Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper

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.