Читать книгу Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper - Michael Bilton - Страница 13

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.’

In the bed-sitting room Stockdale discussed with Peter Swann, the fingerprint man, the sequence in which they would do their work. It was crucial they did it as a team, so as not to damage what the other was trying to achieve. ‘Preserving the crime scene is critical,’ Stockdale says of this kind of work. ‘You can preserve a crime scene by not walking into it, but at some stage you have got to go in there and decide on an operational procedure which is going to work and be followed. Everyone else who has an input to make has to know what everyone else is doing.’ He recalled something he particularly learned from later watching David Gee at work. The Leeds University professor, regarded as a gentleman among gentlemen by whose who knew him well, was standing in a muddy field somewhere looking at a fresh corpse and scribbling in a notebook. He said to Stockdale out of the corner of his mouth: ‘What I am doing now – the police think I am very busy working, but actually I am giving myself time to think.’

‘This was a tremendous piece of advice,’ Stockdale reflected. ‘I thought about standing there with him on that occasion over the coming years, and what David said encapsulated the whole experience. You have to make time for yourself to think. You can’t, if you allow yourself to be rushed by people saying: “Come on, get on with it, we have got to get the body moved.” Why? Where is it going? It isn’t going anywhere because I haven’t finished yet.’

On this call-out to Bradford, Stockdale wasn’t aware he was going to a Ripper murder. He had only just arrived down from Newcastle and did not know that three other prostitutes had been murdered in nearby Leeds. Examining the blood distribution patterns in the room, he kept reminding himself not to impede Peter Swann and his team looking for fingerprints. ‘It is well established with all the forces I have worked for, that if the investigation officer’s fingerprints are found, then it costs them a round of drinks in the bar. You tend to go around the crime scene with your hands in your pockets. It is very easy to unconsciously pick something up or touch it, which you really ought not to do. I wasn’t going to break the habits of my career so far.’

Stockdale became conscious of comments passing between other members of the team. ‘Is it him, then?’ ‘Do you think it’s another one?’ The questioning was addressed to no one in particular, like a murmur rising almost to a groundswell. Finally he turned to Peter Swann and asked: ‘Is it who? What’s going on?’

Swann explained. ‘We’ve got a serial killer – he’s being called The Ripper.’

‘Bloody hell, just my luck to pick up one of these,’ Stockdale exclaimed. It was the first time he had heard the words ‘The Ripper’.

Stockdale examined the woman’s clothing carefully. He believed that after they were pulled down, the jeans and possibly the tights as well had been pulled up again partially. Neither the tights nor the zip fastener of the jeans was damaged in the operation and it was evident that some care had been exercised by the killer. The surface of the body was smeared with blood and gave the appearance of having been manoeuvred by the killer, who must have had wet blood on his hands. Looking around the room generally, he could see there had been no violent struggle or any attempt to ransack the place. He concluded that the sequence of events had been as follows:

1 Atkinson was struck on the head from behind as she entered the room.

2 She fell to the floor bleeding and lay where she fell for some minutes.

3 The killer moved the unconscious body to the bedside where probably her leather coat was removed before being dumped in the corner of the room. The jeans could have been undone at this stage and pulled down, together with her underclothes, and this caused the loss of the left shoe. Bloodstaining on the carpet, the handbag, and the smearing on the leg of the bedside chair, showed probably that another blow to the skull had been struck and that the head had moved about on the floor.

4 The killer, with wet bloody hands, manoeuvred the body on to the unmade bed, probably by clambering on to the bed and dragging the body, rather than by lifting it. In doing so a bloody footwear impression was left on the bottom sheet between the body and the wall.

5 The bloodstream distribution on the bed indicated further blows to the head and a great deal of blood being lost as a result of the wounds sustained. He also believed the stabbing injuries to the abdomen were probably sustained on the bed.

6 The killer then began a process of ‘tidying up’, during which the jeans were partially pushed or drawn on to the legs. The bedding was then piled on top of the body and straightened out sufficiently to cover it almost completely, leaving the injuries and the greater part of the bloodstaining hidden from view.

Shortly before midnight all the work that could be done by Domaille’s team, Gee and Stockdale was complete, and the body was placed on a large plastic sheet and put into a coffin shell before being taken to the Bradford city mortuary. There Tina’s ex-husband, Ramen Mitra, identified her body in the presence of Professor Gee and the coroner’s officer. At 1.30 a.m. on the Sunday morning Gee began his post-mortem. It continued until 5 a.m. The usual crowd of officers was present, including a young constable called Alexander, who was, as the first officer at the scene of the murder, also required to attend the post-mortem.

During the autopsy Gee discovered four major depressed fractures of the skull caused by it being struck with a blunt instrument which left crescent-shaped wounds. There were also wounds to the trunk in the form of abrasions to the middle of the back and another group of grazes and stab wounds over the lower abdomen, linked by an irregular linear abrasion across the left side of the chest. He believed that some kind of large-size hammer was involved. Domaille noticed several stabbing wounds just above the pubic region. The killer obviously had some kind of serious sexual hang-up. These and some of the other stab wounds caused Professor Gee particular problems. He thought some object with a blade half an inch wide might have been used – perhaps a screwdriver or chisel.

What he was looking at confirmed what they had seen in the three other murders – a clear and established pattern: similar kinds of head injuries; similar movement of the clothing; the absence of sexual intercourse; and multiple stab wounds produced by a variety of different instruments. ‘So far we had two different knives, one screwdriver, and, I now thought, some rectangular-shaped, rather blunt object, like, say, a cold chisel,’ he said later. ‘In fact, in this I was wrong. I had by now got the clear impression that what happened each time was that the victim was knocked down purely to make them immobile, possibly with the same hammer, then the clothing was disarranged and the stab wounds inflicted with a different weapon each time, because that act provided the necessary satisfaction [for the killer]. One of the big problems I found in an extended series was trying to keep distinct the themes of the patterns of pathology on the one hand and the nature of the actual weapons on the other. But certainly in this case my conception of a hammer on one hand and a blunt chisel on the other prevented me from putting the two together – into one weapon.’ He only ascertained the truth much later.

For Gee, as a forensic pathologist, it was crucial to determine how the death was caused. He examined the pattern of injuries, the position of the body, the nature of the wounds, and endeavoured to reconstruct a form in which the injuries could have been sustained. This meant developing, sooner or later, some idea of what actually happened – the order of events. It also meant developing preconceived ideas about the situation, but this could be dangerous, though he saw no way to avoid it. Sometimes it led to mistakes. In his own mind he saw a clear and logical sequence of events for all four cases in the series so far.

‘I was quite wrong,’ Gee said. ‘It turned out that this particular girl [Atkinson] was indeed struck with a hammer, but the penetrating injuries were caused by the claws of the claw hammer, which was used on this occasion.’ He should have realized this, he said, by noticing that there was a small second abrasion alongside the main one on the side of the body and from the general pattern of marks on the abdomen. ‘I am sure I was misled on this occasion because of having developed this preconceived idea of two weapons being used – a hammer and a stabbing instrument of some kind.’

A thorough search of the flat produced a diary among Atkinson’s meagre possessions. It contained the names of some fifty men, a good many of whom were probably clients. Two days after the body was found Domaille briefed the local news media about the latest killing.

This was a brutal murder, a very brutal murder. The man we are looking for could be a maniac. The leads that we are following are that there are a number of people in the area that I know knew this lady. I have her diary. This lists a lot of people, names a lot of people, and I would like to see all those people, I shall be making inquiries to trace them. I shall treat as a matter of complete confidentiality any information that comes to me. Anyone can ask to see me personally and I think it might be helpful to some people if they came forward to see me, rather than me making inquiries about some of the facts that I know.

Domaille’s team of ninety officers had begun working hard to learn more about the murdered woman. It emerged that Patricia Tina Atkinson’s family had lived in the Thorpe Edge district of Bradford and she had two brothers. In 1960, when she was sixteen years old, she met her husband, Ramen Mitra, a Pakistani, at a dance hall in the town. She was working as a burler and mender at a mill in Greengates, Bradford. Perhaps it was an omen that they married on All Fools Day – 1 April 1961. They then lived for a short time with her parents before moving to their own home at Girlington, an area of Bradford next to Manningham. During this period both of Tina’s parents died. She and Ramen, known to most people as ‘Ray’, had three daughters during subsequent years and went on to live mainly in the area of Thorpe Edge where Tina had grown up.

In her mid-twenties she was attractive – slim and with long dark brown hair – and she liked a good time. She knew she looked alluring to men whatever she wore. Dressed in tight jeans and a blouse tied at the waist, as she was the night she died, she appeared quite vivacious. Tina – the mother of three and married so young – felt she hadn’t yet done any real living. She enjoyed men’s attention and couldn’t stop herself being unfaithful; the couple separated on a number of occasions, but then got back together for the children’s sake. Finally she left home. In 1975 she had been convicted for prostitution and her husband divorced her on 25 September 1976. He was awarded custody of the children. For a while at least Tina gave up the sex industry. She had met a man called Robert Henderson. They became lovers, but it was a strange, desultory relationship made worse by the fact that she was an alcoholic, and an uncontrollable alcoholic at that. More than that, she got into debt from accumulated fines. A short time before she was killed she went ‘back on the game’ to improve her finances.

Ten days before she was murdered, Tina rented a small flat in a purpose-built 1960s block in Oak Avenue, Manningham, close to the red-light area of Lumb Lane. The block of apartments, which had a flat bitumen and felt roof, was run down and in poor condition. Surrounded by large Edwardian houses, themselves converted into separate flats and maisonettes, the flats were built on sloping ground, two storeys high at the front and three at the back. Atkinson’s was on the ground floor at the back of the premises. To reach it from the Oak Avenue entrance you had to go downstairs.

The Friday night before she died, her boyfriend slept with her. They had sex when the effect of the previous night’s alcohol was beginning to wear off – at about four o’clock on the Saturday morning. On the Saturday night, 23 April 1977, Tina went out determined to have a good time visiting her regular drinking haunts, including the Carlisle Hotel. She had been drinking for most of the day. When the stripper who had been booked for the pub failed to turn up, Tina did an impromptu turn, climbing on to the stage. She knew she was good looking, but she was in no condition to entertain the Saturday-night crowd. Tina was totally out of control and things got rowdy. Instead of stripping down to her bra and pants, Tina took all her clothes off. An argument with the manager ensued and by 10.15 Tina was out of the door and on her way to the International Club in Lumb Lane. The last time she was seen it was by another street girl at about 11.10. Tina was weaving and staggering her way down Church Street towards St Mary’s Road, completely drunk, having consumed the equivalent of twenty measures of spirits.

The next day Robert Henderson became concerned for his girlfriend’s whereabouts and at about 6.30 on the Sunday evening decided to call at her flat. Failing to raise a response for his urgent knocking on the door, he forced his way in and made the appalling discovery of Tina’s body on the bed. She was obviously dead. He rushed to the caretaker’s and urged him to call the police.

During the inquiry, Domaille made time to meet with Tina’s ex-husband and children. ‘She had led him a terrible life,’ he said. ‘He was a Pakistani, an insignificant, ordinary fellow who did his best for her, did everything he could to help her. He wasn’t that hard up, reasonably well off money wise, but she was a bad girl.

‘I thought about why she may have gone that way, I thought about it a lot. She was in the Manningham environment where the girls get together and the girls talk. I’ve met and talked with a lot of prostitutes. They are people who have a great understanding of people in the main, a lot of them are mixed up and are to be pitied. Many girls do it because they have been driven towards it. Every now and then you meet one who is going to make her way out of it and they actually do.’ Yorkshire police officers can be as hard as nails when discussing women who take to the streets. Others working on the Yorkshire Ripper case over the years came to share Domaille’s view of most prostitutes as more sinned against than sinning. ‘Murder is murder,’ said one. ‘Even prostitutes are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, maybe somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother.’

The impressions of the boot print in blood found at the bottom of the bed sheet was later thought to have come from a Dunlop ‘Warwick’ wellington boot. However, since the bed sheet was crumpled it was difficult to determine the exact size, but a match with the boot impression found at the scene of Jackson’s murder was thought possible. The flat was full of fingerprints which then had to be gradually eliminated. The previous occupants were traced and had their fingerprints and palm prints taken for elimination purposes, but no matches were found. One set of prints belonged to a man who had returned to live in Africa, who was then traced and eliminated. A total of nine fingerprints were discovered which could not be eliminated. Domaille’s team began overhauling all the ‘live’ inquiries that were still continuing from the three previous murders. Nothing emerged that assisted their effort, with one exception, and that proved a red herring.

Tina Atkinson was a frequent user of taxis – even for the shortest of journeys. Every known taxi driver in Bradford, some 1,200 of them, was interviewed by Domaille’s murder squad, along with all convicted and known prostitutes in the city. It was during this phase of the operation that the inquiry went off on a false trail. Questioning taxi drivers revealed nothing of value. But a woman called Barbara Kathryn Miller came forward to reveal she had been attacked in Bradford two years previously. The thirty-six-year-old professional stripper was known by police to be an active prostitute in Wolverhampton, Derby and Manningham. She knew Atkinson well and was anxious to help all she could. She told of a man with a beard who picked her up in a pub in Lumb Lane. He drove a Land-Rover with a hard top and a long wheelbase. She could even remember the colour: blue with a dirty cream top. It was in a dirty condition, with a six-inch tear in the black vinyl of the passenger seat and a white square petrol can and sacking behind the driver’s seat. He drove her to a quarry in the Bolton Woods area of Bradford for sex. She believed it happened on either a Wednesday or Friday night at about 9.30 in March 1975. The punter told her to get out of the vehicle, and when she refused, he dragged her out and assaulted her, punching her stomach, chest and face. Then he threw her against the vehicle, banging the back of her head. The man fled after the woman began fighting back.

Putting the experience down as a professional hazard, she failed to tell the police. But now, in answer to the appeal from Domaille for prostitutes who had dealt with violent clients to come forward, she provided detectives with a description of her attacker which in some respects matched the description of the man who tried to kill Claxton and Tracey Browne, but in other crucial areas was wide of the mark. The woman said he was thirty-five to forty years old, five feet eight inches tall, of stocky build with untidy ginger hair, a full ginger beard and moustache, but with the beard cut short under the chin. He had blue eyes, a possible Irish accent with a slight Birmingham dialect, a scar on his left hand, and a blue and red tattoo. The photofit she gave police again bore a good likeness to similar descriptions from other women. However, it was the attacker’s use of a Land-Rover to which police paid most attention. A description of a similar man had been provided by witnesses in an earlier murder. Emily Jackson was said to have been spotted getting into a Land-Rover at about seven o’clock on the night she was killed, at the junction of Roundhay Road and Gathorne Terrace. He too was described as late forties with ginger beard and a scar on his left hand. Nearly 1,250 Land-Rovers registered in West Yorkshire were eliminated, leaving 159 untraced.

During the next three months the ninety officers investigating Atkinson’s murder made 2,300 house-to-house inquiries and 1,924 vehicle checks; completed 3,915 separate actions and took 2,161 statements. All to no avail.

Several years later Domaille ended his police career as an assistant chief constable in the West Yorkshire force. He then had a spell working for the Security Service, MI5. Now long into retirement and living in his native West Country in a town on the edge of Dartmoor, he still feels frustration and passion in equal measures about the Atkinson inquiry: ‘The only thing wrong with the inquiry was the bloody leader of the investigation – me – didn’t catch the man! What can I tell you? I tried and my team bloody tried.’

Four brutal murders and still no conceivable sign of the police catching the man responsible. News of the police investigation was now national headlines, covered extensively in the press and on radio and television. Sunday newspapers dispatched feature writers to Leeds to prepare in-depth stories. The London Weekend Television channel sent its ‘Weekend World’ team to the North to report on what it saw as a compelling story deserving in-depth analysis.

The pressure to solve these homicides was now firmly on George Oldfield and his men. It was the worst kind of professional nightmare for a senior detective. A sadistic maniac was randomly choosing vulnerable women as his prey and then callously slaughtering them. There was no motive as such, only the inner compulsions of a sick and twisted mind wielding a murder weapon. The only connection between the victims was that they were all women down on their luck with absolutely no relationship to the murderer. He appeared to have a burning inner desire to kill loose women. So far the Ripper had made fourteen children motherless, one of the few elements of the media coverage which registered in any emotional sense with the general public. That the victims were all prostitutes seemed to count against them in the public mind. While there could be sympathy for the children they left behind, their mothers received very little simply because of their active role in the oldest profession.

It was even harder for the various murder squads dealing with the separate homicides to persuade the victims’ various clients to come forward so they could be eliminated. Most men naturally feared exposure as clients of streetwalkers. A knock on the door and awkward questions from a police officer inquiring why a particular individual was in the red-light area on a given night would be understandably unwelcome in either the marital home or the workplace. The fact that the victims were selling sex ensured there was no sense of urgency among the public in seeing the killer apprehended. While the compassionate might sympathize with women forced to go on the streets, others with sterner views saw it as a sordid activity and had little empathy. The law-abiding citizens of Leeds and Bradford might have eagerly come forward with potential evidence if an elderly woman or schoolgirl had been murdered. But in the case of the Ripper victims they hung back. Senior investigating officers had to think of ways of keeping the story in the public eye in the hope of jogging a potential witness’s memory. In the red-light areas prostitutes frequented in Leeds and Bradford, actual witnesses seemed few and far between.

Yet again the local police exhausted all the tried and tested methods of solving murders. Yet again there were precious few clues. The only positive evidence was the tyre tracks found in Roundhay Park during the Richardson slaying. The team eliminating all the vehicles in West Yorkshire that could have left such tyre marks continued their foot-slogging work. Thousands and thousands of vehicles were being screened. But such huge and painstaking inquiries brought no returns and it was never easy trying to maintain morale among those given the day-to-day tasks of relentless door knocking.

Each detective taking part in this kind of inquiry has to live with the knowledge that a single false move, a question forgotten, a momentary loss of concentration, might eliminate the killer, passing over the real culprit and rendering the whole exercise futile. Such an error would leave the inquiry team working in vain, without knowing their quarry had already escaped the net. For the conscientious officer wanting to do everything he can to catch a killer, the strain of possibly making such a mistake must be enormous.

The easiest vehicles to screen in the tyre inquiry were done quickly. People who had not moved home and had kept their vehicle since the time of the Richardson murder could be seen and eliminated reasonably swiftly. It was thought unlikely that an owner would have changed all four tyres. The remaining unseen vehicles proved gradually more and more difficult to eliminate. The vehicle may have been sold, scrapped or abandoned. Each generated new lines of inquiry for the beleaguered force. Where someone said they no longer had the car, its current whereabouts had to be checked. There was also a critical need to keep the reason for the tyre operation top secret in case the killer realized the vehicle he owned might trap him. The tyres might be changed and dumped, or the vehicle crushed and turned into a three-foot cube of metal. Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry moved past the half-way stage and before midsummer 1977 more than 30,000 vehicles had been seen. For the Leeds murder squad under Hobson’s command, it seemed the best chance they had of catching the killer – providing he still had his car with him.

The process of recording who had been seen in relation to the Richardson tyre inquiry involved indexing vehicle makes and registration numbers on special cards, but with no separate name index of vehicle owners who had cars with tyres which could have matched those left at the Richardson crime scene. Although Peter Sutcliffe was the owner of one of the vehicles on Hobson’s vast list of over 50,000 potential suspects, his name as yet figured nowhere within the incident room card index system – though a record of the vehicle he owned had yet to be eliminated from the tyre inquiry. If Sutcliffe’s name should arise in connection with some other aspect of the inquiry, no one would be able to tell he had been on the list of potential suspects for the Richardson murder. There were still separate incident rooms for each of the four murders. With no computers available to handle the ever-expanding number of inquiries or the information they produced, the various incident rooms relied on the paper-led system: the keeping of various indexes relating to different aspects of the inquiry and the taking of statements – lots of them. It all took time and manpower.

In any area of Britain the number of police officers and their supervisors is a scarce resource. Precisely how much manpower was needed to devote to a ‘tracking’ inquiry that covered the whole geographical area of West Yorkshire as well as Harrogate in North Yorkshire was highly questionable. The normal pace of life in the region continued unabated, which meant other crimes also had to be tackled. Prostitute victims or not, the existence of a multiple murderer operating in the Leeds and Bradford area raised the stakes for a force CID already burdened with an average twenty-six murders to investigate every year, along with armed robberies, rapes, and sexual assaults as well as routine burglaries and vehicle crimes. Altogether in 1977 West Yorkshire Police had 128,000 crimes reported, including 5,000 crimes of violence. Roughly half these crimes were being solved.

Responsibility for not simply doing something, but being seen to do something rested ultimately with Oldfield’s boss: the chief constable, Ronald Gregory. As chief, he had total autonomy to run the operational side of the force as he thought fit. In legal terms, he alone had ‘direction and control’ of his force. As long as he carried out this task ‘efficiently’ within the terms of the 1964 Police Act, no one could tell him what to do. By tradition and by statute chief constables are independent office holders, a key feature of British democracy. A local police authority or watch committee could oversee the work of the police, but they couldn’t tell the chief constable what to do. The task of overseeing the efficiency of police forces rested with the Inspectors of Constabulary, who reported back to the Home Secretary. For generations in Britain this general rule for the well-ordered preservation of the public good had been observed: no one wanted politicians telling police officers who they could or couldn’t arrest. In 1968, Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, made the legal position of chief constables clear: ‘No Minister of the Crown can tell him that he must or must not keep observation on this place or that; or that he must not prosecute this man or that one. Nor can any Police Authority tell him so. The responsibility of law enforcement lies on him. He is answerable to the law alone.’

However, a massive investigation by one police force into four unsolved murders by the same person had its price. Manpower was stretched, and with it came a rising bill for police overtime. With the costs mounting, Gregory consulted with his local police authority and so ensured that the necessary financial resources to solve the killings were found from within the West Yorkshire Police budget. But it was also clear that something more had to be done for the public to continue to have confidence in their local police service.

De facto, the buck in 1977 stopped at George Oldfield’s first-floor office as assistant chief constable in charge of crime at the Wakefield HQ. For a year he had followed the normal procedure of handing day-to-day responsibility for each individual murder inquiry to the various senior investigating officers. In 1977, as the number of incidents involving the Ripper increased dramatically, there were sensational headlines and public disquiet. How Oldfield dealt with the pressures of the case became the source of considerable controversy over the years. That his response was to overwork himself, drink too heavily and habitually smoke his Craven A cigarettes, was undeniable. The mode of life led eventually to him having two heart attacks.

Later the spotlight would fall on Oldfield’s judgement calls. His management of twentieth-century Britain’s most important criminal investigation became the subject of unique official scrutiny. After a five-year killing spree by the Yorkshire Ripper, the failure to capture him became a national scandal and a group of Britain’s most senior detectives descended on West Yorkshire police. Their orders from the very top of the Home Office were to ‘Sort out what is going wrong’. This unprecedented move came after an outraged Margaret Thatcher herself told the Home Secretary that she was inclined to take personal charge of the Ripper inquiry.

But no one could accuse George Oldfield of being either lazy, uncommitted or a fool. He was typical of many who held similar jobs up and down Britain. He knew about crime, serious crime, and he was a good thief taker. Taking over as ACC (crime) from Donald Craig meant he had a lot to live up to. His predecessor had investigated seventy-three murders and solved every one. It had been Oldfield’s ambition, according to his wife, to become head of CID, and now he was in the hot seat. He had learned the art of mastering internal politics. Indeed, he could never have risen to assistant chief constable had he not understood the value of discretion or been in the habit of making enemies among the force hierarchy. There was, however, a persistent rumour among the higher echelons of the force’s CID that, when offered the job of ACC (crime), he had been warned he had to cut down on his drinking.

Professionally he was an enthusiastically hard worker who took his job very seriously and demanded an equally determined effort from subordinates. Though undoubtedly a leader at local level, he lacked the sophisticated knowledge and intellectually rigorous mind necessary to employ innovative procedures to break the deadlock confronting him. Normally a soft-spoken man, in the latter years of his career he could be mistaken for a country farmer. Rough shooting was his favourite pastime. He presented a bucolic appearance typical among those brought up in rural areas who have improved their station in life. He wore on occasions country tweeds, and his round face and cheeks bore the ruddy features of someone who liked the outdoor life and knew a good quality whisky when he drank it. However easygoing he was at home, his outbursts of temper at work were legendary, though not necessarily understood. He was essentially a private man, rarely speaking about his family, preferring to keep home and professional life separate. When riled by something or someone at work his anger could turn to fury in an instant. He could swear like a trooper, yet he was never one to hold grudges. Once an admonishment was delivered, so far as he was concerned it was over and dealt with, though those who worked for him frequently remembered it for years.

‘He could go bloody mad when he was angry,’ a close colleague and admirer remembered. ‘He would use abusive language and then it was all forgotten. You had had your bollocking. The next job you did for him, you were just as likely to get a pat on the back. Some of the other senior officers bore you malice; if you had dropped a clanger it was with you for life, but it wasn’t so with him.’

Oldfield ran a tight ship. He wanted to know about serious crime when it happened within the force area. A divisional detective chief inspector was expected to let Oldfield have information quickly, rather than keep him in the dark. ‘We had to ring in, he never objected to being told about something at three in the morning,’ said the same officer, who worked closely with Oldfield over many years. ‘He was quite happy, once he got to know you and how you worked, to leave a serious job that happened during the night to you. But you had to contact him before 8.55 the following morning. This was so he had the story when he was asked by the chief constable about it and when the headquarters press conference took place. If ever something came up at either of those two meetings, which he had every morning, without him having been told, you got the mother and father of a bollocking. If it happened a few times, you didn’t keep your job.’

He was born Godfrey Alexander Oldfield in 1924 and grew up in that area of eastern Yorkshire where the terrain of flat, featureless pastureland is strikingly similar to Holland and the Low Countries. He lived in his early years with his brothers, who were twins, amid the farming community on the far eastern fringes of what was then the West Riding at Monk Fryston, a small village tucked away out on its own a few miles from Castleford. His grandfather was the local blacksmith. Like many villages in those days it still had a working windmill where flour was produced. The surrounding farmland hardly rose more than twenty feet above sea level all the way to the Yorkshire Wolds.

Oldfield’s father worked for the LNER (the London and North Eastern Railway). When he was eleven the family moved several miles across the Vale of York to Cawood, where his father became local station master. It was another closely knit rural community, more a small town than a village, but it had its own branch line to the inland port of Selby five miles away. The line halted at Cawood, which had grown in importance historically because of its proximity to the River Ouse, in whose flood plain it lay. Its swing bridge provided the last crossing point on the navigable River Ouse before the ancient City of York ten miles away. Several other rivers fed the Ouse on its journey via the Humber to the North Sea forty miles distant. Formerly Cawood was one of the chief residences of the Archbishop of York, who had a fortified palace-cum-castle built there, and frequently the royal court moved there from Windsor. It was the place where Cardinal Wolsey was arrested and charged with high treason.

The move coincided with Oldfield attending one of Yorkshire’s top boys’ grammar schools, Archbishop Holgate’s in York, where he became known as ‘George’. Indeed, he insisted on the name being used because of his intense dislike of being called Godfrey. The family never used it. At home, and to his future wife, Margaret, who also lived in Cawood, he was always called ‘Goff’.

After leaving grammar school he worked briefly at Naburn Station, just outside York, on the LNER route from London to Edinburgh. His first exposure to iron discipline came as a young naval seaman during the Second World War after he joined the Royal Navy, aged eighteen, in 1942. He hardly ever talked to his family of his war service, either after he got home in 1946 or in later years. He came from that generation of stoical men made brittle by the experience of war who preferred to keep to themselves the awful truth of what they had personally witnessed rather than burden those closest to them.

As a twenty-year-old seaman he saw enemy action aboard HMS Albatross, a much-overhauled former Australian seaplane carrier. In May 1944, she set sail from Devonport and headed up the English Channel in a convoy towards the Goodwin Sands. In darkness, at four o’clock in the morning on the 23rd, she ran aground. ‘We were high and dry,’ Phil Mortimer, then a nineteen-year-old telegraphist from Poole, remembers. ‘It was dark and I think we lost our way. We had to wait for the tide to turn. We came under attack from German shore batteries at Cap Gris Nez. You could see them flashing as they fired, and then the shells landed, splashing in the water around us. It was pretty nerve wracking.’

Two weeks later, the 6,000-ton vessel was positioned off SWORD beach during the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast around Ouistreham. The Albatross had been converted specially for the invasion of France into a repair ship for landing craft. Its cranes could hoist the flat-bottomed boats out of the water so engineers could work on them. She was armed with anti-aircraft and machine guns.

Twice in late June she was hit by shellfire from German coastal batteries, which penetrated the upper deck, though the damage was superficial. Eventually she came under torpedo attack on 11 August, off Courselles, and suffered sixty-nine dead and many seriously injured, at about 6.30 in the morning. The torpedo struck in the forward mess-deck on the port side. Phil Mortimer recalls how the Albatross immediately keeled over to one side. There was a general power failure and the lights went out. In shallow water the surviving crew members managed to shore up the damage. She made her way heavily down in the water to the safety of Portsmouth Harbour, listing badly and towed stern-first by a Dutch tug, with an escort from the minesweeper HMS Acacia. On this difficult journey some twenty of those killed were lashed in their hammocks and buried at sea. Those crew members who were able were mustered aft to witness the skipper reading the prayer to the dead.

In dry dock in the minesweeping section of the naval base the water was pumped out of the Albatross. Another fifty dead lay below decks, most still in their hammocks. Members of HMS Acacia’s crew were among those detailed to go below and retrieve the bodies. They included a nineteen-year-old steward/cook from Blackpool, Frank Roberts. ‘Retrieving the trapped bodies was a really gruesome task,’ he remembered. ‘We were given a mask and a tot of rum and told to get on with it. Some of the dead we found stuck in the portholes as they tried to escape. There was a hole in the side of the ship the size of a bus. We wrapped up those still in their hammocks and brought them out. It was very traumatic and of course we had no such thing as counselling in those days.’ The bodies were then transferred to a landing craft and buried at sea off Chichester. Immediately afterwards George Oldfield was sent home on sick leave to Yorkshire, where he remained for six months with a stress-related illness.

In 1946, after demob from the Navy as a petty officer, he arrived back in Cawood as one of thousands of reasonably educated young men throughout Britain wondering what to do with the rest of their lives. The local village policeman recommended a career in the police, and Oldfield joined the West Riding force the following year. It would, he assured his family, provide him with a good steady job and a pension. It was time to get on with life and forget the awful carnage he had witnessed.

Oldfield was to become living proof that it was possible in Britain gradually to rise from humble origins via a meritocratic police service to hold an important position within the local community. Like Dennis Hoban in Leeds, he spent virtually all his career in the CID gradually rising through the ranks. Unlike Hoban, his postings were far and wide, from one end of the West Riding to the other. Harrogate for one job, Barnsley for another. By 1962 he was a detective chief inspector at Dewsbury. Two years later, he returned briefly to uniform at Keighley before being transferred to the CID staff at the Wakefield headquarters as a detective superintendent and deputy head of CID for the whole of the West Riding. In 1971 he went back into uniform as a chief superintendent for two years. Then, in 1973, he returned to West Yorkshire CID as its head, taking the place of Donald Craig, who had become an assistant chief constable. When the major amalgamation with Leeds and Bradford took place in 1974, Donald Craig held the top job in overall charge of CID. Oldfield was his deputy.

Generally he got on well with his senior colleagues. However, he did have longstanding problems with some senior detectives from the Leeds and Bradford force after amalgamation. Some of the city detectives had no time for Oldfield, nor did he for them. A great deal of the mutual distrust had its origins in an official inquiry Oldfield conducted during the mid-1960s into corruption among some city detectives in Leeds. Called in to investigate as a senior officer from outside Leeds, he was utterly ruthless during this inquiry, often undertaking forceful interrogations in an effort to get to the truth. He had the homes of suspected officers put under intense surveillance, then had their homes searched, and thus put pressure on them through their families.

‘The allegations involved taking backhanders from villains, taking things from people. We are talking about detectives,’ said one officer, familiar with the inquiry at the time. ‘Some of the Leeds lads on the Crime Squad were interviewed and they thought they had had a hard time, that they were treated like villains.’ In short, Oldfield did as he was supposed to do: his investigation was run on the lines of an inquiry into criminal behaviour. But the result was an abiding resentment amongst some officers that he had damaged officers’ careers unjustifiably.

Much of Oldfield’s effort during the corruption inquiry had centred on Brotherton House in Leeds, the City Police HQ and also the home of the local Regional Crime Squad in which some of the suspected officers had served. During the Christmas festivities that year, Oldfield was invited by the local RCS boss to their annual dinner. ‘He [the RCS boss] made a tactical bloomer,’ said one of those present. ‘It was a stupid thing to do because you do not invite someone who is conducting an outside inquiry of that sort to a Christmas dinner. George also made a bloomer in that he came to the dinner … when he came in we all walked out and went to another bar to have a drink. We had arranged that if he turned up, we’d leave as a protest. We left him with the boss.’

The same detective, who was seconded to the RCS, felt no personal animosity to Oldfield. Later he came to realize what Oldfield was up against when he returned to his home force and was subsequently himself asked to conduct an inquiry into a corrupt Leeds officer. ‘It concerned several thousand pounds worth of missing metal and an investigation that went bad,’ he said. ‘This officer tipped off the thieves. He didn’t take money for it, he was crafty enough to have gone on a foreign holiday with his wife and kids, paid for by the criminals.’

Oldfield was by nature a private man and remained very much an enigma. He virtually cultivated the image. Few of his colleagues got really close to him over the years. He and his wife Margaret, his longstanding friend from Cawood, had married in 1954. He was thirty, she twenty-six. Tragedy came seven years later when their six-year-old first born, Judith, developed leukaemia. The doctors told Oldfield that their little girl had just six months to live. Unable to give Margaret such heartbreaking news, he told his wife their daughter would live for another year. In the end she did survive another twelve months. It was a heart-aching period in both their lives. His wife saw Oldfield develop a nervous affliction as a result of the child’s death: a twitch in his shoulder, which never left him.

At work he showed the obsessive behaviour traits familiar in many senior detectives: long hours, a devotion to detail and the ability to sit through the night poring over reports, aided by cigarettes and whisky. But his home life provided an important kind of relief from the stresses and rigours of crime and criminals. He was devoted to his wife, who came from farming stock, and their three other children, two boys and another girl. The youngest, Christopher, was born when Oldfield was forty-one. They put the money aside to have them educated privately in Wakefield and all three offspring took up professional careers in, respectively, the law, accountancy and dentistry.

For a good many years the Oldfield family had to move with his job. They lived in a variety of police houses across the West Riding, in Dewsbury, Keighley and Wakefield. In 1968 they bought their first home, a bungalow high up at Grange Moor on the fringes of Huddersfield, 750 feet above sea level. From there it was a relatively quick journey down to the M62 or M1 motorways, which gave him easy access to most places within the force area. His journey to his office at Wakefield was straightforward: down the A642 and through Horbury into the city.

At home when the children were young he played with them and shared their interests as best he could. In truth the family did not see a good deal of him, but one almost sacrosanct occasion was lunch on Sunday, when the Oldfields ate en famille. Most weeks Oldfield checked the fish in the ornamental pond in his front garden, and at weekends he would poke about in his vegetable patch where he grew some of the family’s produce. At the outbreak of the Ripper killings he had just started work on building a greenhouse behind his garage. ‘He loved getting out of suits and into his old clothes to go out into the garden,’ his wife reflected. He also amused himself with old blacksmith’s and tinsmith’s tools, getting the rust off and restoring them to their original condition so he could display them in the home.

Margaret was a keen cook, and like many women from farming families she was good with the pastry and baking. When a police colleague occasionally visited the bungalow, she would bring out the results of her home baking with coffee on a tray, then discreetly take her leave so as to allow the men to discuss police business. Margaret Oldfield saw her role as keeping things normal at home. ‘If anything came up on television we would just laugh it off. We tried to keep quiet about the things he was involved in, so that he didn’t have to talk about it at home.’

His abiding sense of justice and personal knowledge of the fragility of childhood demonstrated itself in one of his inquiries as a detective chief inspector earlier in his career. He was brought in, again as an outside officer, to investigate criminal allegations of sexual assault against two young girls by a uniformed police officer. He particularly asked for a detective sergeant called Dick Holland to act as his bagman during the delicate inquiry. Holland had three daughters of his own. After some while spent gathering evidence, Oldfield determined that the officer was guilty, but they would have grave difficulty mounting a successful prosecution. He told Holland: ‘If we take this to court these girls will not stand up in court in giving evidence against a police sergeant and they will break down. It might ruin their lives.’ Oldfield had had a long talk with the girls’ parents. He wanted to ensure that the police service was not stuck with an officer who had been acquitted on a technicality of a serious offence against young girls. ‘What we want to do is get rid of this bastard. The girls have suffered enough. If they break down in court and he is reinstated, what are we left with?’

‘His whole attitude was that the police service had to get rid of this bad egg, but he was not having anything adverse happen to these little girls,’ Holland recalled. ‘Another investigator may have done it by the book and it would have gone all the way to court.’

While Oldfield was deliberately reticent at home about the crimes he was investigating, it was impossible for his wife not to see how he could be deeply affected by his work, especially when tragedy struck families with children. One night in 1974 the phone rang at 1.30 a.m. It was at the height of a series of IRA terrorist outrages in England. He answered the call and then put the phone down, telling Margaret: ‘They’ve blown up a bus.’ He got dressed and headed for the nearby M62, where a bomb had exploded on a coach carrying army personnel and their families back to Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire. He then led the major inquiry into the murders of a dozen people. Among the dead were two small children. He had witnessed for himself the horrendous aftermath of the bombing. Body parts were spread all over the carriageway. The carnage sickened him.

During murder inquiries, Oldfield always tried to spend as little time as possible at the post-mortem, perhaps as a result of what he had seen aboard HMS Albatross as a young man. He couldn’t bring himself to spend too long at the autopsies on the coach bombing victims, telling a close colleague that the mortuary resembled ‘a butcher’s shop’. Dick Holland, by now promoted to detective chief inspector, remembered: ‘He didn’t like post-mortems. He didn’t shirk his duty, but he did have the minimum contact with the bodies. He was a bloody good commander and gave the right orders [at the scene of the outrage], things like that came naturally to him. The sight of the children blown apart affected him like it affected all of us.’

Oldfield was to describe the coach bombing as the most horrifying scene of mass murder in his experience. It confirmed his view that terrorists deserved capital punishment. ‘I had the misfortune to see the terrible injuries inflicted on the victims … As long as I live I will never forget the grievous injuries suffered by those two children.’

After the first news of the coach bombing, his family didn’t see George Oldfield for several days. A week or so later he appeared to have developed a phobia about alarm clocks. ‘He told me to get rid of the clock in our bedroom,’ said Mrs Oldfield. ‘I know that incident affected him because he simply couldn’t rest, couldn’t sleep properly if he heard the ticking noise of the clock. He couldn’t stand the sound of the ticking.’