Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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end. It was a place to which prostitutes took punters. Some of the girls on the street told him they also had been to precisely that spot. Women gave descriptions of clients, particularly of ones who had been violent. A month after the murder the West Yorkshire Police issued a special notice to all police forces in the country, officially linking the McCann and Jackson murders. They also circulated a description of a Land-Rover driver with the bushy beard. Throughout the next year, a hundred of Hoban’s officers worked more than 64,000 hours. Nearly 6,400 index cards were filled in in the incident room, making reference to more than 3,700 house-to-house inquiries and 5,220 separate actions. A total of 830 separate statements were taken and more than 3,500 vehicle inquiries carried out.
‘We are quite certain the man we are looking for hates prostitution,’ Hoban said. ‘I am quite certain this stretches to women of rather loose morals who go into public houses and clubs, who are not necessarily prostitutes, the frenzied attack he has carried out on these women indicates this.’
He knew that a man capable of killing twice probably enjoyed it, which meant he would go on doing it till caught. He was never more serious than when he issued a dark warning to the public via the press: ‘I believe the man we are looking for is the type who could kill again. He is a sadistic killer and may well be a sexual pervert.’ Emily Jackson had been killed with a ferocity ‘that bordered on the maniacal’. ‘I cannot stress strongly enough that it is vital we catch this brutal killer before he brings tragedy to another family.’
After several months, to Hoban’s obvious distress, his men were getting nowhere. He had tried everything he knew to push the inquiry forward, but the search for the killer was like hunting for a ghost. Every line of inquiry that could be followed was followed. A thousand Land-Rover drivers were checked out. Nothing. Dodgy punters were closely questioned. Nothing. The prostitutes were asked time and again to rack their brains to identify clients who might have been capable of two brutal murders. Countless men were checked as a result. Nothing. An artist’s impression was drawn of the man with the bushy beard. Nothing. He wrote to local family doctors asking them to come forward with the names of patients who might be capable of killing prostitutes. He was frustrated yet again. The Patients’ Association said such a request would prevent men with violent impulses from seeking medical help. The British Medical Association merely restated that the relationship between doctors and patients was confidential.
Hoban was getting weary and his health was suffering. His diabetes was taking its toll and he began to complain to Betty about a pain in his eye. The strong possibility of the killer striking again continued to bother him. By the time the inquests into both the deaths opened in May 1976, he had little new to say apart from the fact that he was certain the two women had been murdered by the same man. Hoban also knew there was a desperately cruel paradox. If there was to be any hope of apprehending the killer, more clues were needed: fresh clues and lines of inquiry that could only be forthcoming if the killer struck again. Another woman would probably have to die. Hoban could only wait.
2
The Diabetic Detective
Dennis Hoban liked what he knew and his entire life was spent living in the north-west quadrant of Leeds. It was his town, he knew its people, and via the medium of local television and newspapers they knew him. It was the city’s prosperity which had drawn his family there. Both his father and grandfather were Irish immigrants from Cork. His father had been first a lorry driver, then a sales rep for a haulage firm. Dennis was born in 1926, the year of the General Strike.
When Hoban became a fully fledged detective in 1952, Leeds was an overcrowded town bursting at the seams, with masses of substandard housing fit only for demolition. Some 90,000 homes needed demolishing, 56,000 of them squalid back-to-backs built a hundred years earlier eighty to ninety to the acre. Post-war housing estates were planned and built across the city, but the council house waiting list stretched out for twenty years. It made Hoban and Betty determined to own their own home.
Their first son was born while they were living next to Dennis’s parents in Stanningley, a working-class district well to the west of the city centre. Then they moved to nearby Bramley, where Betty’s widowed mother came to join them. In the late 1960s the couple bought a brand-new Wimpey home with a large garden on the Kirkstall-Headingley borders, even though Hoban was the world’s worst and least interested gardener. Neither could he turn his hand to DIY in the home, though he loved cars. Shortly after they married he had bought the chassis of a Morris 8 which stood on the drive of their home. Hoban rebuilt it with a wooden frame and aluminium sheeting, but his real hobby was being a policeman. Whatever cars the family possessed were frequently used in his job, often taking part in high-speed car chases.
While his close-knit family endured his obsession with work, all his working life Hoban coped with two ailments, diabetes and asthma. The regime of daily insulin injections was bothersome. Lazy about using his hypodermic syringe, he had no routine for taking insulin. Consequently there were plenty of times when he felt ‘squiggly’, the word he used for being hypoglycaemic. Then he knew he had to eat something sweet, usually a few cakes from the kitchen pantry. He would administer the insulin in a very haphazard way, never at specific times. Then it would be jab – straight into his thigh. ‘He didn’t look after himself,’ his son Richard reflected. ‘He didn’t live in a world where he could look after himself. He never ate well because he was at his best when he was in pubs and clubs and smoky dives getting information from his snouts.’
The family evening meal was often a snatched affair. He would arrive home, wash, shave, eat, watch the Yorkshire TV soap opera Emmerdale Farm, and then be off back to work. He rarely smoked. It would have exacerbated his asthma, already made worse in his early years by the fact that Leeds was one of the most polluted places in the North of England. Soot and smoke from the mills and factories were blown over the town by the prevailing south-westerly winds. For several generations those who could afford it had moved to the cleaner areas of Leeds in the Northern Heights, and ultimately Hoban and Betty joined them.
They had only just moved round the corner to a new and slightly bigger semi-detached house in 1976 when, a few weeks after the inquest verdicts on Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson, they learned he was on the move professionally. As part of a wider reshuffle among the senior management, he was being transferred to the West Yorkshire force headquarters at Wakefield, fifteen miles away. He was to be deputy to the new CID chief of the amalgamated force. A West Riding man, George Oldfield, was being promoted to assistant chief constable (crime). Within a few months Hoban had moved offices to the brand-new divisional police headquarters in Bradford, still as Oldfield’s deputy, but this time in charge of the CID for the entire Western area of the force.
Two and a half years after the amalgamation between West Yorkshire Police and the Leeds and Bradford city forces, the chief constable, Ronald Gregory, had decided to make crucial changes among the senior management. Moving senior personnel around would provide a better balance between the city and county forces. West Riding men transferred into the Leeds and Bradford divisions – some of the senior city boys had to bite the bullet and move to towns like Pontefract, Huddersfield and Halifax. A new culture was being created and these moves were not always popular. Enmities and petty rivalries abounded. Bradford police viewed Leeds detectives as ‘flash bastards’. ‘More gold than a Leeds detective,’ was a popular saying among the Bradford CID, a reference to their Leeds colleagues’ penchant for wearing gold wrist identity bracelets and rings bearing a gold sovereign. Leeds and Bradford officers called their West Riding colleagues ‘Donkey Wallopers’ or ‘The Gurkhas’ – because they took no prisoners, a reference not to West Riding detectives ‘finishing off the enemy’, but a belief by the city men that the county boys hardly ever got to make an arrest.
These important structural changes in the way Yorkshire and the rest of the country was policed had been a long time coming. The amalgamations, creating one big West Yorkshire force covering half a million acres and a population of more than 2 million, had been delayed for more than half a century. Bringing about cost efficiencies and rational organization to law enforcement had been a drawn-out, tortuous process. For almost a hundred years very little had altered in the way the various police forces of Britain were controlled.
By this time the West