Читать книгу Wicked Beyond Belief - Michael Bilton - Страница 9

Exactly twenty-nine minutes after the body of Wilma McCann was found, the telephone rang beside Hoban’s bed. It was at 8.10 a.m. Early-morning calls were nothing new for the head of Leeds CID. He had been sound asleep for nearly an hour, having crawled between the sheets next to his wife, Betty, not long before dawn. He had been up since 1 a.m. at a murder scene in another part of the city for most of the night. A phone call now was the last thing he needed. The control room at Wakefield was on the line. ‘A murder, sir,’ the operator said. ‘A woman, at the Prince Philip playing fields, Scott Hall Road, Chapeltown. Found by the milkman, sir. The local police surgeon is at the scene already and Mr Craig is on his way.’ Craig! The assistant chief constable in charge of crime was turning out. That settled it – Hoban couldn’t take his time, he wanted to be there before him.

Betty was already downstairs making a cup of tea. She knew what to expect. No point in making him breakfast. He’d be up and off. He’d wash and shave, take his insulin, get dressed. Then he’d be gone. She knew it would be midnight before she saw him again. ‘There’s another murder, young woman this time in Chapeltown,’ he said downstairs in the hallway, kissing her on the cheek and saying goodbye at the same time. ‘Dennis …’ she hardly had time to say ‘take care’ before he was gone. Through the front-room window she saw him reverse his blue Daimler on to the road and drive off. For the umpteenth hundred time in thirty years of marriage, Betty was left alone while her husband went chasing criminals.

A freelance photographer arrived at the playing field before Hoban. The scenes of crime team had not yet put up a tarpaulin screen to shield the body from prying eyes. A uniformed officer prevented the freelance going any further. A 500 mm telephoto lens was clipped on to his Nikon camera. Looking through the eyepiece, he could clearly see one hundred yards away the body of a woman on its back, trousers above her ankles. Just then several figures moved into the framed image from left and right. Two uniform constables from the area traffic car were dragging a crude canvas screen closer towards the woman. And just then, moving slowly into frame from the right, the scenes of crime photographer arrived with his large plate camera already clamped on to its tripod. The freelance had only seconds to take the shot before the body was obscured. His shutter clicked and almost immediately the camera’s motor-drive whirred and wound on. A pathetically sad image of a murder victim in the morning mist was captured for all time on 35 mm film.

More newsmen turned up. Film crews from the local television stations; reporters from the Evening Post. There was some relief for the waiting journalists when Hoban arrived, clearly identifiable in his light-coloured raincoat, belted at the waist, his brimmed hat hiding his receding hairline. There was an almost symbiotic relationship between them and the local CID chief, and so a formal ritual was played out. They would wait patiently, perhaps go door-knocking to see if any local neighbours knew what happened. He’d do what he had to do, then help them. Those in search of a story and pictures needed the goodwill of the man in charge. They had to be patient and not take liberties, not impinge on the investigation. To solve this murder, any murder, Hoban knew he needed information from the public. The media were a valuable resource, so he’d personally make sure they got the story in time for the first edition of the Post and the first news summary on the local TV stations at midday.

Formal greetings with his colleagues were just that. Formal. It was cold. There was low-lying fog. The men around him stamped their feet, arms folded against their chests, trying to keep warm. Some had been waiting at the crime scene for nearly an hour since the woman was found at 7.41 a.m. by the passing milkman. The date was 30 October 1975, the eve of Halloween and only days to go to Fireworks Night. It was that time of year when local kids had been making effigies of Guy Fawkes, standing on street corners, asking ‘Penny for the Guy’. The local milkman was making the early-morning round with his ten-year-old brother. Mist hanging over the area made it difficult to see properly as Alan Routledge drove his electric-powered milk van into the rectangular tarmac car park of the Prince Philip Centre. He got out to deliver a crate of milk and there, on a steep banking on the far side of the car park, near the rear of the caretaker’s house and the sports field clubhouse, spotted what he at first thought was a bundle of rags or perhaps a children’s ‘Guy’. Out of curiosity the brothers edged closer. It was the body of a woman. Routledge ushered his sibling away and ran for a phone. He told the police operator he had found a woman with her throat cut.

The uniformed officers laid down a series of duckboards across the grassy area to the murder scene. Hoban moved forward, treading carefully on the slatted wood. Devlin, the police surgeon, greeted him. The woman lay on her back, at a slightly oblique angle across the slope, the head pointing uphill and the feet directed towards the edge of the car park. Her reddish-coloured handbag lay beside her, its leather strap still looped around her left hand. Her white flared slacks had been pulled down below her knees; both her pink blouse and her blue bolero-style jacket had been ripped apart. Her bra, a flimsy pink-coloured thing, had been pulled up to expose her breasts. Blood from stab wounds had leaked over to the right side of her body. The blood had dried. More blood from a stab wound on the left side of her chest trickled down to the edge of her pants, obviously, thought Hoban, because her feet were pointing downhill. Her auburn hair had been backcombed into a beehive style high above her head, but now much of it was spread out on the grass. She had worn a pair of shoes with an inch-thick sole and a four-inch heel. Her knickers were in the normal position covering her genitalia. They bore a large, colour printed jokey motif, part of which Hoban could easily read without bending down: ‘Famous meeting places’. A small button lay behind her head and some coins were in the nearby grass. The wounds were divided into several areas: a stab wound to the throat; two stab wounds below the right breast; three stab wounds below the left breast and a series of nine stab wounds around the umbilicus.

By the time the local Home Office pathologist arrived at 9.25 a.m. Hoban knew the dead woman’s name and the fact that she lived barely a hundred yards away. The back entrance to her council house in Scott Hall Avenue opened out on to the playing field. Neighbours told officers making house to house inquiries how Wilma McCann lived with four young children, separated from her husband. Two of the children had gone looking for their mother at first light when she failed to return home, after having left the eldest, Sonje, aged nine, in charge. Sonje and her brother went to wait at the nearby bus stop to see if their mother had caught an early-morning bus home. They were standing there freezing when a neighbour found them with their school coats over their pyjamas.

Nothing surprised Hoban any more, he’d seen all this before. Desperate women. Children neglected. Leeds City council officials had already been alerted that the four McCann children would almost certainly need foster care. No one knew at first where their father lived. Initially, because Wilma was found so close to her home, Hoban considered that this might be a domestic incident that got out of hand. Perhaps the former husband was involved. Then he heard that Wilma frequently went out at night to the local pubs and clubs to ‘have a good time’ – and she got paid for it. Like many single mothers on the breadline, she slept with men for money. She came and went via the back entrance to hide the fact that she left the children alone for several hours and frequently returned late at night. For this she had paid the terrible price. Although she had no convictions for prostitution, Hoban knew the fact that she was a good-time girl would be a major complication.

Standing there that morning, he hoped and expected they could solve this case quickly. The victim would surely have some relationship to the killer – a motive would be established and with luck and a fair wind they would have their man. The other senior man to arrive at the McCann murder scene was the forensic pathologist, David Gee, who knew Hoban well and admired his professionalism as a top detective. Each had earned the respect of the other. They had already spent most of the night together at the scene of another murder elsewhere in the city and Gee also had only just dropped off into a very deep sleep when the phone call came through alerting him to this latest case. Not unreasonably, he regarded it as a bit of a nuisance. He had made good speed, considering he had to drive in to Leeds from Knaresborough, twenty miles away, during the morning rush hour. Hoban filled him in on all he knew so far. Gee – notebook in one hand, biro in the other – stood as he always did, listening intently. For a few minutes he looked at and around the body. Eventually he drew a diagram and wrote a few cryptic remarks. For a murder involving multiple stab wounds it was what he would have expected. There was heavy soiling of the skin at the front and right side of the neck because of the stab wound on the throat. Blood was staining the grass beside the victim’s head. The blood trickling from the chest and abdomen had also soiled the right side of the victim’s blouse. Other spots of dried blood could be seen on the front of both her thighs, on the upper surface of her slacks and the upper surface of her right hand.

Gee’s very first thoughts were that the blood seepages running vertically downwards from the stab wounds in all directions suggested she had been stabbed to death where she lay. One blood trickle ran into the top of her knickers and then along it. When the panties were removed, he could see the trickle did not run down inside, probably indicating that no sexual intercourse had taken place either just before or just after the stabbing. Some blood soiled her long and tangled hair, but this was maybe due to blood escaping from the wound to her neck.

Once the body had been photographed, Ron Outtridge, the forensic scientist from the Home Office laboratory at Harrogate, moved closer and began taking Sellotape impressions from the exposed portions, hoping to find tiny fibres, perhaps from the killer’s clothing. Gee took swabs from various orifices – vagina, anus, mouth. Then he began measuring the temperature of the body at roughly half-hourly intervals. In an hour, between 10.30 and 11.30 a.m., Wilma’s corpse grew colder by two degrees, falling to 71.5°F. However, once the sun came up, the external temperature began to rise. By a simple calculation Gee determined that death happened around midnight, according to the hourly rate at which the body dropped in temperature. A gentle south-westerly breeze eventually blew the fog away and by 11.40 the temperature was 59°F, quite warm for an autumn day. The sky, however, remained overcast and there were a few spots of rain. For protection, the body was partly covered by a plastic sheet raised above the corpse on a metal frame so as not to contaminate any clues. By this time there was slight rigor mortis. Outtridge then removed the slacks, shoes and handbag. Plastic bags were placed over the head and hands and the body was gently wrapped in a much larger plastic sheet for the short journey by windowless van to the local mortuary. There the rest of the clothing was removed and handed over to Outtridge. A fingerprint specialist examined the body for prints on the surface of the skin.

The team, including Hoban and Outtridge, gathered again for the formal post-mortem at 2 p.m. It was a long and exacting process which took four hours. Most officers hate post-mortems. ‘It is not only the sight but the smell of the body and the disinfectants,’ recalls one senior detective who had been involved on countless murder inquiries. ‘The smell would cling to your clothing and when I got home I would strip, put clothes in the washer and my suit on the line. I would then have a shower but I would also lose my sex drive for several days. I think a lot of policemen are affected in this way.’

After the formalities of measuring and weighing the body, Gee quickly made an important discovery. Because Wilma had been lying on her back when found, there had been no examination of the rear of her head. On the examination table, her head propped up on a wooden block, he quickly located two lacerations of the scalp that had been concealed by her long hair. One was a vertical and slightly curved laceration, two inches in length, its margins relatively clean cut and shelving towards the right. This wound penetrated the full thickness of the scalp and through it a deep fracture in the skull could be clearly observed. Two inches to the left was another head injury, not so severe. Gee pointed out the two wounds, and later this portion of Wilma’s skull was shaved so they could be photographed prior to her brain being removed and studied.

Gee then began minutely examining the fifteen stab wounds to the body, trying to follow the track of each beneath the surface of the skin. It was a difficult task. The majority of wounds to her abdomen were very close together. It proved impossible to show the direction of each individual track of each individual wound. He had greater success in tracking the wounds to the neck and chest. Here, patiently, slowly, was a scientist methodically at work trying to learn what kind of weapon or weapons had been used to kill Wilma; and to determine more precisely how she actually died.

Gee’s final conclusion was that death occurred within minutes of the victim being struck on the head, then stabbed. He believed the weapon involved in the stabbing was more than three inches long and a quarter of an inch broad. She’d been hit on the head with a blunt object with a restricted striking surface. It could have been a hammer, but at this stage Gee favoured something like an adjustable spanner. There was nothing special about the stab wounds. The victim had been struck from the left side. Death had occurred probably early on the morning of 30 October.

Back in his office later that night Hoban began absorbing the information flowing in. House to house inquiries by the Task Force began to give a more detailed and increasingly depressing picture of Wilma’s lifestyle. Her former husband had been traced. Her parents were contacted in Scotland. Criminal records showed she had four convictions for drunkenness, theft and disorderly conduct. The local vice squad believed she was a known prostitute, though she had never been cautioned.

Wilma had been born and brought up near Inverness, one of eleven children. Her father was a farm worker. She had been christened Willemena Mary Newlands. According to her mother, she had been a good speller as a child, full of life but inclined to go her own way. Mrs Betsy Newlands said she had brought up all eleven children strictly. Wilma had to be in bed by 10 p.m. every night and when her father discovered her wearing make-up he took it from her and buried it in the garden. She could quickly become emotional, and when she did everyone would know about it. From leaving the local technical school she went to work at the Gleneagles Hotel near Perth. She had been pregnant with her daughter, Sonje, before she was out of her teens.

After Sonje was born, Wilma met a joiner, Gerald Christopher McCann from Londonderry, Northern Ireland. They married on 7 October 1968. A few years later they moved to the Leeds area, where five of Wilma’s brothers lived. She and Gerry had three children of their own in fairly quick succession – a son and two daughters. But by February 1974 the marriage was over. Wilma couldn’t settle, she hadn’t the self-discipline to adapt to either marriage or motherhood. She liked her nights out. And she liked other men. Gerry left and soon took up with another woman and had a child by her. He continued to see his kids after school and bought them birthday presents, Wilma did not ask for money from National Assistance but earned it her way – when she went out in the evening. Gerry McCann wanted a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery and Wilma was happy to give it to him. Court proceedings were imminent.

From early on after Wilma and Gerry separated, nine-year-old Sonje seemed to be doing most of the caring for her half-brother and half-sisters at the house. In fact Wilma came to rely increasingly on the little girl, who was expected to grow up quickly and take on board responsibilities for her siblings way before her time. As a mother, Wilma was hopeless. She had degenerated into a terrible drunken state. The house, when police searched it, was filthy. She was sexually promiscuous and irresponsible and Gerry, a caring father, had become increasingly concerned that, since their separation, Wilma was neglecting the children’s welfare and leaving them alone for long periods in the evenings.

Hoban knew inner-city Leeds intimately. He had worked there for thirty years, he knew the streets, he knew the back alleyways, the pubs and clubs. He met his vast network of informants there – the criminal classes who gave him tipoffs that made him probably the best-informed detective in the city. He knew the wide boys, the spivs, the con men, the burglars, the pickpockets, the whores, the fences. He also knew the serious criminals, the ones who thought nothing of taking a shotgun on an armed raid on a bank or post office. He had, over the years, locked up hundreds of criminals and earned himself a fierce reputation. Newspapers referred to him as ‘Crime Buster’, or more particularly as the ‘Crime Buster in the sheepskin coat’ – a fitting reference to Hoban’s liking for sartorial elegance in the city responsible for making the made-to-measure suits that clothed half the male population of England through chain stores like Hepworth and Montague Burton.

Hoban’s extraordinary gift for solving crime and his energy and dedication had marked him out from the beginning of his police career. Commendations from magistrates and judges at the assize courts and quarter sessions came thick and fast. There was an inevitability about him rising to the top. He could move easily among those who skated the line between what was legal and what was not. He would drift into a pub or nightclub and soon there would be an exchange of glances as he clocked one of his snouts, some thief, vagabond or ne’er-do-well with information to sell. Thirty seconds apart, they would make for the gentlemen’s lavatory where a ten-shilling note was exchanged for a piece of paper or a discreetly whispered conversation.

Hoban was not a great drinker. His diabetes put paid to that. But he enjoyed social occasions and he loved the status his job gave him. He thrived on working his way up from humble origins to the top, to being a Citizen of the Year in Leeds. And he luxuriated in his work as a police officer. It wasn’t a job, it was a way of life. It was like a drug. He knew it. Betty knew it. His two sons knew it. And murder was his greatest professional challenge. Finding the person or persons who had snuffed out the life of some undeserving man or woman from among the half million souls who lived in the city of Leeds – that took some doing. And Hoban was very good at it. He had been involved in almost forty murders and solved them all.

The day Wilma’s body was discovered and the hunt for her killer launched, Hoban returned to Betty at midnight, his mind troubled by the fact that Wilma McCann, because she persistently had sex for money, might not have known the man who killed her. In these situations the search for an individual who killed with frenzied violence was a top priority because they were such a danger. The early stages of a murder inquiry took precedence over almost everything. The following morning he was due to undergo firearms training on a local range. Before Hoban drifted off to sleep he had to remind himself he must contact someone and cancel the appointment.

For the next week, apart from Sunday, Hoban worked until midnight every day. On the Sunday he went in an hour later, working only a twelve-hour day, so he was home that night shortly after ten o’clock. Wednesday he took off and spent the day with Betty. He tried to be home by 10 p.m. if he could, but frequently it was impossible. Occasionally other crucial duties as the head of the city’s Criminal Investigation Department demanded his time which took him away from the murder inquiry, such as briefing the assistant chief constable, Donald Craig, or a conference with prosecution counsel in connection with other cases destined for trial. But Hoban, once these appointments were out of the way, kept himself and his officers hard at it. He made frequent appeals through the press and on local radio for people to come forward with information. He needed eyewitnesses who had seen Wilma, possibly with her killer.

As each detail came in, it was filed in the index system at the murder incident room. This in turn generated more inquiries: men friends, especially previous lovers, to be traced, interviewed and eliminated; vehicle sightings to be checked; follow-up interviews arising from house-to-house inquiries to be actioned, carried out, checked and then more follow-up actions sanctioned. A more detailed picture of Wilma’s movements on the night she died began to emerge slowly. She had left home at about 7.30, telling Sonje that the younger kids were not to get out of bed. She was ‘going to town again’ and would be back later. From 8.30 to 10.30 p.m. she had been in various city centre pubs. About 11.30 she was on her own at the Room at the Top nightclub, in the North Street/Sheepscar area of the city. The last positive sighting of her was about 1 a.m. when two officers in a patrol car spotted her in Meanwood Road. Other witnesses had seen her trying to hitch a lift by jumping out in front of cars, causing them to stop. She was roaring drunk. The laboratory report, while it showed no trace of semen in her body, did confirm she had consumed a hefty amount of alcohol, between twelve and fourteen measures of spirit. Reports came in of a lorry driver who had stopped near where Wilma was seen weaving her way down the road. Initially, there was some confusion, because another lorry was also seen to pull up and an eyewitness saw Wilma engaged in conversation with the driver.

An early search of her home produced an address book and so began the task of locating a large number of Wilma’s clients, though Hoban discreetly told the press they were searching for past ‘boyfriends’. He appealed for any not yet contacted to come forward. To label a victim a prostitute in this situation was unhelpful. Experience showed the public were somehow not surprised at what happened to call girls. Photographs and stories in the press about Wilma’s orphaned children were intended to create sympathy.

A week after Wilma was killed, Hoban had late-night roadblocks set up on the route she had taken when she left the Room at the Top. As a result, the lorry driver who stopped to talk to her revealed he didn’t pick her up in response to her plea for a lift home. She was totally drunk and clutching a white plastic container in which she was carrying curry and chips. He was heading for the M62 motorway, across the Pennines to Lancashire. A day or so later a car driver came forward to say he had seen Wilma getting into a ‘K’ registered, red or orange fastback saloon, looking similar to a Hillman Avenger. The driver was said to be coloured, possibly West Indian or African, aged about thirty-five, with a full face ‘and thin droopy moustache’. He was wearing a donkey jacket.

Six weeks after the murder, Hoban’s investigation was clearly floundering. All the normal checks had revealed nothing. The witness pointing them in the direction of the red or orange hatchback also mentioned an articulated lorry, which he said had been parked nearby. Despite inquiries at 483 haulage companies the police drew a blank. A total of twenty-nine former ‘boyfriends’ were interviewed and eliminated. They were still searching for the driver of the fastback car to come forward.

From December 1975 and into the New Year Hoban resumed more of his duties as the head of Leeds CID. There were important functions to attend – dinners held by the Law Society and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He had court appearances in Birkenhead as a result of a famous incident at Headingley when a protest group dug up part of the cricket pitch and poured oil over the wicket, causing the Test match against Australia to be abandoned. The protesters were an unlikely group, trying to right an injustice in the case of George Davis, a London criminal they claimed had been wrongly imprisoned for a bank robbery. It was a high-profile case and Hoban was intimately involved.

He made his obligatory appearance at the chief constable’s pre-Christmas cocktail party for senior officers at the force headquarters in Wakefield. The chief, Ronald Gregory, had reason to be pleased with the way things were going in his administration. Two years previously the West Yorkshire Police Force had merged with the big city forces in Leeds and Bradford to create the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police, one of the larger forces in the country, stretching across a wide area of the North of England. Gregory knew there would be tensions in bringing together the county coppers with the city forces. Leeds and Bradford had had autonomy previously, each with their own budget, chief constable and head of CID. Gregory hadn’t wanted too much disruption and hadn’t insisted on major changes in personnel. The cocktail party, at lunchtime on 22 December, was another getting-to-know-you session.

Hoban knew many of the senior detectives in the newly combined force. Before becoming the senior detective in Leeds, he had been deputy coordinator of No. 3 Regional Crime Squad, which covered a wide area of Northern England. As a detective superintendent he had close contact with his counterparts in the major towns and cities in the West Riding. The senior men were expected to get along with each other and make the amalgamation work. But the easy-going jollity of the cocktail party was in part an illusion. It still rankled the senior Leeds officers that the West Riding men were in the driving seat. As city detectives they were used to dealing with tough gangs and sophisticated crime. They believed the county boys lacked the hard experience needed to deal with ruthless criminals. ‘Donkey Wallopers’, they called them. However, on this occasion the chat was friendly. Most knew Hoban had an unsolved murder, but this was nothing new in their line of work. His reputation stood him in good stead. He was viewed as ‘a hard and occasionally ruthless man’ – ‘a decent bloke’ – ‘a fucking great detective’.

Renewed inquiries among prostitutes in the Chapeltown area over Christmas and the New Year of 1976 produced information about a fifty-year-old Irishman, known to drive a clapped-out Land-Rover, who frequented the area. It was a total red herring. Neither the Irishman, nor the driver of the vehicle thought to be an orange/red fastback car, was ever traced. (In retrospect, it seems highly likely that the driver of the fastback car was Peter Sutcliffe, who at the time drove a lime green K registered Ford Capri. It was some years before the Ripper squad learned that street lighting at night could often give witnesses a confusing picture of the colour of vehicles they were trying to describe. Sutcliffe had a swarthy appearance, which at night and at a distance could have led to him being confused for a light-coloured West Indian. And, of course, he had a droopy moustache.)

By the middle of January 1976 the McCann murder squad, numbering 137 officers, had worked 53,000 hours. Five thousand houses had been called at, these inquiries having generated most of the 3,300 separate index card references in the incident room. These in turn had spawned 2,880 separate actions or follow-ups. Five hundred and thirty-eight statements were taken. There were other clues which were never resolved. The vaginal swabs taken by the pathologist found no trace of semen, but there was a positive semen reaction on the back of Wilma’s trousers and pants. Forensic scientists at the Harrogate laboratory were unable to produce a blood group, most likely because the person who deposited this sample did not secrete his blood cells in his bodily fluids. (Possibly Sutcliffe masturbated over Wilma after he attacked her.) Keeping details of the injuries secret from the media, Hoban announced at one point that the killer seemed to have ‘very personal feelings towards Wilma’. He was clearly speculating elliptically that the frenzied nature of the attack and the physical presence of some sexual motive, i.e. the semen, perhaps made this a personal assault.

In Wilma’s home the scenes-of-crime officers amassed a large number of fingerprints. A fragment of fingerprint on a door jamb was never eliminated. A purse missing from her handbag was never found. To help jog the memory of potential witnesses, a woman police officer dressed up in Wilma’s clothes and a photograph of Wilma’s face was superimposed. Two thousand posters were distributed to shops and other businesses, but little hard information was produced. There was little to distinguish this case from many other unsolved murders. According to Professor Gee: ‘We simply had an unsolved murder in which the only slightly unusual feature was the use of two weapons to cause the injuries.’

Eight weeks and five days after Wilma McCann was murdered, Dennis Hoban was once more summoned from home before breakfast to the scene of the homicide of a woman. Soon, because of the nature of the injuries and the circumstances in which she died, he became firmly convinced that the man who murdered McCann had killed again. Newspapers began talking about a Jack-the-Ripper style killer on the loose.

There had been a false alarm only a few weeks previously at a ghastly murder scene which Hoban attended in Leeds after a ‘photographic model’ and her young child had been stabbed to death. The dead mother also turned out to be a prostitute and Hoban briefly suspected a link. However, this double homicide was almost immediately detected by a combination of good luck and alert thinking by one of Hoban’s former protégés on the No. 3 Regional Crime Squad. A mentally deranged seventeen-year-old youth called Mark Rowntree was quickly arrested by Detective Chief Inspector Dick Holland, stationed at Bradford CID. When the burly rugby-playing detective investigated the killing of a young man, aged sixteen, in nearby Keighley, he came away with a confession from Rowntree that included two other homicides he hadn’t even known had happened. The deaths of the woman and her son in Leeds were barely a few days old and Hoban, who hated bureaucratic paperwork at the best of times, had delayed circulating full details to surrounding divisions. Rowntree confessed to Holland his guilt in a one-man killing spree which included the sixteen-year-old youth, the prostitute and her son, and an eighty-five-year-old widow. He was eventually sent to Broadmoor.

Now, on Wednesday, 21 January 1976, in response to a control room telephone message, Hoban donned a warm, dark brown car coat and his familiar hat and made his way to a derelict area destined for redevelopment. Part of the Manor Street Industrial Estate off Roundhay Road included a row of boarded-up, dilapidated, red-brick buildings, scheduled for demolition. A uniformed inspector took him to an alley between two derelict houses adjacent to a cobblestoned cul-de-sac, Enfield Terrace. The passageway had been roofed over at some point, but the roofing had caught fire and been destroyed. Now the only parts remaining were charred timbers and the passageway was open to the sky. The front of the passage was open but the back was completely filled by masses of rubbish, burnt wood, scrap metal and junked office and factory furniture. The inspector told Hoban that at 8 a.m. a man on his way to work parked his car at the far end of the cul-de-sac almost opposite the passageway. When he got out of the driver’s door, he glanced to the right and saw a pair of legs lying among the rubble about fifteen feet inside the alley. At first he thought it was a shop-window dummy, then realized it was the body of a woman.

Treading carefully, Hoban noticed there were clear drag marks of disturbed earth from the front of the road, along the passageway, to where the body lay on its back. There were also small areas of dried blood on the surface of the cobbles and concrete on the ground. There is never a pleasant place to be brutally murdered, but this was a terrible location in which to die. The first police officer at the scene had earlier noted a boot impression in the roadway, near the entrance to the passageway, and pointed it out to Hoban.

A gale was blowing as the police surgeon, who had been waiting patiently for Hoban to arrive, pulled back a plastic sheet partly covering the body of a middle-aged woman. It had protected the corpse from the wind and rain. The body lay sprawled on its back just outside a doorway, a striped dress pulled up above the waist. The woman’s fawn-coloured imitation leather handbag lay several feet from her head, its flap open. Its contents showed her name was probably Emily Jackson, and that she lived near Morley, a town in the west of Leeds. The brown-haired woman had hazel-coloured eyes and nicotine-stained fingers on both hands, more pronounced on the right than the left. She wore a wedding ring.

Mrs Jackson still had on her red, blue and green checked overcoat and was sprawled on the right of the passage, just in front of the piles of rubbish, with the left arm by her side and the left leg stretched out straight. The right arm was directed out at right angles from the body, and the right leg was bent upwards and outwards, flexed at the knee and hip. The lower limbs were clad in tights, which were laddered and bore a large hole six inches above the knee. She also wore black panties, which were in position, though the left side of the upper edge of the tights was slightly displaced downwards, exposing the knickers. The feet were bare. One cheap-looking white sling-back lay on the ground beside the right foot; the other was a short distance away, closer to the right-hand wall. There was a muddy footprint on her thigh similar to the one in the soil at the entrance to the alley. The front of the body was soiled by dirt in various areas, especially the front and outer sides of the thighs. The face was heavily soiled with mud and blood, and there was bloodstaining on the front of the dress, on the right arm and right hand. The ground beneath and above the head was soiled by small pools and trickles of coagulated blood.

Professor Gee arrived at 9.30 a.m. to be followed soon after by Outtridge from the Home Office laboratory at Harrogate. Examining the spot where the woman lay, the pathologist bent down. The exposed part of the body felt cold to Gee’s touch. Hoban then took him to the front of the passageway, to the cobbled roadway, opposite a flat-roofed modern factory building, the premises of Hollingworth & Moss, bookbinders. Two duckboards had been placed either side of a large piece of hardboard that shielded some vital evidence from the elements. When the hardboard was lifted Hoban and Gee saw a pool of red-stained rainwater – diluted blood. The woman had been struck, probably at this spot, then dragged up the passageway. A chill wind blew strongly and there were intermittent squalls of cold rain. Gee and Hoban quickly agreed that preserving any evidence in these conditions was going to be difficult – particularly contact trace-evidence, which might have been passed from the killer to the victim in the shape of minute fibres of clothing. Gee was reluctant to record the body’s temperature, since this would have involved displacing the victim’s clothing. Instead he instructed that the body be enveloped in large plastic sheets and taken to the public mortuary for a more intensive examination.

Task force officers had begun an inch-by-inch fingertip search among the cobblestones along Elmfield Terrace. Ten officers in overalls, some wearing gloves, got down on their hands and knees in the wind and rain and painstakingly grubbed their way along the street. Among them was a twenty-four-year-old Bradford constable, Andrew Laptew. He had joined the Bradford force after sailing the seven seas as a trainee Merchant Navy officer. After experiencing the delights of South America, the Far East and Australia, he made a determined bid to become a police officer. Joining the Task Force had been an exciting moment, since its members regarded themselves as part of an élite unit. ‘Fingertip searches were back-breaking work because that is what we did – felt with our fingertips to see if we could find any clues,’ he remembered twenty-five years later. They found nothing to help the investigation.

The formal post-mortem began at 11.15 a.m. Until then, no attempt had been made to look more closely at the body, especially at the back. The victim was forty-one years old and slightly overweight, which made her look several years older. She was five feet six inches tall. Donald Craig, the assistant chief constable, stood close to Hoban watching while the normal forensic procedures in a homicide autopsy were applied. Craig was an experienced murder investigator, who had solved all seventy-three murders on his patch during a three-year spell as the West Riding CID chief during the early 1970s. It made him a bit of a legend and people either loved or loathed him. He was tough, uncompromising and, some even said, a bit of a bully at times. He had few social graces and rarely apologized for anything. The West Riding man and the Leeds City man respected one another. You couldn’t take away Craig’s track record, and he had attended dozens of autopsies, so he knew what to look out for. His father, too, had been a policeman.

For nearly eighty years, since the late nineteenth century, the mechanics of identifying and preserving evidence at crime scenes encompassed a process that combined logic with rigorous scientific method. Minute specks of material could prove vital, and in eighty years the technology had changed dramatically. Forensic techniques now encompassed the use of highly expensive electron microscopes and mass photo spectrometers.

The very process of photographing and measuring evidence, particularly in cases of murder, had been perfected initially in France in the 1890s by the clerk to the premier bureau of the Paris Préfecture of Police, Alphonse Bertillon. He had photographed the bodies of victims and their relationship to significant items of evidence at the crime scene, including footprints, stains, tool marks, points of entry among other details. Even today one of the cornerstones of forensic science remains the ‘exchange principle’ first developed by one of Bertillon’s students, Edmond Locard: ‘If there is contact between two items, there will be an exchange.’ When anyone comes into contact with an object or someone else, a cross-transfer of physical evidence occurs. They will leave evidence of that contact and they will take some evidence with them. The job of the forensic scientist is to locate this material to help ultimately identify the criminal and achieve a conviction in a court of law. ‘The criminologist,’ Locard maintained, ‘re-creates the criminal from the traces the latter leaves behind, just as the archaeologist reconstructs prehistoric beings from his finds.’

The process was necessarily painstaking, time consuming and expensive. What Gee, Hoban and their close colleagues hoped to achieve during the next seven and a quarter hours in the Leeds city mortuary was to lay the vital groundwork to help them find and convict the murderer. The application of scientific rigour was not the only process at work. A further ingredient was also required: an attitude of mind or, in more familiar terms, ‘a hunch’, born out of years of experience. Hunches were not mere guesswork. Even at this stage, Dennis Hoban was already speculating out loud privately to Gee that the murderer of McCann was likely to be ‘a long-distance lorry driver’. This intuitive judgement by the senior detective was based on several factors: the possibility that the killer carried tools in his vehicle; the failure to trace the likely killer from among McCann’s boyfriends, with whom she sometimes had sex for money; and the fact that many lorry drivers travelled through Chapeltown from the A1 to the M62 motorway.

As with the McCann autopsy, the process of garnering evidence was protracted. Outtridge examined the clothing, taping the material, looking for fibres or other contact traces; the fingerprint specialist looked for possible evidence that the skin had been touched. Swabs were taken in the search for semen; samples of hair were removed from the scalp, the pubic region and eyebrows. The outer clothing showed no sign of having been penetrated by stabbing. Two areas of dirt soiling on the woman’s tights were closely examined. They measured roughly three inches by four, on the inner and outer right thigh, and appeared several inches above the right knee. These were the marks resembling the sole of a boot, similar to the footprint found in sandy soil close to the murder scene. A plaster cast of this ridged impression at the scene had already been made by the time the post-mortem started. The area of the boot impression on the tights was carefully cut out before the rest of the clothing was removed from the body, which rested on the autopsy table. Along with all the other samples, these were later taken back to the Harrogate laboratory by Outtridge for microscopic examination.

As the clothing began to be removed, it swiftly became apparent that the woman’s bra had been lifted above her breasts and there was a huge number of stab marks to the trunk and back, some so close together as to give the impression of the holes in a pepper pot. They were very small, about one eighth of an inch in diameter, some round, some oval and a few very definitely cruciform in shape, leaving a strange impression on the skin, as if caused by an ‘X’-shaped instrument. Gee thought the wounds ‘very odd’ and subsequently contacted a series of eminent colleagues around the country to see if they could throw light on what had caused them.

Those who had previously attended the post-mortem on Wilma McCann immediately realized the significance of the injuries. It was clear her clothing had been raised to inflict the injuries and then put back in position. Moreover, when Professor Gee examined the head, two significant lacerations were found, one on top of the head, the other at the back. In the first the full thickness of the scalp was penetrated and in the depths of the wound a depressed fracture of the skull was visible. In the second, at the back of the head, a depressed fracture was found beneath the wound. Gee concluded both injuries had been administered with a flat round instrument with a restricted striking surface, like a hammer. A number of bruises and abrasions to the face and throat made it obvious she had been dragged on her face along the ground. When Gee probed deeper, minutely trying to trace the track of a particular wound, he found the blow had passed through the sternum and there reproduced the cruciform shape in the bone. There was also evidence that the neck had been compressed and the victim had been menstruating slightly.

On the body itself Gee counted a total of fifty-two separate stab wounds – in five separate groups – two at the back and three at the front. On the back thirty of the stab wounds were concentrated in an area roughly six inches by eight – hence the impression of a pepper pot. Twelve stab wounds were counted in the abdomen. The killer had turned Emily Jackson over and repeated his frenzied attack. There were so many stab wounds to the trunk situated close together that it was impossible to assign individual tracks to most of them. Since tracks of wounds passed both from the front and from the back of the body into the interior, and many passed into soft tissue, it was impossible for Gee to ascertain the length of any of the tracks with any precision. He thought the weapon might be between two and four inches long. Several people, observing the professor’s precise handiwork in trying to track the wounds, commented that a Phillips cross-head screwdriver was the most likely cause.

At the end Gee finally gave Hoban his scenario by which the woman had met her death. There were blows to the head, dragging to the site where her corpse was found, raising of the clothes, stabbing, turning over and more stabs, in the course of which the assailant trod on her thigh, then the clothing was pulled down. She hadn’t been drinking. Later analysis by the laboratory at Harrogate found semen on a vaginal swab, but it was thought this was from sexual activity prior to the attack. Gee, the scientist who preferred not to deal in speculation, could not say exactly what kind of stabbing instrument had been used – but among the strong possibilities was indeed a Phillips screwdriver. Neither was he totally sure this was the work of McCann’s killer. There were clear similarities, but he could not rule out coincidence. Hoban, on the other hand, felt more certain he was dealing with the same killer for two murders, a suspicion strengthened when he started to hear details of the lifestyle the woman had led.

The murdered woman’s husband, Sydney Jackson, had a difficult story to tell the officers who interviewed him. He realized he was under suspicion himself, for the circumstances of his marriage were slightly out of the ordinary, even for Leeds. His story came out in dribs and drabs over the course of many hours of questioning. As he told it, and as Hoban initially understood it, she was insatiable and had had many affairs. He turned a blind eye to her activities, which included having sex with many boyfriends because her sexual appetite was such that he could not satisfy it.

Later that afternoon Hoban gave another television interview in the murder incident room at the newly opened Millgarth Street police station in Leeds city centre. Looking extraordinarily dapper for a senior detective, in his Aquascutum suit, red shirt and floral tie, he relayed some of the few facts at his disposal, putting the best possible gloss on the woman’s private life. ‘She was a woman who liked to go to public houses,’ he declared matter of factly. ‘She liked to go to bingo. She led a life of her own, really. We are anxious to contact any friends, lady friends or men friends, who may have seen her last night. She probably went to the Gaiety public house, which is a very popular pub in the area. We know the van she was in finished up on the Gaiety car park this morning … She had severe head injuries. There are other injuries I don’t wish to elaborate on at this time.’

Sydney Jackson at first kept from police the fact that since Christmas his wife had been trying to solve their financial and income tax problems by working as a prostitute. Then, under an intensive interrogation which ended shortly before midnight the day his wife’s body was discovered, he finally admitted that he often accompanied her when she went out looking for ‘business’. No one in the local community where they lived had a clue. The truth was that Emily and Sydney’s marriage was a marriage in name only: they stayed together for their children’s sake. Each, it appeared, went their own way, except that Sydney not only knew of his wife’s secret life, he drove her to her work. He had gone with her in their van, which his wife drove, to the Gaiety pub, a mile from Chapeltown, on Roundhay Road. It was a large, modern open-plan building that became a popular local drinking haunt, particularly for West Indians. The pub was surrounded on three sides by back-to-back rows of small Victorian terraced houses. Strippers danced at lunchtimes and prostitutes regularly gathered there at all hours looking for punters. Sydney had gone into the pub for a drink. Emily went immediately to work. Sydney stayed inside, listening to Caribbean music being thumped out on the juke box until about 10.30 p.m. He then emerged to find his wife had not kept their rendezvous. They had arranged she would drive him home. Assuming she was with one of her men friends, he instead caught a taxi back to Morley and only discovered what had happened when police called at their house in the morning.

His wife had been born Emily Wood in 1933, one of five brothers and three sisters, who lived with their parents in Hemsworth, a mining village. The entire family later moved to Brancepath Place, Leeds. She and Sydney married on 2 January 1953, when she was nineteen and he twenty-one, and during the early part of their marriage lived at various addresses in the Leeds area. Six years later she left him to live with another man. In 1961 they resumed their relationship and eventually set up house in Northcote Crescent, Morley, and became partners in a roofing business which they ran from home. They had three sons and a daughter, but tragedy struck in 1970 when their fourteen-year-old son, Derek, was killed in a fall from a first-floor window.

Emily was a hard-working, energetic woman, quite attractive in her own way. Neighbours remembered her as someone who was always busy. Because Sydney didn’t like to drive, Emily picked up the roofing supplies in their battered blue Commer van. She ferried the men who worked for them from job to job, took the kids to and from school. She also did the paperwork for their business. The day she died one of the neighbours recalled how Emily was supposed to be picking her ten-year-old son up from school. ‘When I got back my husband was waiting for me at the bus stop,’ said the neighbour, who lived just along the road from the Jackson family. ‘I thought something was wrong. And when we got home the boy was sat with a policeman in their house … they [Sydney and Emily] often used to go out but we thought they were going to the bingo in Leeds, we never realized what she was doing.’

After the death of their son, which Sydney said Emily never recovered from, they began to live from day to day. ‘We decided life was too short, we would live for today and not bother about the future. Sometimes she would go out alone, and I would meet up with her for a drink later on. But I do know that she never went in pubs on her own. She’s been in the Gaiety five times at the most, and always with me. We got on together as well as most. We both believed in having a good time – after all, why stop in every night? We believed in having fun while we could.’

Sydney remained strong and reasonably composed for the sake of his children after the murder, but went through a difficult time as he realized he was under suspicion for killing his wife. The day after Emily’s body was found the door-stepping journalists were rewarded when Sydney opened his heart to them. Sitting in the lounge of his semi-detached house, holding his head in his hands as he wept, he told them: ‘I know what people are saying – but I didn’t do it. There’s nothing I want to say to the man who did it, there’s nothing I can say, but if he’s done it once, he’ll do it again. I just pray they catch him.’

The information about Emily’s secret life was clearly an awkward embarrassment. Emily’s married sister refused to believe the things being said about her: ‘It’s time someone denied what is being said about Emily going into clubs and so on. She just wasn’t that kind of person.’ Unfortunately for Emily’s relatives, the press had quickly been let in on the details of her secret life. Hoban had no choice but to admit she had been soliciting about the time she was killed. Moreover, he could not ignore the obvious link with the McCann murder. He believed he had a duty to warn women who earned money by selling sex that they were in mortal danger. ‘While this man is at large no prostitute is safe,’ he declared.

Sydney Jackson made frequent visits to the police station to answer questions, insisting he had not killed his wife in revenge for her becoming a prostitute. Eventually Dennis Hoban went to reassure him that they knew he was innocent. He pledged that his detectives would find the man who killed his wife.

The police had taken away the Commer van containing Sydney’s tools and equipment for his business, so he couldn’t work or earn money. The vehicle had stood, with the ladder on the roof rack, at the Gaiety car park when Emily was murdered. For a while police thought it might have been moved. They were told Emily went touting for business in the van, sometimes taking customers in the back for sex. One look in the rear of the vehicle told them this was an unlikely passion-wagon the night she died. The materials for the roofing business filled up the inside. It was filthy and reeked of bitumen. There was a huge vat for heating tar, gas bottles, cans of paraffin, rolls of roofing felt, half-empty bags of cement, buckets containing trowels and other paraphernalia. Forensic experts gave it a thorough inspection. It was a well-used and abused vehicle, with the front bumper almost hanging off and several dents in the rear nearside panels. Four fingerprints were found that could not be eliminated. They also never determined who left a fingerprint on a lemonade bottle in the van, or another on a sweepstake ticket found in Emily’s handbag.

Two days into the murder hunt Hoban appealed for women who worked the streets in the area to come forward. He announced that Emily used her van to solicit clients. ‘Sometimes she would leave the van in the Gaiety car park and go with clients in their own cars, when they would drive to some secluded place for sex. It was probably on one of these excursions that she met her killer.’ Newspapers quickly linked the murder of Jackson with that of McCann: ‘RIPPER HUNTED IN CALL-GIRL MURDERS’ announced the Sun on 23 January.

A month later a witness came forward to say she had actually seen Emily around 7 p.m. getting into a Land-Rover. Police had begun questioning all convicted and known prostitutes in the area. One, a nineteen-year-old streetwalker, had been casually chatting to Emily moments before she got in the vehicle. A description of the driver, a man with a bushy beard, was widely circulated and an artists’ impression issued to the media. All Land-Rovers registered in West Yorkshire were checked, with negative results. Some time later a man answering this description, the owner of a Land-Rover registered in Essex, was interviewed and cleared. He had been temporarily staying in Leeds and admitted consorting with prostitutes. However, he denied that on the night in question he had been out looking to pay for sex with a woman. He had a cast-iron alibi. Some detectives believe he may well have picked up Jackson, and even had sex with her, but denied it emphatically because he had been driving while disqualified. There were searches for other vehicles. Sydney told police Emily had spoken of one of her clients as being ‘funny’ – they failed to locate him or the Moskovitch estate car he drove. Another witness saw a dark blue ‘L’ registered Transit van near the murder scene around 3.30 a.m. A list of 329 vehicles registered in Leeds was drawn up and 278 owners were eliminated from the investigation. The remaining fifty-one were never traced. It proved another frustrating investigation.

No attempt was made to trace the boots the killer wore. Hoban thought too many workmen in the city used this type of footwear to waste time on this particular line of inquiry. It did suggest the killer was not an office worker, but was perhaps involved in manual work. He sent an urgent telex to police stations in West Yorkshire asking that anyone brought into custody wearing similar boots, who might have a vehicle containing tools, such as a workman’s van, be held for questioning. He also wanted local criminal intelligence cells in collators’ offices to begin examining records for the names of people convicted of series attacks on prostitutes.

Hardware shops were visited to positively identify the kind of weapon used. Hoban was convinced a cross-head screwdriver was the answer; but Gee, when he carried out a variety of tests using different tools, could not reproduce the same kind of wound. When he tried to produce wounds with a Phillips screwdriver, he found that although the flanges of the tip would indeed produce a cruciform wound, as soon as you drove the weapon in with any degree of force, the rounded shaft destroyed the pattern and left simply a round hole. He began searching for a weapon with flanges all the way up its length. ‘The explanation of course had to be that some of the wounds were not driven home with sufficient force to extend right up the shaft of the weapon, but there were fifty-two of them and it was difficult to follow the tracks of all,’ he said later.

Gee wrote confidentially seeking assistance and suggestions from a number of senior forensic pathologists around Britain and Ireland, including the eminent Professor Keith Simpson. All kinds of possibilities were offered: a carpenter’s awl; the implement in a boy scout’s knife for taking stones out of horses’s hooves; a spud lock key; a roofing hammer; and a reamer. Several pathologists backed the idea of a Phillips screwdriver. ‘I am surprised that you had difficulty in getting a Phillips screwdriver through the skin,’ replied Professor Keith Mant of Guy’s Hospital. ‘I have seen fatal stab wounds from such instruments as pokers, and in one case, a boy was stabbed through the heart with a poker during some horseplay with his brother, who had no idea that he had hurt the deceased, especially when he subsequently walked upstairs to his bedroom. He was found dead in bed the next morning – no blood having issued from the wound!’

More media coverage was generated when a police Range Rover, complete with flashing blue light on top, toured the Chapeltown and Roundhay Road area. It contained a large photograph of Emily Jackson and appealed for witnesses who might have seen her on the night of the murder to come forward. Loudspeaker vans toured Leeds, interrupting weekend rugby and football matches. Cinemas and bingo halls suspended proceedings to broadcast appeals from the police. Publicity about two prostitutes having been murdered within three months caused some local women to stop soliciting. Others said they had no choice and accepted the risks: ‘There is always a danger when you do this game, but you have got to find a quiet spot, a dark spot,’ said one.

Everything told Hoban that Emily Jackson had been picked up in a vehicle while offering herself for sex; she was taken less than half a mile from the Gaiety to Elmfield Terrace, a quiet spot with little street lighting, where she met her terrible end. It was a place to which prostitutes took punters. Some of the girls on the street told him they also had been to precisely that spot. Women gave descriptions of clients, particularly of ones who had been violent. A month after the murder the West Yorkshire Police issued a special notice to all police forces in the country, officially linking the McCann and Jackson murders. They also circulated a description of a Land-Rover driver with the bushy beard. Throughout the next year, a hundred of Hoban’s officers worked more than 64,000 hours. Nearly 6,400 index cards were filled in in the incident room, making reference to more than 3,700 house-to-house inquiries and 5,220 separate actions. A total of 830 separate statements were taken and more than 3,500 vehicle inquiries carried out.

‘We are quite certain the man we are looking for hates prostitution,’ Hoban said. ‘I am quite certain this stretches to women of rather loose morals who go into public houses and clubs, who are not necessarily prostitutes, the frenzied attack he has carried out on these women indicates this.’

He knew that a man capable of killing twice probably enjoyed it, which meant he would go on doing it till caught. He was never more serious than when he issued a dark warning to the public via the press: ‘I believe the man we are looking for is the type who could kill again. He is a sadistic killer and may well be a sexual pervert.’ Emily Jackson had been killed with a ferocity ‘that bordered on the maniacal’. ‘I cannot stress strongly enough that it is vital we catch this brutal killer before he brings tragedy to another family.’

After several months, to Hoban’s obvious distress, his men were getting nowhere. He had tried everything he knew to push the inquiry forward, but the search for the killer was like hunting for a ghost. Every line of inquiry that could be followed was followed. A thousand Land-Rover drivers were checked out. Nothing. Dodgy punters were closely questioned. Nothing. The prostitutes were asked time and again to rack their brains to identify clients who might have been capable of two brutal murders. Countless men were checked as a result. Nothing. An artist’s impression was drawn of the man with the bushy beard. Nothing. He wrote to local family doctors asking them to come forward with the names of patients who might be capable of killing prostitutes. He was frustrated yet again. The Patients’ Association said such a request would prevent men with violent impulses from seeking medical help. The British Medical Association merely restated that the relationship between doctors and patients was confidential.

Hoban was getting weary and his health was suffering. His diabetes was taking its toll and he began to complain to Betty about a pain in his eye. The strong possibility of the killer striking again continued to bother him. By the time the inquests into both the deaths opened in May 1976, he had little new to say apart from the fact that he was certain the two women had been murdered by the same man. Hoban also knew there was a desperately cruel paradox. If there was to be any hope of apprehending the killer, more clues were needed: fresh clues and lines of inquiry that could only be forthcoming if the killer struck again. Another woman would probably have to die. Hoban could only wait.