Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Michael Bilton
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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