Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

6

A Fresh Start

Several weeks before the midsummer of 1977 a key decision had been made by George Oldfield. If there was another murder in the Ripper series, then he would take command as senior investigating officer and continue with his role of ACC (crime), doing the two jobs back-to-back. He didn’t have long to wait. On Sunday morning, 26 June, nine weeks after the death of Patricia Atkinson, a woman’s body was found on waste ground in Chapeltown, Leeds. The discovery was made by two young children. The fact of the body being found in an area frequented by prostitutes was enough to justify a call to Oldfield. He immediately told the control room at force headquarters to contact Dick Holland at home. By now a detective superintendent, Holland was deputy head of CID for the Western Area, operating out of Bradford. Preparing to don an SIO’s hat, he wanted a senior detective at his side who knew how the old West Yorkshire force investigated murders.

‘He knew me and the way I worked, and he knew I would work the West Yorkshire system,’ says Holland. ‘This wasn’t going to be my murder – it was Oldfield’s, but George would be able to keep nipping off to do his job at headquarters and leave me there, knowing his will would be carried out. He regarded me as an extension of himself. If he had left Hobson in charge, it would have been done Hobson’s way.’ Holland was Oldfield’s protégé – they were West Riding men and there was mutual respect and trust. Holland, then a divorcee, would become one of the few officers invited to Oldfield’s home. The two thought alike. In Holland’s view they were ‘a bit like bookends’. A close colleague once told Holland the only difference between him and Oldfield was that, ‘George’s answer to stress and problems is a bottle of whisky. Yours is to go out and buy a steak or a meal.’ Holland – a giant of a man who turned out rain and shine for the force rugby team – was a non-smoking, non-drinking foodaholic. ‘I knew how to switch off and I enjoy the company of women. George was set in his ways. You weren’t going to change George,’ he said.

He drove to Leeds at high speed down the motorway, to find Oldfield had just beaten him to the murder scene. Oldfield came to greet him, then directed him to a patch of derelict land in front of a children’s adventure playground in Reginald Street, next to a dilapidated factory building scheduled for demolition. It was overlooked by two streets. Three-storey Edwardian terraced houses in Reginald Terrace faced the playground on one side; the rear gardens and outhouses of a row of large semi-detached houses looked across on to the crime scene on the other side of Reginald Street. The playground itself resembled a Wild West stockade, its boundary fencing made of timbered railway sleepers driven several feet into the ground, with sawn lengths of barked timber secured at the top to a height of about seven feet. The equipment in the children’s play area was made from large timbers, including telegraph poles. One half of what had been a pair of hinged timbered gates at the entrance into the stockade remained shut. The other gate was missing.

A mobile police command with a tall radio mast had been positioned in Reginald Street, complete with its own power generator. Roads had been cordoned off and detectives with clipboards were already knocking on doors. Milling around were members of the Leeds murder squad, who had received an early ‘shout’ of possibly another Ripper killing. They did not know Oldfield had decided on a change of tactics. Neither, apparently, did Jim Hobson, who as head of the city’s CID was present and expecting to lead another murder inquiry. He was trying to drive along his Ripper investigation, anxiously following the progress of the tyre inquiry and organizing a small proactive undercover operation in the Chapeltown area using a few women police officers as decoys. His team were starting to gear up for a major investigation when Oldfield announced he was taking charge and bringing in his own team of supervisors.

Oldfield wanted a fresh start, using the West Yorkshire murder investigation system drawn up by his predecessor, Donald Craig. Holland’s most important task would be to indoctrinate the Leeds murder incident room team into using the West Yorkshire system of keeping records. It meant more statements would be taken. The Leeds system relied not on paper but on activity, with paperwork kept to a minimum. Oldfield wanted much more detail, especially in terms of descriptions of people seen around the crime scene at relevant times.

Holland explained the reason: ‘If somebody says, “I was saying goodnight to my girlfriend outside No. 14 Reginald Terrace when I saw a man come past in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, pale blue shirt and dark blue trousers,” you want to be able to consult the index system in the incident room to find out who fits that description and see who has been identified and make sure this person has been properly eliminated.’ The Leeds system was excellent at dealing with murders committed by local people. Most were quickly solved because detectives were not bogged down by paperwork; they could put manpower to better use. But if the inquiry became protracted, Oldfield believed, a more thorough system of record keeping based on detailed statements was essential, especially if they were going to mount a successful prosecution. And that was the ultimate goal: to get the guilty man into court and put away.

Inside the playground area was a single-storey, white-painted clubhouse covered in graffiti. A scenes-of-crime photographer stood on the felt-covered flat roof taking pictures, looking down at the corpse on the ground behind the wooden fence, and at the general area of waste ground towards Reginald Street already marked out in white tape. The senior detectives had to wait until the photographer completed his work on the roof before going to see the body. Near the corpse lay an old spring mattress, dumped alongside a pile of rubbish, including a rolled-up length of disused carpet. One of the woman’s shoes, which bore an impossibly long high heel, lay beside her foot.

Because a local pub was a regular haunt of prostitutes, the automatic assumption was that the victim was a street walker. Oldfield and Holland strolled over a tarmac path crossing the waste land, which contained a considerable amount of rubbish. Oldfield pointed out a woman’s imitation leather handbag lying beside the path, a few feet from Reginald Street. Adjacent to it was a piece of rough paper which appeared heavily bloodstained.

The sandy soil leading to the playground entrance was bone dry. A clear trail, consisting of a line of spots and splashes of blood, together with furrows in the soil that looked like drag marks, led down the gentle slope from Reginald Street towards the gateway. Inside the playground on the right side, close to the boundary brick wall of the derelict factory and lying parallel with the timber fencing, was the body of the young woman. From the street she was completely hidden. She lay face down with her head six feet from the brick wall. The legs were stretched out straight and the feet were crossed, the left over the right; the left arm was bent up with the hand beneath her head, the right arm stretched out beside the body. There were large quantities of rubbish and refuse, old tin cans, broken bottles and other material around the corpse.

The body was clad in a grey jacket which had been partly pulled upwards to the shoulders exposing bare skin in her lower back. Her blue and white checked skirt was rumpled towards the upper part of her thighs. One of her high-heeled pale yellow ‘clog’ shoes was still in place; her black tights had a hole visible in the left heel. On closer inspection, the detectives could see blood soiling her head and left hand as well as her jacket and skirt. Vertical trickles of blood ran downwards from the back of the chest across the sides of her body.

By now Professor Gee had arrived. He walked across the wooden duck-boarding into the playground to join the group of officers behind the fence. A fingerprint officer and forensic scientist were making a superficial examination of the body. Green bottle flies buzzed around the victim who they could now see was a young woman, probably in her teens. As the photographer took his pictures flies appeared on her jacket and hair. After a while Gee himself lifted the skirt to expose her underwear. A pale blue underskirt had been raised slightly upwards. Her tights were in the normal position and beneath them she wore a black pair of pants and an external sanitary pad. Peter Swann, the fingerprint expert, wanted some of the woman’s clothing sent away for special examination. The jacket had obviously been pulled up towards the victim’s head by the killer. To prevent contamination, plastic bags were placed over her shoes and hands. The body was then gently raised, the belt of her skirt and the zip fastener at the side were loosened so the skirt could be removed. Her jacket, held by one button across the front of her chest, was also undone and removed, revealing a blue and white sun top bunched up in the upper part of the back. Beneath it was a single stab wound.

Indications confirmed she had been dragged along the ground. Debris was caught in the centre of the straps at the back of the sun top. A piece of paper was discovered in the folds of the left side of the skirt in front of the abdomen. When the body was turned over and placed on a plastic sheet they saw blood soiling the young woman’s face. She looked very young and wore no bra. Her sun top was displaced, exposing the nipple of her left breast. In the front of the central upper region of her abdomen was a large wound and embedded in it was part of the broken top of a bottle with a screw top. Gee pointed out two irregular wounds to the scalp. After mortuary officials took the body away, two more pools of blood were found – one where the abdomen had lain, the other close to the head.

During a four-hour post-mortem that afternoon Gee found three semi-circular lacerated wounds to the scalp typical of other Ripper killings, along with depressed fractures to the skull. In the chest area, in addition to the large wound containing the bottle top, was a series of long scratches and cuts. A large stab wound in her back had penetrated various organs, including heart, kidneys and lungs. Gee thought a thin-bladed weapon, not less than six and a half inches long, had been thrust through the two openings on the front and back of the body. Multiple thrusts, perhaps as many as twenty, had been made in and out of the same wound, causing it to become much enlarged. The broken bottle top probably entered the chest as the victim was turned over on the ground. She had first been hit on the back of the head at the edge of the waste ground and fallen. She was then struck again on the head and, while still alive, dragged by hands under the armpits from the point where her handbag was found, down the slope and into the playground area.

The body initially lay on its back when the stab wounds at the front were inflicted. Then it was turned on its face and further stab wounds made to the back. Gee knew for sure she was not yet dead when some of these stab wounds were made because he found a large quantity of blood in each chest cavity. The killer had removed the knife from the back wound and then wiped each side of the blade on the skin on the woman’s back. Death had occurred some time between midnight and 3 a.m.

Soon after arriving at the crime scene, Jim Hobson had someone search the handbag found on the waste and her identity was quickly established. She was Jayne Michelle MacDonald, a sixteen-year-old who lived near by in Scott Hall Avenue. Wilma McCann, the Ripper’s first victim, had been a close neighbour in the same road, just six doors away. It seemed probable that Jayne MacDonald was mistaken for a prostitute when she was killed taking a short cut home across the waste ground, probably only a hundred yards from safety. She had gone with a girlfriend to a city centre bar, the Hofbrauhaus, at eight o’clock on the Saturday night, and left in the company of a young man aged about eighteen, with broad shoulders and a slim waist.

Jayne was a singularly pretty teenager with shoulder-length light brown hair; a good-looking girl, according to her friends, always smiling and truly the apple of her father Wilfred’s eye. He collapsed when police told him Jayne had been murdered, and subsequently developed nervous asthma and chronic bronchitis and never returned to his job with British Rail. He spent days on end staring at a photo of his daughter and patiently carving a wooden cross from the ladder of her old bunk bed. It came to mark Jayne’s last resting place. He couldn’t forget what he had seen in the mortuary when he went to identify her body. According to his wife, Irene, all he would say was that there was blood over Jayne’s beautiful hair.

Jayne had left a local high school a few months previously at Easter to work in the shoe department at Grandways supermarket in Roundhay Road. It sounds like a cliché to say she was a happy-go-lucky teenager, but in her case it was true. She loved life, indeed had everything to live for, and liked to spend her money on clothes and going out dancing or roller skating. Hers was a close-knit community, the kind where neighbours and friends did favours for one another and whose children were in and out of each other’s homes. One such family were the Bransbergs, who had a telephone, unlike the MacDonalds. Normally, if Jayne was planning to stay over at a girlfriend’s house, she would call the Bransbergs and they would tell her parents. Wilf MacDonald and Irene were a loving and devoted couple who kept a close eye on all their children, four girls and a son. Recently Jayne had broken off a relationship with a boyfriend, believing he was getting ‘too serious’. In their eyes, she was a bonny girl with a trim figure for her age, who simply drew the boys. They liked to believe their daughter was ‘innocent’, which in 1977 meant they thought she had not yet lost her virginity. In fact she had been having regular intercourse with her two previous boyfriends.

Jack Bransberg worked for British Rail with Jayne’s father. She had called to see him and his wife before going into town on Saturday night. She was going dancing at the Astoria Ballroom, then on to another discotheque. When, later that night, Jayne didn’t phone to say she would be late, both her parents and the Bransbergs assumed she had had a little too much to drink, stayed with a friend and forgot to telephone. Wilf MacDonald was furious Jayne had not called, more concerned about her thoughtlessness than anything else. After the death of Wilma McCann, all local parents had been alarmed the killer might strike again. But that was twenty-one months before and the fear was starting to wear off. Nevertheless Jayne had several times promised her mother she would never walk home alone in the dark.

As with all the relatives of the Ripper’s victims so far, the tragedy had a devastating effect on the family, the more so perhaps because this was a sixteen-year-old, carefree girl about to begin life when she was snatched away in such a brutal fashion. ‘He has killed my Jayne,’ cried a tearful Mrs MacDonald. ‘She was a virgin. A clean-living girl. How many more?’

Her husband was still under sedation, too shocked to be interviewed. The family doctor said the entire family was in a terrible state: ‘The husband is very bad and I have had to give him a sedative injection this morning because he has been in a state of complete collapse. This has been added to because of the fact that he had to go down and identify his daughter and see the terrible injuries she had suffered. This is an awful lot for any man to put up with. The murder itself is something which is a terrible thing to have to accept but to have to go down and identify the body and see the full extent of this is just making it even worse.’

Neighbours and friends of the MacDonalds rallied round to give them support, with several helping around the house. Others vented their feelings in a different way. The day after the murder white painted graffiti appeared on a nearby wall: ‘SCOTT HALL SAYS HANG THE RIPPER!’

Piecing together the last few hours of Jayne’s life took detectives several days of foot slogging. Oldfield wanted a minute breakdown of where she went after leaving the city centre. A detailed surveyor’s street map of the area, showing every house, was blown up and placed on a wall of the incident room on the top floor of Millgarth Police Station. He wanted to flag everyone who had been in the area at the relevant time in the hope someone must have seen the killer and possibly his car.

The Hofbrauhaus in the Merion Centre in Leeds was a Bierkeller and one of the city’s earliest themed pubs. It advertised German beer for only 32p a pint, and although trade could be slow early in the week, come Thursday, Friday and Saturday the place hotted up and the ale began to flow. Chief attraction was an ‘Oompah Band’, a fake German band dressed in leather shorts and Tyrolean hats which played songs like ‘The Happy Wanderer’ and waltzes associated with the Black Forest and Austria. Despite being under legal drinking age, Jayne had no trouble gaining entry. She met a local lad, Mark Jones, whose fair hair was brushed back off his face and who wore a dark velvet jacket, a light coloured shirt and dark flared trousers. There was a clear mutual attraction. She had not drunk any alcohol in the crowded bar, preferring soft drinks on what was already a warm night. When the Hofbrauhaus closed at 10.30 they left to walk into the city centre with his friends. Eventually the others drifted off until he and Jayne were left alone. They stopped for a bag of chips in the city centre, and then realized Jayne had missed her last bus. It was about midnight. They started walking up the York Road towards Chapeltown, Mark promising that his sister, who lived near by, would drive her home. When they reached his sister’s house, he saw her car wasn’t there, and they continued walking towards St James’s Hospital. They went into the garden of the nurses’ home and lay there on the ground for forty-five minutes, having a kiss and a cuddle. Jones later told detectives that Jayne was still having a period. She had promised him they would have sex together if he met her during the week.

The young couple later set off walking towards Harehills, but when they reached Becket Street they parted company. It was now 1.30 a.m. Mark himself had to go to his home on a nearby council estate. Jayne didn’t seem at all bothered. Close by was Grandways, the supermarket where she worked. If she couldn’t hail a taxi, she was used to walking home. So they bade each other farewell and promised to renew their assignation the following Wednesday. She walked off along Becket Street towards Harehills Road. Several people saw her walking along in her ridiculously high ‘clog’ shoes, including two AA patrolmen in their vehicle parked near St James’s Hospital. At about 1.40 she was seen in Bayswater Mount, walking in the direction of Roundhay Road. She was last seen about five minutes’ walk from the murder scene at 1.45 a.m. walking through Chapeltown. A woman living in Reginald Terrace said that around 2 a.m. she had heard a banging and scuffling from the adventure playground, followed by the voice of what sounded like a Scotsman mouthing obscenities.

The murder squad’s attempts to detail individual people’s movements along a few residential streets at 2 a.m. in the morning might seem reasonably straightforward, given the expectation that most people would be tucked up in bed asleep. But not in Chapeltown on a Saturday night. It was a veritable hive of activity. This was a strong immigrant area. There were people here from Eastern Europe, working-class Jews who could not afford to reside in the northern hills around Leeds. There were families from the New Commonwealth, particularly West Indians, many of whom attended illegal drinking clubs, where the sacred brown ‘weed’ was rolled into six-inch joints for mutual recreation and spiritual enlightenment. Oldfield later estimated some two hundred people were out and about in the immediate vicinity of the route Jayne walked once she left Mark Jones. Of these, some fifty were thought to be in or around the Reginald Street/Reginald Terrace area at the crucial time. Oldfield was desperate to identify and eliminate any of these people. Forty revellers were drinking in a West Indian club and left to attend a party in nearby Sholebroke Avenue.

A free-phone telephone service was set up in the incident room in the hope that someone might just have seen Jayne or the killer. But this was a time preceding the inner-city riots of the 1980s by only a few years. There was a recession, with rising unemployment, government cutbacks and little funding for the inner cities or urban renewal. There were tensions between police and some in the immigrant communities, particularly the younger element. They tended to avoid each other if possible, so it was not surprising if witnesses from among this section of the community were not flooding forward to help in the Ripper investigation.

On the blown-up wall map in the incident room were two hundred taggings of people and vehicles from 1 until 4 a.m. Some were individuals, some groups. Each was represented by a flag. Some were positive sightings where police had identified or interviewed a particular person. But there were also blanks. Oldfield was anxious to fill them in: ‘My problem is in identifying those people. Once I can identify them and eliminate them I am hoping I shall be left with one or two or three, or a handful of individuals, who have not come forward and have a reason for not coming forward. The trouble I am having is that we are getting cooperation from certain members of the public who are feeding this information of having seen people there, but some sections of the public, for reasons best known to themselves, are reluctant to come forward and admit they were in that area on this particular night. They are the ones who represent the blank spaces I cannot fill. It is frustrating … I am not interested why they were there. The only individual I am concerned about who was in that area at that time is the killer. Anyone else I want him to come forward so I can eliminate him, and find that killer.’ Oldfield told the local TV news: ‘I believe the man we are looking for has a good knowledge of the Leeds area but he does not necessarily live in Leeds.’

Oldfield began to get more and more desperate in his appeals for help. They had a paucity of evidence. The finger-tip search of the area around the playground revealed absolutely zero. In Jayne’s handbag there were some bus tickets on which the forensic lab found fingerprints that could not be identified. A cigarette packet discovered near the body bore fingerprints which were never eliminated. The Ripper had appeared and disappeared like a phantom, and this in itself added to the gossip-driven mythology surrounding both his identity and the supposed ‘ritual’ slaying of his victims.

Oldfield’s greatest fear was that the killer would strike again – and soon. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that he will strike again. The big questions are when, where and who is going to be his next victim.’ He was convinced there were many people living in the immediate area who had not come forward. He made several urgent public appeals for witnesses before there was another murder, asking local church and community leaders for assistance. The murder squad also began re-examining old files of attacks on women.

Oldfield believed the killer had definitely taken four of his previous victims in his car after picking them up for sex. He was positive other women who probably were not prostitutes may have been propositioned or offered a lift and had turned the killer away. He hoped the man’s face peering out of the car window would still be fresh in their minds. ‘We believe the man we want must have tried it more than once and been turned down.’ One case they focused on closely was a serious assault on a thirty-four-year-old woman in an alleyway in Keighley two years previously in July 1975. Mrs Anna Rogulski had been assaulted and left badly injured. Oldfield told journalists she had been struck over the head with a blunt instrument and had injuries to her body similar to those of the Ripper’s victims. Sadly they failed to listen to Marcella Claxton from Chapeltown, who was convinced it was the Ripper who attacked her. The day after Jayne was killed, she told a reporter she was sure the man who bludgeoned her was also responsible for the girl’s murder.