Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

Dennis Hoban, as deputy ACC (crime), attended the scene with his longtime friend and colleague Jim Hobson, now detective chief superintendent in charge of the Eastern Area CID. This was Hobson’s patch and he was senior investigating officer. Hoban wore his traditional suit and a Burberry trench coat, but had abandoned his usual trilby or peaked cap, leaving his balding pate that morning devoid of headgear and exposed to the balmy rays of the sun, which after a long winter was something akin to a tonic. Hoban wasn’t treading on anyone’s toes. He saw it as a courtesy to Hobson more than anything else, or so at least he would have convinced himself. Living only a few minutes’ drive away, Hoban could not possibly have passed up the opportunity to visit a crucial crime scene like this, particularly with the murders of McCann and Jackson unsolved for a year and fresh in his mind. The most superficial examination had made it clear to everyone that this young woman had suffered severe head injuries. However, it was not until Professor Gee arrived at the scene that the full horror became apparent.

Gee arrived at 10 a.m., followed fifteen minutes later by Edward Mitchell, a forensic scientist from the laboratory at Harrogate. By then the standard murder investigation procedures had swung into action. The crime scene was taped off, duckboards laid on the muddy ground, the twenty-strong uniformed task force alerted to conduct a fingertip search; and a black plastic screen about thirty-five feet long was placed in front of the body to veil it from prying eyes. In the distance, officers in uniform began alerting the football teams arriving to play their fixtures that the matches would have to be cancelled while the pitches were minutely examined for clues. When Gee first saw the body it lay on the grass with the face directed towards the left shoulder. The upper part was clad in a long brown, machine-knit woollen cardigan with a zip fastener; the lower part, from the waist downwards, was covered by a short brown imitation suede coat with fur trimming. The feet protruded beyond the end of the coat and there was a sock on the left foot but the right foot was bare. Blood soiled her head, hair and cardigan as well as her neck. Leaves beside the body also had a little blood on them. Beside the body was a tampon. Later laboratory analysis confirmed she was having a period at the time she was killed. The tampon was lightly covered in blood, showing she was nearing the end of her monthly cycle. On the other side of the body, nearer to the pavilion, a trail of blood ran between the body and a handbag lying on leaves nearly four feet off. The flap of the handbag was open and a cosmetics bag and a lipstick were next to it. Beneath the handbag was a mortice key and a 1p coin.

Tyre tracks from a vehicle could clearly be seen between the body and the back of the pavilion in an area of muddy ground clear of trees. The tracks led from the roadway, along the back of the pavilion, and stopped close to the body. Mitchell began to examine the surrounding area, collecting his array of samples and taping the woman’s face. Adhesive tape was stretched across areas of bare skin on her arms, legs and back to pick up fibres, possibly from the killer’s clothing. These fibres would be examined under powerful microscopes and compared with the woman’s clothing. Anything ‘foreign’ would be possible confirmation of Locard’s theory of contact and exchange.

After the body had been photographed in situ, the coat covering the lower part of the body was removed to reveal some bizarre details. Originally the woman had worn two pairs of pants, one pair over her tights, as well as a pair of long light-coloured socks over the tights, presumably to make her footwear more comfortable. Now the woman’s long brown leather boots, with three-inch block heels and two-inch soles, lay along the backs of her legs. As she lay dead on the ground, they had been deliberately placed on her legs, stretching from her thighs down to her calves. When the boots were lifted off, the left leg only was found to have a rolled-down pair of tights bunched up around her left knee. Rolled up into the tights was a pair of red pants and the missing sock from her right foot. There were also fragments of leaves and ground debris tucked into the top of the tights. The woman’s other pants, a small brown nylon pair, were in position over her backside and covering her genitalia.

Once the cardigan was pulled upwards towards the woman’s head, her yellow skirt was found bunched up around her waist, together with a blue underslip. She also wore a yellow jacket beneath which her yellow bra was still fastened. After her temperature was recorded and the body photographed once more, she was turned on her back on to a large white plastic sheet. Her hands were crossed over the lower part of the body, the left wrist overlaying the right. Around her right wrist were four metal bangles. There was a seventeen-jewelled fake-gold watch with a narrow expanding strap on the left wrist, its glass partly obscured by droplets of water inside. It was no longer working and the hands were stopped at the 8.50 position. Time had literally run out for her.

Now Gee, Hoban, Hobson and the others could see there was a large wound at the front of the throat, with soiling of the surrounding skin and the front of the jacket, which was fastened with one button. Beneath her hands in the lower part of the abdomen was a truly shocking wound. A large slashing cut on the left side of the stomach had sliced through the abdominal wall. A number of coils of intestine protruded and these were slightly soiled with blood, matted with leaves and pieces of twig. Still more photographs were taken before the body was wrapped in the plastic sheet, ready to be taken to the mortuary for Gee to carry out a more detailed six-hour examination.

Hobson’s team had meanwhile been examining the contents of the woman’s handbag to see if they could identify her. As the senior investigating officer he quickly needed to know as much about her as possible. The handbag yielded a vital clue: a name and address in Roundhay. From this it transpired that the dead woman was called Irene Richardson; that she had applied for a job as a nanny with a family in Roundhay a week or two previously. The person who advertised for the nanny was then able to provide Irene’s home address, a miserable rooming house in Cowper Street, Chapeltown. Apart from a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches, a few bus tickets and a Yale and mortice key, Irene Richardson’s entire wealth lay in her purse – all 35½ pence of it.

Everyone agreed that what was learned from inquiries over the next few weeks about the lost soul who was Irene Richardson amounted to an immensely sad story. She had been twenty-eight years old, penniless, and fending for herself in very straitened circumstances. Born into a large family called Osborne in the Possilpark area of Glasgow, she had six sisters and three brothers. Their mother was a Roman Catholic and they had a Church of Scotland father. The children were brought up as Protestants. It was said to be a poor, large, but loving family. At primary school Irene was a normal child, though somewhat shy and sensitive. She enjoyed music and loved to laugh. But at Springburn Secondary School she turned into something of a rebel, smoking and playing truant. At some point the entire Osborne clan had settled at various places in England: a brother in Corby, Northamptonshire; a sister at Canvey Island in Essex. Another sister, Helen, worked in the hotel and catering industry in Blackpool, then married a Yorkshireman and later set up home in Sheffield. In 1965, at the age of seventeen, Irene Osborne ran off to London and for the next five years or so completely cut herself off from her family. When her father died, they were unable to contact her and she missed his funeral. Before her teens were out she had two children. Her daughter Lorraine’s father was a man called John Henry Wade. Police believed that Alan, the second child, might have been fathered by someone else, a friend of Irene’s called ‘Dennis’, who was never found. Irene could hardly cope by herself, let alone with two small children. Baby Lorraine was fostered out aged eighteen months in 1968 to a dealer in reproduction antiques and his wife, George and Mary Dwyer, from Croydon. They then adopted her when she was four. Irene’s son Alan was also fostered out.

Subsequently she moved to Blackpool, where her sister Helen was then working. There she met her future husband, George Richardson, a barman turned plasterer, in November 1970, and married him in June the following year. They set up home in Blackpool and had two daughters. Until the summer of 1975 Irene was working at the local Pontins Holiday Camp. Their daughter, also named Irene, was two years old and Irene was expecting another baby, Amanda. She almost certainly suffered from severe postnatal depression, for very soon after the baby was born she suddenly left Blackpool for London without saying where she was going. Mr Richardson reported her missing to the police, but she made contact a few months later. As a result, George Richardson travelled to London and located his wife in South Kensington, working in a hotel. They set up home in Kensington briefly, in an attempt to patch up their marriage. It did not last long. In April 1976 Irene left again without leaving a forwarding address. George Richardson did not see her alive again and their children, too, were subsequently fostered.

In London Irene Richardson met and cohabited with a six-foot ex-seaman, Steven Bray, who had absconded from Leicester Prison and was now working as a chef. Irene kept secret from him the fact that she was still married to George Richardson. Bray and Irene arrived in Leeds in October 1976 and moved between various boarding houses in the Chapeltown area. He was employed as a doorman at Tiffany’s Club and Irene began using the name Bray and worked at various hotels in the city as a chambermaid and also as a cleaner at a YMCA hostel, the Residential Boys’ Club in nearby Chapel Allerton. Incredibly she and Bray had organized to get married at Leeds Register Office on 22 January 1977, but neither turned up. Some time later Bray left for London, and then caught a ferry to Ireland, where he remained for several weeks.

Ten days before her death, Irene failed to turn up for work at the YMCA hostel. She had asked the warden for an advance on her wages because she had a large bill to pay. Mrs Nellie Morrison was only able to give her £1. They didn’t see Irene for a few days and then she came to collect her shoes and overalls and apologized for her behaviour, saying she had to get away from a man she had been living with. A week before she was murdered, a man suddenly arrived at the YMCA and collected the wages due to her. But she never saw the money. Hobson learned that in the last ten days of her life she had been wandering the streets practically destitute.

A woman in the rooming house in Cowper Street told detectives that Irene and Bray had twice rented an attic room in the house, and shortly before her death the landlord had let her occupy a ground-floor room rent free for a few days. Rent for a room was normally between £5 and £8 a week. Severely depressed and down on her luck, Irene had been hanging around street corners in Chapeltown. She had been living rough on the streets for about two weeks and spent several nights sleeping in a public lavatory. A few friends allowed her to take the occasional bath in their flat. The room in Cowper Street should have been a life-saver for Irene, who was urgently trying to get a job. She didn’t drink a great deal and only went out at weekends.

On the Saturday night of 5 February Irene spent some time getting ready, trying to dress tidily and applying a considerable amount of make-up, especially around the eyes. At about 11.15 she told her friend Pam Barker, who also had a room in the Cowper Street property, that she was going to Tiffany’s dance hall in the Merrion Centre in Leeds to find Steven Bray. She then briefly visited a house in Sholebrook Avenue and talked to a friend, Mrs Walsh. They parted company at 11.30. Some time before midnight she got into a stranger’s car, apparently willing to have sex with him for money.

The next time George Richardson saw Irene was at the Leeds City Mortuary. The police arranged for a car to bring him from Blackpool to identify her. It was a sight which was to haunt him for years to come. He was convinced Irene had never been a prostitute. ‘She was sick. She just couldn’t settle down,’ he said. Her funeral in Blackpool the following week, he said, would end two years of a living hell. But George Richardson’s life in subsequent years went from bad to worse. He became an alcoholic.

Following the post-mortem Hobson had a clearer idea of what had happened to Irene. For a few days at least she had been prepared to resort to prostitution to get money. He knew from forensic lab results that she had had sex with someone in the twenty-four hours before her death. Swabs from her vagina showed the presence of semen. On the inside of her coat an area of seminal staining was also found, from an ‘O’ blood-type secretor, a male who secreted blood cells into his saliva or semen. There were similar seminal stains on her tights and knickers, but in neither case was sperm found in the semen. The man who previously had intercourse with Irene was definitely aspermous.

It seemed certain she had been picked up in Chapeltown shortly before being killed. Later it was learned that at 11.35 p.m. on the Saturday night another woman had been propositioned on several occasions in Nassau Place, Chapeltown, by a man in a white car. Could the same man have picked up Irene and taken her to Soldier’s Field? She had got out of the car intending to have sex with the driver, but first had to discreetly remove the tampon she was wearing. As she crouched down the killer struck her a massive blow to the head, followed by two more. It was self-evident that if Irene was crouching or kneeling in the split second before she was killed, a hammer raised above the murderer’s head as he stood over her would have been brought crashing down with a greater velocity than if she had been standing. The only saving grace was that Irene would have known nothing about it. The blow would have stunned her and instant unconsciousness would have followed.

‘This was an almost circular, punched-out depressed fracture,’ Professor Gee wrote in his autopsy report, ‘with the central disc of the bone driven deeply into the underlying brain.’ He made another chilling discovery: ‘The bevelling up of one edge of the fracture of the skull clearly showed where the hammer had got stuck by the force of the blow into the skull and had to be levered out to get it clear of the bone.’ The nature of the hole indicated it had almost the precise dimensions of a hammer head. Gee thought the woman had then been dragged from the position of the tyre tracks to the spot where she was found and further injured. The murderer had slashed at her throat, causing a gaping wound exposing the larynx. In a frenzy he then tore a wound nearly seven inches long down the left side of the abdomen, which caused her intestines to tumble out, and two more stab wounds to the stomach followed. The weapons used were probably a hammer with a flat circular striking surface and a very sharp knife of some kind. For Gee the importance of this case lay in it being able to confirm they were dealing with a multiple killer. He preferred to deal in certainties rather than speculation. It was essential not to make a mistake because it could confuse the whole investigation. Now he felt sure he knew. ‘Here was a clear pattern,’ he said later, though it took some time for everyone to agree.

Hobson still wasn’t certain in his own mind that all three murders were linked, but this didn’t prevent speculation in the media. The fact that two other women had been slaughtered in similar circumstances in Leeds, coupled with the grisly detail of Richardson’s throat injury, prompted one tabloid the next morning to splash its story. ‘JACK THE RIPPER MURDER HORROR’: ‘A girl was found brutally hacked to death in a sports field yesterday. And it started a hunt for a Jack the Ripper killer.’ The Sun partially regurgitated the sensational headline it used a year previously, following Emily Jackson’s death: ‘RIPPER HUNTED IN CALL GIRL MURDERS’. This third death was clearly major front-page news. With a madman slaying prostitutes on the loose, Britain had not seen anything like this since the Thames nude murders in London during the mid-1960s. However, it would be another year before the term ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ became common currency.

Sensing the urgency of the situation, Ronald Gregory, the chief constable, was among those who turned up at the murder scene before the body was moved. When suspicions were eventually confirmed that the killing was the work of the man who had also slain McCann and Jackson, Gregory knew he had a maniacal killer in his force area, equal, in his mind, to the worst work of the notorious multiple murderers, Haigh and Christie, a few decades earlier. Gregory’s foreboding was well justified. The search for the ‘Ripper’ would become the most notorious criminal investigation in British history, and far more complex than either the infamous Haigh or Christie cases. For in February 1977 West Yorkshire police had an on-going murder hunt on their hands, a series of crimes to be solved, whereas the Haigh and Christie cases presented no great mystery for investigators, even though they produced sensational trials and equally sensational headlines. The killers were under arrest before police knew they had multiple deaths on their hands. Haigh admitted straight away he was a serial murderer and became infamous as the ‘Acid in the Bath’ killer. There was no police hunt for him as such. Christie had killed eight women over a period of ten years, including his own wife, but none of them were linked to a series for the bodies were not found till very late in the day. Indeed, they were discovered by accident. Christie walled up his victims or buried them in the back yard or under floorboards at 10 Rillington Place in London, where he lived. They later gave off a rather unpleasant smell. Four days after the discovery of various skeletons he was arrested and immediately confessed. Both Haigh and Christie had their defence pleas of not guilty of murder by reason of insanity rejected by a jury at the Old Bailey and both were hanged.

Convinced the man who killed Richardson had to be bloodstained, Jim Hobson telexed a warning to all West Yorkshire divisions and surrounding forces to keep an eye out for anyone coming into custody with bloodstained clothing. He also wanted urgent inquiries made at local dry cleaners. One hundred officers then began house-to-house inquiries. Among those soon interviewed was one of Britain’s top television stars, Jimmy Savile, who lived in West Avenue, opposite the murder scene. He wasn’t at home at the crucial time, but when a neighbour gave him the news he was badly shaken and kept repeating: ‘This is terrible. It is a ghastly thing to happen practically in your own front garden.’ In the following weeks numerous men were hauled in and questioned closely; several items of potential suspect’s clothing were examined at the Harrogate laboratory, along with various pairs of shoes and a bloodstained raincoat retrieved from a dry cleaners in the centre of Leeds. Tools, hammers and knives were also handed over for scientific analysis. A fragmentary fingerprint found on a bus ticket near the scene could not be eliminated. Prostitutes in Leeds were asked to come forward if they had been ill-treated by their clients. Courting couples using Roundhay Park over the weekend were asked to report anything suspicious. None of these initiatives led anywhere. Hobson appealed directly to women not to accept lifts from strangers. The last thing he needed was another murder before they had exhausted all lines of inquiry from the current one.

Four days after Irene died, he sought the cooperation of the public in finding Marcella Claxton, who nine months previously had been attacked in virtually the same spot at Soldier’s Field. Now she had moved home and police couldn’t find her. The local press claimed it as ‘a carbon copy’ attack and reported that Marcella could hold vital clues to the killer’s identity. Hobson told reporters that there were striking similarities. Both women had been viciously attacked with a blunt instrument from the rear; both had clearly been picked up in Chapeltown for sex and taken to Roundhay Park, a favourite place for prostitutes to take their clients.

Hobson said of Marcella: ‘She could help us with vital clues to the identity. It is essential that we interview this woman in view of the recent murder. There may be some connection between the attack on her and the murder of Mrs Richardson.’ An eminent biographer once declared that although hindsight is often the last refuge of the instant historian, scorning hindsight is always the first escort of the evasive politician. He might also have said policeman. With the benefit of hindsight and twenty-five years on, Hobson’s prophetic comment seems like irony heaped upon irony. There was indeed a connection between the two events, but it was overlooked. Marcella Claxton had repeatedly told police that the man who attacked her had been driving a white car; so was the man who tried repeatedly to pick up a woman in Nassau Place, Chapeltown, not long before Irene Richardson was walking in the same area, probably half an hour before she was murdered. Even more damning, Marcella had helped prepare a photofit, but again its value to the investigation was never realized.

Later that day, Marcella spoke to detectives and repeated her description of the man in a white car who attacked her. But next morning at a press conference Hobson briefed the media saying Marcella had given them a description, ‘but this is not necessarily the description of the murderer [my italics]’. It was a comment hardly likely to inspire confidence. The public was told he was aged twenty-five to thirty-five, five feet nine inches tall, medium build, with dark wavy hair, who at the time of the assault was wearing a dark suit with a multicoloured shirt and tie. He was well spoken and drove a white car which was fairly new. Anyone recognizing this description was asked to contact the police immediately. Tragically, the detail police left out from Marcella Claxton’s description was that the man had a beard and a moustache. Nor did they issue to the press the photofit Marcella prepared on 10 May 1976, the day after she was attacked. It had been published in Police Reports, a confidential internal police publication sent to northern police forces, and in a separate police circular a week later. However, the public was never given the opportunity of seeing the actual photofit (which bore a stunning likeness to Sutcliffe). True, Marcella had problems selecting the components for the photofit, but when it was finished she was satisfied it was a good likeness of the man who tried to kill her. But Hobson was not convinced, and was moreover doubly concerned that the public could be misled if given the wrong information. The simple truth was that the West Yorkshire police did not believe what Marcella Claxton was telling them.

Ever cautious, Hobson repeated his warning to the ‘good time girls’ of Chapeltown to be wary of accepting lifts in cars: ‘From our observations taken over the last week it seems that women are still getting into cars in the area. I would again warn them of the dangers.’

Over the next few months, Leeds police mounted a crackdown on prostitutes in the Chapeltown area, arresting and issuing cautions to more than a hundred women. Hobson’s policy was to get sex workers out of the vice area, a policy which appeared to be working. ‘We have clamped down to try to get prostitutes off the streets,’ he said. ‘It is as much for their safety as anything else. We are making every effort to prevent another murder.’ If they insisted on plying their trade, he believed they should let one of their friends know where they were going, or take the car number. Then another tactic was tried. Special squads of police operating in the Chapeltown area noted the registration numbers of cars belonging to men cruising around looking for sex. A similar stratagem had been applied by the Metropolitan Police in London more than ten years previously during the hunt for the Thames nude prostitute murderer. In a proactive effort to apprehend the London killer, all the ‘pick-up’ places in Bayswater, Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill had been kept under observation. ‘A system of “flagging” was introduced whereby the same car in an area more than once became suspect, and if it appeared three times the driver was questioned.’ The operation was not a success.