Ghosts & Gallows (23 page)

Early in July 1975, thirty-seven-year-old Anna Rogulskyj was struck down from behind by a man wielding a hammer as she walked through an alleyway in the town of Keighley, five miles north-west of Bradford. As she lay stunned on the ground, her attacker slashed her across the stomach and then ran off. Despite the brutality of the assault, Anna survived but required brain surgery. The following month, on 15 August, forty-five-year-old office cleaner Olive Smelt was attacked in a similar way near her home at Boothtown in Halifax. A man in his thirties with whom she had struck up a conversation suddenly turned on her, hitting her twice with a hammer on the top of the head and cutting at her back with a knife before running away. Luckily, like Anna Rogulskyj, Mrs Smelt recovered. Another survivor of the early days of the Yorkshire Ripper’s reign of terror was Tracey Browne, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from the village of Silsden, on the fringe of the Pennines north of Keighley. Only a few days after the attack on Olive Smelt she was left with a fractured skull after being repeatedly beaten about the head by a man who fell into step beside her as she walked home late one evening to her parents’ house after visiting friends in Silsden. Her attacker was apparently frightened off by an approaching car and the teenager, covered in blood, was rushed to Chapel Allerton Hospital in nearby Leeds, where surgeons removed bone splinters from her brain.

Early on the morning of 30 October 1975, a milkman and his brother passing along Scott Hall Road in the Chapeltown area of Leeds noticed what they took at first to be a bundle of rags lying in the grass on the Prince Philip playing fields. Going closer, they saw it was the body of a woman lying on her back, her clothes saturated with blood. Police identified her as twenty-eight-year-old Wilma McCann, a Scotswoman separated from her husband and originally from Inverness, who supported herself and her four children through prostitution. She had been struck down by two violent blows to the head with either a hammer or an adjustable spanner and then stabbed fifteen times in the neck and body. At the time, West Yorkshire police had no idea it was the beginning of a campaign of unremitting and shocking violence that had claimed its first victim and would last for over half a decade.

In the opening month of 1976 the Ripper struck again. Unbeknown to her husband, a Leeds-based roofing contractor, and the rest of her family, Emily Jackson, a forty-two-year-old housewife and mother of three children, supplemented her husband’s wages by soliciting from Sydney Jackson’s Commer van while he was out at work. When on the evening of 20 January she failed to pick up Mr Jackson as arranged from a job, he was forced to take a taxi home. The following morning a passer-by found Emily Jackson’s body lying in a narrow alleyway off Manor Street in the Sheepscar district of Leeds; her head had been battered almost beyond recognition, and the killer had inflicted over fifty stab wounds to the body with a sharpened screwdriver. Soon after the murder of Emily Jackson, an eighteen-year-old shop assistant was struck down from behind while walking along the edge of a field at Queensbury in Bradford. She was left for dead with serious head injuries but survived. Four months later, on the evening of 19 May, Marcella Claxton, who had come to Britain from the Caribbean island of St Kitts in the mid-1960s, was accosted while walking home in an intoxicated state from a West Indian drinking club in Leeds city centre. She was driven to Roundhay Park, where she was struck by a flurry of powerful blows from a hammer. The twenty-year-old only escaped certain death by pretending to be unconscious and her assailant, believing her to be dead, got back into his car and drove away. She managed to crawl to a public telephone box and dial 999. Later, in Leeds General Infirmary, doctors were able to successfully treat her dreadful head injuries but Marcella, three months pregnant, miscarried her baby. For most of the long hot summer of 1976 the Ripper laid low, although an assault later in August at Lister Hills in Bradford that left a twenty-nine-year-old housewife with head trauma and stab wounds to her body had all the hallmarks of another attack. It would be over twelve months following the death of Emily Jackson before the Ripper killed again but, as if making up for missed opportunities, the following year an explosion of murderous violence took place in both Leeds and Manchester which stunned the country and left the north of England under a palpable cloud of fear.

The twelve months of 1977 saw six separate attacks, four of them fatal, and the killer, christened the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ by the British tabloid press, entered the public consciousness for the first time. On the morning of 6 February, an early morning jogger passing through Roundhay Park, where nine months before Marcella Claxton had been violently assaulted, came across the body of Irene Richardson lying on the grass near to the sports pavilion; the twenty-eight-year-old prostitute had been killed with a hammer and her body slashed with a knife. On 24 April, Bradford police were called to a small flat at Oak Avenue in Manningham, where the boyfriend of Patricia ‘Tina’ Atkinson had found the thirty-two-year-old battered and stabbed to death. As with the killing of Mary Kelly by his Victorian namesake in the autumn of 1888, this was to be the only murder that the Ripper carried out indoors. Jayne MacDonald was a sixteen-year-old Leeds schoolgirl with film star looks who lived only a few doors from Wilma McCann. It would seem highly likely that, on 26 June 1977, while walking home from an evening out dancing at Leeds’ city centre Hofbrauhaus, she was mistaken for a prostitute and ambushed while passing by an adventure playground in Reginald Street. The following morning her body was found by two young children. The killer had knocked her down with brutal efficiency using hammer blows to the head and had then dragged her to the spot where she was discovered, stabbed over twenty times in the front and back with a thin-bladed weapon. Her death sent shockwaves across the county as the general public, seemingly ambivalent to the violent and mounting deaths of street-workers, now realised that every woman out at night in the north of England was a potential target for a psychopathic killer. This became chillingly clear a month after the murder of Jayne MacDonald when residents of a gypsy caravan site near Bowling Back Lane in Leeds heard cries for help coming from a patch of wasteground. Police called to the scene found forty-two-year-old Maureen Long, a mother of several children separated from her husband, lying with severe head injuries and several stab wounds. The Ripper had left her for dead but she survived. The penultimate attack, and what would be the final killing of 1977, took place three months later at the beginning of October, when the Yorkshire Ripper crossed the Pennines to Manchester. There he picked up twenty-year-old Scottish-born prostitute Jean Jordan and took her to an allotment in Chorlton near to the city’s Southern Cemetery. Nine days later her heavily decomposed body, heaving with maggots and savagely mutilated, was discovered by Bruce Jones, a local dairyman who was collecting bricks to build a shed base on an adjacent allotment. Jones, then aged twenty-three, would later find national fame as an actor in the long-running television soap opera
Coronation Street
, but his experience that day was one that would haunt him for many years. It later transpired that Jordan’s body had lain hidden under a nearby hedge for over a week, after which time the killer had returned looking for a new, and therefore traceable, £5 note which he had given to the woman before attacking her. Frustrated in his search, the Ripper had attacked the body again, cutting open the abdomen and partially severing the head with a hacksaw blade. Ten days before Christmas, on 14 December, the Ripper returned to Leeds, where he picked up twenty-five-year-old Chapeltown prostitute Marilyn Moore and took her to a quiet factory site in Buslingthorpe Lane. As with all the previous victims, Marilyn was beaten mercilessly with a hammer from behind but, seemingly disturbed by the noise of a barking dog, the Ripper curtailed the assault and, getting back into his car, drove away. The mother of two managed to stagger out to the main road, where passers-by came to her aid and, like Maureen Long, she survived after emergency neurosurgery.

The opening month of 1978 saw the Ripper claim two more lives amid a massive police hunt that, despite vast resources and a dedicated team of detectives (known as the ‘Ripper Squad’ and lead by Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield), seemed powerless to prevent further killings. On the night of 21 January, Yvonne Pearson, a twenty-one-year-old prostitute, disappeared from the streets of Bradford after leaving her two young children with a babysitter in order to carry out an evening’s business. Her decomposed body was found nearly two months later on Easter Sunday, 26 March, partly concealed by an overturned settee on wasteground off Arthington Street in the city’s Whetley Hill district; at Bradford public mortuary the pathologist found her skull had been smashed into over twenty separate pieces. At this point four of the Ripper’s total of seven victims had been murdered in Leeds, but the intense police presence in the city was to drive the killer to nearby Huddersfield where, ten days after Yvonne Pearson was reported missing, eighteen-year-old street-worker Helen Rytka was stabbed to death at a timber yard in Great Northern Street. On 17 May, over three months after the killing in Huddersfield, the Ripper returned to Manchester. Early the following morning, Jim McGuigan, a landscape gardener working on a contract at the city’s Royal Infirmary, saw what he assumed to be a large doll or dummy lying on the grass next to a wire fence in the hospital grounds. The area was known as a favourite spot for prostitutes to take their clients. Forty-year-old Vera Millward, a Spanish-born street-worker, had taken the Yorkshire Ripper there the previous evening. She was killed by three hammer blows to the head and then stabbed repeatedly as she lay dying on the ground. Weeks passed with no further attacks and by the end of the year, as the region held its breath, it seemed that possibly the atrocities had come to an end. However, as the lull continued into the spring of 1979, police were well aware that it was simply that – by his very nature the man they sought would never stop killing and for the people of the north of England it was to prove to be the eye of the storm.

The Ripper ended his near year-long hiatus in Halifax. Josephine Whitaker was a nineteen-year-old bank clerk who, around midnight on 4 April 1979, walked home alone after spending the evening watching television at her grandparents’ house. As she crossed a football pitch in Saville Park, she was attacked and struck down by a single powerful hammer blow that fractured her skull and left her defenceless. The killer then stabbed her repeatedly in the torso and vagina with a sharpened screwdriver. Six months later, at the beginning of September, the Ripper claimed his eleventh victim back in Bradford. In the early hours of 2 September, university student Barbara Leach left the Manville Arms pub – not far from the university campus – after an after-hours lock-in with some fellow students. Barbara was renting a small bedsit in Grove Terrace and decided to walk back there alone. When it became clear, around teatime later the same day, that she was missing, a police search began in earnest. The following morning her body was found leaning against a dustbin in an alleyway at the rear of 13 Ash Grove, partly covered with a discarded carpet weighed down with bricks. Like Josephine Whitaker she had been felled by a single hammer blow from behind and then stabbed; pathologist David Gee found eight wounds to the torso, which had been carried out using the same screwdriver weapon that had been used in Halifax earlier in the year. Unbeknown to the police and the public, the Yorkshire Ripper was to enjoy a further fifteen months of freedom, during which his murderous crusade would kill two more young women and leave another two severely injured.

Nearly a year passed before the Ripper struck again – then, the late summer and autumn days of 1980 became filled with a savage frenzy of killing. Marguerite Walls was a forty-seven-year-old unmarried civil servant who worked as an officer for the schools inspectorate at the Department of Education at Pudsey on the western outskirts of Leeds. On 20 August, after working late and eating a takeaway meal at her desk, she left her office around a quarter to eleven and set out to walk the mile and a half to her home on a new estate in the city’s nearby Farsley district. The following morning, a couple arriving to carry out gardening work at ‘Claremont’, a detached house in its own grounds in New Street, Farsley, noticed a pair of women’s shoes and a torn skirt, as well as a shopping bag and a chequebook, lying discarded on the grass. Concerned they alerted the police, who discovered Marguerite Wall’s naked body close to a garage building and covered with grass cuttings. A post-mortem showed she had put up a terrific fight after being initially struck down and dragged into the garden of ‘Claremont’, where her killer had knelt on her chest, breaking three ribs, before strangling her with a ligature and stripping off her clothes. Although the initial assault had begun with a blow to the head, at the time the lack of stab wounds gave detectives the impression that the murderer was a local man and it was not until the Ripper’s arrest five months later that Marguerite Walls was officially classed as the Yorkshire Ripper’s twelfth and penultimate victim.

The next two victims, attacked within a few weeks of one another in Leeds and Huddersfield, both survived. Around eleven o’clock, thirty-four-year-old Dr Uphadya Bandara, a postgraduate student at Leeds University on a scholarship from the World Health Organization, was walking home alone after spending the evening visiting a friend in Headingley. As she turned into Chapel Lane, a bearded man came up behind her and strangled her into unconsciousness with a length of rope. The attacker then seemingly changed his mind and ran away, although it is likely he was unsettled by the presence of a passing police patrol car, whose officers found Dr Bandara lying prone and bleeding from a head wound in the cobbled road. On 5 November, Bonfire Night, James Furey, a Huddersfield millworker in his mid-twenties watching fireworks from a window of his house in Willwood Avenue, saw what he took to be two youths scuffling further down the street. It was in fact his teenage girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Teresa Sykes, fighting for her life against a mystery assailant who had struck her from behind as she was returning from buying cigarettes at a local off-licence. Furey shouted out, causing the Ripper to break off his attack. He ran off with Furey in pursuit but managed to hide under a hedge and get away. Teresa Sykes spent five weeks in hospital and required brain surgery. It was the closest the Yorkshire Ripper ever came to being caught red-handed. Twelve days later, a shop manager making an early morning visit to a bank in Leeds’ Arndale Centre saw a woman lying on a patch of wasteground behind a wire fence off Alma Road in Headingly. Around ten o’clock the previous evening, a blood-spotted handbag had been found by a student returning to the nearby university hall of residence and police called some two hours later briefly searched the area where the bag had been picked up, before being called away to attend a burglar alarm alert. Jacqueline Hill, twenty years of age from Middlesborough attending Leeds University as an undergraduate studying English, lay dead in the darkness on the other side of the street. Beaten with a hammer and stabbed in the body and once through the right eye, she was to be the thirteenth fatal and ultimately final victim of the Yorkshire Ripper
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