Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

In the bed-sitting room Stockdale discussed with Peter Swann, the fingerprint man, the sequence in which they would do their work. It was crucial they did it as a team, so as not to damage what the other was trying to achieve. ‘Preserving the crime scene is critical,’ Stockdale says of this kind of work. ‘You can preserve a crime scene by not walking into it, but at some stage you have got to go in there and decide on an operational procedure which is going to work and be followed. Everyone else who has an input to make has to know what everyone else is doing.’ He recalled something he particularly learned from later watching David Gee at work. The Leeds University professor, regarded as a gentleman among gentlemen by whose who knew him well, was standing in a muddy field somewhere looking at a fresh corpse and scribbling in a notebook. He said to Stockdale out of the corner of his mouth: ‘What I am doing now – the police think I am very busy working, but actually I am giving myself time to think.’

‘This was a tremendous piece of advice,’ Stockdale reflected. ‘I thought about standing there with him on that occasion over the coming years, and what David said encapsulated the whole experience. You have to make time for yourself to think. You can’t, if you allow yourself to be rushed by people saying: “Come on, get on with it, we have got to get the body moved.” Why? Where is it going? It isn’t going anywhere because I haven’t finished yet.’

On this call-out to Bradford, Stockdale wasn’t aware he was going to a Ripper murder. He had only just arrived down from Newcastle and did not know that three other prostitutes had been murdered in nearby Leeds. Examining the blood distribution patterns in the room, he kept reminding himself not to impede Peter Swann and his team looking for fingerprints. ‘It is well established with all the forces I have worked for, that if the investigation officer’s fingerprints are found, then it costs them a round of drinks in the bar. You tend to go around the crime scene with your hands in your pockets. It is very easy to unconsciously pick something up or touch it, which you really ought not to do. I wasn’t going to break the habits of my career so far.’

Stockdale became conscious of comments passing between other members of the team. ‘Is it him, then?’ ‘Do you think it’s another one?’ The questioning was addressed to no one in particular, like a murmur rising almost to a groundswell. Finally he turned to Peter Swann and asked: ‘Is it who? What’s going on?’

Swann explained. ‘We’ve got a serial killer – he’s being called The Ripper.’

‘Bloody hell, just my luck to pick up one of these,’ Stockdale exclaimed. It was the first time he had heard the words ‘The Ripper’.

Stockdale examined the woman’s clothing carefully. He believed that after they were pulled down, the jeans and possibly the tights as well had been pulled up again partially. Neither the tights nor the zip fastener of the jeans was damaged in the operation and it was evident that some care had been exercised by the killer. The surface of the body was smeared with blood and gave the appearance of having been manoeuvred by the killer, who must have had wet blood on his hands. Looking around the room generally, he could see there had been no violent struggle or any attempt to ransack the place. He concluded that the sequence of events had been as follows:

1 Atkinson was struck on the head from behind as she entered the room.

2 She fell to the floor bleeding and lay where she fell for some minutes.

3 The killer moved the unconscious body to the bedside where probably her leather coat was removed before being dumped in the corner of the room. The jeans could have been undone at this stage and pulled down, together with her underclothes, and this caused the loss of the left shoe. Bloodstaining on the carpet, the handbag, and the smearing on the leg of the bedside chair, showed probably that another blow to the skull had been struck and that the head had moved about on the floor.

4 The killer, with wet bloody hands, manoeuvred the body on to the unmade bed, probably by clambering on to the bed and dragging the body, rather than by lifting it. In doing so a bloody footwear impression was left on the bottom sheet between the body and the wall.

5 The bloodstream distribution on the bed indicated further blows to the head and a great deal of blood being lost as a result of the wounds sustained. He also believed the stabbing injuries to the abdomen were probably sustained on the bed.

6 The killer then began a process of ‘tidying up’, during which the jeans were partially pushed or drawn on to the legs. The bedding was then piled on top of the body and straightened out sufficiently to cover it almost completely, leaving the injuries and the greater part of the bloodstaining hidden from view.

Shortly before midnight all the work that could be done by Domaille’s team, Gee and Stockdale was complete, and the body was placed on a large plastic sheet and put into a coffin shell before being taken to the Bradford city mortuary. There Tina’s ex-husband, Ramen Mitra, identified her body in the presence of Professor Gee and the coroner’s officer. At 1.30 a.m. on the Sunday morning Gee began his post-mortem. It continued until 5 a.m. The usual crowd of officers was present, including a young constable called Alexander, who was, as the first officer at the scene of the murder, also required to attend the post-mortem.

During the autopsy Gee discovered four major depressed fractures of the skull caused by it being struck with a blunt instrument which left crescent-shaped wounds. There were also wounds to the trunk in the form of abrasions to the middle of the back and another group of grazes and stab wounds over the lower abdomen, linked by an irregular linear abrasion across the left side of the chest. He believed that some kind of large-size hammer was involved. Domaille noticed several stabbing wounds just above the pubic region. The killer obviously had some kind of serious sexual hang-up. These and some of the other stab wounds caused Professor Gee particular problems. He thought some object with a blade half an inch wide might have been used – perhaps a screwdriver or chisel.

What he was looking at confirmed what they had seen in the three other murders – a clear and established pattern: similar kinds of head injuries; similar movement of the clothing; the absence of sexual intercourse; and multiple stab wounds produced by a variety of different instruments. ‘So far we had two different knives, one screwdriver, and, I now thought, some rectangular-shaped, rather blunt object, like, say, a cold chisel,’ he said later. ‘In fact, in this I was wrong. I had by now got the clear impression that what happened each time was that the victim was knocked down purely to make them immobile, possibly with the same hammer, then the clothing was disarranged and the stab wounds inflicted with a different weapon each time, because that act provided the necessary satisfaction [for the killer]. One of the big problems I found in an extended series was trying to keep distinct the themes of the patterns of pathology on the one hand and the nature of the actual weapons on the other. But certainly in this case my conception of a hammer on one hand and a blunt chisel on the other prevented me from putting the two together – into one weapon.’ He only ascertained the truth much later.

For Gee, as a forensic pathologist, it was crucial to determine how the death was caused. He examined the pattern of injuries, the position of the body, the nature of the wounds, and endeavoured to reconstruct a form in which the injuries could have been sustained. This meant developing, sooner or later, some idea of what actually happened – the order of events. It also meant developing preconceived ideas about the situation, but this could be dangerous, though he saw no way to avoid it. Sometimes it led to mistakes. In his own mind he saw a clear and logical sequence of events for all four cases in the series so far.

‘I was quite wrong,’ Gee said. ‘It turned out that this particular girl [Atkinson] was indeed struck with a hammer, but the penetrating injuries were caused by the claws of the claw hammer, which was used on this occasion.’ He should have realized this, he said, by noticing that there was a small second abrasion alongside the main one on the side of the body and from the general pattern of marks on the abdomen. ‘I am sure I was misled on this occasion because of having developed this preconceived idea of two weapons being used – a hammer and a stabbing instrument of some kind.’

A thorough search of the flat produced a diary among Atkinson’s meagre possessions. It contained the names of some fifty men, a good many of whom were probably clients. Two days after the body was found Domaille briefed the local news media about the latest killing.

This was a brutal murder, a very brutal murder. The man we are looking for could be a maniac. The leads that we are following are that there are a number of people in the area that I know knew this lady. I have her diary. This lists a lot of people, names a lot of people, and I would like to see all those people, I shall be making inquiries to trace them. I shall treat as a matter of complete confidentiality any information that comes to me. Anyone can ask to see me personally and I think it might be helpful to some people if they came forward to see me, rather than me making inquiries about some of the facts that I know.

Domaille’s team of ninety officers had begun working hard to learn more about the murdered woman. It emerged that Patricia Tina Atkinson’s family had lived in the Thorpe Edge district of Bradford and she had two brothers. In 1960, when she was sixteen years old, she met her husband, Ramen Mitra, a Pakistani, at a dance hall in the town. She was working as a burler and mender at a mill in Greengates, Bradford. Perhaps it was an omen that they married on All Fools Day – 1 April 1961. They then lived for a short time with her parents before moving to their own home at Girlington, an area of Bradford next to Manningham. During this period both of Tina’s parents died. She and Ramen, known to most people as ‘Ray’, had three daughters during subsequent years and went on to live mainly in the area of Thorpe Edge where Tina had grown up.

In her mid-twenties she was attractive – slim and with long dark brown hair – and she liked a good time. She knew she looked alluring to men whatever she wore. Dressed in tight jeans and a blouse tied at the waist, as she was the night she died, she appeared quite vivacious. Tina – the mother of three and married so young – felt she hadn’t yet done any real living. She enjoyed men’s attention and couldn’t stop herself being unfaithful; the couple separated on a number of occasions, but then got back together for the children’s sake. Finally she left home. In 1975 she had been convicted for prostitution and her husband divorced her on 25 September 1976. He was awarded custody of the children. For a while at least Tina gave up the sex industry. She had met a man called Robert Henderson. They became lovers, but it was a strange, desultory relationship made worse by the fact that she was an alcoholic, and an uncontrollable alcoholic at that. More than that, she got into debt from accumulated fines. A short time before she was killed she went ‘back on the game’ to improve her finances.

Ten days before she was murdered, Tina rented a small flat in a purpose-built 1960s block in Oak Avenue, Manningham, close to the red-light area of Lumb Lane. The block of apartments, which had a flat bitumen and felt roof, was run down and in poor condition. Surrounded by large Edwardian houses, themselves converted into separate flats and maisonettes, the flats were built on sloping ground, two storeys high at the front and three at the back. Atkinson’s was on the ground floor at the back of the premises. To reach it from the Oak Avenue entrance you had to go downstairs.

The Friday night before she died, her boyfriend slept with her. They had sex when the effect of the previous night’s alcohol was beginning to wear off – at about four o’clock on the Saturday morning. On the Saturday night, 23 April 1977, Tina went out determined to have a good time visiting her regular drinking haunts, including the Carlisle Hotel. She had been drinking for most of the day. When the stripper who had been booked for the pub failed to turn up, Tina did an impromptu turn, climbing on to the stage. She knew she was good looking, but she was in no condition to entertain the Saturday-night crowd. Tina was totally out of control and things got rowdy. Instead of stripping down to her bra and pants, Tina took all her clothes off. An argument with the manager ensued and by 10.15 Tina was out of the door and on her way to the International Club in Lumb Lane. The last time she was seen it was by another street girl at about 11.10. Tina was weaving and staggering her way down Church Street towards St Mary’s Road, completely drunk, having consumed the equivalent of twenty measures of spirits.

The next day Robert Henderson became concerned for his girlfriend’s whereabouts and at about 6.30 on the Sunday evening decided to call at her flat. Failing to raise a response for his urgent knocking on the door, he forced his way in and made the appalling discovery of Tina’s body on the bed. She was obviously dead. He rushed to the caretaker’s and urged him to call the police.

During the inquiry, Domaille made time to meet with Tina’s ex-husband and children. ‘She had led him a terrible life,’ he said. ‘He was a Pakistani, an insignificant, ordinary fellow who did his best for her, did everything he could to help her. He wasn’t that hard up, reasonably well off money wise, but she was a bad girl.

‘I thought about why she may have gone that way, I thought about it a lot. She was in the Manningham environment where the girls get together and the girls talk. I’ve met and talked with a lot of prostitutes. They are people who have a great understanding of people in the main, a lot of them are mixed up and are to be pitied. Many girls do it because they have been driven towards it. Every now and then you meet one who is going to make her way out of it and they actually do.’ Yorkshire police officers can be as hard as nails when discussing women who take to the streets. Others working on the Yorkshire Ripper case over the years came to share Domaille’s view of most prostitutes as more sinned against than sinning. ‘Murder is murder,’ said one. ‘Even prostitutes are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, maybe somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother.’

The impressions of the boot print in blood found at the bottom of the bed sheet was later thought to have come from a Dunlop ‘Warwick’ wellington boot. However, since the bed sheet was crumpled it was difficult to determine the exact size, but a match with the boot impression found at the scene of Jackson’s murder was thought possible. The flat was full of fingerprints which then had to be gradually eliminated. The previous occupants were traced and had their fingerprints and palm prints taken for elimination purposes, but no matches were found. One set of prints belonged to a man who had returned to live in Africa, who was then traced and eliminated. A total of nine fingerprints were discovered which could not be eliminated. Domaille’s team began overhauling all the ‘live’ inquiries that were still continuing from the three previous murders. Nothing emerged that assisted their effort, with one exception, and that proved a red herring.

Tina Atkinson was a frequent user of taxis – even for the shortest of journeys. Every known taxi driver in Bradford, some 1,200 of them, was interviewed by Domaille’s murder squad, along with all convicted and known prostitutes in the city. It was during this phase of the operation that the inquiry went off on a false trail. Questioning taxi drivers revealed nothing of value. But a woman called Barbara Kathryn Miller came forward to reveal she had been attacked in Bradford two years previously. The thirty-six-year-old professional stripper was known by police to be an active prostitute in Wolverhampton, Derby and Manningham. She knew Atkinson well and was anxious to help all she could. She told of a man with a beard who picked her up in a pub in Lumb Lane. He drove a Land-Rover with a hard top and a long wheelbase. She could even remember the colour: blue with a dirty cream top. It was in a dirty condition, with a six-inch tear in the black vinyl of the passenger seat and a white square petrol can and sacking behind the driver’s seat. He drove her to a quarry in the Bolton Woods area of Bradford for sex. She believed it happened on either a Wednesday or Friday night at about 9.30 in March 1975. The punter told her to get out of the vehicle, and when she refused, he dragged her out and assaulted her, punching her stomach, chest and face. Then he threw her against the vehicle, banging the back of her head. The man fled after the woman began fighting back.

Putting the experience down as a professional hazard, she failed to tell the police. But now, in answer to the appeal from Domaille for prostitutes who had dealt with violent clients to come forward, she provided detectives with a description of her attacker which in some respects matched the description of the man who tried to kill Claxton and Tracey Browne, but in other crucial areas was wide of the mark. The woman said he was thirty-five to forty years old, five feet eight inches tall, of stocky build with untidy ginger hair, a full ginger beard and moustache, but with the beard cut short under the chin. He had blue eyes, a possible Irish accent with a slight Birmingham dialect, a scar on his left hand, and a blue and red tattoo. The photofit she gave police again bore a good likeness to similar descriptions from other women. However, it was the attacker’s use of a Land-Rover to which police paid most attention. A description of a similar man had been provided by witnesses in an earlier murder. Emily Jackson was said to have been spotted getting into a Land-Rover at about seven o’clock on the night she was killed, at the junction of Roundhay Road and Gathorne Terrace. He too was described as late forties with ginger beard and a scar on his left hand. Nearly 1,250 Land-Rovers registered in West Yorkshire were eliminated, leaving 159 untraced.

During the next three months the ninety officers investigating Atkinson’s murder made 2,300 house-to-house inquiries and 1,924 vehicle checks; completed 3,915 separate actions and took 2,161 statements. All to no avail.

Several years later Domaille ended his police career as an assistant chief constable in the West Yorkshire force. He then had a spell working for the Security Service, MI5. Now long into retirement and living in his native West Country in a town on the edge of Dartmoor, he still feels frustration and passion in equal measures about the Atkinson inquiry: ‘The only thing wrong with the inquiry was the bloody leader of the investigation – me – didn’t catch the man! What can I tell you? I tried and my team bloody tried.’

Four brutal murders and still no conceivable sign of the police catching the man responsible. News of the police investigation was now national headlines, covered extensively in the press and on radio and television. Sunday newspapers dispatched feature writers to Leeds to prepare in-depth stories. The London Weekend Television channel sent its ‘Weekend World’ team to the North to report on what it saw as a compelling story deserving in-depth analysis.

The pressure to solve these homicides was now firmly on George Oldfield and his men. It was the worst kind of professional nightmare for a senior detective. A sadistic maniac was randomly choosing vulnerable women as his prey and then callously slaughtering them. There was no motive as such, only the inner compulsions of a sick and twisted mind wielding a murder weapon. The only connection between the victims was that they were all women down on their luck with absolutely no relationship to the murderer. He appeared to have a burning inner desire to kill loose women. So far the Ripper had made fourteen children motherless, one of the few elements of the media coverage which registered in any emotional sense with the general public. That the victims were all prostitutes seemed to count against them in the public mind. While there could be sympathy for the children they left behind, their mothers received very little simply because of their active role in the oldest profession.

It was even harder for the various murder squads dealing with the separate homicides to persuade the victims’ various clients to come forward so they could be eliminated. Most men naturally feared exposure as clients of streetwalkers. A knock on the door and awkward questions from a police officer inquiring why a particular individual was in the red-light area on a given night would be understandably unwelcome in either the marital home or the workplace. The fact that the victims were selling sex ensured there was no sense of urgency among the public in seeing the killer apprehended. While the compassionate might sympathize with women forced to go on the streets, others with sterner views saw it as a sordid activity and had little empathy. The law-abiding citizens of Leeds and Bradford might have eagerly come forward with potential evidence if an elderly woman or schoolgirl had been murdered. But in the case of the Ripper victims they hung back. Senior investigating officers had to think of ways of keeping the story in the public eye in the hope of jogging a potential witness’s memory. In the red-light areas prostitutes frequented in Leeds and Bradford, actual witnesses seemed few and far between.

Yet again the local police exhausted all the tried and tested methods of solving murders. Yet again there were precious few clues. The only positive evidence was the tyre tracks found in Roundhay Park during the Richardson slaying. The team eliminating all the vehicles in West Yorkshire that could have left such tyre marks continued their foot-slogging work. Thousands and thousands of vehicles were being screened. But such huge and painstaking inquiries brought no returns and it was never easy trying to maintain morale among those given the day-to-day tasks of relentless door knocking.

Each detective taking part in this kind of inquiry has to live with the knowledge that a single false move, a question forgotten, a momentary loss of concentration, might eliminate the killer, passing over the real culprit and rendering the whole exercise futile. Such an error would leave the inquiry team working in vain, without knowing their quarry had already escaped the net. For the conscientious officer wanting to do everything he can to catch a killer, the strain of possibly making such a mistake must be enormous.

The easiest vehicles to screen in the tyre inquiry were done quickly. People who had not moved home and had kept their vehicle since the time of the Richardson murder could be seen and eliminated reasonably swiftly. It was thought unlikely that an owner would have changed all four tyres. The remaining unseen vehicles proved gradually more and more difficult to eliminate. The vehicle may have been sold, scrapped or abandoned. Each generated new lines of inquiry for the beleaguered force. Where someone said they no longer had the car, its current whereabouts had to be checked. There was also a critical need to keep the reason for the tyre operation top secret in case the killer realized the vehicle he owned might trap him. The tyres might be changed and dumped, or the vehicle crushed and turned into a three-foot cube of metal. Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry moved past the half-way stage and before midsummer 1977 more than 30,000 vehicles had been seen. For the Leeds murder squad under Hobson’s command, it seemed the best chance they had of catching the killer – providing he still had his car with him.

The process of recording who had been seen in relation to the Richardson tyre inquiry involved indexing vehicle makes and registration numbers on special cards, but with no separate name index of vehicle owners who had cars with tyres which could have matched those left at the Richardson crime scene. Although Peter Sutcliffe was the owner of one of the vehicles on Hobson’s vast list of over 50,000 potential suspects, his name as yet figured nowhere within the incident room card index system – though a record of the vehicle he owned had yet to be eliminated from the tyre inquiry. If Sutcliffe’s name should arise in connection with some other aspect of the inquiry, no one would be able to tell he had been on the list of potential suspects for the Richardson murder. There were still separate incident rooms for each of the four murders. With no computers available to handle the ever-expanding number of inquiries or the information they produced, the various incident rooms relied on the paper-led system: the keeping of various indexes relating to different aspects of the inquiry and the taking of statements – lots of them. It all took time and manpower.