Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

Under some pressure from the media Hobson was extraordinarily open with information. The press knew the latest victim had head injuries, that her throat was cut and she had wounds to her stomach; they knew files from previous cases were being reviewed and a special watch was being kept on people driving through the Chapeltown red-light area. Hobson also informed the media of a possible connection with the murder of a prostitute in Preston, Lancashire. The Leeds Evening Post was able to inform readers on 8 February 1977, two days after Richardson’s body was found: ‘Police are comparing notes from the files of three brutal murders committed in the last 16 months – two in Leeds and one in Lancashire. In each case a prostitute was the victim.’

The next day the local Leeds evening newspaper gave more information: ‘Mr Hobson said Chief Supt. Brook from Lancashire who is leading investigations into the murder of a prostitute – Joan Harrison – who was found battered to death in Preston in November 1975, was travelling from Blackpool to Leeds today to liaise with Leeds detectives.’ Wilf Brooks, the head of Lancashire CID, had his meeting with Hobson, then left a file on the Harrison case for the Leeds CID chief to examine, ‘because of the striking similarities’, according to the Evening Post on the 10th.

The similarities were indeed striking: twenty-six-year-old Joan Harrison had no convictions for prostitution but had been cohabiting with several men. She had once been a houseproud mother, devoted to her children, but then her life appears to have descended into chaos. She was prepared to have sex to fund her chronic alcoholism and addiction to cough mixtures containing small doses of morphine, often getting through as many as eight bottles a day. She suffered severe head injuries when she was killed in a garage in Berwick Road, Preston, less than a month after Wilma McCann was murdered. Her body was found lying face down, covered by her coat. Her clothing appeared to have been displaced in a similar way to the West Yorkshire killings. She had been wearing two bras, both unfastened. The inner one had been pulled up over her breasts, leaving the outer one in position. The left leg was outside her pants and tights, with the trousers replaced on both legs and partly pulled up. Finally, and most intriguingly, her left boot had been placed tightly between her legs with the zip opened. But there were also several differences. Robbery was thought to be a motive. Her handbag and some of her possessions were missing, and several injuries were thought to be due to kicking or stamping to the head and body. There were no stab wounds and it was thought she had had sex immediately before she was killed. Brooks himself was not convinced of a link between the killings, neither was Hobson. The Lancashire CID chief was more intent on finding the man who had normal and anal intercourse with Joan Harrison. Semen traces were identified as being from a blood group B secretor and police began a mass screening of local men in the Preston area.

In Leeds, Jim Hobson believed he had a more positive line to follow, the most important clue found in the three Leeds murders so far, and something the police could get to grips with: the tyre tracks left behind in muddy ground at the scene, almost certainly by the killer’s car. Scenes of crime officers quickly took plaster casts and calculations were made by the Harrogate laboratory. This herculean task of finding the car that left the tyre tracks began as a matter of urgency the very day Irene Richardson’s body was found. It became known as ‘the tracking inquiry’, because the initial goal was to ascertain the make of vehicle involved by measuring the track width of the vehicle from the distance between the tyre marks left at the scene. Only a certain number of cars would match that particular measurement. If the experts could narrow it down there was a good chance they might isolate the make of the killer’s car, and hopefully find it and, more crucially, the murderer.

As principal scientific officer at Harrogate, Ron Outtridge quickly contacted the murder incident room at Millgarth Street, the brand-new purpose-built police headquarters in Leeds which had been open less than a year. He had narrowed down the track width after a careful analysis of the plaster casts and photographs taken at the crime scene. The inner width was forty-six inches, the outer width fifty-four and a quarter inches. But there was one complication. It was impossible to tell whether the tracks had been made by the front axle or the rear axle. This doubled the number of vehicles involved. Outtridge had isolated the makes of tyres from the 250 different types of tyre available to motorists, but couldn’t determine whether the car had been driven straight on to the grass beside the pavilion or reversed in. All four were cross-ply tyres – one a Pneumant brand, manufactured in East Germany, worn down to 2 mm of tread, with an Esso E110 on the other side of the same axle; and there were two India Autoways tyres, both well worn, on the other axle. Each tyre had certain characteristics peculiar to its make, whether it was winter type, normal road use, remould, cross-ply or radial. In terms of mathematical probabilities, the chances of reproducing this exact combination of tyres were nearly 159 million to one. Another set of tyre tracks at the scene was eliminated. They were found to belong to a Leeds Corporation parks department trailer used to deliver chemicals to the pavilion three days before the murder.

By 5.15 p.m. on the day following the discovery of the body, Outtridge, with the help of the Home Office Central Research Establishment, had produced a list of a hundred different makes of vehicle which could fit the various combinations of these measurements. They were telexed to the Millgarth Incident Room as a matter of urgency. The twentieth vehicle on the schedule of makes was a Ford Corsair, which had a front track width of four feet two and a half inches. (Peter Sutcliffe was at the time driving a white Ford Corsair, which he had purchased second-hand shortly before he attacked Marcella Claxton.)

Jim Hobson wanted to move the inquiry forward quickly and instructed night duty officers throughout the Chapeltown Division to examine all parked vehicles during normal routine patrols. Every time a car was examined the officer took the registration number and tyre details, and a card was filled in showing that car had been eliminated from the inquiry. Other checks were carried out in scrapyards, vehicle breakers and auctioneers, and also of vehicles regarded as abandoned and due to be written off and crushed under the Civil Amenities Act. Tens of thousands of cars were checked in this way, but after six weeks the exercise was abandoned.

Hobson’s team had consulted an expert in the tyre industry, R. J. Grogan of Dunlop Ltd, who confirmed that the vehicle concerned was probably one of twenty-one makes and fifty-one models. His more rigorous and specialized analysis allowed the original list of a hundred models to be cut in half. The tyres fitted to one axle could have been of a diameter of twelve inches, thirteen inches or fourteen inches, while the other pair were of a type only manufactured in thirteen and fifteen inches. The science of determining which kind of vehicle was involved in a crime by analysing the combination of tyre tracks left at a scene was not perfect. A series of complex mathematical probabilities was involved. It was sometimes possible to determine the wheel base when a vehicle had sunk into soft ground when parked, or been reversed and driven off again. It might also be possible to measure the turning circle if the vehicle had been turned on its tightest lock, and again this could narrow down the car involved. However, it was unsafe to rely totally on measurements from front wheel tracks alone, as opposed to the rear wheel tracks, because of wear in the steering joints. A quarter of a century on, the situation is even more refined and tyre tracks can be as good as a fingerprint, according to one eminent forensic scientist: ‘The marks left by tyres when they are examined contain far more evidential value than would, say, a wound relating to the weapon that produced it. If you get a car with [a particular] track width and the turning circle and if that particular tyre is a Firestone, and there is a cut in it there – it’s virtually as good as a fingerprint.’

In a bold move Hobson got approval to carry out a mass screening of all vehicles of these models within the West Yorkshire police area and in the Harrogate division of the North Yorkshire police. It was a massive task and particularly arduous for the inquiry team involved, whose morale and motivation became seriously affected as time went on. Manual searches were carried out at vehicle licensing offices and a search was made of computer records by the Police National Computer (PNC) unit. Hobson learned that 53,000 vehicles would need to be examined. Then there was another problem. The Police National Computer was a relatively new resource, first introduced in 1974. Today it employs twenty-first century technology and there is a second-generation PNC which deals with 200,000 queries a day from British police forces. A vast array of information has been loaded into the system, which includes 42.5 million vehicles registered in the United Kingdom and their owners; stolen property; criminal records; missing and wanted people and disqualified drivers; and people subject to court orders.

But in 1977 the PNC was still in its relative infancy, and programmers were continuing to input the data to build the vast index of vehicles and their owners. A great deal of ‘back record conversion’ had yet to be done, transferring the records of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea on to the Police National Computer. Some information was held in the PNC, but to be sure they would not miss anything Hobson’s team also had to check manually with the local Leeds Vehicle Licensing Office. Sutcliffe’s white-coloured Ford Corsair – KWT 721D – was among the 53,000 vehicles, but would Hobson’s team be able to get to it?

A long list of vehicle owners was compiled. The cards which had earlier been completed during the special night duty check in Chapeltown were cross-checked to eliminate those already examined. What in effect was happening was a mass elimination exercise on the basis of gradually purging vehicle registration numbers until what you had left was the car you were searching for. Hobson rightly gambled that, since all three murders so far had involved the Leeds red-light area, it was reasonable to begin looking in West Yorkshire first. But there was a danger that the vehicle might have been scrapped, or the tyres changed, especially if the suspect became aware that police were making inquiries about tyres. For several years the tracking inquiry remained a highly secret part of the investigation.

The next stage was to develop an index card system for all the remaining vehicles to be checked by personal home visits by police officers. However, the index cards used were filed in registration number order, and then carried the owners’ names. Tragically, no index cards were made out for names of owners as a reference system in itself. Had an index such as this been operated within the murder incident room at Millgarth Street, then the name of Peter William Sutcliffe would have been referenced in connection with the tracking inquiry. Any officer looking up his name in connection with some other aspect of the Ripper investigation would immediately have seen that he owned a car which could have been used in the murder of Irene Richardson.

Even more tragically, circumstances conspired against Hobson and his team. They were simply overtaken by events – another murder and a very serious attack in which a victim survived. Demand for manpower in the investigation became totally overloaded. The incident room was operating a manual, paper-led system. There was nothing in the police armoury at the time to help them sift through the masses of information they were accumulating, let alone the mountains of paperwork yet to come as the bodies of Sutcliffe’s victims increased, along with the fears and anxieties of tens of thousands of women in Yorkshire and the North of England after the discovery of yet another woman found murdered at the hands of the Ripper.

The double tragedy was that Hobson’s team had broken the back of the tracking inquiry when a halt was ordered because further murderous attacks on local women demanded his manpower be shifted elsewhere. The drain on resources had been immense. Of the 53,000 vehicle owners in West Yorkshire whose cars may have left the tyre tracks on Soldier’s Field, only 20,000 car owners remained to be seen. Sutcliffe’s white Ford Corsair was among those on the list waiting to be checked.

5

Impressions in Blood

Just four words made the hair on the back of John Domaille’s neck stand on end. ‘Boss, we’ve got one,’ the voice at the other end said with an air of breathless desperation.

Domaille, the new head of Bradford CID just two months into the job, had answered the call that Sunday night in late April 1977 after returning from a teatime stroll. He was planning a relaxing night in front of the television when a detective chief inspector telephoned with the news that a thirty-three-year-old prostitute had been found dead in her flat in the red-light district.

‘I knew what he meant,’ Domaille recalled. ‘It meant we had one of these so-called Ripper murders in Bradford. I said “Okay, I’ll come over” and I went immediately.’ The DCI gave him a few more details. Her name was Patricia Atkinson. The woman had been convicted of soliciting two years previously. She had been found by her boyfriend at a block of flats in Oak Avenue, off Manningham Lane.

Detective Chief Superintendent Domaille, then a month short of his forty-third birthday, sped off in his car at about 8 p.m., and did not return home until the crack of dawn the following morning. He took the M62 across country towards Bradford, before turning off on the motorway spur, past a large number of factories and distribution centres located among a myriad of newly built industrial units. Then it was down into the city centre and on towards Manningham. His head was buzzing. He wondered who the pathologist would be. Who would forensics send? He wanted the best he could get. The new lab at Wetherby needed to send someone down immediately.

‘There’s so much going through your head when you get a call like that,’ he said. ‘What mortuary am I going to move this to? What time is the PM going to be, when am I going to see the press, which DCI will I have, which detective superintendent? What am I going to tell the boss? What am I going to tell the chief constable?’

The second he saw her he knew she was a Ripper victim. The DCI had indicated as much. Looking at her, he could see why. There had been a massive attack to the head; it was almost smashed in. The clothing was disarranged and there were curious stab wounds and cuts to the body. The signature was the attack to the abdomen. He had seen this before at the scenes of previous Ripper killings which he had attended as the senior officer with overall charge of media and community relations for West Yorkshire Police. Keeping the media onside then was an absolute priority. Now that he was the senior investigating officer, the man in overall charge, it would be no different. He and Dennis Hoban thought alike in that regard.

Going through his mind was the management of the crime scene and what followed. Domaille thrived on this kind of pressure, especially in his dealings with the media. Aware of the need to get it right, he thought of the first two murders and Hoban’s control of the crime scene. That had been total management. It had always seemed to work for Hoban in Leeds until the Ripper appeared. Now in Bradford, Domaille was working with a totally new set-up. If he didn’t get all the bits and pieces on the chess board very quickly, he realized, he would face criticism later. In his own mind he was determined to give the media all he could, even if it conflicted with George Oldfield’s instincts. The ACC (crime) was obsessive about not giving the press too much. He warned Domaille about not keeping enough back to use when he got someone in who was a serious suspect for a killing. Domaille could see the sense of this, but preferred to deal with a prime suspect when the time came. Of course you needed something held back from the press and television which only the murderer could tell you. You had to sort out the genuine article from the cranks who came in to confess to crimes they didn’t commit – but you had to catch your killer first.

‘I’ve always been very keen on telling the media what I’ve got because I believe in the people out there, there’s thousands of them. You’ve got all those eyes and ears working for you and they bring stuff to you. I didn’t have the snouts but I’d got the people. You don’t actually detect it by yourself. You detect it because of all the bits people tell you. This was the first [Ripper killing] in Bradford whereas previously he had been in Leeds. He’d gone outside his area. I wasn’t surprised because Bradford also had a sizeable prostitute area. I thought: “This person is not very far away” because it doesn’t take long to drive from Leeds to Bradford.’

The apartment block Atkinson lived in was seedy. Before he entered the door into the victim’s flat Domaille saw an old mattress from a double bed propped against a wall in the corridor outside. Someone had abandoned it there instead of arranging for it to be taken away. ‘Tina’ Atkinson, as she was commonly known, had rented a self-contained bed-sitting room with a separate bathroom and kitchenette, both of which were in a deplorable condition, with no sign of any effort to clean them. Domaille’s immediate thought was that the flat was used for one thing only: sex. The main room contained a bed, pushed into a corner up against the wall; there was also a two-seater sofa, a dressing table and a couple of dining room chairs. A flower-patterned curtain ran in sections right across the only wall with a window. On a three-drawer dressing table with a large mirror stood an empty vase and two ornamental glass gondoliers.

Two dresses, one a sort of shift with a separate belt, hung on coat hangers suspended from the top of the large double wardrobe, one from the side, one from the door. A third dress, which had also hung on a coat hanger, had been thrown on to the sofa, a simple two-seater affair with wooden arms. Two pairs of pants with black frilled tops lay crumpled on a sofa cushion. A few feet away was a three-bar electric fire, the kind which gave a glow of imitation coal. It was plugged in by a short cable to a socket on the wall. Above the socket, the wall was bare except for a map – an RAC road map of Yorkshire.

To Domaille’s eye the main room seemed reasonably clean. On a sideboard stood a pair of sling-back shoes with platform soles and a plastic tray. On the table, which had a partly check-patterned tablecloth, was a leather handbag, a large ashtray, a box of Scotties tissues and a can of Harmony hair spray, plus a bottle of cheap scent and a tube of hand cream. There was a towel thrown over the back of a chair. On the floor just in front of the table was a large denim shoulder bag. And beside that was a pool of blood. The victim was on the bed, with blankets and a flower-patterned duvet covering her, face down with her head turned away from the door to face the wall. She wore a black brassière, the left shoulder strap visible under the bedding. A pair of Scholl wooden sandals lay just under the edge of the bed. There were spots of blood on the front of the left sandal.

The room was getting crowded with people doing their work. The scenes of crime photographer took several shots of the sandals from different angles, including the soles, to see if there were any traces of blood. Beside the electric fire was a single blue thick-soled lady’s shoe. Domaille briefly pondered whether she had been wearing the sandals when she was killed, or had she just slipped them off and kicked them under the bed? Where was the other blue shoe? He looked down. The floor was covered in a threadbare carpet which looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned for a long time. The photographer bent down to frame a shot of a spent match and a filter-tip cigarette stub.

The woman had probably bled to death on the bed. Her dark hair was soaked in blood, as were the sheets and pillow, which was covered in a striped pillowcase. Her arms were spread out down her side. She had been wearing bell-bottomed jeans. When the bedclothes were pulled back by Professor Gee, the jeans were shown to have been tugged below her knees. Her white cotton pants had been pulled down to expose her buttocks. Her T-shirt had been hitched up and her bra unfastened. There was clear bruising on her right leg above the knee. Her tights had been pulled way down to her ankles and she was wearing one shoe – a blue sling-back denim shoe with a platform sole. This answered Domaille’s question as to whether she had been wearing the wooden sandals. Then someone pointed out what looked like a shoe print in blood on one of the sheets.

Gee’s attention was drawn to the large bloodstain in front of the wooden chair beside the bed, but he could also see spots of blood on the front of the chair legs. He was then shown a short dark leather jacket which was heavily bloodstained in the middle of the floor adjacent to the wardrobe. Pulling back the bedclothes had also revealed the body twisted at the lower part of the trunk so that the abdomen was almost at right angles to the bed. The body was clad in a patterned jumper pulled upwards towards the shoulders. On the edges of the bed, lying on the undersheet in front of the knees, was a mortice lock key. Underneath the right knee was another key – a Yale. It was nearly 10.30 p.m. before Gee began the process of measuring the body temperature at half-hour stages. An hour later the bedclothes were completely removed from the body and handed to an exhibits officer.

By the time the forensic scientist from the new Wetherby laboratory arrived, the bed-sitting room was crowded with activity. The place reeked of alcohol. Fingerprints were being taken. The photographer’s camera flashed intermittently, and several people in suits stood around chatting. Russell Stockdale had the furthest of anyone to travel to the scene of the murder – from Rufforth, near York. He was new to West Yorkshire, only just posted to Wetherby from the laboratory at Newcastle. Having been on call this Sunday night, he was the one who had to turn out. He hadn’t been involved with West Yorkshiremen before, so it came as some surprise to find the SIO, John Domaille, turned out to have a soft Devonian accent. With the exception of Professor Gee, all the others in the room were clearly Yorkshiremen. On the drive over, Stockdale was conscious he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to strike up a rapport with the police from Bradford and Leeds. He was going to meet a new investigating team. Stockdale knew from experience that there was a process of trust and confidence to be built before either side could get the best from each other.

Domaille gave Stockdale the impression of being very young for the senior rank he held, but it soon became apparent that he was extremely confident and more than up to the job. The usual formalities to break the ice with the newcomer were exchanged. Stockdale had long ago decided that professionals in such circumstances be accorded the status they deserved. If you adopted the role of the shrinking violet, you would be treated like a shrinking violet. It was the way of the world.

He strongly believed the forensic scientist had an important role to play at the crime scene. That did not mean he could march in in an arrogant way, because it was very much a joint operation, especially between the pathologist and the forensic scientist. Much of his learning had been on the job training. Stockdale had been a grave-digger on leaving grammar school in Battersea, South London, and was then commissioned in the RAF. He resigned his commission twelve months later and went off to London University. Having graduated as a zoologist he applied for a job at the Newcastle lab in response to a newspaper advertisement. The then director, Stuart Kind, later told him why he appointed him: ‘You were such an odd bugger, rather like myself, that’s why I gave you the job.’