Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Michael Bilton
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long list of vehicle owners was compiled. The cards which had earlier been completed during the special night duty check in Chapeltown were cross-checked to eliminate those already examined. What in effect was happening was a mass elimination exercise on the basis of gradually purging vehicle registration numbers until what you had left was the car you were searching for. Hobson rightly gambled that, since all three murders so far had involved the Leeds red-light area, it was reasonable to begin looking in West Yorkshire first. But there was a danger that the vehicle might have been scrapped, or the tyres changed, especially if the suspect became aware that police were making inquiries about tyres. For several years the tracking inquiry remained a highly secret part of the investigation.
The next stage was to develop an index card system for all the remaining vehicles to be checked by personal home visits by police officers. However, the index cards used were filed in registration number order, and then carried the owners’ names. Tragically, no index cards were made out for names of owners as a reference system in itself. Had an index such as this been operated within the murder incident room at Millgarth Street, then the name of Peter William Sutcliffe would have been referenced in connection with the tracking inquiry. Any officer looking up his name in connection with some other aspect of the Ripper investigation would immediately have seen that he owned a car which could have been used in the murder of Irene Richardson.
Even more tragically, circumstances conspired against Hobson and his team. They were simply overtaken by events – another murder and a very serious attack in which a victim survived. Demand for manpower in the investigation became totally overloaded. The incident room was operating a manual, paper-led system. There was nothing in the police armoury at the time to help them sift through the masses of information they were accumulating, let alone the mountains of paperwork yet to come as the bodies of Sutcliffe’s victims increased, along with the fears and anxieties of tens of thousands of women in Yorkshire and the North of England after the discovery of yet another woman found murdered at the hands of the Ripper.
The double tragedy was that Hobson’s team had broken the back of the tracking inquiry when a halt was ordered because further murderous attacks on local women demanded his manpower be shifted elsewhere. The drain on resources had been immense. Of the 53,000 vehicle owners in West Yorkshire whose cars may have left the tyre tracks on Soldier’s Field, only 20,000 car owners remained to be seen. Sutcliffe’s white Ford Corsair was among those on the list waiting to be checked.
5
Impressions in Blood
Just four words made the hair on the back of John Domaille’s neck stand on end. ‘Boss, we’ve got one,’ the voice at the other end said with an air of breathless desperation.
Domaille, the new head of Bradford CID just two months into the job, had answered the call that Sunday night in late April 1977 after returning from a teatime stroll. He was planning a relaxing night in front of the television when a detective chief inspector telephoned with the news that a thirty-three-year-old prostitute had been found dead in her flat in the red-light district.
‘I knew what he meant,’ Domaille recalled. ‘It meant we had one of these so-called Ripper murders in Bradford. I said “Okay, I’ll come over” and I went immediately.’ The DCI gave him a few more details. Her name was Patricia Atkinson. The woman had been convicted of soliciting two years previously. She had been found by her boyfriend at a block of flats in Oak Avenue, off Manningham Lane.
Detective Chief Superintendent Domaille, then a month short of his forty-third birthday, sped off in his car at about 8 p.m., and did not return home until the crack of dawn the following morning. He took the M62 across country towards Bradford, before turning off on the motorway spur, past a large number of factories and distribution centres located among a myriad of newly built industrial units. Then it was down into the city centre and on towards Manningham. His head was buzzing. He wondered who the pathologist would be. Who would forensics send? He wanted the best he could get. The new lab at Wetherby needed to send someone down immediately.
‘There’s so much going through your head when you get a call like that,’ he said. ‘What mortuary am I going to move this to? What time is the PM going to be, when am I going to see the press, which DCI will I have, which detective superintendent? What am I going to tell the boss? What am I going to tell the chief constable?’
The second he saw her he knew she was a Ripper victim. The DCI had indicated as much. Looking at her, he could see why. There had been a massive attack to the head; it was almost smashed in. The clothing was disarranged and there were curious stab wounds and cuts to the body. The signature was the attack to the abdomen. He had seen this before at the scenes of previous Ripper killings which he had attended as the senior officer with overall charge of media and community relations for West Yorkshire Police. Keeping the media onside then was an absolute priority. Now that he was the senior investigating officer, the man in overall charge, it would be no different. He and Dennis Hoban thought alike in that regard.
Going through his mind was the management of the crime scene and what followed. Domaille thrived on this kind of pressure, especially in his dealings with the media. Aware of the need to get it right, he thought of the first two murders and Hoban’s control of the crime scene. That had been total management. It had always seemed to work for Hoban in Leeds until the Ripper appeared. Now in Bradford, Domaille was working with a totally new set-up. If he didn’t get all the bits and pieces on the chess board very quickly, he realized, he would face criticism later. In his own mind he was determined to give the media all he could, even if it conflicted with George Oldfield’s instincts. The ACC (crime) was obsessive about not giving the press too much. He warned Domaille about not keeping enough back to use when he got someone in who was a serious suspect for a killing. Domaille could see the sense of this, but preferred to deal with a prime suspect when the time came. Of course you needed something held back from the press and television which only the murderer could tell you. You had to sort out the genuine article from the cranks who came in to confess to crimes they didn’t commit – but you had to catch your killer first.
‘I’ve always been very keen on telling the media what I’ve got because I believe in the people out there, there’s thousands of them. You’ve got all those eyes and ears working for you and they bring stuff to you. I didn’t have the snouts but I’d got the people. You don’t actually detect it by yourself. You detect it because of all the bits people tell you. This was the first [Ripper killing] in Bradford whereas previously he had been in Leeds. He’d gone outside his area. I wasn’t surprised because Bradford also had a sizeable prostitute area. I thought: “This person is not very far away” because it doesn’t take long to drive from Leeds to Bradford.’
The apartment block Atkinson lived in was seedy. Before he entered the door into the victim’s flat Domaille saw an old mattress from a double bed propped against a wall in the corridor outside. Someone had abandoned it there instead of arranging for it to be taken away. ‘Tina’ Atkinson, as she was commonly known, had rented a self-contained bed-sitting room with a separate bathroom and kitchenette, both of which were in a deplorable condition, with no sign of any effort to clean them. Domaille’s immediate thought was that the flat was used for one thing only: sex. The main room contained a bed, pushed into a corner up against the wall; there was also a two-seater sofa, a dressing table and a couple of dining room chairs. A flower-patterned curtain ran in sections right across the only wall with a window. On a three-drawer dressing table with a large mirror stood an empty vase and two ornamental glass gondoliers.
Two dresses, one a sort of shift with a separate belt, hung on coat hangers suspended from the top of the large double wardrobe, one from the side, one from the door. A third dress, which had also hung on a coat hanger, had been thrown on to the sofa, a simple two-seater affair with wooden arms. Two pairs of pants with black frilled tops lay crumpled on a sofa cushion. A few feet away was a three-bar electric fire, the kind which gave a glow of imitation coal. It was plugged in by a short cable to a socket on the wall. Above the socket, the wall was bare except for a map – an RAC road map of Yorkshire.
To Domaille’s eye the main room seemed reasonably clean. On a sideboard stood a pair of sling-back shoes with platform soles and a plastic tray.