Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

Six weeks after the murder, Hoban’s investigation was clearly floundering. All the normal checks had revealed nothing. The witness pointing them in the direction of the red or orange hatchback also mentioned an articulated lorry, which he said had been parked nearby. Despite inquiries at 483 haulage companies the police drew a blank. A total of twenty-nine former ‘boyfriends’ were interviewed and eliminated. They were still searching for the driver of the fastback car to come forward.

From December 1975 and into the New Year Hoban resumed more of his duties as the head of Leeds CID. There were important functions to attend – dinners held by the Law Society and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He had court appearances in Birkenhead as a result of a famous incident at Headingley when a protest group dug up part of the cricket pitch and poured oil over the wicket, causing the Test match against Australia to be abandoned. The protesters were an unlikely group, trying to right an injustice in the case of George Davis, a London criminal they claimed had been wrongly imprisoned for a bank robbery. It was a high-profile case and Hoban was intimately involved.

He made his obligatory appearance at the chief constable’s pre-Christmas cocktail party for senior officers at the force headquarters in Wakefield. The chief, Ronald Gregory, had reason to be pleased with the way things were going in his administration. Two years previously the West Yorkshire Police Force had merged with the big city forces in Leeds and Bradford to create the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police, one of the larger forces in the country, stretching across a wide area of the North of England. Gregory knew there would be tensions in bringing together the county coppers with the city forces. Leeds and Bradford had had autonomy previously, each with their own budget, chief constable and head of CID. Gregory hadn’t wanted too much disruption and hadn’t insisted on major changes in personnel. The cocktail party, at lunchtime on 22 December, was another getting-to-know-you session.

Hoban knew many of the senior detectives in the newly combined force. Before becoming the senior detective in Leeds, he had been deputy coordinator of No. 3 Regional Crime Squad, which covered a wide area of Northern England. As a detective superintendent he had close contact with his counterparts in the major towns and cities in the West Riding. The senior men were expected to get along with each other and make the amalgamation work. But the easy-going jollity of the cocktail party was in part an illusion. It still rankled the senior Leeds officers that the West Riding men were in the driving seat. As city detectives they were used to dealing with tough gangs and sophisticated crime. They believed the county boys lacked the hard experience needed to deal with ruthless criminals. ‘Donkey Wallopers’, they called them. However, on this occasion the chat was friendly. Most knew Hoban had an unsolved murder, but this was nothing new in their line of work. His reputation stood him in good stead. He was viewed as ‘a hard and occasionally ruthless man’ – ‘a decent bloke’ – ‘a fucking great detective’.

Renewed inquiries among prostitutes in the Chapeltown area over Christmas and the New Year of 1976 produced information about a fifty-year-old Irishman, known to drive a clapped-out Land-Rover, who frequented the area. It was a total red herring. Neither the Irishman, nor the driver of the vehicle thought to be an orange/red fastback car, was ever traced. (In retrospect, it seems highly likely that the driver of the fastback car was Peter Sutcliffe, who at the time drove a lime green K registered Ford Capri. It was some years before the Ripper squad learned that street lighting at night could often give witnesses a confusing picture of the colour of vehicles they were trying to describe. Sutcliffe had a swarthy appearance, which at night and at a distance could have led to him being confused for a light-coloured West Indian. And, of course, he had a droopy moustache.)

By the middle of January 1976 the McCann murder squad, numbering 137 officers, had worked 53,000 hours. Five thousand houses had been called at, these inquiries having generated most of the 3,300 separate index card references in the incident room. These in turn had spawned 2,880 separate actions or follow-ups. Five hundred and thirty-eight statements were taken. There were other clues which were never resolved. The vaginal swabs taken by the pathologist found no trace of semen, but there was a positive semen reaction on the back of Wilma’s trousers and pants. Forensic scientists at the Harrogate laboratory were unable to produce a blood group, most likely because the person who deposited this sample did not secrete his blood cells in his bodily fluids. (Possibly Sutcliffe masturbated over Wilma after he attacked her.) Keeping details of the injuries secret from the media, Hoban announced at one point that the killer seemed to have ‘very personal feelings towards Wilma’. He was clearly speculating elliptically that the frenzied nature of the attack and the physical presence of some sexual motive, i.e. the semen, perhaps made this a personal assault.

In Wilma’s home the scenes-of-crime officers amassed a large number of fingerprints. A fragment of fingerprint on a door jamb was never eliminated. A purse missing from her handbag was never found. To help jog the memory of potential witnesses, a woman police officer dressed up in Wilma’s clothes and a photograph of Wilma’s face was superimposed. Two thousand posters were distributed to shops and other businesses, but little hard information was produced. There was little to distinguish this case from many other unsolved murders. According to Professor Gee: ‘We simply had an unsolved murder in which the only slightly unusual feature was the use of two weapons to cause the injuries.’

Eight weeks and five days after Wilma McCann was murdered, Dennis Hoban was once more summoned from home before breakfast to the scene of the homicide of a woman. Soon, because of the nature of the injuries and the circumstances in which she died, he became firmly convinced that the man who murdered McCann had killed again. Newspapers began talking about a Jack-the-Ripper style killer on the loose.

There had been a false alarm only a few weeks previously at a ghastly murder scene which Hoban attended in Leeds after a ‘photographic model’ and her young child had been stabbed to death. The dead mother also turned out to be a prostitute and Hoban briefly suspected a link. However, this double homicide was almost immediately detected by a combination of good luck and alert thinking by one of Hoban’s former protégés on the No. 3 Regional Crime Squad. A mentally deranged seventeen-year-old youth called Mark Rowntree was quickly arrested by Detective Chief Inspector Dick Holland, stationed at Bradford CID. When the burly rugby-playing detective investigated the killing of a young man, aged sixteen, in nearby Keighley, he came away with a confession from Rowntree that included two other homicides he hadn’t even known had happened. The deaths of the woman and her son in Leeds were barely a few days old and Hoban, who hated bureaucratic paperwork at the best of times, had delayed circulating full details to surrounding divisions. Rowntree confessed to Holland his guilt in a one-man killing spree which included the sixteen-year-old youth, the prostitute and her son, and an eighty-five-year-old widow. He was eventually sent to Broadmoor.

Now, on Wednesday, 21 January 1976, in response to a control room telephone message, Hoban donned a warm, dark brown car coat and his familiar hat and made his way to a derelict area destined for redevelopment. Part of the Manor Street Industrial Estate off Roundhay Road included a row of boarded-up, dilapidated, red-brick buildings, scheduled for demolition. A uniformed inspector took him to an alley between two derelict houses adjacent to a cobblestoned cul-de-sac, Enfield Terrace. The passageway had been roofed over at some point, but the roofing had caught fire and been destroyed. Now the only parts remaining were charred timbers and the passageway was open to the sky. The front of the passage was open but the back was completely filled by masses of rubbish, burnt wood, scrap metal and junked office and factory furniture. The inspector told Hoban that at 8 a.m. a man on his way to work parked his car at the far end of the cul-de-sac almost opposite the passageway. When he got out of the driver’s door, he glanced to the right and saw a pair of legs lying among the rubble about fifteen feet inside the alley. At first he thought it was a shop-window dummy, then realized it was the body of a woman.

Treading carefully, Hoban noticed there were clear drag marks of disturbed earth from the front of the road, along the passageway, to where the body lay on its back. There were also small areas of dried blood on the surface of the cobbles and concrete on the ground. There is never a pleasant place to be brutally murdered, but this was a terrible location in which to die. The first police officer at the scene had earlier noted a boot impression in the roadway, near the entrance to the passageway, and pointed it out to Hoban.

A gale was blowing as the police surgeon, who had been waiting patiently for Hoban to arrive, pulled back a plastic sheet partly covering the body of a middle-aged woman. It had protected the corpse from the wind and rain. The body lay sprawled on its back just outside a doorway, a striped dress pulled up above the waist. The woman’s fawn-coloured imitation leather handbag lay several feet from her head, its flap open. Its contents showed her name was probably Emily Jackson, and that she lived near Morley, a town in the west of Leeds. The brown-haired woman had hazel-coloured eyes and nicotine-stained fingers on both hands, more pronounced on the right than the left. She wore a wedding ring.

Mrs Jackson still had on her red, blue and green checked overcoat and was sprawled on the right of the passage, just in front of the piles of rubbish, with the left arm by her side and the left leg stretched out straight. The right arm was directed out at right angles from the body, and the right leg was bent upwards and outwards, flexed at the knee and hip. The lower limbs were clad in tights, which were laddered and bore a large hole six inches above the knee. She also wore black panties, which were in position, though the left side of the upper edge of the tights was slightly displaced downwards, exposing the knickers. The feet were bare. One cheap-looking white sling-back lay on the ground beside the right foot; the other was a short distance away, closer to the right-hand wall. There was a muddy footprint on her thigh similar to the one in the soil at the entrance to the alley. The front of the body was soiled by dirt in various areas, especially the front and outer sides of the thighs. The face was heavily soiled with mud and blood, and there was bloodstaining on the front of the dress, on the right arm and right hand. The ground beneath and above the head was soiled by small pools and trickles of coagulated blood.

Professor Gee arrived at 9.30 a.m. to be followed soon after by Outtridge from the Home Office laboratory at Harrogate. Examining the spot where the woman lay, the pathologist bent down. The exposed part of the body felt cold to Gee’s touch. Hoban then took him to the front of the passageway, to the cobbled roadway, opposite a flat-roofed modern factory building, the premises of Hollingworth & Moss, bookbinders. Two duckboards had been placed either side of a large piece of hardboard that shielded some vital evidence from the elements. When the hardboard was lifted Hoban and Gee saw a pool of red-stained rainwater – diluted blood. The woman had been struck, probably at this spot, then dragged up the passageway. A chill wind blew strongly and there were intermittent squalls of cold rain. Gee and Hoban quickly agreed that preserving any evidence in these conditions was going to be difficult – particularly contact trace-evidence, which might have been passed from the killer to the victim in the shape of minute fibres of clothing. Gee was reluctant to record the body’s temperature, since this would have involved displacing the victim’s clothing. Instead he instructed that the body be enveloped in large plastic sheets and taken to the public mortuary for a more intensive examination.

Task force officers had begun an inch-by-inch fingertip search among the cobblestones along Elmfield Terrace. Ten officers in overalls, some wearing gloves, got down on their hands and knees in the wind and rain and painstakingly grubbed their way along the street. Among them was a twenty-four-year-old Bradford constable, Andrew Laptew. He had joined the Bradford force after sailing the seven seas as a trainee Merchant Navy officer. After experiencing the delights of South America, the Far East and Australia, he made a determined bid to become a police officer. Joining the Task Force had been an exciting moment, since its members regarded themselves as part of an élite unit. ‘Fingertip searches were back-breaking work because that is what we did – felt with our fingertips to see if we could find any clues,’ he remembered twenty-five years later. They found nothing to help the investigation.

The formal post-mortem began at 11.15 a.m. Until then, no attempt had been made to look more closely at the body, especially at the back. The victim was forty-one years old and slightly overweight, which made her look several years older. She was five feet six inches tall. Donald Craig, the assistant chief constable, stood close to Hoban watching while the normal forensic procedures in a homicide autopsy were applied. Craig was an experienced murder investigator, who had solved all seventy-three murders on his patch during a three-year spell as the West Riding CID chief during the early 1970s. It made him a bit of a legend and people either loved or loathed him. He was tough, uncompromising and, some even said, a bit of a bully at times. He had few social graces and rarely apologized for anything. The West Riding man and the Leeds City man respected one another. You couldn’t take away Craig’s track record, and he had attended dozens of autopsies, so he knew what to look out for. His father, too, had been a policeman.

For nearly eighty years, since the late nineteenth century, the mechanics of identifying and preserving evidence at crime scenes encompassed a process that combined logic with rigorous scientific method. Minute specks of material could prove vital, and in eighty years the technology had changed dramatically. Forensic techniques now encompassed the use of highly expensive electron microscopes and mass photo spectrometers.

The very process of photographing and measuring evidence, particularly in cases of murder, had been perfected initially in France in the 1890s by the clerk to the premier bureau of the Paris Préfecture of Police, Alphonse Bertillon. He had photographed the bodies of victims and their relationship to significant items of evidence at the crime scene, including footprints, stains, tool marks, points of entry among other details. Even today one of the cornerstones of forensic science remains the ‘exchange principle’ first developed by one of Bertillon’s students, Edmond Locard: ‘If there is contact between two items, there will be an exchange.’ When anyone comes into contact with an object or someone else, a cross-transfer of physical evidence occurs. They will leave evidence of that contact and they will take some evidence with them. The job of the forensic scientist is to locate this material to help ultimately identify the criminal and achieve a conviction in a court of law. ‘The criminologist,’ Locard maintained, ‘re-creates the criminal from the traces the latter leaves behind, just as the archaeologist reconstructs prehistoric beings from his finds.’

The process was necessarily painstaking, time consuming and expensive. What Gee, Hoban and their close colleagues hoped to achieve during the next seven and a quarter hours in the Leeds city mortuary was to lay the vital groundwork to help them find and convict the murderer. The application of scientific rigour was not the only process at work. A further ingredient was also required: an attitude of mind or, in more familiar terms, ‘a hunch’, born out of years of experience. Hunches were not mere guesswork. Even at this stage, Dennis Hoban was already speculating out loud privately to Gee that the murderer of McCann was likely to be ‘a long-distance lorry driver’. This intuitive judgement by the senior detective was based on several factors: the possibility that the killer carried tools in his vehicle; the failure to trace the likely killer from among McCann’s boyfriends, with whom she sometimes had sex for money; and the fact that many lorry drivers travelled through Chapeltown from the A1 to the M62 motorway.

As with the McCann autopsy, the process of garnering evidence was protracted. Outtridge examined the clothing, taping the material, looking for fibres or other contact traces; the fingerprint specialist looked for possible evidence that the skin had been touched. Swabs were taken in the search for semen; samples of hair were removed from the scalp, the pubic region and eyebrows. The outer clothing showed no sign of having been penetrated by stabbing. Two areas of dirt soiling on the woman’s tights were closely examined. They measured roughly three inches by four, on the inner and outer right thigh, and appeared several inches above the right knee. These were the marks resembling the sole of a boot, similar to the footprint found in sandy soil close to the murder scene. A plaster cast of this ridged impression at the scene had already been made by the time the post-mortem started. The area of the boot impression on the tights was carefully cut out before the rest of the clothing was removed from the body, which rested on the autopsy table. Along with all the other samples, these were later taken back to the Harrogate laboratory by Outtridge for microscopic examination.

As the clothing began to be removed, it swiftly became apparent that the woman’s bra had been lifted above her breasts and there was a huge number of stab marks to the trunk and back, some so close together as to give the impression of the holes in a pepper pot. They were very small, about one eighth of an inch in diameter, some round, some oval and a few very definitely cruciform in shape, leaving a strange impression on the skin, as if caused by an ‘X’-shaped instrument. Gee thought the wounds ‘very odd’ and subsequently contacted a series of eminent colleagues around the country to see if they could throw light on what had caused them.

Those who had previously attended the post-mortem on Wilma McCann immediately realized the significance of the injuries. It was clear her clothing had been raised to inflict the injuries and then put back in position. Moreover, when Professor Gee examined the head, two significant lacerations were found, one on top of the head, the other at the back. In the first the full thickness of the scalp was penetrated and in the depths of the wound a depressed fracture of the skull was visible. In the second, at the back of the head, a depressed fracture was found beneath the wound. Gee concluded both injuries had been administered with a flat round instrument with a restricted striking surface, like a hammer. A number of bruises and abrasions to the face and throat made it obvious she had been dragged on her face along the ground. When Gee probed deeper, minutely trying to trace the track of a particular wound, he found the blow had passed through the sternum and there reproduced the cruciform shape in the bone. There was also evidence that the neck had been compressed and the victim had been menstruating slightly.

On the body itself Gee counted a total of fifty-two separate stab wounds – in five separate groups – two at the back and three at the front. On the back thirty of the stab wounds were concentrated in an area roughly six inches by eight – hence the impression of a pepper pot. Twelve stab wounds were counted in the abdomen. The killer had turned Emily Jackson over and repeated his frenzied attack. There were so many stab wounds to the trunk situated close together that it was impossible to assign individual tracks to most of them. Since tracks of wounds passed both from the front and from the back of the body into the interior, and many passed into soft tissue, it was impossible for Gee to ascertain the length of any of the tracks with any precision. He thought the weapon might be between two and four inches long. Several people, observing the professor’s precise handiwork in trying to track the wounds, commented that a Phillips cross-head screwdriver was the most likely cause.

At the end Gee finally gave Hoban his scenario by which the woman had met her death. There were blows to the head, dragging to the site where her corpse was found, raising of the clothes, stabbing, turning over and more stabs, in the course of which the assailant trod on her thigh, then the clothing was pulled down. She hadn’t been drinking. Later analysis by the laboratory at Harrogate found semen on a vaginal swab, but it was thought this was from sexual activity prior to the attack. Gee, the scientist who preferred not to deal in speculation, could not say exactly what kind of stabbing instrument had been used – but among the strong possibilities was indeed a Phillips screwdriver. Neither was he totally sure this was the work of McCann’s killer. There were clear similarities, but he could not rule out coincidence. Hoban, on the other hand, felt more certain he was dealing with the same killer for two murders, a suspicion strengthened when he started to hear details of the lifestyle the woman had led.

The murdered woman’s husband, Sydney Jackson, had a difficult story to tell the officers who interviewed him. He realized he was under suspicion himself, for the circumstances of his marriage were slightly out of the ordinary, even for Leeds. His story came out in dribs and drabs over the course of many hours of questioning. As he told it, and as Hoban initially understood it, she was insatiable and had had many affairs. He turned a blind eye to her activities, which included having sex with many boyfriends because her sexual appetite was such that he could not satisfy it.

Later that afternoon Hoban gave another television interview in the murder incident room at the newly opened Millgarth Street police station in Leeds city centre. Looking extraordinarily dapper for a senior detective, in his Aquascutum suit, red shirt and floral tie, he relayed some of the few facts at his disposal, putting the best possible gloss on the woman’s private life. ‘She was a woman who liked to go to public houses,’ he declared matter of factly. ‘She liked to go to bingo. She led a life of her own, really. We are anxious to contact any friends, lady friends or men friends, who may have seen her last night. She probably went to the Gaiety public house, which is a very popular pub in the area. We know the van she was in finished up on the Gaiety car park this morning … She had severe head injuries. There are other injuries I don’t wish to elaborate on at this time.’

Sydney Jackson at first kept from police the fact that since Christmas his wife had been trying to solve their financial and income tax problems by working as a prostitute. Then, under an intensive interrogation which ended shortly before midnight the day his wife’s body was discovered, he finally admitted that he often accompanied her when she went out looking for ‘business’. No one in the local community where they lived had a clue. The truth was that Emily and Sydney’s marriage was a marriage in name only: they stayed together for their children’s sake. Each, it appeared, went their own way, except that Sydney not only knew of his wife’s secret life, he drove her to her work. He had gone with her in their van, which his wife drove, to the Gaiety pub, a mile from Chapeltown, on Roundhay Road. It was a large, modern open-plan building that became a popular local drinking haunt, particularly for West Indians. The pub was surrounded on three sides by back-to-back rows of small Victorian terraced houses. Strippers danced at lunchtimes and prostitutes regularly gathered there at all hours looking for punters. Sydney had gone into the pub for a drink. Emily went immediately to work. Sydney stayed inside, listening to Caribbean music being thumped out on the juke box until about 10.30 p.m. He then emerged to find his wife had not kept their rendezvous. They had arranged she would drive him home. Assuming she was with one of her men friends, he instead caught a taxi back to Morley and only discovered what had happened when police called at their house in the morning.

His wife had been born Emily Wood in 1933, one of five brothers and three sisters, who lived with their parents in Hemsworth, a mining village. The entire family later moved to Brancepath Place, Leeds. She and Sydney married on 2 January 1953, when she was nineteen and he twenty-one, and during the early part of their marriage lived at various addresses in the Leeds area. Six years later she left him to live with another man. In 1961 they resumed their relationship and eventually set up house in Northcote Crescent, Morley, and became partners in a roofing business which they ran from home. They had three sons and a daughter, but tragedy struck in 1970 when their fourteen-year-old son, Derek, was killed in a fall from a first-floor window.

Emily was a hard-working, energetic woman, quite attractive in her own way. Neighbours remembered her as someone who was always busy. Because Sydney didn’t like to drive, Emily picked up the roofing supplies in their battered blue Commer van. She ferried the men who worked for them from job to job, took the kids to and from school. She also did the paperwork for their business. The day she died one of the neighbours recalled how Emily was supposed to be picking her ten-year-old son up from school. ‘When I got back my husband was waiting for me at the bus stop,’ said the neighbour, who lived just along the road from the Jackson family. ‘I thought something was wrong. And when we got home the boy was sat with a policeman in their house … they [Sydney and Emily] often used to go out but we thought they were going to the bingo in Leeds, we never realized what she was doing.’

After the death of their son, which Sydney said Emily never recovered from, they began to live from day to day. ‘We decided life was too short, we would live for today and not bother about the future. Sometimes she would go out alone, and I would meet up with her for a drink later on. But I do know that she never went in pubs on her own. She’s been in the Gaiety five times at the most, and always with me. We got on together as well as most. We both believed in having a good time – after all, why stop in every night? We believed in having fun while we could.’

Sydney remained strong and reasonably composed for the sake of his children after the murder, but went through a difficult time as he realized he was under suspicion for killing his wife. The day after Emily’s body was found the door-stepping journalists were rewarded when Sydney opened his heart to them. Sitting in the lounge of his semi-detached house, holding his head in his hands as he wept, he told them: ‘I know what people are saying – but I didn’t do it. There’s nothing I want to say to the man who did it, there’s nothing I can say, but if he’s done it once, he’ll do it again. I just pray they catch him.’

The information about Emily’s secret life was clearly an awkward embarrassment. Emily’s married sister refused to believe the things being said about her: ‘It’s time someone denied what is being said about Emily going into clubs and so on. She just wasn’t that kind of person.’ Unfortunately for Emily’s relatives, the press had quickly been let in on the details of her secret life. Hoban had no choice but to admit she had been soliciting about the time she was killed. Moreover, he could not ignore the obvious link with the McCann murder. He believed he had a duty to warn women who earned money by selling sex that they were in mortal danger. ‘While this man is at large no prostitute is safe,’ he declared.

Sydney Jackson made frequent visits to the police station to answer questions, insisting he had not killed his wife in revenge for her becoming a prostitute. Eventually Dennis Hoban went to reassure him that they knew he was innocent. He pledged that his detectives would find the man who killed his wife.

The police had taken away the Commer van containing Sydney’s tools and equipment for his business, so he couldn’t work or earn money. The vehicle had stood, with the ladder on the roof rack, at the Gaiety car park when Emily was murdered. For a while police thought it might have been moved. They were told Emily went touting for business in the van, sometimes taking customers in the back for sex. One look in the rear of the vehicle told them this was an unlikely passion-wagon the night she died. The materials for the roofing business filled up the inside. It was filthy and reeked of bitumen. There was a huge vat for heating tar, gas bottles, cans of paraffin, rolls of roofing felt, half-empty bags of cement, buckets containing trowels and other paraphernalia. Forensic experts gave it a thorough inspection. It was a well-used and abused vehicle, with the front bumper almost hanging off and several dents in the rear nearside panels. Four fingerprints were found that could not be eliminated. They also never determined who left a fingerprint on a lemonade bottle in the van, or another on a sweepstake ticket found in Emily’s handbag.

Two days into the murder hunt Hoban appealed for women who worked the streets in the area to come forward. He announced that Emily used her van to solicit clients. ‘Sometimes she would leave the van in the Gaiety car park and go with clients in their own cars, when they would drive to some secluded place for sex. It was probably on one of these excursions that she met her killer.’ Newspapers quickly linked the murder of Jackson with that of McCann: ‘RIPPER HUNTED IN CALL-GIRL MURDERS’ announced the Sun on 23 January.

A month later a witness came forward to say she had actually seen Emily around 7 p.m. getting into a Land-Rover. Police had begun questioning all convicted and known prostitutes in the area. One, a nineteen-year-old streetwalker, had been casually chatting to Emily moments before she got in the vehicle. A description of the driver, a man with a bushy beard, was widely circulated and an artists’ impression issued to the media. All Land-Rovers registered in West Yorkshire were checked, with negative results. Some time later a man answering this description, the owner of a Land-Rover registered in Essex, was interviewed and cleared. He had been temporarily staying in Leeds and admitted consorting with prostitutes. However, he denied that on the night in question he had been out looking to pay for sex with a woman. He had a cast-iron alibi. Some detectives believe he may well have picked up Jackson, and even had sex with her, but denied it emphatically because he had been driving while disqualified. There were searches for other vehicles. Sydney told police Emily had spoken of one of her clients as being ‘funny’ – they failed to locate him or the Moskovitch estate car he drove. Another witness saw a dark blue ‘L’ registered Transit van near the murder scene around 3.30 a.m. A list of 329 vehicles registered in Leeds was drawn up and 278 owners were eliminated from the investigation. The remaining fifty-one were never traced. It proved another frustrating investigation.

No attempt was made to trace the boots the killer wore. Hoban thought too many workmen in the city used this type of footwear to waste time on this particular line of inquiry. It did suggest the killer was not an office worker, but was perhaps involved in manual work. He sent an urgent telex to police stations in West Yorkshire asking that anyone brought into custody wearing similar boots, who might have a vehicle containing tools, such as a workman’s van, be held for questioning. He also wanted local criminal intelligence cells in collators’ offices to begin examining records for the names of people convicted of series attacks on prostitutes.

Hardware shops were visited to positively identify the kind of weapon used. Hoban was convinced a cross-head screwdriver was the answer; but Gee, when he carried out a variety of tests using different tools, could not reproduce the same kind of wound. When he tried to produce wounds with a Phillips screwdriver, he found that although the flanges of the tip would indeed produce a cruciform wound, as soon as you drove the weapon in with any degree of force, the rounded shaft destroyed the pattern and left simply a round hole. He began searching for a weapon with flanges all the way up its length. ‘The explanation of course had to be that some of the wounds were not driven home with sufficient force to extend right up the shaft of the weapon, but there were fifty-two of them and it was difficult to follow the tracks of all,’ he said later.

Gee wrote confidentially seeking assistance and suggestions from a number of senior forensic pathologists around Britain and Ireland, including the eminent Professor Keith Simpson. All kinds of possibilities were offered: a carpenter’s awl; the implement in a boy scout’s knife for taking stones out of horses’s hooves; a spud lock key; a roofing hammer; and a reamer. Several pathologists backed the idea of a Phillips screwdriver. ‘I am surprised that you had difficulty in getting a Phillips screwdriver through the skin,’ replied Professor Keith Mant of Guy’s Hospital. ‘I have seen fatal stab wounds from such instruments as pokers, and in one case, a boy was stabbed through the heart with a poker during some horseplay with his brother, who had no idea that he had hurt the deceased, especially when he subsequently walked upstairs to his bedroom. He was found dead in bed the next morning – no blood having issued from the wound!’

More media coverage was generated when a police Range Rover, complete with flashing blue light on top, toured the Chapeltown and Roundhay Road area. It contained a large photograph of Emily Jackson and appealed for witnesses who might have seen her on the night of the murder to come forward. Loudspeaker vans toured Leeds, interrupting weekend rugby and football matches. Cinemas and bingo halls suspended proceedings to broadcast appeals from the police. Publicity about two prostitutes having been murdered within three months caused some local women to stop soliciting. Others said they had no choice and accepted the risks: ‘There is always a danger when you do this game, but you have got to find a quiet spot, a dark spot,’ said one.

Everything told Hoban that Emily Jackson had been picked up in a vehicle while offering herself for sex; she was taken less than half a mile from the Gaiety to Elmfield Terrace, a quiet spot with little street lighting, where she met her terrible end. It was a place to which prostitutes took punters. Some of the girls on the street told him they also had been to precisely that spot. Women gave descriptions of clients, particularly of ones who had been violent. A month after the murder the West Yorkshire Police issued a special notice to all police forces in the country, officially linking the McCann and Jackson murders. They also circulated a description of a Land-Rover driver with the bushy beard. Throughout the next year, a hundred of Hoban’s officers worked more than 64,000 hours. Nearly 6,400 index cards were filled in in the incident room, making reference to more than 3,700 house-to-house inquiries and 5,220 separate actions. A total of 830 separate statements were taken and more than 3,500 vehicle inquiries carried out.

‘We are quite certain the man we are looking for hates prostitution,’ Hoban said. ‘I am quite certain this stretches to women of rather loose morals who go into public houses and clubs, who are not necessarily prostitutes, the frenzied attack he has carried out on these women indicates this.’

He knew that a man capable of killing twice probably enjoyed it, which meant he would go on doing it till caught. He was never more serious than when he issued a dark warning to the public via the press: ‘I believe the man we are looking for is the type who could kill again. He is a sadistic killer and may well be a sexual pervert.’ Emily Jackson had been killed with a ferocity ‘that bordered on the maniacal’. ‘I cannot stress strongly enough that it is vital we catch this brutal killer before he brings tragedy to another family.’

After several months, to Hoban’s obvious distress, his men were getting nowhere. He had tried everything he knew to push the inquiry forward, but the search for the killer was like hunting for a ghost. Every line of inquiry that could be followed was followed. A thousand Land-Rover drivers were checked out. Nothing. Dodgy punters were closely questioned. Nothing. The prostitutes were asked time and again to rack their brains to identify clients who might have been capable of two brutal murders. Countless men were checked as a result. Nothing. An artist’s impression was drawn of the man with the bushy beard. Nothing. He wrote to local family doctors asking them to come forward with the names of patients who might be capable of killing prostitutes. He was frustrated yet again. The Patients’ Association said such a request would prevent men with violent impulses from seeking medical help. The British Medical Association merely restated that the relationship between doctors and patients was confidential.

Hoban was getting weary and his health was suffering. His diabetes was taking its toll and he began to complain to Betty about a pain in his eye. The strong possibility of the killer striking again continued to bother him. By the time the inquests into both the deaths opened in May 1976, he had little new to say apart from the fact that he was certain the two women had been murdered by the same man. Hoban also knew there was a desperately cruel paradox. If there was to be any hope of apprehending the killer, more clues were needed: fresh clues and lines of inquiry that could only be forthcoming if the killer struck again. Another woman would probably have to die. Hoban could only wait.

2

The Diabetic Detective

Dennis Hoban liked what he knew and his entire life was spent living in the north-west quadrant of Leeds. It was his town, he knew its people, and via the medium of local television and newspapers they knew him. It was the city’s prosperity which had drawn his family there. Both his father and grandfather were Irish immigrants from Cork. His father had been first a lorry driver, then a sales rep for a haulage firm. Dennis was born in 1926, the year of the General Strike.

When Hoban became a fully fledged detective in 1952, Leeds was an overcrowded town bursting at the seams, with masses of substandard housing fit only for demolition. Some 90,000 homes needed demolishing, 56,000 of them squalid back-to-backs built a hundred years earlier eighty to ninety to the acre. Post-war housing estates were planned and built across the city, but the council house waiting list stretched out for twenty years. It made Hoban and Betty determined to own their own home.

Their first son was born while they were living next to Dennis’s parents in Stanningley, a working-class district well to the west of the city centre. Then they moved to nearby Bramley, where Betty’s widowed mother came to join them. In the late 1960s the couple bought a brand-new Wimpey home with a large garden on the Kirkstall-Headingley borders, even though Hoban was the world’s worst and least interested gardener. Neither could he turn his hand to DIY in the home, though he loved cars. Shortly after they married he had bought the chassis of a Morris 8 which stood on the drive of their home. Hoban rebuilt it with a wooden frame and aluminium sheeting, but his real hobby was being a policeman. Whatever cars the family possessed were frequently used in his job, often taking part in high-speed car chases.