Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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sense of urgency, enthusiasm and inspiration.
Experience had shown him the killer was most likely a local man. The victim lived in a new housing scheme within a development area, but with no local facilities to attract people from outside – no cinema, shops or places of entertainment. Anyone present in the area was most likely to be there because they were acquainted with someone locally rather than having stumbled on the place by accident. When the search for the weapon proved fruitless, Hoban tried another tack. A survey of every home in the vicinity was carried out. Every day detectives went to local houses armed with a questionnaire to establish exactly where every man in each household had been at the time of the murder and to see if anyone had noticed anything suspicious.
By such painstaking methods are murders traditionally solved. Reports filtered in about other attacks on women in the city, and while each was carefully probed, none could be linked to the murder of Phyllis Jackson either by method or motive. Fear among women in the city became palpable. There was a run on people buying door locks and safety chains, and stocks at hardware shops ran out in some areas. Special lifeline buzzers were distributed to the elderly so they could summon help if frightened. Some two hundred calls a day were coming in to the incident room offering information, and each call was followed up by detectives working long hours. At that time police officers were very poorly paid, so a chance of overtime was rarely turned down. Murders frequently made the difference for a young detective between having or not having a week’s holiday with his kids at Bridlington, Scarborough or Filey.
Every house within a half-mile radius of the murder scene was visited – without a breakthrough. So Hoban extended the search area by another half-mile. A twenty-year-old illiterate Irish labourer living with his wife in a corporation flat in Hunslet filled in a questionnaire that attracted attention. This former altar boy from County Wicklow, one of twenty-two children, learned many passages from the bible by heart, but he was a womanizer. He had been working on a sewer scheme near the murder scene and claimed that on the afternoon of the murder he saw a man running down Dewsbury Road. He identified the individual involved. But when the other man was checked, his alibi for the time of the murder was perfect – witnesses confirmed his presence in Leicester.
The Irish labourer had recently been released for larceny in Dublin and Hoban’s men were ordered to keep him under close observation day and night so he shouldn’t escape the net tightening round him. Finally, as is so often the case, forensic scientists provided the proof. Despite the fact that the man had washed his bloodstained clothing at his kitchen sink, the Home Office laboratory in Harrogate found thirteen fibres on trousers belonging to the suspect exactly matching those from clothing the victim was wearing when she was killed. Moreover, two hairs, similar in colour and appearance to those of the Irishman, were found on the dead woman.
Another protected inquiry masterminded by Hoban began on 2 April 1974, the day after Leeds City was amalgamated with the West Yorkshire force. Lily Blenkarn, an eighty-year-old shopkeeper known to everyone as ‘Old Annie’, had been brutally killed in a burglary that went wrong. She was severely beaten and suffered horrendous injuries, including a broken jaw and broken ribs. One fingerprint was found on a toffee tin and another on a bolt on the rear door of the premises, a sweet and tobacco shop in a terraced street. Hoban was convinced they belonged to the killer and organized a mass fingerprinting of all males in the area. They were invited to come to two local police checkpoints to provide their fingerprints.
It was the first major operation for the newly amalgamated force and it involved 150 detectives and the task force, a handpicked team of mobile reserves trained to work in major incidents. Some 24,000 people were interviewed in house-to-house inquiries, but some sixty men were unaccounted for. Some on the list had travelled abroad to Canada, Australia, Iceland and Hong Kong. Through Interpol they were traced and eliminated. The mass fingerprinting attracted huge media attention, including TV crews from America.
The killer turned out to be a cold, calm, sallow youth aged seventeen. He had persuaded a friend to give fingerprints in his place, allowing him to slip through the net. The one who impersonated him was the same who had given him an alibi early on in the inquiry. None of this came to light until the murderer gatecrashed a local party. When an argument ensued, he threw a brick through a window. Under arrest, his fingerprints were taken, and after a routine examination by the murder squad fingerprint experts they realized they had their man and someone must have impersonated the killer and given his fingerprints twice. Hoban said it taught him a valuable lesson. Never take anything for granted. ‘Should mass fingerprinting be required again – people would be fingerprinted in their own front room.’ It had been too easy for a killer determined to cover his tracks to collude with someone else to cover up his crime. Hoban’s inquiry had been thrown completely off the trail for a while.
Dennis Hoban’s bid to find the killer of Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson was an ambition that completely eluded him. He felt utterly frustrated, but he had other concerns. The huge volume of crime on his patch never stopped growing. Other women were randomly murdered in similar style and for a while he briefly flirted with the idea that the same man might have struck again. Then his handiwork was ruled out. The file on the McCann and Jackson murders remained open, but resources eventually had to be switched elsewhere. There was a horrible but unremitting truth he had to reconcile himself to: unless the killer struck again the chances of catching him were slim. So long as the murderer kept his head down, the investigation would go nowhere. Another poor unfortunate soul was probably going to die before this man could be put away.
3
‘A Man with a Beard’
In 1963, a seventeen-year-old youth called Peter Sutcliffe appeared before local magistrates accused by Keighley Police of driving unaccompanied while being a provisional licence holder and for failing to display L-plates. There was a similar traffic conviction against him in May the following year at Bradford City Magistrates Court. They were the first of his eleven motoring convictions and an innocuous introduction to the judicial process. But a year later came a more serious encounter. Peter Sutcliffe’s first criminal conviction.
On 17 May 1965 he was fined £5 with £2 7s. 6d. costs at the Bingley West Riding Magistrates Court for attempting to steal from an unattended motor vehicle. The brown-eyed labourer, with black curly hair and (at that time) a fresh, clean-shaven complexion, had been caught ‘bang-to-rights’ trying to break into cars. It had happened on a quiet Sunday night the previous March, in Old Main Street, Bingley, beside the river Aire, not far from his home on the other side of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Cornwall Road, in the Gilstead area of Bingley. He and another youth, Eric Robinson, had been seen trying the door handles of a locked car that had property left on the rear seat. They were disturbed by two people who saw the pair then try the door handles of other cars parked near by. Police were called and a Constable Thornley quickly arrested the youth who would, ten years later, start a series of murderous attacks that became notorious in the annals of crime.
This conviction generated two separate official records: the first at the West Riding Regional Criminal Record Office at Wakefield, the second at the Central Criminal Record Office at New Scotland Yard in London. Each record detailed Sutcliffe’s name, age, date of birth, address, description and information about the offence. More motoring convictions followed in 1965 and 1966, but these were never filed at the criminal record offices.
The next recorded criminal violation by Peter Sutcliffe was during the early hours of 30 September 1969, in the Manningham area of Bradford, close to the city’s red-light district. He was seen late at night sitting in a motor vehicle deliberately trying to be unobtrusive, with the engine running quietly and the lights switched off. When a police officer called Bland approached the vehicle, Sutcliffe immediately drove off at high speed. A search was carried out and the officer later found the car unattended a short distance away. When nearby gardens were searched, Sutcliffe was caught and arrested. In his possession was a hammer.
Questioned by police, he could not provide a satisfactory explanation for having the hammer, but denied criminal intent. He was charged only with the banal offence of going equipped to steal rather than being in possession of an offensive weapon. We now know from Peter Sutcliffe’s own words that he fully intended attacking a woman that night, but the police