Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

During a night out she let Maureen do her own thing. Another detective accompanied them, keeping in the background but maintaining close watch as they drank and danced at West Yorkshire police expense. The pair built up a good rapport. On a few occasions Megan watched her new friend get loaded. She once asked her whether she always got this drunk when she went out. ‘No,’ replied Maureen, ‘it’s just that it makes me feel safe.’

Megan Winterburn, a married detective on plain-clothes undercover duty, handbag slung over her shoulder, was getting an education into the seedier side of life. She visited pubs she would otherwise have avoided and she had never been a night club person. To her Maureen appeared somewhat naïve and lived in an insular world, doing the same things, week in, week out. Going out drinking was part of her social world. But Megan didn’t find any of it the least bit offensive. She had been brought up in the mining village of South Kirkby. Her father was a miner who after he was injured became a steward of a club. Policing was what she had always wanted to do and after a couple of years as a shorthand-typist after leaving school at seventeen, she joined the West Riding force. ‘Maureen was quite funny and entertaining when she had a drink,’ said Megan. ‘She knew everybody in every pub we went into and everyone knew Maureen. It opened my eyes to the sort of person Maureen mixed with. They were the salt of the earth. Everyone was concerned about her. The people she knew didn’t think any the less of her because she had been a victim. They didn’t shun her. She was mortified that [some] people were saying she was a prostitute, which wasn’t true. You had this very naïve and pleasant lady who was leading a normal life, with an active social life, labelled by the press as a prostitute. To have to explain this to your family, who were still coming to terms with you being attacked, must have been horrendous to her and her family.’

On one occasion they were on the Mecca dance floor. Suddenly Maureen stood stock still and stared at a man across the room. ‘I said, “What’s the matter?” She shook her head and said, “Nothing.” I said, “Yes there is, what is it?” She said, “It’s him over there.” I’ll never forget him. He didn’t have a gap in his teeth and it wasn’t Sutcliffe, but he did have a lot of jet-black curly hair. Obviously her subconscious had said: “The hair.”’ The man was checked out and eliminated quickly.

Another time the pair were pub crawling in Manningham Lane, close to where the prostitutes hung out. A young colleague of Winterburn’s, in the dark about the operation, came into the pub. ‘I recognized him and he was looking at me and I was looking away, trying to make him not look at me. Eventually he plucked up courage and walked over to me and said: “What are you doing here, Sarge, dressed like that?” I remember taking the lad out to the toilet to have an appropriate word. I pinned him against the wall and told him to leave. It was serious and I couldn’t afford to let my guard slip.’

The undercover operation with Maureen Long, though it showed commendable courage on her part, went nowhere. She failed to recognize her would-be killer. The rest of the murder squad had plenty of other avenues to explore. The bosses knew proactive policing was working, for the clampdown against prostitutes and the covert operations in Chapeltown were clearly having an effect, the most important being that they appeared to have driven the Ripper back to strike again in Bradford.

Oldfield immediately stepped up the covert observations recording the registration numbers of vehicles in the red-light areas, extending them from Chapeltown to Manningham in Bradford. The attack on Long was treated as attempted murder. A major effort was mounted to find everyone who had been at the Mecca Ballroom on the Saturday night. Thousands were interviewed during the inquiry. It led nowhere. The information provided by the security guard was critical. In response a search was launched for Mark II Ford Cortina owners in West Yorkshire. Three thousand owners were interviewed and no positive evidence obtained.

More crucially, Jim Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry was, over his profound objections, brought to an abrupt halt because the Mark II Ford Cortina was not on the list of vehicles which could have left the tyre marks at the Richardson murder scene. (As we now know, the Ford Cortina inquiry was a complete red herring. The security guard had seen Peter Sutcliffe’s car leaving the scene of Long’s attack, except he was driving a white Ford Corsair – which was on Hobson’s list of ‘tracking’ inquiry vehicles waiting to be eliminated.) But Oldfield was faced with a massive problem – lack of manpower. Eliminating 30,000 vehicles had been a colossal task, and Oldfield felt the remaining 20,000 vehicles would take forever to check. Experience had shown that, as you got nearer the end of such an inquiry, progress on eliminating one vehicle took far longer than the straightforward checks at the beginning. As an inquiry continued, the man hours that went into it got higher and higher in relation to the finished product, while the actual productivity of the investigating team got lower and lower. All the difficult vehicle checks were those that had dragged on and were left to the end. They were cars that had been sold to gypsies six times under false names, had gone through car auctions, had changed owners, had been stolen, written off or not correctly recorded on the fledgling PNC.

Oldfield thus found himself in a complete bind. He had major murder inquiries involving a maniac on the loose going on in Leeds and Bradford, and the tyre inquiry seemed never ending, with no assurance of success. ‘We were desperate for men,’ Holland said. ‘If you were warm and breathing you were on the bloody Ripper case. We had checked roughly 30,000 vehicles and eliminated those, but there were in fact 22,000 to go … Sutcliffe’s vehicle was in there and unfortunately it was missed.’

Hobson took the cancellation of the tracking inquiry very badly. In the incident room for the Long investigation at Bradford police headquarters, a few senior officers, including Holland, Oldfield and Hobson, were standing in a corner late one afternoon when Oldfield broke the news as a fait accompli. Hobson had seen the tyre inquiry as the one good chance to find the killer. They had a positive clue from a murder scene and his inquiry ought to run its course. Now they were suddenly looking for a Ford Cortina. Oldfield believed the Ripper had changed cars. There was a good chance the one which made the tyre tracks in Roundhay Park had been destroyed. Hobson was furious, visibly angry and muttering under his breath. But the decision had been made. The Leeds murder squad believed Oldfield was being deliberately partisan because of his known disagreements with the senior city detectives. It was a fracture in relationships that never really healed.

The Ripper by now had murdered five women: McCann, Jackson, Richardson and MacDonald in Leeds; and Atkinson in Bradford. The police believed he had attacked Long, intending to kill her, and were now casting an eye over several other serious assaults on women. In reality there were eight other women that Sutcliffe had almost certainly attacked in the West Yorkshire area, though the squad had ruled most of them out as Ripper attacks because they could not rule them in for certain. Indeed, they were gripped almost by a phobia of putting an attack into the Ripper series, for fear it would turn out not to be his handiwork and might contaminate the investigation with erroneous evidence. Moreover, if the Ripper was caught and prosecuted for one murder he did not commit, he could escape justice. Thus Tracey Browne and Marcella Claxton along with several other victims were never included in the series, though there was an extraordinary similarity in the photofit descriptions they had given, which now lay unnoticed in police files. Day by day the cost of the investigation was assuming mountainous proportions: 300 officers had worked 343,000 man hours; 175,000 people had been questioned, 12,500 statements taken and 101,000 vehicles checked. The attempt to find the man with a ginger beard said to have been seen by witnesses in the MacDonald and Jackson inquiries was stepped up. Police had 117 tips of men who bore such a description. They traced fifty-six such men and eliminated them; the rest were never found because there was no real clue to their identity. Already inside the mountain of paper were the clues and the evidence that could have identified the Yorkshire Ripper.

7

Punter’s Money

In the mid-1970s the backbone technology of British industry, its businesses and institutions, was still a Victorian invention: the typewriter and shorthand note. Computers were as yet the hugely expensive private tools of government, vast number crunchers gobbling up and spewing out punchcards. They occupied whole floors to do the work a child’s toy can perform today, but the world was still only on the verge of the revolution.

Within a year or two advertisements began to appear in colour supplements offering home computers to be built by hand, whose programming language needed to be learned before simple mathematic problems could be solved and tic-tac-toe games played. Pocket calculators, costing the equivalent of a working man’s weekly wage, were finding their way on to the market. But the white heat of silicon technology was still ten years from our desk tops. The Home Office, the government department primarily responsible for the security and policing of Britain, wanted to be at the forefront of this revolution. The computer, when it arrived, would be a vital tool in the battle against crime, reducing the burden on manpower and budgets and speeding up detection. But the use of computers and the application software would have to be tailor-made to the task, specifically designed to handle, sort, cross-check and deliver information.

In August 1976, the House of Commons learned that the Police Scientific Development Branch at the Home Office was studying the use of computers to assist the investigation of major crimes like murder. Computers, according to the Home Office minister, Dr Shirley Summerskill, would organize the collection of information and the identification of key elements in murder inquiries. Parliament was debating criticism of the police handling of the Black Panther inquiry when Dr Summerskill reiterated a key principle of British justice affecting any criminal inquiry – that overall command in an investigation rested ultimately with the chief constable: ‘It is for him to decide when to call for assistance and help and what to call for.’ So if a chief constable wanted a computer, he had to ask for one. For the overburdened West Yorkshire Police in the summer of 1977 it seemed like a lifeline – or at least a straw to clutch at.

Ronald Gregory therefore set up a working party at his headquarters in Wakefield to look at ways of using computers in the Ripper inquiry. The force’s new Computer Project Unit in turn approached the Home Office to see how close its scientists were to achieving the goal of a computerized incident room which could actually handle a complex murder investigation. They had been working on the problem for three years. After several meetings, the West Yorkshireman learned that more development work was needed by government scientists and the Police Research Services Unit before they could hand over a computer they were certain was reliable. The only experimental working police computer in the country was in Staffordshire, in the Midlands. The working group and Gregory paid a visit, but the project was still in its infancy and the budget for the experiment was prohibitive, already running at more than £1 million.

Breakthroughs were being made in pushing back the frontiers of computerized systems, but in August 1977, when the West Yorkshire force needed one as a matter of desperate urgency, no machine was available. The writing of programs of such complexity was in its infancy. Moreover, three of the most senior Home Office scientists had just departed from the project, leaving only a junior colleague to work on the necessary research.

Then West Yorkshire Police were given the chance to use spare capacity on the mainframe computer at the Atomic Energy Authority Establishment at Harwell in Berkshire. It was a rare opportunity. Even the suggestion of such an offer was a clear indication that at least someone in Whitehall recognized the importance of catching the ‘Ripper’ and the difficulties the police in West Yorkshire were facing. Whether the senior officials in the Police Department of the Home Office appreciated that the murder investigation was not just a little ‘local difficulty’ facing their friends in the north is open to question.

It wasn’t the first time a branch of the Home Office, faced with a major investigation, had received help from atomic scientists with access to the country’s best computer technology. In the early 1960s, the Security Service (MI5) approached the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, which at the time had the biggest computer facility in Britain. MI5, in conjunction with the code breakers at GCHQ, were trying to decipher intercepted Soviet Union espionage messages intended for Eastern bloc agents in Britain. The traffic was known by the code name ‘VENONA’. The AWRE began a top-secret project, with its computer running code-cracking programs for six hours every night for two months.

To help catch a serial killer, the AEAE at Harwell was now willing to allow its mainframe computer to be accessed via telephone lines by the Ripper squad directly from West Yorkshire, with additional information on cassette tapes being sent physically to Harwell by courier. There were huge problems with this imaginative plan. To back-convert existing records held at Millgarth would taken thirteen man years of effort, costing a nominal figure of £25,000, which the Home Office was prepared to fund. But West Yorkshire would have to stump up £3,000 a week to run the system. Finally, Ronald Gregory decided, on the grounds of budget and the experimental nature of the project, to turn the offer down. At this stage the experiment would have involved using equipment not yet proven at the operational level. Gregory was later backed by the hierarchy of the police service for making a brave decision to stick with the manual system of managing information within the incident room. Though the volume of material grew larger every day, it was at least a tried and tested method. The problem was there had been nothing like the Ripper case before.

Gregory authorized his working party to contact the private sector to see whether the nominal index in the incident room could be computerized. IBM suggested a mainframe computer called STAIRS. The quote was in excess of half a million pounds. Again back-record conversion would be a mammoth task. A number of the biggest multinational computer firms and local government agencies in Britain were also approached, but could not come up with a viable scheme to automate the incident room. As the amount of information in the system grew, the problem of back-record conversion became the biggest obstacle to computerization. At that stage no one had designed a full-text retrieval system that could solve the incident room problems. Another worry by some senior officers was that serious money would be wasted if the murderer should be apprehended quickly.

Home Office officials knew the urgency of the West Yorkshire problem, which became worse as the years went by and the toll of yet more Ripper victims began to rise. Yet development of a police incident room computer system was never a priority, and it took several more years before one was available. An increasing number of attacks by the Ripper meant greater information-overload both for the incident room and the men and women having to manage it. The more the documentation piled up, the less likely the chance grew of back-converting it into a computerized system. The West Yorkshiremen seemed to be chasing their tails. And their problems were about to be compounded by the very next, and sixth, Ripper murder, across the Pennines, in Manchester, England’s second largest city. Here he murdered another prostitute on 1 October 1977 – a twenty-year-old mother of two children, Jean Jordan. Then he hid her body under bushes, where it lay undiscovered for over a week. The killer’s decision to strike in a completely different town reflected a pattern of sorts. When the heat was on in Leeds, with Hobson’s undercover teams keeping watch on Chapeltown’s red-light area, he moved to Bradford and found a victim in Manningham. With the pressure on in both Leeds and Bradford, he visited Moss Side, the red-light district of Manchester.

Positioned in the north-west of the country, some two hundred miles from London, Manchester spreads itself over sixty square miles. With local government reorganization in 1974, it had become Greater Manchester, absorbing a number of local towns like Salford. Within five miles of the city centre lived a million people; within ten miles, two and a half million. Manchester dwarfed the Leeds-Bradford conurbation and was the hub of many industries – not least as the northern headquarters of the national newspapers, who all had offices and printing plants there. It was also home to one of Britain’s great liberal institutions, the Manchester Guardian. In the nineteenth century, as in Leeds and Bradford, the manufacture of textiles was a dominant industry, the humid air apparently assisting in the production of cotton products.

In the 1950s and 1960s redevelopment schemes swept away the old and the derelict to produce a modernized city centre. A new road on stilts was built, the Mancunian Way, designed to ease traffic congestion. Piccadilly, a large square in the heart of the city, became a central shopping area, dominated on one side by a towering modern hotel designed to appeal to a fast-moving, international clientele. Around the periphery of the city were arterial road links – the M6 and M62 motorways – taking traffic north and south, east and west. In no time at all, a driver could speed from Bradford and Leeds, over the Pennines and into the heart of Manchester. From there to Moss Side took ten minutes by car. Just like Chapeltown in Leeds, and Bradford’s Manningham, Manchester’s red-light district was a formerly prosperous area fallen on hard times where large terraced houses had long been converted into flats. Together with Hulme, where Jean Jordan lived in a run-down council block, it was, and remains today, among the poorest areas in the country. In twenty-first century Britain, Moss Side and Hulme score first and fifth on the government’s most recent index of urban deprivation. A high concentration of ethnic minorities form a third of the local population. Lone parent households abound and the area has had high levels of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion for years. Sixty per cent of households receive social security and a third of local people are long-term unemployed. Fifty-four per cent of local youngsters leave school without qualifications, and only 3.7 per cent of them manage to get five GCSE passes at grades A–C.

Nine days after Jean Jordan was murdered, her body lay on an old allotment site off Princess Road in the suburb of Chorlton, near Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, two miles from where she had lived. It was found at lunchtime on 10 October. Adjacent to Princess Road was an iron gateway opening on to a track, bordered on both sides by trees. The track led into an area of disused allotments, measuring roughly a hundred yards square. The murder scene was between the cemetery and a new area of ground recently provided for allotment holders by Manchester Corporation. The new allotments had been fenced off from the disused land, which then became quickly overgrown. It was well known as a place where prostitutes took clients for sex. Those among the Greater Manchester Police murder squad who saw the body claim it as one of the most horrific crime scenes they have ever witnessed. And for twenty-three-year-old Bruce Jones, the unfortunate local dairy worker who called the police, the sight left him with nightmares for years to come. He held an allotment on the adjoining land and had merely been looking for disused house bricks with a friend.