RIPPER FILES REOPENED
or mental problems. All unjustly spent the best years of their adult lives behind bars.
The police’s chaotic and ineffective hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was doomed by three fatal misconceptions – that he attacked only prostitutes, that a hoaxer with a Sunderland accent was the culprit, and that he only attacked in Manchester and Yorkshire.
But if they had widened their search to cover all attacks with a similar, incredibly rare, method, they would have discovered detailed descriptions that would have firmly pointed the finger at Sutcliffe, and surely have saved the lives of a least a dozen women.
Detailed analysis of the unsolved case files – one was carried out by police after Sutcliffe’s prosecution, but never acted upon – shows not only that his first attacks were on men, but that he operated across a wide swathe of England, and carried out many more crimes in his native Yorkshire. The first missed case came on April 22, 1966 – almost a decade before the Ripper’s first official attack – when Bingley bookmaker Fred Craven was smashed on the back of the head with a blunt instrument. Robbers made off with £200, leaving Mr Craven dead in a pool of blood.
Detectives soon had descriptions of two suspects: one was described as no more than 20, slim, 5ft 5in and dressed in a dark jacket, light trousers and a denim ‘Donovan’ cap – as worn by the Scottish singer popular at the time. Sutcliffe was then just weeks short of his 20th birthday. Within two days, police arrested Michael Sutcliffe, Peter’s 16-year-old brother, who was known to wear a Donovan cap, but he had an alibi. They failed to realise that Peter Sutcliffe fitted the description better.
He also owned such a cap and had repeatedly pestered Mr Craven’s daughter to go out with him. The case remains unsolved.
Almost a year later, on March 22, 1967, bespectacled taxi driver John Tomey picked up a fare in Leeds city centre. His passenger was in his early 20s, local, with dark hair, a moustache and beard. On a deserted stretch of road, the passenger smashed a ball-peen hammer several times into the back of Mr Tomey’s skull. As he came to, he got a clear view of his assailant, who had jumped out of the car and was trying to pull the driver’s door open, smashing the window with the hammer. Dazed and bleeding heavily, Mr Tomey managed drive away, but he did give a full description to police.
AGAIN, the case remains unsolved and was never considered a Ripper crime, although one detective tried to bring the case to the Ripper squad’s attention and was rebuffed ‘because the Ripper only attacked women’. According to their official version, he would not start his attacks for another eight years.
But the police know their authorised version of history is wrong. Their own files show the Ripper attacked a prostitute in August 1969. Sutcliffe was on one of his regular trawls of Bradford’s red light district with his friend Trevor Birdsall when they saw a woman staggering drunkenly along the pavement.
Sutcliffe suddenly got out of the vehicle and returned ten minutes later, telling Birdsall he had followed ‘an old cow’ to a house and hit her on the back of the head with a stone stuffed into a sock.
The woman survived to tell police the registration plate of Birdsall’s van. Sutcliffe admitted hitting the woman in a drunken argument, but the victim, fearful her husband would discover she was working as a prostitute, declined to press charges. Sutcliffe accepted a police caution.
The following month he was arrested in the red light district with a knife and a ball-peen hammer after a beat bobby spotted him crouched down in his old Morris Minor. He was arrested and fined for going equipped to steal. No connection was made with his caution for attacking a prostitute.
Meanwhile, the wave of unsolved killings continued. They have a sickening similarity, but police communication was so poor that no one even realised a serial killer was on the loose. On Saturday, March 14, 1970, a Cheshire farmer stumbled across
the body of Jacqueline ‘ Jackie’ Ansell-Lamb, an 18-year-old legal secretary who shared a flat with her best friend in Manchester. Jackie had been in London for a party the previous weekend and was last seen hitch-hiking back up the M1.
Her body bore evidence of both sexual assault and battering to the back of the head. The clear cause of death was strangulation with a strand of knotted rope. Revealingly, the killer had posed her dead body.
CRIME scene staging is present in just one per cent of homicides and forms a distinctive signature – indeed, it was a hallmark of the Yorkshire Ripper, who frequently killed and mutilated his victims, often face-down. He then dragged them to their final resting place, where he would typically, though not always, turn them over and arrange their clothing to display their breasts and his frenzied stabbing of the abdomen and groin.
Sometimes his victims were covered, on other occasions their clothes were placed nearby. Despite a huge police inquiry, Jackie’s killer was never found.
By September 1970, Sutcliffe’s fiancee Sonia had enrolled at a teacher-training college in London and Sutcliffe drove down to see her most weekends. Barbara Mayo was a 24-year-old trainee teacher living with her boyfriend in Shepherd’s Bush, West London. On October 12, she set out to hitch-hike up the M1 to Catterick to collect her car. Six days later her body was discovered in woods in Derbyshire.
She was face-down, with her clothing in disarray and her jacket spread over her. She had been beaten about the head and strangled with a ligature. A DNA sample, presumably semen, was found on her clothing –another common part of the Ripper MO. Barbara Mayo’s murder has never been solved.
The near-naked body of Gloria Booth was discovered at 8am on Sunday, June 13, 1971, in brambles on a recreation ground in Ruislip, West London. She had been viciously attacked. A post-mortem suggested she had been lying face-down for at least half an hour after she was hit over the head, garotted and mutilated. Then her body was posed: her bra and blouse had been pushed up to reveal her breasts and she had several nasty-looking wounds to the abdomen – evidence that the crime was far from a ‘typical’ rape.
Sutcliffe used a knotted garotte on his last two ‘official’ victims and was carrying a 3ft length of knotted nylon rope when he was finally caught in January 1981.
THE partial removal of Gloria’s clothing was similar to the staging noted in all of the murders for which Sutcliffe was eventually convicted. The mutilation of her pubic region had a strong parallel with several acknowledged murders. And police discovered distinctive bite marks as found in at least one other murder – made by a man with the same gap in his front teeth as Sutcliffe.
In all, the murder of Gloria Booth showed eight of the 11 often-seen characteristics of the Ripper’s MO, more than any of the murders he admitted. The uncanny parallels between the deaths of Gloria Booth, Jackie Ansell-Lamb and Barbara Mayo and the known victims of the Yorkshire Ripper are far more than a coincidence. Individually, the aspects of the Ripper’s MO are rare; together, they make it extremely unlikely that the killer was anyone else than Sutcliffe. Yet all remain unsolved.
The murders form just a small part of a disturbing catalogue of 30 unsolved cases that show distinct and unusual hallmarks of the Ripper.
Indeed, the correlation is as extraordinary as it is obvious. In 22 cases, a ball-peen hammer or similar object was used on the back of the head, ten were stabbed, eight were throttled with a ligature, 15 were stripped, ten cases were posed, and in ten cases the body was moved – although in a further 11 cases the Ripper was disturbed.
Sutcliffe’s unacknowledged crimes across the country range from 1966 to 1980, just before his arrest. Fourteen of his crimes came before the first ‘official’ Ripper attack in the summer of 1975. Few, as the Ripper police insisted, were prostitutes. Two were men.
Police have known for more than 30 years that the Ripper may have struck many more times. Scandalously, the cases have not been reopened. The families of the men and women he killed and the unacknowledged survivors have been shamefully ignored to preserve the blushes of West Yorkshire Police.
It is time for Peter William Sutcliffe to face prosecution for the full catalogue of his crimes. Only then will all the ghosts of the Yorkshire Ripper finally be laid to rest.
From Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders, by Chris Clark and Tim Tate, published by John Blake Publishing on June 29, priced £17.99. It is available for £13.49 with free p&p from www. mailbookshop.co.uk until July 5.