Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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of Scotties tissues and a can of Harmony hair spray, plus a bottle of cheap scent and a tube of hand cream. There was a towel thrown over the back of a chair. On the floor just in front of the table was a large denim shoulder bag. And beside that was a pool of blood. The victim was on the bed, with blankets and a flower-patterned duvet covering her, face down with her head turned away from the door to face the wall. She wore a black brassière, the left shoulder strap visible under the bedding. A pair of Scholl wooden sandals lay just under the edge of the bed. There were spots of blood on the front of the left sandal.
The room was getting crowded with people doing their work. The scenes of crime photographer took several shots of the sandals from different angles, including the soles, to see if there were any traces of blood. Beside the electric fire was a single blue thick-soled lady’s shoe. Domaille briefly pondered whether she had been wearing the sandals when she was killed, or had she just slipped them off and kicked them under the bed? Where was the other blue shoe? He looked down. The floor was covered in a threadbare carpet which looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned for a long time. The photographer bent down to frame a shot of a spent match and a filter-tip cigarette stub.
The woman had probably bled to death on the bed. Her dark hair was soaked in blood, as were the sheets and pillow, which was covered in a striped pillowcase. Her arms were spread out down her side. She had been wearing bell-bottomed jeans. When the bedclothes were pulled back by Professor Gee, the jeans were shown to have been tugged below her knees. Her white cotton pants had been pulled down to expose her buttocks. Her T-shirt had been hitched up and her bra unfastened. There was clear bruising on her right leg above the knee. Her tights had been pulled way down to her ankles and she was wearing one shoe – a blue sling-back denim shoe with a platform sole. This answered Domaille’s question as to whether she had been wearing the wooden sandals. Then someone pointed out what looked like a shoe print in blood on one of the sheets.
Gee’s attention was drawn to the large bloodstain in front of the wooden chair beside the bed, but he could also see spots of blood on the front of the chair legs. He was then shown a short dark leather jacket which was heavily bloodstained in the middle of the floor adjacent to the wardrobe. Pulling back the bedclothes had also revealed the body twisted at the lower part of the trunk so that the abdomen was almost at right angles to the bed. The body was clad in a patterned jumper pulled upwards towards the shoulders. On the edges of the bed, lying on the undersheet in front of the knees, was a mortice lock key. Underneath the right knee was another key – a Yale. It was nearly 10.30 p.m. before Gee began the process of measuring the body temperature at half-hour stages. An hour later the bedclothes were completely removed from the body and handed to an exhibits officer.
By the time the forensic scientist from the new Wetherby laboratory arrived, the bed-sitting room was crowded with activity. The place reeked of alcohol. Fingerprints were being taken. The photographer’s camera flashed intermittently, and several people in suits stood around chatting. Russell Stockdale had the furthest of anyone to travel to the scene of the murder – from Rufforth, near York. He was new to West Yorkshire, only just posted to Wetherby from the laboratory at Newcastle. Having been on call this Sunday night, he was the one who had to turn out. He hadn’t been involved with West Yorkshiremen before, so it came as some surprise to find the SIO, John Domaille, turned out to have a soft Devonian accent. With the exception of Professor Gee, all the others in the room were clearly Yorkshiremen. On the drive over, Stockdale was conscious he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to strike up a rapport with the police from Bradford and Leeds. He was going to meet a new investigating team. Stockdale knew from experience that there was a process of trust and confidence to be built before either side could get the best from each other.
Domaille gave Stockdale the impression of being very young for the senior rank he held, but it soon became apparent that he was extremely confident and more than up to the job. The usual formalities to break the ice with the newcomer were exchanged. Stockdale had long ago decided that professionals in such circumstances be accorded the status they deserved. If you adopted the role of the shrinking violet, you would be treated like a shrinking violet. It was the way of the world.
He strongly believed the forensic scientist had an important role to play at the crime scene. That did not mean he could march in in an arrogant way, because it was very much a joint operation, especially between the pathologist and the forensic scientist. Much of his learning had been on the job training. Stockdale had been a grave-digger on leaving grammar school in Battersea, South London, and was then commissioned in the RAF. He resigned his commission twelve months later and went off to London University. Having graduated as a zoologist he applied for a job at the Newcastle lab in response to a newspaper advertisement. The then director, Stuart Kind, later told him why he appointed him: ‘You were such an odd bugger, rather like myself, that’s why I gave you the job.’
In the bed-sitting room Stockdale discussed with Peter Swann, the fingerprint man, the sequence in which they would do their work. It was crucial they did it as a team, so as not to damage what the other was trying to achieve. ‘Preserving the crime scene is critical,’ Stockdale says of this kind of work. ‘You can preserve a crime scene by not walking into it, but at some stage you have got to go in there and decide on an operational procedure which is going to work and be followed. Everyone else who has an input to make has to know what everyone else is doing.’ He recalled something he particularly learned from later watching David Gee at work. The Leeds University professor, regarded as a gentleman among gentlemen by whose who knew him well, was standing in a muddy field somewhere looking at a fresh corpse and scribbling in a notebook. He said to Stockdale out of the corner of his mouth: ‘What I am doing now – the police think I am very busy working, but actually I am giving myself time to think.’
‘This was a tremendous piece of advice,’ Stockdale reflected. ‘I thought about standing there with him on that occasion over the coming years, and what David said encapsulated the whole experience. You have to make time for yourself to think. You can’t, if you allow yourself to be rushed by people saying: “Come on, get on with it, we have got to get the body moved.” Why? Where is it going? It isn’t going anywhere because I haven’t finished yet.’
On this call-out to Bradford, Stockdale wasn’t aware he was going to a Ripper murder. He had only just arrived down from Newcastle and did not know that three other prostitutes had been murdered in nearby Leeds. Examining the blood distribution patterns in the room, he kept reminding himself not to impede Peter Swann and his team looking for fingerprints. ‘It is well established with all the forces I have worked for, that if the investigation officer’s fingerprints are found, then it costs them a round of drinks in the bar. You tend to go around the crime scene with your hands in your pockets. It is very easy to unconsciously pick something up or touch it, which you really ought not to do. I wasn’t going to break the habits of my career so far.’
Stockdale became conscious of comments passing between other members of the team. ‘Is it him, then?’ ‘Do you think it’s another one?’ The questioning was addressed to no one in particular, like a murmur rising almost to a groundswell. Finally he turned to Peter Swann and asked: ‘Is it who? What’s going on?’
Swann explained. ‘We’ve got a serial killer – he’s being called The Ripper.’
‘Bloody hell, just my luck to pick up one of these,’ Stockdale exclaimed. It was the first time he had heard the words ‘The Ripper’.
Stockdale examined the woman’s clothing carefully. He believed that after they were pulled down, the jeans and possibly the tights as well had been pulled up again partially. Neither the tights nor the zip fastener of the jeans was damaged in the operation and it was evident that some care had been exercised by the killer. The surface of the body was smeared with blood and gave the appearance of having been manoeuvred by the killer, who must have had wet blood on his hands. Looking around the room generally, he could see there had been no violent struggle or any attempt to ransack the place. He concluded that the sequence of events had been as follows:
1 Atkinson was struck on the head from behind as she entered the room.
2 She fell to the floor bleeding and lay where she fell for some minutes.
3 The killer moved the unconscious body to the