Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Michael Bilton
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a Ripper victim and liked to show off her scars.’
To prepare for this undercover assignment in the pubs and nightclubs of Bradford, Megan Winterburn had ceased washing her hair, letting it go lank. She found a seedy outfit, including a rather old Afghan coat. ‘Mr Domaille said that if I dressed up as I normally do to go out, I’d stand out like a sore thumb,’ she said. ‘I had the most smelly Afghan coat, a raw suede coat with this horrible fur round the collar and embroidered sections on the front, and fur round the bottom. I went a little bit over the top with the make-up and tried to blend in with the rest of the clientele.’
During a night out she let Maureen do her own thing. Another detective accompanied them, keeping in the background but maintaining close watch as they drank and danced at West Yorkshire police expense. The pair built up a good rapport. On a few occasions Megan watched her new friend get loaded. She once asked her whether she always got this drunk when she went out. ‘No,’ replied Maureen, ‘it’s just that it makes me feel safe.’
Megan Winterburn, a married detective on plain-clothes undercover duty, handbag slung over her shoulder, was getting an education into the seedier side of life. She visited pubs she would otherwise have avoided and she had never been a night club person. To her Maureen appeared somewhat naïve and lived in an insular world, doing the same things, week in, week out. Going out drinking was part of her social world. But Megan didn’t find any of it the least bit offensive. She had been brought up in the mining village of South Kirkby. Her father was a miner who after he was injured became a steward of a club. Policing was what she had always wanted to do and after a couple of years as a shorthand-typist after leaving school at seventeen, she joined the West Riding force. ‘Maureen was quite funny and entertaining when she had a drink,’ said Megan. ‘She knew everybody in every pub we went into and everyone knew Maureen. It opened my eyes to the sort of person Maureen mixed with. They were the salt of the earth. Everyone was concerned about her. The people she knew didn’t think any the less of her because she had been a victim. They didn’t shun her. She was mortified that [some] people were saying she was a prostitute, which wasn’t true. You had this very naïve and pleasant lady who was leading a normal life, with an active social life, labelled by the press as a prostitute. To have to explain this to your family, who were still coming to terms with you being attacked, must have been horrendous to her and her family.’
On one occasion they were on the Mecca dance floor. Suddenly Maureen stood stock still and stared at a man across the room. ‘I said, “What’s the matter?” She shook her head and said, “Nothing.” I said, “Yes there is, what is it?” She said, “It’s him over there.” I’ll never forget him. He didn’t have a gap in his teeth and it wasn’t Sutcliffe, but he did have a lot of jet-black curly hair. Obviously her subconscious had said: “The hair.”’ The man was checked out and eliminated quickly.
Another time the pair were pub crawling in Manningham Lane, close to where the prostitutes hung out. A young colleague of Winterburn’s, in the dark about the operation, came into the pub. ‘I recognized him and he was looking at me and I was looking away, trying to make him not look at me. Eventually he plucked up courage and walked over to me and said: “What are you doing here, Sarge, dressed like that?” I remember taking the lad out to the toilet to have an appropriate word. I pinned him against the wall and told him to leave. It was serious and I couldn’t afford to let my guard slip.’
The undercover operation with Maureen Long, though it showed commendable courage on her part, went nowhere. She failed to recognize her would-be killer. The rest of the murder squad had plenty of other avenues to explore. The bosses knew proactive policing was working, for the clampdown against prostitutes and the covert operations in Chapeltown were clearly having an effect, the most important being that they appeared to have driven the Ripper back to strike again in Bradford.
Oldfield immediately stepped up the covert observations recording the registration numbers of vehicles in the red-light areas, extending them from Chapeltown to Manningham in Bradford. The attack on Long was treated as attempted murder. A major effort was mounted to find everyone who had been at the Mecca Ballroom on the Saturday night. Thousands were interviewed during the inquiry. It led nowhere. The information provided by the security guard was critical. In response a search was launched for Mark II Ford Cortina owners in West Yorkshire. Three thousand owners were interviewed and no positive evidence obtained.
More crucially, Jim Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry was, over his profound objections, brought to an abrupt halt because the Mark II Ford Cortina was not on the list of vehicles which could have left the tyre marks at the Richardson murder scene. (As we now know, the Ford Cortina inquiry was a complete red herring. The security guard had seen Peter Sutcliffe’s car leaving the scene of Long’s attack, except he was driving a white Ford Corsair – which was on Hobson’s list of ‘tracking’ inquiry vehicles waiting to be eliminated.) But Oldfield was faced with a massive problem – lack of manpower. Eliminating 30,000 vehicles had been a colossal task, and Oldfield felt the remaining 20,000 vehicles would take forever to check. Experience had shown that, as you got nearer the end of such an inquiry, progress on eliminating one vehicle took far longer than the straightforward checks at the beginning. As an inquiry continued, the man hours that went into it got higher and higher in relation to the finished product, while the actual productivity of the investigating team got lower and lower. All the difficult vehicle checks were those that had dragged on and were left to the end. They were cars that had been sold to gypsies six times under false names, had gone through car auctions, had changed owners, had been stolen, written off or not correctly recorded on the fledgling PNC.
Oldfield thus found himself in a complete bind. He had major murder inquiries involving a maniac on the loose going on in Leeds and Bradford, and the tyre inquiry seemed never ending, with no assurance of success. ‘We were desperate for men,’ Holland said. ‘If you were warm and breathing you were on the bloody Ripper case. We had checked roughly 30,000 vehicles and eliminated those, but there were in fact 22,000 to go … Sutcliffe’s vehicle was in there and unfortunately it was missed.’
Hobson took the cancellation of the tracking inquiry very badly. In the incident room for the Long investigation at Bradford police headquarters, a few senior officers, including Holland, Oldfield and Hobson, were standing in a corner late one afternoon when Oldfield broke the news as a fait accompli. Hobson had seen the tyre inquiry as the one good chance to find the killer. They had a positive clue from a murder scene and his inquiry ought to run its course. Now they were suddenly looking for a Ford Cortina. Oldfield believed the Ripper had changed cars. There was a good chance the one which made the tyre tracks in Roundhay Park had been destroyed. Hobson was furious, visibly angry and muttering under his breath. But the decision had been made. The Leeds murder squad believed Oldfield was being deliberately partisan because of his known disagreements with the senior city detectives. It was a fracture in relationships that never really healed.
The Ripper by now had murdered five women: McCann, Jackson, Richardson and MacDonald in Leeds; and Atkinson in Bradford. The police believed he had attacked Long, intending to kill her, and were now casting an eye over several other serious assaults on women. In reality there were eight other women that Sutcliffe had almost certainly attacked in the West Yorkshire area, though the squad had ruled most of them out as Ripper attacks because they could not rule them in for certain. Indeed, they were gripped almost by a phobia of putting an attack into the Ripper series, for fear it would turn out not to be his handiwork and might contaminate the investigation with erroneous evidence. Moreover, if the Ripper was caught and prosecuted for one murder he did not commit, he could escape justice. Thus Tracey Browne and Marcella Claxton along with several other victims were never included in the series, though there was an extraordinary similarity in the photofit descriptions they had given, which now lay unnoticed in police files. Day by day the cost of the investigation was assuming mountainous proportions: 300 officers had worked 343,000 man hours; 175,000 people had been questioned, 12,500 statements taken and 101,000 vehicles checked. The attempt to find the man with a ginger beard said to have been seen by witnesses in the MacDonald and Jackson inquiries was stepped up. Police had 117 tips of men who bore such a description. They traced fifty-six such men and eliminated them; the rest were never found because there was no real clue to their identity. Already inside the mountain of paper were