Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

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.

While his close-knit family endured his obsession with work, all his working life Hoban coped with two ailments, diabetes and asthma. The regime of daily insulin injections was bothersome. Lazy about using his hypodermic syringe, he had no routine for taking insulin. Consequently there were plenty of times when he felt ‘squiggly’, the word he used for being hypoglycaemic. Then he knew he had to eat something sweet, usually a few cakes from the kitchen pantry. He would administer the insulin in a very haphazard way, never at specific times. Then it would be jab – straight into his thigh. ‘He didn’t look after himself,’ his son Richard reflected. ‘He didn’t live in a world where he could look after himself. He never ate well because he was at his best when he was in pubs and clubs and smoky dives getting information from his snouts.’

The family evening meal was often a snatched affair. He would arrive home, wash, shave, eat, watch the Yorkshire TV soap opera Emmerdale Farm, and then be off back to work. He rarely smoked. It would have exacerbated his asthma, already made worse in his early years by the fact that Leeds was one of the most polluted places in the North of England. Soot and smoke from the mills and factories were blown over the town by the prevailing south-westerly winds. For several generations those who could afford it had moved to the cleaner areas of Leeds in the Northern Heights, and ultimately Hoban and Betty joined them.

They had only just moved round the corner to a new and slightly bigger semi-detached house in 1976 when, a few weeks after the inquest verdicts on Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson, they learned he was on the move professionally. As part of a wider reshuffle among the senior management, he was being transferred to the West Yorkshire force headquarters at Wakefield, fifteen miles away. He was to be deputy to the new CID chief of the amalgamated force. A West Riding man, George Oldfield, was being promoted to assistant chief constable (crime). Within a few months Hoban had moved offices to the brand-new divisional police headquarters in Bradford, still as Oldfield’s deputy, but this time in charge of the CID for the entire Western area of the force.

Two and a half years after the amalgamation between West Yorkshire Police and the Leeds and Bradford city forces, the chief constable, Ronald Gregory, had decided to make crucial changes among the senior management. Moving senior personnel around would provide a better balance between the city and county forces. West Riding men transferred into the Leeds and Bradford divisions – some of the senior city boys had to bite the bullet and move to towns like Pontefract, Huddersfield and Halifax. A new culture was being created and these moves were not always popular. Enmities and petty rivalries abounded. Bradford police viewed Leeds detectives as ‘flash bastards’. ‘More gold than a Leeds detective,’ was a popular saying among the Bradford CID, a reference to their Leeds colleagues’ penchant for wearing gold wrist identity bracelets and rings bearing a gold sovereign. Leeds and Bradford officers called their West Riding colleagues ‘Donkey Wallopers’ or ‘The Gurkhas’ – because they took no prisoners, a reference not to West Riding detectives ‘finishing off the enemy’, but a belief by the city men that the county boys hardly ever got to make an arrest.

These important structural changes in the way Yorkshire and the rest of the country was policed had been a long time coming. The amalgamations, creating one big West Yorkshire force covering half a million acres and a population of more than 2 million, had been delayed for more than half a century. Bringing about cost efficiencies and rational organization to law enforcement had been a drawn-out, tortuous process. For almost a hundred years very little had altered in the way the various police forces of Britain were controlled.

By this time the West Riding of Yorkshire no longer existed officially. At the stroke of a pen in 1974 a massive local government reorganization approved by Parliament did away with a nomenclature that had defined an entire region of Northern England for hundreds of years. The East, West and North Ridings of Yorkshire – titles originating from the Anglo-Saxon word thriding, meaning ‘a third’ – became mere counties, bits and pieces of their local geography seemingly thrown into the air by civil servants and politicians in London, only to land as new structures called Humberside, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.

Hoban’s home town of Leeds had managed to weather the storms of economic upheaval over the years better than most. In the immediate post-war years, it remained a giant among the great manufacturing towns. In 1952 it was at the centre of the world’s clothing industry. Montague Burton was the world’s largest multiple tailor, with 600 outlets. Burton’s was only one of several large clothing factories in Leeds, all of which subsequently closed. In the words of Denis Healey, a local MP: ‘It went on making three-piece suits long after people stopped wearing waistcoats, and failed to adapt to the growing taste for casual wear.’