Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

Leeds was a key part of England’s central industrial belt, whose origins, wealth and history had been essentially determined by two pieces of natural good fortune. First was the topography of the landscape across Yorkshire from the Pennines going eastwards – rough moorland and fells capable of little but sustaining sheep farming. It had done this for centuries. In addition there was the availability of vast quantities of water. Via becks and streams flowing off the fells and moors, water from the heavens poured into an abundance of river systems passing through the West Riding in its search for the sea. The rivers not only provided power for the wool and textile mills; their pure soft water also cleaned the wool. Later canals were built east and west of Leeds and waterways made navigable, allowing the wool, its finished products and other manufactures to be transported to both coasts. As the engines of the industrial revolution turned faster, so the population of Yorkshire’s towns and cities multiplied. It doubled and doubled again.

By 1840 Leeds was an industrial and commercial centre with a population of 150,000 and still expanding. Fifty years on and the official census of 1891 recorded Leeds’ population as 395,000. Many were immigrants or their descendants. They had come flooding in initially in the early 1800s from the rural areas of England, but also from deprived parts of Scotland and then Ireland, following the potato famine. Later in the 1880s they were joined by Jews escaping the pogroms in Poland and the province of Knovo in Russia. The only word in English many Jewish immigrants knew was ‘Leeds’. In an effort to escape compulsory military conscription or religious persecution, they had headed for the place which for them signified a modern term for El Dorado.

Dominating the city centre was the magnificent edifice of the town hall, built to demonstrate the achievements of a city bursting with pride at its commercial and industrial dynamism. But where the urban poor were concerned, Leeds, like many other overcrowded British cities, had little to celebrate. In 1858 a sizeable number of the town’s then 15,000 Irish immigrants, who lived in some of the worst housing, were said to have been among the cheering crowds of more than 100,000 who waved flags and shouted greetings to Queen Victoria as she arrived to perform the opening ceremony for the new town hall. The streets were lined with palm trees and triumphal arches and some 18,000 people sang the National Anthem. Looking down on the scene, the town hall’s massive clock tower, rising 225 feet above the new building, was the finishing touch, symbolizing Leeds at its grandest. Yet unseen by the sovereign were the depressing conditions in which many of her subjects existed.

Leeds truly was a perfect example of what Disraeli termed the ‘Two Nations’. It was a town with a physical divide. While great swathes were dirty, soot-ridden, cramped and crowded, other areas, in the Northern Heights, provided cleaner air and fashionable housing for the middle classes. The wealthy escaped the dirt and soot while the tens of thousands of the urban poor who provided the raw manpower for the factories and workshops were herded into overcrowded, insanitary dwellings. Drinking houses and brothels abounded. There were thirteen brothels within a hundred yards of where one unsuspecting churchman had his rooms. He noted that, ‘The proceedings of these miserable creatures who tenanted them were so openly disgusting that I was obliged to call in the rule of law to abate the nuisance.’ Forty-six beerhouses were closed down by police on the grounds that they were frequented by thieves, prostitutes and ‘persons of bad character’. Prostitutes were easily distinguished from factory girls in beerhouses by their tawdry finery and the bareness of their necks, though the costume and headdresses of the factory girls were not dissimilar. In many establishments there was a convenience upstairs for vice. Lord Shaftesbury described parts of Leeds as ‘a modern equivalent of Sodom’.

In accordance with the wishes of the town’s middle classes, prostitution in Leeds in the 1850s was controlled by the police rather than banned. They classified and kept a register of the proprietors and inmates of the town’s eighty-five brothels and lodging houses. This ‘has tended materially to check disorder and to aid the police in detecting crime and bring offenders to justice’, said the chief constable at the time. ‘Any attempt at the removal of these places would answer no good, for the sons and daughters of vice would find a resting place elsewhere and most like would get into respectable neighbourhoods where their proximity would be deeply deplored.’

Had Queen Victoria taken a full guided tour, she would have gone to the rear of the new town hall, which was used as court and bridewell. Below ground she would have entered a different world, one of thievery, violence and drunkenness. Known as the Central Charge Office, the bridewell held prisoners arrested within the town who awaited an appearance in court. The original cells, situated under the front steps, each contained a wooden bench and shackle rings for wrist and ankle; stone-flagged floors, whitewashed walls and gas lighting. A cell held up to four prisoners, each entitled to half a loaf of bread, a pint of ale and sufficient straw for bedding. Right through to the late 1970s, the central bridewell remained a forbidding place. Hoban even gave his young sons a guided tour of the ‘dungeons’. The eighteen cells had no natural light, ventilation or exercise facilities. Conditions in the bridewell, which failed to clear legal certification, had long been criticized, and just at the point of Hoban’s move to Wakefield the Home Office cut an improvement programme to save money.

Leeds had formed its own police force in 1836, paid for out of local rates and overseen by a watch committee made up of local burgers. Like many other newly formed police forces, they were also responsible for fire-fighting. Money for equipment, clothing and everything else came from local funding. The wealthy and local taxes paid for peace and law and order. The preservation of peace and good order were the central priorities laid down by the members of the watch committees. Neighbouring Bradford, slower off the mark in setting up its own police force, did so in 1848. Its headquarters were in a building which housed the city’s fire engines. Police out-stations in both cities were linked to headquarters by morse-code telegraph until the 1890s, when they were replaced by telephones and police call boxes.

Before 1968 the West Riding of Yorkshire was served by nine separate forces. In addition to Leeds and Bradford, the city of Wakefield and the boroughs of Dewsbury, Halifax, Huddersfield, Barnsley and Doncaster each had their own local force. Most were small organizations. The surrounding local government county area had a force based at Wakefield called the West Riding Constabulary. In 1956 it had 354 men in its ranks. Covering a vast geographical area, it was way ahead of other forces in recognizing the importance of keeping intelligence on criminals and was one of the first in the country to establish a criminal intelligence bulletin, the West Riding Police Reports. This confidential publication, printed on the West Riding’s own printing press at the force headquarters, circulated details of crimes and wanted villains between forces.

A 1920 Report by a Parliamentary Committee praised the West Riding’s lead in drawing up a list of classes of criminals by their modus operandi. The force’s chief constable stressed the importance of creating a central clearing house of intelligence information: ‘Its full advantage cannot be developed unless the reports are complete and in the proper form.’ The system was mostly used in the North of England, and not by all forces even then. The First World War interrupted a plan to introduce a similar scheme in the Midlands and the South of England. The Parliamentary Committee was enthusiastic about the West Riding clearing house and believed it to be a big advance not only in detecting crime but also in the systematization of the detective method. ‘The greatest advantage should be taken of it,’ they said, and recommended the Home Office and Scottish Office to develop it further and extend it across the whole of Britain.

Twenty-first century computers can store limitless amounts of information and be programmed to draw links between seemingly unconnected facts in an intelligent way. Police forces around the world, like every other institution and business, are now utterly dependent on them. But in Hoban’s time there were no computers in which local intelligence could be stored. He and his detectives in a murder incident room relied on a card index system, with its complex classifications.

The Parliamentary Committee investigating the police service in 1919–20 was given a simple example where police officers knew how a particular criminal worked, but had no way of passing on the information. There was a burglar in Liverpool who regularly defecated in a corner in every house he broke into. This was known to detectives in the city but not outside Liverpool. How could they inform other forces and how could they communicate the information? ‘There is any amount of knowledge which is not available beyond the actual man who possesses it, or the actual police force which records it,’ a witness told the committee. ‘It is difficult to classify that sort of thing. Every police officer had this knowledge fifteen or sixteen years ago, and we tried to card it in Liverpool but we were up against another difficulty. We had many of these cards describing the methods followed by the particular criminal described on the card, but we had no system by which we could index them. So except for the personal memory of the man who prepared the cards, and he had a very good memory, the thing was valueless and we would not get out an index.’

The person who in 1909 solved this problem for Britain’s police was the then chief constable of the West Riding, Major-General L. W. Atcherley. He got the cooperation of all neighbouring county and borough forces and established a clearing house for information at his Wakefield HQ. In this way intelligence reports about the routes used by travelling thieves and swindlers were analysed. It was well known that thieves travelled to other towns to commit crimes and had long been doing so. In April 1853 three pickpockets from Leeds were arrested among a large crowd come to witness an execution at York Castle, along with numerous other petty thieves who had travelled from as far afield as Manchester and Yarmouth.

By a careful comparison of a modus operandi and a personal description of the criminal, a long list of undetected crimes committed by the same man in different police authorities could be cleared up. Different ways of committing crimes like larceny were broken down and filed separately. A handbook let an individual officer understand and use the system with little delay. He was taught the clues to look for. ‘Four years’ experience in the West Riding with its twenty-two divisions has proved the utility of this system and although the number of cases of reported crime in the county police area has increased by a third, the percentage of undetected crime is very low, and much less in proportion to what it used to be in former years,’ a report revealed immediately prior to the First World War.

The ‘peculiarity of method’, according to the 1920 Parliamentary Report, gave the policemen their clues to solving crime. ‘The leading feature of the Wakefield system which is proving its value against the modern travelling thief and swindler, is the investigation of crime through its methods. In the past, knowledge of this sort has remained far too much in the possession of this or that policeman or this or that police force … the clearing house is the machinery for the detection of crime.’ This prescient observation came to have real force more than sixty years later during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. The keeping of records, and how and where they were administered, was a key feature unrecognized during the prolonged murder hunt, and it had the most tragic results.

Of all the great institutions in Britain, the police service has been among the slowest to bring about radical reform. The prime reason has been the jealously guarded principle that police forces should be subject to control by local communities through watch committees. The argument raged for more than a hundred years. Bradford and Leeds successfully stayed out of the great amalgamation in 1968, only to be absorbed into the West Yorkshire force six years later. Historically, British police forces have been fiercely independent, even leading to arguments over whether the ‘office of constable’ was one subject to local or central control under the British constitution. Towns and boroughs fought to achieve the right to choose their own chief constable rather than have one imposed on them by government. Legislation to bring about reform was seen as interfering with their independent control over the organization and expenditure of the police force in their area.

When amalgamations were proposed, they often met with fierce resistance – not least in Yorkshire. The city of York mounted vigorous opposition to legislation which would have amalgamated forces in the 1850s, provided money from the Treasury for efficient forces, and set up a system of inspections. York also opposed Palmerston’s Police Bill, fearing ‘the police would become a standing army entrusted with powers unheard of in the darkest ages of tyranny’. The York Herald proclaimed: ‘To surrender up the control of the police to the executive government would be an act of folly which every lover of constitutional liberty ought to do all in his power to prevent.’ County magistrates and local watch committees would become mere puppets: ‘Local control of policing which allowed local communities to decide which form of policing best suited them would disappear.’

In 1920 Parliament heard arguments pleading for police forces to be banded together if they were to become more efficient. Forty-eight police forces had less than twenty-five men in their ranks and forty forces had less than fifty officers. The boroughs of Louth and Tiverton consisted of a chief constable, two sergeants and eight constables; total strength: eleven men. Bigger forces meant better administration, training and the chance for individual officers to gain wider experience.

Amalgamations were still high on the agenda when the Royal Commission on the Police reported in 1962. So was the question of the educational standards of men being recruited into the police service. The 1920 Parliamentary Committee had found the system lacking in this respect; so did the Report of the Royal Commission. ‘We have come across no recent instance of a university graduate entering the service, only about 1 per cent of recruits have two or more GCE A levels, a further 10 per cent have five subjects or more at O level and an additional 20 per cent have one to four O levels.’ The report strongly criticized the police service for failing to recruit anything like its proper share of able, well-educated young men. The commissioners’ principal concern was being able to attract sufficient recruits who would make good chief constables fifteen or twenty years hence. This without question remained a problem for the British police force for generations. ‘They preferred to educate the recruited rather than recruit the educated,’ said one senior detective, closely involved in the Yorkshire Ripper case, who had himself given up a university place to get married and join the police force.

Absence of a grammar school or university education had not proved a barrier to men like Hoban, who had left school aged fourteen with no qualifications, joined the Leeds City Police aged twenty-one, and in 1960 become the force’s youngest detective inspector. He achieved promotion on grounds of merit and consistent hard work. The police force in Leeds which Dennis Hoban joined in 1947 after wartime service in the Royal Navy aboard motor torpedo boats had hardly changed in technological terms since Edwardian times. They still carried whistles to draw attention. It was only in 1930 that the city police got its own motor patrol section and even then it consisted of one motor car, one three-wheeled vehicle, two motorcycle combinations and a solo motorcycle. For years bicycles provided the extra mobility for the forces of law and order in their everyday fight against crime.

Leeds got its first police boxes containing a telephone in 1931, and these were the mainstay of communication with officers on the beat until the 1950s, when they were replaced by telephones in pillars. Communication between police stations and headquarters was by wireless. In 1955, by which time Hoban was a fully fledged plain-clothes detective, thirty-three police cars in the city were fitted with radios, but it was to be another ten years before individual personal radio sets were issued to officers. In the mid-1950s, Leeds had had plain-clothes detectives for a hundred years, but specialization within the town’s CID did not emerge until the 1960s, with the setting up of crime squads, a drug squad in 1967 and a stolen vehicles squad in 1970. Hoban, in the early 1960s, took part in an experimental project involving undercover detectives working over a wide area and drawn from several major cities, towns and county forces. They targeted major criminals, using covert surveillance to gather intelligence, often over weeks and months at a time. It was the forerunner of the Regional Crime Squads.

Many smaller towns had their own chief constables – but less than 300 officers. Unlike Hoban’s family, plenty of police officers were tied tenants, living in police houses, including some of the senior officers. There were considerable restrictions in terms of promotion. Some smaller towns, like Dewsbury and Wakefield, had to advertise externally to obtain suitably qualified senior officers above the rank of inspector. The efficiency of the police was a key phrase during the post Second World War period, when important questions about the future were being discussed. Efficiency wasn’t simply a value-for-money term, it also called in question the ability of the police to tackle modern problems, and especially modern criminals, who were far more mobile, being prepared to live in one area of the country and commit crime in another. By the time Parliament voted for large-scale amalgamations in the early 1960s, they were long overdue. Rising crime rates were a national problem.

Once amalgamations had taken place, the actual moulding of large new forces from smaller ones carried sizeable headaches in terms of management. Some towns had given their constables special rights. For example, in Huddersfield Borough a constable could not be moved from his home without his consent. Many a police officer, either buying his own home or firmly settled with a young family in a police house, refused to be uprooted and sent to the other side of the county. West Riding officers were used to being moved, but those in the towns and cities were familiar with their back yard and had got used to it. There were other privileges. Huddersfield being a textile town, officers had uniforms made of specially woven cloth, dyed and finished in police indigo blue – top quality worsted – a reflection of the predominance of wool merchants on the local watch committee. Pride dictated that their officers be dressed in the best cloth – and the uniforms were tailor made. ‘Then we went into the West Riding,’ said one who went on to become a senior detective, ‘and it was like the army, they got the nearest bloody size. There were only two sizes – too big and too small.’

The Leeds City Force of Hoban and his colleagues, with a strength of 1,300 men, was already bigger than some of the newly amalgamated county forces like Cumbria, Wiltshire, Suffolk and Dorset. Plenty of policemen and politicians in Leeds and nearby Bradford wanted the two cities to combine into one large metropolitan force instead of being lumped together with the rest of West Yorkshire. The ever-expanding Leeds–Bradford conurbation is such that the two are for all practical purposes virtually joined together, separated only by a small tract of land; even the local regional airport is called Leeds–Bradford, though each city retains its separate identity.

Hoban’s move to the Wakefield HQ, and later to Bradford as No. 2 in the force Criminal Investigation Department, was greeted with some dismay by his close colleagues, who believed he should have got the top job. Privately they blamed inter-force politics. The chief constable was West Riding; his deputy came from Leeds. The retiring assistant chief constable (crime), Donald Craig, was a West Riding man. So was George Oldfield, who had been deputy ACC (crime) and was now being moved up a rank. When Oldfield was named it raised hackles, not least because he had upset a good number of Leeds detectives during the 1960s when he carried out an investigation into alleged police corruption in the city. To put it mildly, Oldfield had trampled over a lot of city officers to get to the truth. Hoban wasn’t involved, but it may not have been internal politics alone which affected his future career prospects.

Hoban was seen as an officer possibly destined for promotion. Indeed, he himself seriously considered applying for an ACC position. His energy and enormous operational experience as the deputy coordinator of the Regional Crime Squad, and subsequently as head of Leeds CID, had marked him out as the kind of senior man who might benefit personally from the amalgamation. West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police was now a force of 5,000 officers, making it one of the biggest in the country in terms of manpower. There was plenty of opportunity for good men to succeed. But Hoban was going to have to wait before being moved further up the promotion ladder. He needed greater management experience. Where paperwork – the bureaucracy of running a large team of officers – was concerned, his boredom threshold was very low. He frequently passed the buck to junior colleagues, sometimes dumping an in-tray of documentation on them with the words: ‘Sort that lot out – I’ll be back later.’

Brilliant detective he may have been; skilled at administration he wasn’t. Virtually his entire career had been at the sharp end of detective work: feeling collars, making arrests, locking up criminals, and in the process earning twenty-nine commendations from judges, magistrates and senior officers. For this he had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal (QPM) in 1974, a mark of great merit in the police service. ‘It’s for what you have done, rather than what you are going to do,’ said one of Hoban’s contemporaries.

Few of Hoban’s senior detective colleagues around the country at that time had received the QPM, and in 1975 another honour came his way – an award for gallantry, the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct. Alerted by a blackmailer’s phone call that a bomb had been planted in the Leeds city branch of Woolworths, Hoban went immediately to the scene. The blackmailer had demanded £50,000 for revealing the whereabouts of the explosive device in the packed store. Staff and shoppers were quickly evacuated and a suspicious holdall was discovered in the toilets, placed on top of the cistern. Inside were explosives and a timing device. A fire brigade hosepipe was placed inside the room and Hoban proceeded to stand on top of the toilet seat and reach with one hand into the bag and hold the device while detaching two wires with the other. Hoban thought there was about twenty minutes left before the device went off, and he knew the bomb disposal squad could not reach Leeds from Catterick in time. He disconnected the wires from the battery before the army arrived, so defusing the device.

It was a typical piece of reckless heroism, for which he was named Leeds’ first Citizen of the Year by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. But it gave Betty nightmares. She had been on at him to retire as soon as he completed his thirty years’ service. Betty grew resentful, which added to the constant stress she felt about the way Dennis had put his job first throughout the whole of their married life. He never took off the time due to him and frequently worked a fourteen-hour day or longer. She would often say: ‘Please don’t go in today’ – but some inner compulsion clearly made him put his job first. On the few occasions when they did get the chance to go out together, there would be a telephone call and Betty would be left high and dry. They could never plan a proper holiday. And when they did go as a family to Scarborough with their two sons, after three days away from the job, Dennis needed to get on the phone. According to his son, Richard, many years later: ‘It was as if he was suffering withdrawal symptoms.’ ‘If we got to Christmas Day and we got as far as Christmas dinner, he would have to go to the office for a couple of hours.’