Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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murder. The first was on a thirty-seven-year-old woman, Anna Rogulskyj, in an alleyway in Keighley. Five weeks previously she had been attacked from behind with a hammer and left on the ground suffering head injuries and a number of superficial slash wounds across her body. And on Friday, 15 August 1975, an office cleaner, living at Boothtown, Halifax, received two depressed fractures of the skull, one on the midline at the top of the head, the second at the back. Mrs Olive Smelt, aged forty-five, said she had before the assault been talking to a man aged about thirty, slightly built, dark haired and with a beard or some hair growth on his face. She did not think there was anything unusual about his accent, which again indicated that he was probably a ‘local’ man. One other feature of the attack became clearly visible when Mrs Smelt was examined in hospital. There were two abrasions on her back. One, twelve inches long, ran upwards from the small of her back; the other, four inches long, ran backwards on the right side.
Dr Michael Green, a Home Office pathologist based at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds who examined both women’s injuries, came to a startling conclusion: ‘It might be interesting to look again at the case of Mrs Rogulskyj, who was assaulted on 5 July, and compare the photograph of a wound on the abdomen with a wound on the back of Mrs Smelt,’ he wrote in his report to the police. Unfortunately, it would take two years for the attacks on Rogulskyj and Smelt to be linked to the murder series by the Ripper Squad.
Yet further assaults, by virtue of their modus operandi very similar to those already described, were also excluded from any series. An eighteen-year-old shop assistant was followed down the side of a field at 6.30 p.m. at Queensbury, Bradford, early in 1976. Her assailant then lunged at her from the rear, causing serious head injuries. He was twenty-five to thirty years old, of slim build, between five feet nine or ten inches tall, and with dark hair and moustache, dressed in dark jeans and a green jacket. Seven and a half months later, in August 1976 at Lister Hills in Bradford, a twenty-nine-year-old housewife was set upon during the early hours. Unable to provide any description of the person who assaulted her, she had stab-like wounds to her abdomen and injuries to her head.
In neither of these assaults was a photofit available. But a savage attack on an intellectually challenged West Indian woman in Leeds in the early summer of 1976 produced a description and photofit that perfectly matched the one provided in the Tracey Browne case at Keighley ten months previously. Yet these attempted murders were never linked, primarily because detectives in the Leeds case believed the victim misled them.
Marcella Claxton was a twenty-year-old native of the Caribbean island of St Kitts, who had come to Britain with her mother at the age of ten. She had had a hard upbringing at the hands of her father, and bore the physical and emotional scars to prove it. Educationally she was officially graded as subnormal, with an IQ of 50. However, this doesn’t square with the opinions of those who know her well and say it gives a misleading impression. While Marcella had always had a problem expressing herself, she eventually became a good mother to her children.
In 1976 she was unemployed and living in Chapeltown, the run-down quarter of Leeds that had once been a favourite residence of the city’s prosperous, and not so wealthy, Jewish community. They lived in large late-Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, originally the homes of respectable working and middle classes, many of which were later subdivided into flats. It became the second largest Jewish community outside London. Some 12,000 of the city’s 20,000 Jewish population lived in Chapeltown until the 1930s, when the majority began moving out to the newer, more desirable suburbs of Moortown, Roundhay and Alwoodley, leaving behind them, as J. B. Priestley put it in the 1950s, ‘traces of that restless glitter which is the gift of the Jew’. In their wake came other immigrants – Latvians and a sizeable community of Poles who opted to stay in Britain after the war, who established their own Polish Catholic Church in Chapeltown, and then West Indians and Asians. By the 1970s, however, the area was termed by the media ‘a Mecca of Vice’ or ‘a red light suburb’. The sizeable influx of immigrants from the Caribbean led the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1973 to describe it as ‘The Colony Within’. Chapeltown was ‘the melting pot for immigrants from many lands, for many years’.
Marcella was a single mother of two children (in foster care) and expecting a third. She was three months’ pregnant. She was poor, and the police believed, wrongly, that she was a prostitute. Marcella insists she was not a prostitute. On a Saturday evening in early May 1976 she went out late at night to drink in a West Indian club. At around five in the morning she left her friends, rather the worse for wear. As she walked back home along Spencer Place she saw a white-coloured car cruising the area. Eventually the driver stopped to ask if she was ‘doing business’. She says she said ‘No’, but the driver got out, took her by the hand, led her to his car and said he was going to take her to Roundhay Park for sex. At the park the driver asked her to take off her clothes. He gave her five pounds. She told him she wanted to urinate and went to hide among the bushes until, believing the man had gone, she returned ten minutes later to retrieve her shoes. At this point she received a number of vicious blows on the head. Knocked to the ground, she pretended to be unconscious. The attack stopped and the man drove off. Marcella claimed in a later interview that he had masturbated in front of her before walking back to his car. He told her: ‘Don’t phone the police.’
With her head bleeding profusely, she took off her knickers and held them up to stem the flow. Realizing she was in bad shape, she began half-crawling and half-walking towards the edge of the park. She managed to reach a telephone box beside the road one hundred yards away and made a 999 call. The ambulance took ages to arrive. Slumped in a huddled position, waiting anxiously in the telephone box, she saw through the glass window the driver of the white car touring around as if looking for her. Finally he stopped some way off and walked across to the place where he had launched his attack. Unable to find Marcella, he drove off. ‘He come back to see if I were dead,’ she said years later. ‘He didn’t see me, so he kept on driving.’
At Leeds General Infirmary doctors discovered eight severe lacerations to her scalp, each about an inch long, needing a total of fifty-two stitches. Discharged after six days, it was then Marcella’s second nightmare began. She feared the man would come back for her because she could identify him. She had provided police with a description of a smartly dressed white man with dark hair, a beard and moustache. Amazingly the police did not believe her and said repeatedly when questioning her that the person responsible had been a black man. ‘I said no black man would have done this to me.’ She lost the child she was carrying and began to suffer dreadful headaches and the occasional blackout. The trauma remains to this day, twenty-five years later. ‘It is like my brain is bursting and hitting the inside of my head, sometimes all day,’ she said.
Not long after coming out of hospital Marcella had the shock of her life when she was out for a drink at the Gaiety pub. The man who had assaulted her walked in, took a look round, then went out again. She told friends that he was the person police were looking for, and they rushed outside, but he had gone.
An internal West Yorkshire inquiry some time later reported: ‘Although she had been struck about the head with an unknown instrument there were factors which were dissimilar to previous “Ripper” attacks. Most significant was the absence of stabbing to the body and there was the motive of taking the money and running away … officers were aware of the dangers of including details of an incident which was not part of the series because it would mislead the investigation as a whole.’
In 1978, at a hearing before the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, West Yorkshire Police claimed Marcella had misled them during their inquiries, giving a picture of her attacker that was ‘hopelessly inaccurate’ because her memory was impaired. Her application was rejected.
4
Tracks in the Grass
In the 1870s, seven hundred acres of rolling fields, woodland and two large lakes provided a much-needed gigantic lung for the city of Leeds. It allowed the overcrowded population the chance to breathe clean air, free of soot, grime and chimney smoke. Roundhay Park was personally purchased by the then Lord Mayor, a wealthy clothing manufacturer called John Barran, who intended it as ‘an ideal playground for the people of this city’. At the end of the nineteenth century it was observed of the park: ‘Although it is four miles