Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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the back. Beneath it was a single stab wound.
Indications confirmed she had been dragged along the ground. Debris was caught in the centre of the straps at the back of the sun top. A piece of paper was discovered in the folds of the left side of the skirt in front of the abdomen. When the body was turned over and placed on a plastic sheet they saw blood soiling the young woman’s face. She looked very young and wore no bra. Her sun top was displaced, exposing the nipple of her left breast. In the front of the central upper region of her abdomen was a large wound and embedded in it was part of the broken top of a bottle with a screw top. Gee pointed out two irregular wounds to the scalp. After mortuary officials took the body away, two more pools of blood were found – one where the abdomen had lain, the other close to the head.
During a four-hour post-mortem that afternoon Gee found three semi-circular lacerated wounds to the scalp typical of other Ripper killings, along with depressed fractures to the skull. In the chest area, in addition to the large wound containing the bottle top, was a series of long scratches and cuts. A large stab wound in her back had penetrated various organs, including heart, kidneys and lungs. Gee thought a thin-bladed weapon, not less than six and a half inches long, had been thrust through the two openings on the front and back of the body. Multiple thrusts, perhaps as many as twenty, had been made in and out of the same wound, causing it to become much enlarged. The broken bottle top probably entered the chest as the victim was turned over on the ground. She had first been hit on the back of the head at the edge of the waste ground and fallen. She was then struck again on the head and, while still alive, dragged by hands under the armpits from the point where her handbag was found, down the slope and into the playground area.
The body initially lay on its back when the stab wounds at the front were inflicted. Then it was turned on its face and further stab wounds made to the back. Gee knew for sure she was not yet dead when some of these stab wounds were made because he found a large quantity of blood in each chest cavity. The killer had removed the knife from the back wound and then wiped each side of the blade on the skin on the woman’s back. Death had occurred some time between midnight and 3 a.m.
Soon after arriving at the crime scene, Jim Hobson had someone search the handbag found on the waste and her identity was quickly established. She was Jayne Michelle MacDonald, a sixteen-year-old who lived near by in Scott Hall Avenue. Wilma McCann, the Ripper’s first victim, had been a close neighbour in the same road, just six doors away. It seemed probable that Jayne MacDonald was mistaken for a prostitute when she was killed taking a short cut home across the waste ground, probably only a hundred yards from safety. She had gone with a girlfriend to a city centre bar, the Hofbrauhaus, at eight o’clock on the Saturday night, and left in the company of a young man aged about eighteen, with broad shoulders and a slim waist.
Jayne was a singularly pretty teenager with shoulder-length light brown hair; a good-looking girl, according to her friends, always smiling and truly the apple of her father Wilfred’s eye. He collapsed when police told him Jayne had been murdered, and subsequently developed nervous asthma and chronic bronchitis and never returned to his job with British Rail. He spent days on end staring at a photo of his daughter and patiently carving a wooden cross from the ladder of her old bunk bed. It came to mark Jayne’s last resting place. He couldn’t forget what he had seen in the mortuary when he went to identify her body. According to his wife, Irene, all he would say was that there was blood over Jayne’s beautiful hair.
Jayne had left a local high school a few months previously at Easter to work in the shoe department at Grandways supermarket in Roundhay Road. It sounds like a cliché to say she was a happy-go-lucky teenager, but in her case it was true. She loved life, indeed had everything to live for, and liked to spend her money on clothes and going out dancing or roller skating. Hers was a close-knit community, the kind where neighbours and friends did favours for one another and whose children were in and out of each other’s homes. One such family were the Bransbergs, who had a telephone, unlike the MacDonalds. Normally, if Jayne was planning to stay over at a girlfriend’s house, she would call the Bransbergs and they would tell her parents. Wilf MacDonald and Irene were a loving and devoted couple who kept a close eye on all their children, four girls and a son. Recently Jayne had broken off a relationship with a boyfriend, believing he was getting ‘too serious’. In their eyes, she was a bonny girl with a trim figure for her age, who simply drew the boys. They liked to believe their daughter was ‘innocent’, which in 1977 meant they thought she had not yet lost her virginity. In fact she had been having regular intercourse with her two previous boyfriends.
Jack Bransberg worked for British Rail with Jayne’s father. She had called to see him and his wife before going into town on Saturday night. She was going dancing at the Astoria Ballroom, then on to another discotheque. When, later that night, Jayne didn’t phone to say she would be late, both her parents and the Bransbergs assumed she had had a little too much to drink, stayed with a friend and forgot to telephone. Wilf MacDonald was furious Jayne had not called, more concerned about her thoughtlessness than anything else. After the death of Wilma McCann, all local parents had been alarmed the killer might strike again. But that was twenty-one months before and the fear was starting to wear off. Nevertheless Jayne had several times promised her mother she would never walk home alone in the dark.
As with all the relatives of the Ripper’s victims so far, the tragedy had a devastating effect on the family, the more so perhaps because this was a sixteen-year-old, carefree girl about to begin life when she was snatched away in such a brutal fashion. ‘He has killed my Jayne,’ cried a tearful Mrs MacDonald. ‘She was a virgin. A clean-living girl. How many more?’
Her husband was still under sedation, too shocked to be interviewed. The family doctor said the entire family was in a terrible state: ‘The husband is very bad and I have had to give him a sedative injection this morning because he has been in a state of complete collapse. This has been added to because of the fact that he had to go down and identify his daughter and see the terrible injuries she had suffered. This is an awful lot for any man to put up with. The murder itself is something which is a terrible thing to have to accept but to have to go down and identify the body and see the full extent of this is just making it even worse.’
Neighbours and friends of the MacDonalds rallied round to give them support, with several helping around the house. Others vented their feelings in a different way. The day after the murder white painted graffiti appeared on a nearby wall: ‘SCOTT HALL SAYS HANG THE RIPPER!’
Piecing together the last few hours of Jayne’s life took detectives several days of foot slogging. Oldfield wanted a minute breakdown of where she went after leaving the city centre. A detailed surveyor’s street map of the area, showing every house, was blown up and placed on a wall of the incident room on the top floor of Millgarth Police Station. He wanted to flag everyone who had been in the area at the relevant time in the hope someone must have seen the killer and possibly his car.
The Hofbrauhaus in the Merion Centre in Leeds was a Bierkeller and one of the city’s earliest themed pubs. It advertised German beer for only 32p a pint, and although trade could be slow early in the week, come Thursday, Friday and Saturday the place hotted up and the ale began to flow. Chief attraction was an ‘Oompah Band’, a fake German band dressed in leather shorts and Tyrolean hats which played songs like ‘The Happy Wanderer’ and waltzes associated with the Black Forest and Austria. Despite being under legal drinking age, Jayne had no trouble gaining entry. She met a local lad, Mark Jones, whose fair hair was brushed back off his face and who wore a dark velvet jacket, a light coloured shirt and dark flared trousers. There was a clear mutual attraction. She had not drunk any alcohol in the crowded bar, preferring soft drinks on what was already a warm night. When the Hofbrauhaus closed at 10.30 they left to walk into the city centre with his friends. Eventually the others drifted off until he and Jayne were left alone. They stopped for a bag of chips in the city centre, and then realized Jayne had missed her last bus. It was about midnight. They started walking up the York Road towards Chapeltown, Mark promising that his sister, who lived near by, would drive her home. When they reached his sister’s house, he saw her car wasn’t there, and they continued walking towards St James’s Hospital. They went into the garden of the nurses’ home and lay there on the ground for forty-five minutes, having a kiss and a cuddle. Jones later told detectives that Jayne was still having a