Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

She was nineteen years old in 1972, working as a clerk-typist in a local firm. It was December, two days before New Year’s Eve. ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’ she went on. She was living on her own in a house in Westgate, at the bottom end of Wakefield. It was a ‘queer’ foggy night. She had been to ‘Dolly Grey’s’ for a drink, but left quite early, about 10.30 p.m., and begun walking down Westgate towards home. As she neared the train station she realized she was being followed. She looked back at the man, noticing his staring eyes, dark longish hair, and beard. She clearly remembers thinking he was up to no good.

With her heart thumping, she carried on walking, thinking carefully about which route to take when she got near home. She planned carefully in her mind which way to get to her house, because there was a beck running at the front of where she lived and she feared the man might throw her in. A few houses near by belonged to prison officers at Wakefield’s maximum security gaol, and she hoped against hope they might not have gone to bed.

Walking past a pub called The Swan with Two Necks, she toyed with the idea of going into one of the bars as people would still be on drinking-up time and she might know them and feel safe in their company. Then she had second thoughts, fearing they might wonder what on earth she was imagining. So she kept walking, still very anxious, and stuck to the middle of the pavement, trying to walk quickly past the ginnels – dark passageways that ran between some of the terraced houses.

She had just reached the row of houses where she lived when she was grabbed from behind. Immediately she screamed loudly and her attacker urgently put his hands over her mouth, telling her: ‘Shurrup, shurrup,’ a couple of times. She still remembered this vividly because his accent sounded local. As a Scot living in Yorkshire, she noticed immediately. She screamed out again and this time he hit her on the back of the head with his fist and pushed her into a low wall, where she received a graze to her face – her only real injury. One of the prison officers opened his bedroom window to see what was happening, and then swiftly came running downstairs to help, chasing after the attacker, but losing him.

The police came and the victim gave a statement. She was told to go to the local police station the following day, to help provide a photofit description. Next morning her sister accompanied her, but while she was there, she said, she felt as if she was the one under suspicion and thought the police did not take her seriously. She was very glad the prison officer could confirm her story. Before she went to the police station she had looked at a photograph of the pop singer ‘Cat’ Stevens – because the attacker looked so similar. He had been a man in his mid-twenties of medium build and about five feet ten inches tall, with long dark hair, dark eyebrows, a beard and moustache, and a similar tuft of beard between chin and mouth. Years later, when the Yorkshire Ripper was apprehended and photographs of Peter Sutcliffe appeared in the newspapers and on television, she said out loud to her family: ‘I’m sure that’s the man who attacked me …’ But after she made her initial complaint she never heard from the police again.

Almost two years later a twenty-eight-year-old student was attacked twenty-five miles away in Bradford. On 11 November 1974 Gloria Wood was approached as she walked across a school playing field some time between 7.30 and 8 p.m. A man offered to carry her bags and then attacked her about the head, causing severe injuries and a depressed fracture of the skull that left a crescent-shaped wound. The weapon was thought to be a claw hammer. According to the victim, the man had worn a dark suit and looked smartly dressed. She couldn’t provide a photofit, but described him as being in his early thirties, 5 feet 8 inches tall and of medium build. He had dark curly hair to the neck, a short curly beard to the hairline. She was unable to remember how he spoke.

The summer of 1975 was long and hot. The sun continued to blaze down all day from clear blue skies for weeks on end. Clothes dried quickly on washing lines, reservoirs emptied, drought warnings were issued, the harvest was safely gathered in and half the country had hay fever. On the edge of the Pennines in West Yorkshire, a mile from the village of Silsden and its early eighteenth-century parish church of St James, lived the Browne family. Upper Hayhills Farm stood nearly 700 feet above sea level. It was there that Mrs Nora Browne bred dogs. She and her husband, Anthony, had four daughters, including fourteen-year-old twins, Tracey and Mandy. Like most parents they laid down house rules and expected their children to abide by them.

One August evening, with only a week or so to go before they returned to school, the twins went visiting friends in the village. Since it was still the school holiday, they were told to be home by 10.30 on what was a balmy, clear and moonlit night. Tracey had hung on too long saying goodbye to her pals while her sister went ahead up Bradley Road, knowing their dad would ‘go mad’ if they were late. As it was a clear summer’s night in a remote rural area, their parents were not unduly concerned that Mandy arrived home first, minus her sister. The girls had walked up and down this country lane on their own dozens of times.

Tracey meanwhile was struggling, her young frame tottering uphill in platform-soled sandals. Her feet ached and as she sat down on a large stone beside the road to take off her sandals and rub them she noticed a stranger, in his late twenties or early thirties, also walking up the lane. He stopped briefly to look at her, standing only a few feet away as he drew level. Then he walked on. She wasn’t afraid and assumed the man was living near by. Her only worry was to get home to avoid her father getting angry with her. The man was clearly dawdling since Tracey soon caught him up again.

‘There’s nothing doing in Silsden, is there?’ he said.

‘Not really,’ she replied, walking beside him.

He then asked how far she had to go, and she answered casually: ‘About a mile.’ When he asked, she told him her name. He said his was ‘Tony Jennis’. Tracey had a friend called Tony Jennison with whom she had spent a lot of time during the holidays playing at a local park. She believed this must be a coincidence, but kept the thought to herself. He then asked if she had a boyfriend and she said she had and that he lived in the village.

They continued walking in silence for a while, so Tracey got a good look at the man, who kept blowing his nose, as if affected by the high pollen count. His knitted V-neck cardigan with two pockets at the front was worn over a light blue open-necked shirt. He had dark Afro-style crinkly hair and beard. He wore flared, dark brown trousers with slit pockets at the front, and brown suede shoes. Suddenly, in his quiet, high-pitched voice, he said: ‘My pal normally gives me a lift home but he’s in the nick for drink driving.’ That term ‘the nick’ stuck in her mind. The man seemed to be dropping back to tie his shoelace or blow his nose. He said he had a summer cold. Otherwise, he never took his hands out of his pockets. Tracey still had no reason to feel fear. Indeed, at times she stopped and waited for the man to catch her up. Finally they reached the gateway to the family farm and he hung back yet again. The pretty schoolgirl was about to turn towards the farmhouse. As well-brought-up kids do in the countryside, she intended to part on pleasant terms by thanking the stranger for his company. Instead she came under ferocious attack. Suddenly he rained down blows on her head and face. In his hand he held something heavy.

At that time a popular hero among young girls the world over was a handsome American tennis star who featured in the finals at Wimbledon. His name was Jimmy Connors and when he power-served to an opponent, he did something he became famous for. He let out an extraordinary grunt, ‘eeeu-uuuugggghhhhhh’, as he unleashed an excess of forceful energy through arm and shoulder and simultaneously exhaled air from his lungs. Tracey Browne remembered how, with each blow to her head, the man trying to kill her made a similar grunting noise.

‘Please don’t, please don’t,’ she cried as the first blow drove her to her knees beside the tarmacked road. Her immediate thought was that this was the notorious ‘Black Panther’ – an as yet unapprehended multiple killer being hunted by police for the kidnapping and murder of the heiress Leslie Whittle. She even shouted out the name, ‘Black Panther’, several times in the hope someone would hear her. To no avail. By now, lying at the roadside, she was in a dreadful state, blinded by both the shock of the attack and blood from her head filling her eyes.

Ultimately a car coming up the lane with its headlights on saved her life. The attacker put an arm under her legs, another round her waist. Scooping Tracey up, he tipped her like a sack of potatoes over a barbed-wire fence and into a field. Then he ran off. She heard his footsteps as he made good his escape. As she lay in the grassy field, she felt numbed by the force of the blows. Staggering around the field, she became disorientated, fearing the man might return and attack again. Covered in blood, she staggered towards a farm worker’s caravan, pleading for help. An elderly man took her in, then helped her to her parents’ farmhouse. She almost fell through the door, her mother gasping at the dreadful sight confronting her: ‘When she came through the door her jumper was squelching with blood.’ At first she thought someone had thrown a pot of paint over her daughter. But then her family saw a severe wound that appeared to leave a hole in the top of her head.

Tracey was rushed to Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds for emergency neurosurgery. She had a fractured skull. Doctors removed a sliver of bone from her brain. She remained in hospital for a week, and later recalled the moment the bandages were removed. Nurses gave her a mirror and told her to take her time. When she looked at herself she saw the truly shocking extent of the injuries to her face. Her eyes were blackened and she had extensive bruising. ‘I never expected it to be so bad,’ she said much later. She stayed off school for six weeks and wore a wig over her shaven head. For the next two years she had brain scans, and drugs to prevent seizures.

The victim had survived the assault and was able to give an excellent description of her attacker. It therefore seems extraordinary that Sutcliffe remained at large. The accuracy of Tracey Browne’s description and photofit was confirmed by another witness who provided police with details, and a photofit, of a dark-haired man with a beard and moustache seen in the neighbourhood. But while Tracey’s photofit description of her attacker appeared briefly in the local press, the one provided by the other witness was never shown publicly. In some ways, it was even more accurate. The man had been seen standing near a ‘white’ Ford car, and Sutcliffe was at that time apparently the owner of a lime green Ford Capri. While searching the area, police found a distinctive ‘hippy’-style bracelet with wooden beads, and a paper handkerchief, which the attacker was thought to have used to blow his nose on.

Taking charge of the case was Detective Superintendent Jim Hobson, who had spent almost all of his career in the Leeds City force as a detective, working frequently with Dennis Hoban from the days when they were constables in uniform. Indeed, he was godfather to Hoban’s son, Richard. At first it was suspected that Tracey’s head had been smashed with a large stick. Later, after a more thorough forensic analysis, a claw hammer was thought to have been used. Through the local press, Superintendent Hobson appealed for anyone who had been in Silsden between 10.15 and 11.15 on the night of the attack to come forward. He was fairly confident, because of the lateness of the hour, that the attacker was a local man. But one particular thing puzzled the police. The man had told Tracey he was living at ‘Holroyd House’. They wanted the help of the public in finding Holroyd House.

Since ‘Holroyd’ is a common enough West Yorkshire surname, dating back to the early fourteenth century, it could be expected that there are any number of places called Holroyd House. In fact, there were very few. Almost certainly the nearest was a 200-year-old house at Micklethwaite, on the outskirts of Bingley, the town which had been Sutcliffe’s home until he married and moved in with his parents-in-law at Clayton, near Bradford. Holroyd House stood adjacent to Holroyd Mill, built in 1812, which for generations had manufactured fustian, a coarse twilled cotton fabric with a nap, like velveteen. Jim Hobson’s early instincts were right: the attacker of Tracey Browne was probably a local man.

Two weeks after the attack, Tracey, wearing a wig and accompanied by a woman detective, made a tour of pubs and discos in the Silsden and Streeton area of Keighley, looking for the man who had tried to kill her. The search proved fruitless. (It appears that Sutcliffe immediately left with his new wife, Sonia, for a holiday visit to Prague with his parents-in-law to visit relatives, stopping off in Rome on the way.)

In recent weeks there had in fact been two other assaults on West Yorkshire women who suffered severe injuries which left crescent-shaped wounds to their skulls, but neither of these was linked with Tracey Browne’s attempted murder. The first was on a thirty-seven-year-old woman, Anna Rogulskyj, in an alleyway in Keighley. Five weeks previously she had been attacked from behind with a hammer and left on the ground suffering head injuries and a number of superficial slash wounds across her body. And on Friday, 15 August 1975, an office cleaner, living at Boothtown, Halifax, received two depressed fractures of the skull, one on the midline at the top of the head, the second at the back. Mrs Olive Smelt, aged forty-five, said she had before the assault been talking to a man aged about thirty, slightly built, dark haired and with a beard or some hair growth on his face. She did not think there was anything unusual about his accent, which again indicated that he was probably a ‘local’ man. One other feature of the attack became clearly visible when Mrs Smelt was examined in hospital. There were two abrasions on her back. One, twelve inches long, ran upwards from the small of her back; the other, four inches long, ran backwards on the right side.

Dr Michael Green, a Home Office pathologist based at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds who examined both women’s injuries, came to a startling conclusion: ‘It might be interesting to look again at the case of Mrs Rogulskyj, who was assaulted on 5 July, and compare the photograph of a wound on the abdomen with a wound on the back of Mrs Smelt,’ he wrote in his report to the police. Unfortunately, it would take two years for the attacks on Rogulskyj and Smelt to be linked to the murder series by the Ripper Squad.

Yet further assaults, by virtue of their modus operandi very similar to those already described, were also excluded from any series. An eighteen-year-old shop assistant was followed down the side of a field at 6.30 p.m. at Queensbury, Bradford, early in 1976. Her assailant then lunged at her from the rear, causing serious head injuries. He was twenty-five to thirty years old, of slim build, between five feet nine or ten inches tall, and with dark hair and moustache, dressed in dark jeans and a green jacket. Seven and a half months later, in August 1976 at Lister Hills in Bradford, a twenty-nine-year-old housewife was set upon during the early hours. Unable to provide any description of the person who assaulted her, she had stab-like wounds to her abdomen and injuries to her head.

In neither of these assaults was a photofit available. But a savage attack on an intellectually challenged West Indian woman in Leeds in the early summer of 1976 produced a description and photofit that perfectly matched the one provided in the Tracey Browne case at Keighley ten months previously. Yet these attempted murders were never linked, primarily because detectives in the Leeds case believed the victim misled them.

Marcella Claxton was a twenty-year-old native of the Caribbean island of St Kitts, who had come to Britain with her mother at the age of ten. She had had a hard upbringing at the hands of her father, and bore the physical and emotional scars to prove it. Educationally she was officially graded as subnormal, with an IQ of 50. However, this doesn’t square with the opinions of those who know her well and say it gives a misleading impression. While Marcella had always had a problem expressing herself, she eventually became a good mother to her children.

In 1976 she was unemployed and living in Chapeltown, the run-down quarter of Leeds that had once been a favourite residence of the city’s prosperous, and not so wealthy, Jewish community. They lived in large late-Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, originally the homes of respectable working and middle classes, many of which were later subdivided into flats. It became the second largest Jewish community outside London. Some 12,000 of the city’s 20,000 Jewish population lived in Chapeltown until the 1930s, when the majority began moving out to the newer, more desirable suburbs of Moortown, Roundhay and Alwoodley, leaving behind them, as J. B. Priestley put it in the 1950s, ‘traces of that restless glitter which is the gift of the Jew’. In their wake came other immigrants – Latvians and a sizeable community of Poles who opted to stay in Britain after the war, who established their own Polish Catholic Church in Chapeltown, and then West Indians and Asians. By the 1970s, however, the area was termed by the media ‘a Mecca of Vice’ or ‘a red light suburb’. The sizeable influx of immigrants from the Caribbean led the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1973 to describe it as ‘The Colony Within’. Chapeltown was ‘the melting pot for immigrants from many lands, for many years’.

Marcella was a single mother of two children (in foster care) and expecting a third. She was three months’ pregnant. She was poor, and the police believed, wrongly, that she was a prostitute. Marcella insists she was not a prostitute. On a Saturday evening in early May 1976 she went out late at night to drink in a West Indian club. At around five in the morning she left her friends, rather the worse for wear. As she walked back home along Spencer Place she saw a white-coloured car cruising the area. Eventually the driver stopped to ask if she was ‘doing business’. She says she said ‘No’, but the driver got out, took her by the hand, led her to his car and said he was going to take her to Roundhay Park for sex. At the park the driver asked her to take off her clothes. He gave her five pounds. She told him she wanted to urinate and went to hide among the bushes until, believing the man had gone, she returned ten minutes later to retrieve her shoes. At this point she received a number of vicious blows on the head. Knocked to the ground, she pretended to be unconscious. The attack stopped and the man drove off. Marcella claimed in a later interview that he had masturbated in front of her before walking back to his car. He told her: ‘Don’t phone the police.’

With her head bleeding profusely, she took off her knickers and held them up to stem the flow. Realizing she was in bad shape, she began half-crawling and half-walking towards the edge of the park. She managed to reach a telephone box beside the road one hundred yards away and made a 999 call. The ambulance took ages to arrive. Slumped in a huddled position, waiting anxiously in the telephone box, she saw through the glass window the driver of the white car touring around as if looking for her. Finally he stopped some way off and walked across to the place where he had launched his attack. Unable to find Marcella, he drove off. ‘He come back to see if I were dead,’ she said years later. ‘He didn’t see me, so he kept on driving.’

At Leeds General Infirmary doctors discovered eight severe lacerations to her scalp, each about an inch long, needing a total of fifty-two stitches. Discharged after six days, it was then Marcella’s second nightmare began. She feared the man would come back for her because she could identify him. She had provided police with a description of a smartly dressed white man with dark hair, a beard and moustache. Amazingly the police did not believe her and said repeatedly when questioning her that the person responsible had been a black man. ‘I said no black man would have done this to me.’ She lost the child she was carrying and began to suffer dreadful headaches and the occasional blackout. The trauma remains to this day, twenty-five years later. ‘It is like my brain is bursting and hitting the inside of my head, sometimes all day,’ she said.

Not long after coming out of hospital Marcella had the shock of her life when she was out for a drink at the Gaiety pub. The man who had assaulted her walked in, took a look round, then went out again. She told friends that he was the person police were looking for, and they rushed outside, but he had gone.

An internal West Yorkshire inquiry some time later reported: ‘Although she had been struck about the head with an unknown instrument there were factors which were dissimilar to previous “Ripper” attacks. Most significant was the absence of stabbing to the body and there was the motive of taking the money and running away … officers were aware of the dangers of including details of an incident which was not part of the series because it would mislead the investigation as a whole.’

In 1978, at a hearing before the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, West Yorkshire Police claimed Marcella had misled them during their inquiries, giving a picture of her attacker that was ‘hopelessly inaccurate’ because her memory was impaired. Her application was rejected.

4

Tracks in the Grass

In the 1870s, seven hundred acres of rolling fields, woodland and two large lakes provided a much-needed gigantic lung for the city of Leeds. It allowed the overcrowded population the chance to breathe clean air, free of soot, grime and chimney smoke. Roundhay Park was personally purchased by the then Lord Mayor, a wealthy clothing manufacturer called John Barran, who intended it as ‘an ideal playground for the people of this city’. At the end of the nineteenth century it was observed of the park: ‘Although it is four miles from the centre of the city it is quickly reached by means of a capital service of electric cars. Once within its gates, the pleasure-seeker or the holiday-maker may quickly persuade himself that Leeds is far away.’ For more than a hundred years it has provided a magnificent prospect for the city people to wander amid a wildlife setting containing whooper swans, Canada geese, great-crested grebes and herons. The crocuses remain abundant in spring, followed by daffodils, bluebells and orchids. Even today keen-eyed inner-city children from Leeds’ bleak urban landscape are often taken to Roundhay Park to spot roe-deer, foxes, rabbits and grey squirrels.

By night, though, it becomes a different kind of habitat, a venue for courting couples and lovers seeking seclusion for amorous recreation. Prostitutes in the 1970s brought their clients here, so it would have been nothing unusual late on a Saturday evening in 1977 for the residents living in the great Victorian mansions along Park and West Avenues, which over-look this part of the park, to see a car pull off the road and stop, and for the headlights to be switched off. Opposite these grand homes with names like ‘Woodlands’ and ‘The Clockhouse’ stands Soldier’s Field, nowadays a recreation area for organized sport, so-called because the army used it as a training ground in the 1890s.

Standing amid a number of beech trees on the periphery of this vast expanse of playing fields was a large flat-roofed pavilion, built of York stone and used as changing rooms by visiting amateur football teams. Sunday morning, 6 February 1977, was bitterly cold with a clear sky. The beech trees stood denuded of leaves, and cast across the ground long shadows in an unexpected burst of warmth and light from a winter sun that hung low in the temporarily cloudless sky behind the houses in West Avenue. Lying on muddy ground in the pavilion’s shade, and hidden from the road, was a body, discovered by a man out jogging at 7.50 that morning. John Bolton, a forty-seven-year-old accountant, lived a stone’s throw from the park. Most mornings he got in a run before breakfast and it was on one of these that he spotted the corpse. At first he wasn’t sure what it was. Then, as he got closer, he could see it was a woman lying on her side. Her face, turned downwards towards the grass, was concealed by her shoulder-length brown hair. ‘I brushed the hair to one side,’ he said, ‘and then I saw the blood on her neck. Her eyes were glazed and staring. She was obviously dead and I ran to one of the houses to call the police.’