Moore had been attacked. But still the police were no nearer catching the killer.

It was then a further 11 months before Sutcliffe killed again. During that period, his mother died, at the age of 59. He had always been close to her and he was grief-stricken. In this time, he had replaced the red Corsair with a metallic-grey Sunbeam Rapier. At work, he was a conscientious driver who kept immaculate logs and repair records. His workmates saw him as a bit of a loner who kept very much to himself and never showed any signs of violence – nor did he swear or speak crudely about sex or women. When police interviewed him again because his registration number had been noted in red-light areas, he was not noticeably concerned. He explained that driving to and from work regularly took him through those areas.

During the time of the murders, police had received a number of letters from people claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper. Two of these had originated from Sunderland in the northeast of England, and the police had looked at them in great detail but doubted their authenticity. However, on 23 March 1979 they received a third letter, also from Sunderland, which contained a reference to the Vera Millward murder. This made them wonder. Saliva samples from the envelope were tested and this time they got a result; they indicated the rare blood group B, the same as that of Joan Harrison’s killer. Forensic tests now confirmed that all three of the letters were from the same source. The writer predicted that the next victim would be ‘an old slut’ in Bradford or Liverpool.

This prediction was to prove incorrect when on Wednesday, 4
April 1979, the killer struck again. Josephine Whitaker, aged 19 and a building-society clerk, had walked the short mile to her grandparents’ home in Halifax to show them the new watch she had bought. Her grandmother had been out when she arrived, so she watched television with her grandfather to await her grandmother’s return at 11pm. Tom and Mary Priestley always enjoyed their granddaughter’s weekly Sunday visits, and had been pleasantly surprised by this extra midweek visit. When Jo, as they called her, decided to go home, her grandparents tried to talk her into staying the night. It was only a 10-minute walk home, which she had done many times before.

It was almost midnight by the time Whitaker reached Saville Park, an area of open grassland surrounded by well-lit roads. As she walked across the damp grass in the park, she met Peter Sutcliffe, who stopped her to ask the time. She looked towards the town clock in the distance and Peter took the hammer from his jacket, crashing it down on her head. As she lay on the grass, he hit her again, and then dragged her 10yd back into the darkness, away from the road. He pulled her clothing back and stabbed her 25 times, in her breasts, stomach and thighs; even in her vagina. He left her lying like a bundle of rags. One of her tan shoes still lay at the roadside where his attack had begun. She had been almost in sight of her home when she was murdered. The next morning, at 6.30am, a woman waiting at a bus stop found the body and called the police.

The pathologist’s report revealed that there had been traces of a mineral oil used in engineering shops in Josephine Whitaker’s wounds. It was soon confirmed that the particles were similar to those found on one of the envelopes of the mysterious letters from Sunderland. The letters were seen as credible evidence that could lead to the capture of the elusive Yorkshire Ripper.

The police then dispatched a team of detectives to carry out enquiries in Sunderland. Two months later, they received a cassette tape from the writer of the letters, which sent them on a wild goose chase as they then searched for a killer with a Geordie
accent. While police officials debated whether or not to go public with the tape, news of its arrival and contents were leaked to the press. The decision was made and a press conference, at which the tape was played, was called on Tuesday, 26 June 1979. Despite public appeals and extensive enquiries, the man whose voice was on the tape and who is believed to have written the three letters was not traced. In the end, police had serious doubts about whether the tape and the letters were actually genuine.

Then Peter Sutcliffe struck again, throwing the police enquiry wide open once more. On the night of 1 September 1979, Barbara Janine Leach went to the Manville Arms in Bradford with five of her closest friends. Barbara was a student at Bradford University and lived with a group of students in a house in Grove Terrace, just across Great Horton Road from the university. Also at the Manville Arms that night was Peter Sutcliffe. He had seen Barbara from across the other side of the room and had watched her continuously. At closing time, 11pm, he left and waited in his car outside. Barbara, along with her five friends, had stayed behind to help clean up and have a drink with the landlord. When they finally left at 12.45am, Sutcliffe was watching nearby as the group walked towards Great Horton Road. As they were about to turn left into Grove Terrace, Barbara decided to go for a walk and invited her friend, Paul Smith, to join her. When he declined the offer, she asked him to wait for her, as she didn’t have a key. He agreed and they parted company.

As he watched Barbara walk down Great Horton Road alone, Sutcliffe started the car and drove down to Back Ash Grove, where he parked. Armed with the hammer and knife, he got out of the car and walked quickly along the alleyway, knowing that Barbara would soon be walking past at the other end. He waited for her in the shadows of Back Ash Grove, listening to the echo of her boots on the pavement as she walked towards him. As she passed, he sprang, smashing the hammer into her head. With just one blow she was dead.

Sutcliffe then dragged the lifeless body back into the shadows of the side entrance towards Back Ash Grove. In the yard behind number 13, he dropped her body and tore at her clothing, exposing her breasts, abdomen and knickers. He stabbed her eight times, then dragged her body close to some rubbish bins and covered her with a piece of old carpet lying nearby. When Leach was reported missing the following day a search began, and her body was found that afternoon. Professor Gee, the pathologist who had worked on all of the Yorkshire Ripper cases, believed that the knife used to stab Leach was the same one used on Josephine Whitaker. With the deaths of two victims who were not prostitutes in non-red light areas in a six-month period, the West Yorkshire public now began venting its anger on the police. All this time, Peter Sutcliffe was living only five minutes away from the police headquarters in Bradford.