Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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He’d do what he had to do, then help them. Those in search of a story and pictures needed the goodwill of the man in charge. They had to be patient and not take liberties, not impinge on the investigation. To solve this murder, any murder, Hoban knew he needed information from the public. The media were a valuable resource, so he’d personally make sure they got the story in time for the first edition of the Post and the first news summary on the local TV stations at midday.
Formal greetings with his colleagues were just that. Formal. It was cold. There was low-lying fog. The men around him stamped their feet, arms folded against their chests, trying to keep warm. Some had been waiting at the crime scene for nearly an hour since the woman was found at 7.41 a.m. by the passing milkman. The date was 30 October 1975, the eve of Halloween and only days to go to Fireworks Night. It was that time of year when local kids had been making effigies of Guy Fawkes, standing on street corners, asking ‘Penny for the Guy’. The local milkman was making the early-morning round with his ten-year-old brother. Mist hanging over the area made it difficult to see properly as Alan Routledge drove his electric-powered milk van into the rectangular tarmac car park of the Prince Philip Centre. He got out to deliver a crate of milk and there, on a steep banking on the far side of the car park, near the rear of the caretaker’s house and the sports field clubhouse, spotted what he at first thought was a bundle of rags or perhaps a children’s ‘Guy’. Out of curiosity the brothers edged closer. It was the body of a woman. Routledge ushered his sibling away and ran for a phone. He told the police operator he had found a woman with her throat cut.
The uniformed officers laid down a series of duckboards across the grassy area to the murder scene. Hoban moved forward, treading carefully on the slatted wood. Devlin, the police surgeon, greeted him. The woman lay on her back, at a slightly oblique angle across the slope, the head pointing uphill and the feet directed towards the edge of the car park. Her reddish-coloured handbag lay beside her, its leather strap still looped around her left hand. Her white flared slacks had been pulled down below her knees; both her pink blouse and her blue bolero-style jacket had been ripped apart. Her bra, a flimsy pink-coloured thing, had been pulled up to expose her breasts. Blood from stab wounds had leaked over to the right side of her body. The blood had dried. More blood from a stab wound on the left side of her chest trickled down to the edge of her pants, obviously, thought Hoban, because her feet were pointing downhill. Her auburn hair had been backcombed into a beehive style high above her head, but now much of it was spread out on the grass. She had worn a pair of shoes with an inch-thick sole and a four-inch heel. Her knickers were in the normal position covering her genitalia. They bore a large, colour printed jokey motif, part of which Hoban could easily read without bending down: ‘Famous meeting places’. A small button lay behind her head and some coins were in the nearby grass. The wounds were divided into several areas: a stab wound to the throat; two stab wounds below the right breast; three stab wounds below the left breast and a series of nine stab wounds around the umbilicus.
By the time the local Home Office pathologist arrived at 9.25 a.m. Hoban knew the dead woman’s name and the fact that she lived barely a hundred yards away. The back entrance to her council house in Scott Hall Avenue opened out on to the playing field. Neighbours told officers making house to house inquiries how Wilma McCann lived with four young children, separated from her husband. Two of the children had gone looking for their mother at first light when she failed to return home, after having left the eldest, Sonje, aged nine, in charge. Sonje and her brother went to wait at the nearby bus stop to see if their mother had caught an early-morning bus home. They were standing there freezing when a neighbour found them with their school coats over their pyjamas.
Nothing surprised Hoban any more, he’d seen all this before. Desperate women. Children neglected. Leeds City council officials had already been alerted that the four McCann children would almost certainly need foster care. No one knew at first where their father lived. Initially, because Wilma was found so close to her home, Hoban considered that this might be a domestic incident that got out of hand. Perhaps the former husband was involved. Then he heard that Wilma frequently went out at night to the local pubs and clubs to ‘have a good time’ – and she got paid for it. Like many single mothers on the breadline, she slept with men for money. She came and went via the back entrance to hide the fact that she left the children alone for several hours and frequently returned late at night. For this she had paid the terrible price. Although she had no convictions for prostitution, Hoban knew the fact that she was a good-time girl would be a major complication.
Standing there that morning, he hoped and expected they could solve this case quickly. The victim would surely have some relationship to the killer – a motive would be established and with luck and a fair wind they would have their man. The other senior man to arrive at the McCann murder scene was the forensic pathologist, David Gee, who knew Hoban well and admired his professionalism as a top detective. Each had earned the respect of the other. They had already spent most of the night together at the scene of another murder elsewhere in the city and Gee also had only just dropped off into a very deep sleep when the phone call came through alerting him to this latest case. Not unreasonably, he regarded it as a bit of a nuisance. He had made good speed, considering he had to drive in to Leeds from Knaresborough, twenty miles away, during the morning rush hour. Hoban filled him in on all he knew so far. Gee – notebook in one hand, biro in the other – stood as he always did, listening intently. For a few minutes he looked at and around the body. Eventually he drew a diagram and wrote a few cryptic remarks. For a murder involving multiple stab wounds it was what he would have expected. There was heavy soiling of the skin at the front and right side of the neck because of the stab wound on the throat. Blood was staining the grass beside the victim’s head. The blood trickling from the chest and abdomen had also soiled the right side of the victim’s blouse. Other spots of dried blood could be seen on the front of both her thighs, on the upper surface of her slacks and the upper surface of her right hand.
Gee’s very first thoughts were that the blood seepages running vertically downwards from the stab wounds in all directions suggested she had been stabbed to death where she lay. One blood trickle ran into the top of her knickers and then along it. When the panties were removed, he could see the trickle did not run down inside, probably indicating that no sexual intercourse had taken place either just before or just after the stabbing. Some blood soiled her long and tangled hair, but this was maybe due to blood escaping from the wound to her neck.
Once the body had been photographed, Ron Outtridge, the forensic scientist from the Home Office laboratory at Harrogate, moved closer and began taking Sellotape impressions from the exposed portions, hoping to find tiny fibres, perhaps from the killer’s clothing. Gee took swabs from various orifices – vagina, anus, mouth. Then he began measuring the temperature of the body at roughly half-hourly intervals. In an hour, between 10.30 and 11.30 a.m., Wilma’s corpse grew colder by two degrees, falling to 71.5°F. However, once the sun came up, the external temperature began to rise. By a simple calculation Gee determined that death happened around midnight, according to the hourly rate at which the body dropped in temperature. A gentle south-westerly breeze eventually blew the fog away and by 11.40 the temperature was 59°F, quite warm for an autumn day. The sky, however, remained overcast and there were a few spots of rain. For protection, the body was partly covered by a plastic sheet raised above the corpse on a metal frame so as not to contaminate any clues. By this time there was slight rigor mortis. Outtridge then removed the slacks, shoes and handbag. Plastic bags were placed over the head and hands and the body was gently wrapped in a much larger plastic sheet for the short journey by windowless van to the local mortuary. There the rest of the clothing was removed and handed over to Outtridge. A fingerprint specialist examined the body for prints on the surface of the skin.
The team, including Hoban and Outtridge, gathered again for the formal post-mortem at 2 p.m. It was a long and exacting process which took four hours. Most officers hate post-mortems. ‘It is not only the sight but the smell of the body and the disinfectants,’ recalls one senior detective who had been involved on countless murder inquiries. ‘The smell would cling to your clothing and when I got home I would strip, put clothes in the washer and my suit on the line. I would then have a shower but I would also lose my sex drive for several days. I think a lot of policemen are affected in this way.’
After the formalities of measuring and weighing the body, Gee quickly made