Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Michael Bilton
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Club in Lumb Lane. The last time she was seen it was by another street girl at about 11.10. Tina was weaving and staggering her way down Church Street towards St Mary’s Road, completely drunk, having consumed the equivalent of twenty measures of spirits.
The next day Robert Henderson became concerned for his girlfriend’s whereabouts and at about 6.30 on the Sunday evening decided to call at her flat. Failing to raise a response for his urgent knocking on the door, he forced his way in and made the appalling discovery of Tina’s body on the bed. She was obviously dead. He rushed to the caretaker’s and urged him to call the police.
During the inquiry, Domaille made time to meet with Tina’s ex-husband and children. ‘She had led him a terrible life,’ he said. ‘He was a Pakistani, an insignificant, ordinary fellow who did his best for her, did everything he could to help her. He wasn’t that hard up, reasonably well off money wise, but she was a bad girl.
‘I thought about why she may have gone that way, I thought about it a lot. She was in the Manningham environment where the girls get together and the girls talk. I’ve met and talked with a lot of prostitutes. They are people who have a great understanding of people in the main, a lot of them are mixed up and are to be pitied. Many girls do it because they have been driven towards it. Every now and then you meet one who is going to make her way out of it and they actually do.’ Yorkshire police officers can be as hard as nails when discussing women who take to the streets. Others working on the Yorkshire Ripper case over the years came to share Domaille’s view of most prostitutes as more sinned against than sinning. ‘Murder is murder,’ said one. ‘Even prostitutes are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, maybe somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother.’
The impressions of the boot print in blood found at the bottom of the bed sheet was later thought to have come from a Dunlop ‘Warwick’ wellington boot. However, since the bed sheet was crumpled it was difficult to determine the exact size, but a match with the boot impression found at the scene of Jackson’s murder was thought possible. The flat was full of fingerprints which then had to be gradually eliminated. The previous occupants were traced and had their fingerprints and palm prints taken for elimination purposes, but no matches were found. One set of prints belonged to a man who had returned to live in Africa, who was then traced and eliminated. A total of nine fingerprints were discovered which could not be eliminated. Domaille’s team began overhauling all the ‘live’ inquiries that were still continuing from the three previous murders. Nothing emerged that assisted their effort, with one exception, and that proved a red herring.
Tina Atkinson was a frequent user of taxis – even for the shortest of journeys. Every known taxi driver in Bradford, some 1,200 of them, was interviewed by Domaille’s murder squad, along with all convicted and known prostitutes in the city. It was during this phase of the operation that the inquiry went off on a false trail. Questioning taxi drivers revealed nothing of value. But a woman called Barbara Kathryn Miller came forward to reveal she had been attacked in Bradford two years previously. The thirty-six-year-old professional stripper was known by police to be an active prostitute in Wolverhampton, Derby and Manningham. She knew Atkinson well and was anxious to help all she could. She told of a man with a beard who picked her up in a pub in Lumb Lane. He drove a Land-Rover with a hard top and a long wheelbase. She could even remember the colour: blue with a dirty cream top. It was in a dirty condition, with a six-inch tear in the black vinyl of the passenger seat and a white square petrol can and sacking behind the driver’s seat. He drove her to a quarry in the Bolton Woods area of Bradford for sex. She believed it happened on either a Wednesday or Friday night at about 9.30 in March 1975. The punter told her to get out of the vehicle, and when she refused, he dragged her out and assaulted her, punching her stomach, chest and face. Then he threw her against the vehicle, banging the back of her head. The man fled after the woman began fighting back.
Putting the experience down as a professional hazard, she failed to tell the police. But now, in answer to the appeal from Domaille for prostitutes who had dealt with violent clients to come forward, she provided detectives with a description of her attacker which in some respects matched the description of the man who tried to kill Claxton and Tracey Browne, but in other crucial areas was wide of the mark. The woman said he was thirty-five to forty years old, five feet eight inches tall, of stocky build with untidy ginger hair, a full ginger beard and moustache, but with the beard cut short under the chin. He had blue eyes, a possible Irish accent with a slight Birmingham dialect, a scar on his left hand, and a blue and red tattoo. The photofit she gave police again bore a good likeness to similar descriptions from other women. However, it was the attacker’s use of a Land-Rover to which police paid most attention. A description of a similar man had been provided by witnesses in an earlier murder. Emily Jackson was said to have been spotted getting into a Land-Rover at about seven o’clock on the night she was killed, at the junction of Roundhay Road and Gathorne Terrace. He too was described as late forties with ginger beard and a scar on his left hand. Nearly 1,250 Land-Rovers registered in West Yorkshire were eliminated, leaving 159 untraced.
During the next three months the ninety officers investigating Atkinson’s murder made 2,300 house-to-house inquiries and 1,924 vehicle checks; completed 3,915 separate actions and took 2,161 statements. All to no avail.
Several years later Domaille ended his police career as an assistant chief constable in the West Yorkshire force. He then had a spell working for the Security Service, MI5. Now long into retirement and living in his native West Country in a town on the edge of Dartmoor, he still feels frustration and passion in equal measures about the Atkinson inquiry: ‘The only thing wrong with the inquiry was the bloody leader of the investigation – me – didn’t catch the man! What can I tell you? I tried and my team bloody tried.’
Four brutal murders and still no conceivable sign of the police catching the man responsible. News of the police investigation was now national headlines, covered extensively in the press and on radio and television. Sunday newspapers dispatched feature writers to Leeds to prepare in-depth stories. The London Weekend Television channel sent its ‘Weekend World’ team to the North to report on what it saw as a compelling story deserving in-depth analysis.
The pressure to solve these homicides was now firmly on George Oldfield and his men. It was the worst kind of professional nightmare for a senior detective. A sadistic maniac was randomly choosing vulnerable women as his prey and then callously slaughtering them. There was no motive as such, only the inner compulsions of a sick and twisted mind wielding a murder weapon. The only connection between the victims was that they were all women down on their luck with absolutely no relationship to the murderer. He appeared to have a burning inner desire to kill loose women. So far the Ripper had made fourteen children motherless, one of the few elements of the media coverage which registered in any emotional sense with the general public. That the victims were all prostitutes seemed to count against them in the public mind. While there could be sympathy for the children they left behind, their mothers received very little simply because of their active role in the oldest profession.
It was even harder for the various murder squads dealing with the separate homicides to persuade the victims’ various clients to come forward so they could be eliminated. Most men naturally feared exposure as clients of streetwalkers. A knock on the door and awkward questions from a police officer inquiring why a particular individual was in the red-light area on a given night would be understandably unwelcome in either the marital home or the workplace. The fact that the victims were selling sex ensured there was no sense of urgency among the public in seeing the killer apprehended. While the compassionate might sympathize with women forced to go on the streets, others with sterner views saw it as a sordid activity and had little empathy. The law-abiding citizens of Leeds and Bradford might have eagerly come forward with potential evidence if an elderly woman or schoolgirl had been murdered. But in the case of the Ripper victims they hung back. Senior investigating officers had to think of ways of keeping the story in the public eye in the hope of jogging a potential witness’s memory. In the red-light areas prostitutes frequented in Leeds and Bradford, actual witnesses seemed few and far between.
Yet again the local police exhausted all the tried and tested methods of solving murders. Yet again there were precious few clues. The only positive evidence was the tyre tracks found in Roundhay Park during the Richardson