Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

A ten-year-old boy and a housewife, both living in Chapeltown, contacted the incident room. The woman had started noting down the registration numbers of kerb crawlers after being pestered by a man in a car. The boy had been collecting car numbers – hundreds of them. Officers were detailed to check the owners. Oldfield, by now very much the public face of the police investigation, asked residents to jot down the registration number of any vehicle acting suspiciously or kerb crawling and ring the police. ‘They will not be wasting our time,’ he said. Nothing more clearly reflected the desperate situation he was in as senior investigating officer.

Finally Oldfield made a firm decision to bring the documentation for all five murders under one roof. The paperwork for the four previous killings was integrated into a major incident room on the top floor at Millgarth. A few doors down from the purpose-built incident room, Oldfield shared an office with Dick Holland and another superintendent, Jack Slater. They were working an average thirteen hours a day, arriving at 9.15 a.m. in time for a ten o’clock briefing at which they updated officers conducting house-to-house inquiries. Top priority was trying to maintain their morale. They left to go home between 10 p.m. and midnight. At that stage Holland and Slater were reviewing the paperwork, dispensing actions to the troops on the ground, checking follow-ups. They filtered the stuff Oldfield ought to see, and the paperwork began to pile up. Occasionally his other job at the Wakefield HQ held up his work on the Ripper inquiry. Suddenly he would announce: ‘I’m stopping tonight.’ He would make sure he had half a bottle of decent whisky on hand, taking frequent sips until he had cleared the backlog. Then he would go and bed down in the section house of the police station, where a number of single constables had rooms, so he would be ready and available for work first thing the next morning.

Holland directed that a detective inspector or detective chief inspector trained in the West Yorkshire murder system should work on every shift in the incident room. Their job was to check incoming statements. The Leeds staff hadn’t taken kindly to the changes Holland made. ‘Their reaction was hostile to start with,’ he said. ‘They were moaning and trying to get away. At that stage I actually worked in the incident room seeing that everything that went there was done in the West Yorkshire style. Now that had never been done in Leeds until then.’

The house-to-house inquiries were widened until the occupants of 679 homes in twenty-nine streets were seen and interviewed. Many houses were in multiple occupation. Nearly 3,700 statements were taken. Checks were made on all men taken into police custody for offences of violence, particularly if they involved women. Oldfield also organized a seminar with twenty-five psychiatrists from Yorkshire in an unsuccessful effort to get assistance from mental hospitals about patients who might be suspects.

Prostitutes were questioned in detail about regular clients even as the Leeds police began clamping down on soliciting in Chapeltown. On the one hand, they wanted the women’s cooperation; on the other, they were trying to put them out of business. At the same time Jim Hobson was mounting a covert operation of static observations, with officers recording registration numbers of vehicles trying to pick up women in the red-light district. Lists of registrations numbers could then be examined after any future murder and the drivers traced and interviewed. Over the next few months, 152 women were arrested and reported for soliciting, and sixty-eight more cautioned.

It was a measure of Oldfield’s frustration and desperation that he virtually begged people to support the police effort: ‘The public have the power to decide what sort of society they want. If they want murder and violence then they will keep quiet. If they want a law-abiding society in which their womenfolk can move freely without fear of attack from the likes of the individual we are hunting, then they must give us their help.’

A month after the murder the trail had gone cold, but the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, MP for a Leeds constituency, seemed to have full confidence in the West Yorkshire force. He paid a visit to the incident room in Leeds and was asked how concerned he was that ‘The Ripper’ had been at large so long. ‘I am no more concerned than the chief constable,’ he replied. ‘Often piecing evidence together, considering it, analysing it, does take time unless someone is there with a camera when the murder is committed.’

Considering that five women had been killed by the same hand within a small geographical area, this answer appeared somewhat flippant. But as the law stood, the Home Secretary could have said little else. He simply could not interfere. His own Home Office colleague, Dr Shirley Summerskill, had made the position clear during a debate on the Black Panther case twelve months previously. Britain’s criminal justice system relied on the operational autonomy of the police.

The press at this stage was describing ‘The Ripper’ as Yorkshire’s most wanted killer. No policeman pointed out to the Home Secretary during his visit that this was a national problem rather than a little local difficulty. Neither did they reveal they hadn’t a hope of catching the man – unless he tried to kill again. In such a hopeless situation there were few words of comfort that Oldfield or his colleagues could find for the MacDonald family when they buried Jayne. Those who have never suffered bereavement in such circumstances can have no comprehension of the feelings of the families. Wilf MacDonald later described in a television interview the moment he learned of his daughter’s death:

The police came in and said ‘Are you the father of Jayne MacDonald’, I said ‘Yes’. I said ‘I’ll kill her when she comes home because she didn’t phone last night’. They said you may not have to … and that’s as much as I knew … if she had died of you know illness or accident but when it happens like it did, mutilation and everything, I went to identify her and … I just collapsed there and then. He has murdered the whole family you can almost say.

Oldfield’s surviving daughter was about the same age as Jayne, and a pupil at Wakefield Girls’ High School, hoping to go on to university to study dentistry. His heart went out to Wilf MacDonald, and soon after her murder he made a private visit to the family to pledge he would not rest until the man who killed Jayne was caught. In October 1979, Wilf MacDonald too was dead, aged sixty. He was buried in a grave next to his beloved daughter. His family emphatically believed he never recovered from Jayne’s murder and died of a broken heart.

In the months following the death of Jayne MacDonald, Oldfield’s nightmare scenario, that the killer would go on attacking women again and again, came true. Two weeks after he struck down Jayne, Mrs Maureen Long became his latest victim. She survived the attack but at a terrible cost. Twenty-five years later, in her sixties, she still suffers as a result of the head injuries she received. In conversation she is very nervous, clasping her hands to stop them shaking. She cannot watch anything on television that involves violence. She has bouts of depression and anger.

In July 1977, Maureen was forty-two, the mother of several children and separated from her husband. She hadn’t had an easy life by any means. At various times she had been in trouble with the police. She enjoyed the company of men but was certainly no prostitute. She lived with another man in Farsley on the borders of Leeds and Bradford. According to a police report, although she and her husband were separated, they continued to have a friendly relationship and she still held a good measure of affection for him. On Saturday night, 9 July, they met up in a Bradford pub and she drank four pints of lager in his company. When the pub was closing, around 11.10 p.m., she headed alone in her long black dress for the Mecca Ballroom in Manningham Lane. She was a woman who loved dressing up in her finest and going out for the evening, especially to a night out dancing. Maureen was a regular at the Mecca and well known to many of the staff. The music played, she danced with several men and continued drinking. Her last clear memory was of going to the cloakroom at about 2 a.m. on the Sunday morning. Outside a ‘hot dog’ salesman preparing to close up his pitch for the night saw her leave the Mecca heading for the city centre.

Her recall of subsequent events is hazy. Police believe that, infused with alcohol and in a befuddled state, she may have been going to see her husband, who lived in Reynell Street. Later, at around 3.15 a.m., a security guard, Frank Whitaker, who worked at the Tanks & Drums Ltd factory abutting on Bowling Back Lane, heard his dog bark. He went to the main entrance and looked up the lane. An engine revved up and he saw a car without lights initially drive off at high speed out of Mount Street. He was certain it was a white Ford Cortina Mark II with a black roof. He thought there might have been something heavy in the boot.

Next morning, at around 8.30, the residents of a gypsy caravan site off Bowling Back Lane heard shouts for help coming from near by. Police were called and on a patch of rubbish-strewn open land they found Maureen Long in a deeply distressed condition.

‘All I remember was trying to pick myself up,’ she said. ‘I kept falling and then I wondered what was wrong with me, and I kept falling back and as I were trying to pull myself up, falling back again. Then I was screaming and I heard this dog barking, and someone say: “Oh, you’re all right,” and that’s all I remember. When you get hit over the back of the head you can’t remember things. If I hadn’t had beer that night I’d have died of hypothermia.’

The person who attacked her obviously left her for dead. Her clothing was displaced. Her bra had been pulled down to her waist, her tights and pants pulled to her knees. Suffering very severe head injuries, she was rushed by ambulance to Bradford Royal Infirmary, where doctors saved her life. There was a large depressed fracture of the skull, and five stab wounds to the front and side of her trunk and left shoulder. She also had three fractured ribs. Her head injuries were so severe that she required specialist neurosurgery at the Leeds General Infirmary. Professor Gee examined Maureen in hospital at Bradford a few hours after she was admitted. Accompanied by Oldfield and Holland, he stood beside her bed in a cubicle in the casualty department. Her head had been partially shaved by the neurosurgical senior registrar, revealing the severe lacerations to her skull. A police surgeon took various swabs from intimate areas, searching for potential forensic evidence. One of the stab wounds had penetrated her liver, though she had not suffered from gross bleeding. Gee thought her lucky to be alive.

She spent nine weeks in hospital before being discharged but continued as an out-patient for many years because of fits as a result of her head injuries. Maureen couldn’t provide the police with much help. She had woken up in the intensive care ward of the local hospital. That Maureen’s memory was poor did not surprise Holland. He had recently worked on a stabbing case in Bradford where a (non-Ripper) victim’s memory was impaired because of loss of blood and consequently loss of oxygen to the brain. ‘They got her brain functioning again perfectly, she hadn’t brain damage, but everything that was stored on her “disk”, if you like, to use a computer analogy, prior to the stabbing had gone forever.’

Holland’s belief that extensive head injuries made a surviving victim’s memory unreliable was understandable though tragically mistaken. Yet he eagerly grasped at one clue provided by Maureen Long. She described the man who gave her a lift as being a fair-haired white male, aged about thirty-five, thickset, over six feet tall, and having what could have been a white car …

The Ripper squad had already targeted taxi drivers in Leeds and Bradford as potential prime suspects. Many prostitutes, including Tina Atkinson, used taxis. More than 600 cab drivers were interviewed. A taxi driver called Terry Hawkshaw, whose physical appearance was similar to the description provided by Long, was top of their list. He lived with his sixty-seven-year-old mother in an old terraced house at Drighlington, between Leeds and Bradford. He was thirty-six, six feet tall, weighed fifteen or sixteen stone and had rather long fair hair brushed back, a fresh complexion and a round, almost babyish face – a bit saggy and flabby, as was his whole build. He dressed casually, but not scruffily – a typical taxi driver who did his own repairs. He also drove a white car.

Hawkshaw was one of fifteen men at that stage regarded as strong suspects, whose alibis were to be thoroughly checked for the night Jayne MacDonald was killed. Some were flagged to be kept under observation and taken in for questioning the moment another Ripper incident occurred. Hawkshaw, now dead, had been seen in his taxi near the Mecca Ballroom on the crucial night. He came under close scrutiny because he was a taxi driver who drove a white Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof and made a living ferrying prostitutes and their clients. ‘He allowed them to have it off in the back of his taxi,’ Holland revealed. Oldfield suspected Hawkshaw got sexual thrills out of watching the prostitutes at work on the back seat. A search of his accounts revealed taxi receipts proving that he had the opportunity to have carried out several of the Ripper attacks – he was in close proximity to the red-light area at the material times.

There was not enough evidence to hold him in a police cell, so Oldfield arranged for him to help the police with their inquiries without arresting him. He was virtually kidnapped and held incommunicado. Oldfield took him in as a prime suspect despite the fact that legally the police were not allowed to hold him at a police station. So he was kept for over thirty-six hours at the Detective Training School at Bishopgarth in Wakefield, which has a thirteen-storey accommodation block just across the road from the force headquarters. No student courses were being held and the flats on the top floor were empty.

This was not the first time this had happened. Suspects in other serious cases had previously been questioned at the Detective Training School when there was a danger of leaks to the media. Oldfield was anxious also that other police officers were kept in the dark about the fact that they were questioning a ‘prisoner’ who was not a prisoner. It was a high-risk strategy and could have landed some of West Yorkshire’s most senior detectives in hot water had it backfired. Hawkshaw’s civil rights were clearly denied in the belief they had a strong suspect for five murders. Nowadays, he could probably have sued for wrongful imprisonment; the officers involved would have been disciplined, the Police Complaints’ Authority involved, questions asked in Parliament, with the media becoming self-righteous and the civil rights lobby having a field day. Today, without question, someone’s head would have rolled, probably several. That it was done at all was a measure of the sheer desperation the Ripper’s reign of terror had caused among the senior detectives. The cost of the inquiry so far was approaching £1 million.

‘He was not arrested, and I’m playing with words here,’ Holland admitted. ‘There was a detective who slept at his door to make sure he went nowhere, but he was not arrested. It was a long way down, thirteen storeys, if he’d gone out of the window. We took him there because there wasn’t enough evidence for putting him in one of the cells. We found a way of holding him, without “holding him”. In the euphemism of the day, he was “assisting police with inquiries”. He knew where he was going. I would have defended it to his lawyer by saying he was just being interviewed. The legal test then was that if he had chosen to go, if he had said, “I’m leaving”, would you have stopped him? I would have said, “No.” He agreed to come, so he couldn’t have made a complaint that we had kidnapped him. We did not give him the impression he was under arrest. We didn’t read any caution, but the law was different then. You only had to caution when you had some real evidence, but we felt we had strong grounds for suspicion. We had all day on him verifying his story, verifying what he was doing, forensically checking his car. He really fitted the bill as described by Long, and had the car described by the night watchman, so we hadn’t dreamed his name up. He had also visited the pubs and clubs frequented by Richardson and Jackson. He also had two hammers which were checked – so circumstantially he was a strong candidate. Forensic later gave us a negative report [on the hammers].

‘He didn’t get rough treatment. We’d been going all day and well into the night. This is typical George. Hawkshaw was quite open. He was talking to us and he was saying, “Yes, I do run prostitutes. I get paid, they pay a bit more than the standard fare if they use my taxi. I might help prostitutes, but I am not a murderer.” That was his line and he was quite frank and he was softly spoken. He might have had a kinky streak and I think he was a soft touch for the prostitutes. But he made a bit more money.’

Information provided by Hawkshaw was checked with the files. Oldfield, convinced that he’d got his man, cross-questioned him for hours on end. For Hawkshaw, the whole experience was terrifying: ‘It was a nightmare,’ he said. ‘When George Oldfield sits behind his desk and tells you he thinks you are the Ripper, blimey, it turns your stomach over. They told me: “Come and sit here. Terence, this fellow wants catching. He is not bad, it’s just his mind.” The police nearly convinced me I was out of my head. They said someone with a split personality could be like the killer. He could be normal in the day and all of a sudden his mind goes click and he kills someone.’

After a considerable time – by now it was 3.45 in the morning – Oldfield decided: ‘It’s crunch time.’ Holland was unsure whether Hawkshaw was out of the frame. Looking at his watch, Oldfield decided to defer a decision which wasn’t going his way. He thought they should snatch some sleep in the empty training school study/bedrooms. ‘We will start again at nine o’clock,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, we’ll have an extra half-hour, we’ll start at 9.30!’ He had laid on breakfast and an early call.

‘Now that was the sort of boss he was,’ said Holland. ‘He thought he’d given us the earth because he’d given us an extra half-hour and paid for our breakfast. He hadn’t paid himself, he’d authorized the force to pay for our breakfast. So we got a free cooked meal and an extra half-hour in fucking bed! We had worked all day until a quarter to four in the morning.’

After thorough searches of his taxi and his mother’s home, in the end Hawkshaw was allowed to return home: ‘We had no evidence, forensic had turned up absolutely nothing; because it wasn’t him, they’d done their job. Forensic can be a two-edged sword to the investigator, but it’s a good thing from the point of view of the innocent person. It revealed absolutely nothing to connect him [with the attacks] and we would have expected something. The hammers he had were not of the same dimension and weight we were looking for. We needed time to have those things examined. We had him for the best part of forty-eight hours when the point came when we had to say: “Thank you, Mr Hawkshaw,” and let him go. Then we fixed up a team of detectives to shadow him discreetly night and day. That was done chiefly with crime squad cars supplemented by murder squad detectives. There were twelve men a day on this. Eventually he realized he was being followed. We checked with his books and records of taxi runs and he was in the right area to have the opportunity to have committed eight of the attacks.

‘I don’t think we did anything illegal. In order to do our job, we were deliberately sailing as near to the wind as we could. We were just on the side of legality. We planned to interrogate him and keep him away [from any potential leak of information]. You’ve got to appreciate, it would have been all over the media if we had a suspect in for the Ripper.’ The surveillance on Hawkshaw lasted for some considerable time until he was completely exonerated and alibied for one of the Ripper murders.

John Domaille decided he could not afford to wait for the Ripper to strike again in order to move the inquiry forward. He decided as a new tactic to enlist the help of the latest victim herself. So, several months after the attack, Maureen Long cooperated with the Ripper Squad in mounting an undercover operation to see if she could recognize the Ripper and help them arrest him. For three weeks running she went out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in Bradford, accompanied by a woman detective sergeant, Megan Winterburn. To the uninitiated they were two women out on the town together, and Winterburn, then in her thirties, found Maureen affable and pleasant. ‘She didn’t deserve what happened to her,’ she said. ‘She was very fortunate to have survived the injuries she had. Maureen made no bones about saying she was a Ripper victim and liked to show off her scars.’

To prepare for this undercover assignment in the pubs and nightclubs of Bradford, Megan Winterburn had ceased washing her hair, letting it go lank. She found a seedy outfit, including a rather old Afghan coat. ‘Mr Domaille said that if I dressed up as I normally do to go out, I’d stand out like a sore thumb,’ she said. ‘I had the most smelly Afghan coat, a raw suede coat with this horrible fur round the collar and embroidered sections on the front, and fur round the bottom. I went a little bit over the top with the make-up and tried to blend in with the rest of the clientele.’

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.’