Ghosts & Gallows (24 page)

Just before eleven o’clock on the evening of Friday, 2 January 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring and Constable Robert Hyde, a probationary, became suspicious of a car parked in the driveway of an office building on Melbourne Avenue in the Broomhill district of Sheffield. The area was well known to the police as a place where street-workers took their clients and, as they pulled the patrol car up in front of the Rover saloon, the two men saw that the occupants were a bearded man in his early thirties and a young black woman. The driver, who gave his name as John Williams from Rotherham, claimed the passenger was his girlfriend but PC Hyde was unconvinced, especially when Williams was unable to tell him his companion’s name. Sergeant Ring radioed the car’s numberplate through to divisional headquarters and soon a check with the computer database showed that the registration actually belonged to a Skoda owned by an Asian man. The policemen found the Rover’s plates were false and, arresting the couple on suspicion of stealing a vehicle, they were taken in the patrol car to Hammerton Road police station. Twenty-four-year-old Olivia Reivers had at that point just escaped with her life by a matter of minutes.

In the interview room at Hammerton Road, Robert Hyde quickly felt that there was something not right about the arrested man, who now admitted his real name was Peter Sutcliffe and gave an address at Heaton in Bradford. When the prisoner had been searched at the police station, Hyde had found a three-foot length of knotted rope in his pocket. Sutcliffe said it was for repairing cars but the policeman noticed there was a more than passing resemblance between the arrested man and a photo-fit of the person who had attacked Marilyn Moore in Leeds just before Christmas in 1977. The following morning Sutcliffe was taken by car to Dewsbury police station and, as he ate breakfast in the cells, detectives from the Ripper Squad were contacted. The interview with Sutcliffe occupied most of the day and it soon became apparent that he had been questioned several times over the past five years in connection with the Ripper murders; his car had also been recorded dozens of times in the red-light areas of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester. Sutcliffe lied fluently but by ten o’clock in the evening he was still at Dewsbury and was returned to the cells, while detectives from the Ripper Squad made arrangements to check a number of his alibis.

Around the same time, Sergeant Robert Ring came on duty for the nightshift at Hammerton Road in Sheffield. Learning that the man he had picked up the previous evening for car theft was still in custody and had been interviewed all day by the Ripper Squad in Leeds, Ring decided to take a trip back to Melbourne Road. The sergeant recalled that while he and Constable Hyde had been waiting for their vehicle check to come through, the driver had gone off on his own for a brief time to relieve himself behind a wall a short distance from where the two cars had been parked. It was to prove a crucial decision and a pivotal moment in the long search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Ring took a patrol car and drove up to Broomhill. Searching around by torchlight in the area where Peter Sutcliffe had slipped away, he found a ball-pein hammer and a knife lying on a pile of leaves over a grating in a gap between the stone wall and an oil storage tank. Some time later a check was made in the lavatory that Sutcliffe had used just prior to his initial interview at the Hammerton Road station, and another knife was found submerged inside the toilet cistern. When told of the discoveries, Sutcliffe immediately confessed and over the next fifteen hours dictated a thirty-four page statement admitting to a string of violent attacks and murders: a half-decade campaign of evil had finally come to an end. Protected by a police cordon from a huge crowd baying for his blood, Sutcliffe appeared at Dewsbury Magistrates Court on 5 January 1981 charged with thirteen murders and was remanded in custody in Armley Gaol. Four months later, on 5 May, his trial began in Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey in London. Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility, claiming he had been on a mission from God to rid the world of prostitutes by a campaign of organised murder. The jury were unconvinced and on 22 May 1981, Peter William Sutcliffe was jailed for life with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of thirty years.

Much has been written since that time concerning the Yorkshire Ripper and what drove him to carry out his crimes. Sutcliffe, a ‘manipulative psychopathic liar’, clearly derived powerful sexual satisfaction during the act of killing, unobtainable during normal intercourse – a sweater worn under his trousers with the V-neck exposing his genitals allowed him to kneel and masturbate over his victims as they lay dead or dying, and he furthered a morbid fascination with red-light areas and the world of the street-worker. Sutcliffe was also able to live a double life: his wife Sonia, five years his junior and the daughter of Czech and Ukrainian immigrants, was completely unaware that she was living with a killer. They first met in 1967 and later married in August 1974, but although the relationship was at times stormy and marred with arguments and the problems associated with Sonia’s schizophrenia, Sutcliffe never laid a finger on his wife during all the time they were together. This parallels the life and crimes of Peter Kürten, the sadistic ‘Monster of Dusseldorf’, who carried out a similar series of sex crimes directed at women and young children during the 1920s, and whose wife at no time suspected her husband’s vile and hidden perversions. Unlike the Yorkshire Ripper, Kürten went to the guillotine on 2 July 1931. Sutcliffe had in fact been interviewed a staggering nine times in connection with the Ripper murders, but he was one of thousands and had evaded detection on each occasion, his file buried under the vast information overload that afflicted the West Yorkshire police’s investigation in the days before extensive computerisation and DNA technology would revolutionise crime detection. During the early months of 1979, the investigation took a dramatic turn when the Ripper Squad received a number of letters and a cassette tape recording that purported to come direct from the killer, a man with a distinctive Geordie accent that was narrowed down by phonetic experts to the Castleton district of Sunderland. As the West Yorkshire police concentrated a proportion of their enquiry in the hunt for ‘Wearside Jack’, anyone not from the region was dismissed as a suspect and Peter Sutcliffe, who was born in Bingley, later admitted that he felt safe during this period
2
. In the dark days of the late 1970s, with police unable to make the breakthrough that would trap the vicious perpetrator of a seemingly endless series of killings, the psychic angle offered by clairvoyants and mediums may have appeared to some to be able to succeed where the forces of the Ripper Squad were failing.

The psychic search for the Yorkshire Ripper was one that was driven by both local and national newspapers. During the second half of the 1970s, one medium who became firmly established in the public eye as one of the country’s major psychics was Essex housewife Doris Stokes. Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire in 1920, Stokes claimed to have had paranormal and mediumistic experiences from childhood. During the Second World War she enlisted in the WRAF and in 1943 married John Stokes, a sergeant in the paratroops who became a prisoner of war following the raid on Arnhem in 1944. Their son, John Michael, died in infancy and the Stokes later adopted a young orphan, Terry, who they subsequently brought up as their own. The Stokes household was a poor one, due in no small part to the head injuries that John Stokes had received during his time in Holland and which affected his ability to work throughout his life. Inspired by the Scottish materialisation medium Helen Duncan, who supplemented her husband’s income as a postman by giving séances throughout the country, and one of whose sittings she attended around the time that they adopted Terry, Doris decided to train as a medium and support the family in the same way. Developing her natural ability as a clairaudient at a local spiritualist church, she eventually passed a ‘test séance’ at Nottingham and in 1949 was registered as a practising medium by the Spiritualists’ National Union. Stokes later became a State Enrolled Nurse but continued to give séances privately and, in 1975, at the age of fifty-five, became one of the resident mediums at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain’s headquarters at Belgrave Square in London.

Doris Stokes’ major fame outside of the Spiritualist movement was precipitated by a visit to Australia in 1978, when she took part in
The Don Lane Show
on television. This generated a huge public interest in her platform work and, like Estelle Roberts before her, Stokes began to give large scale demonstrations of her mediumship before capacity audiences at prestigious venues such as the London Palladium and Barbican Hall in England and Australia’s Sydney Opera House. Assisted by her invisible spirit guide, a Tibetan lama named ‘Ramanov’, Stokes seemed to be able to provide and pass on convincing evidence for survival after death to people from all walks of life around the world: she issued a number of autobiographical volumes – beginning with the 1980 book
Voices In My Ear: The Autobiography of a Medium
– that chronicled much of her psychic work, and on her death, following an operation for a brain tumour in London on 8 May 1987, Stokes had easily been the public face of mediumship in Britain throughout the 1980s up until that point.

On 1 July 1979, just over three months after the murder of Josephine Whitaker in Halifax, the
Sunday People
newspaper ran a dramatic front page story entitled ‘Face of the Ripper’ featuring Doris Stokes’ attempts to identify the unknown killer following the broadcast of the ‘Wearside Jack’ tape recording on television. The article was accompanied by a prominent sketch of the murderer drawn by the tabloid’s resident artist Bob Williams, who had been guided by the medium’s psychic description as he drew his portrait, and the clairaudient’s profile was passed on by the newspaper to West Yorkshire police. Through a link with the spirit world, Stokes revealed the Ripper was aged between thirty-one and thirty-two, five feet eight inches tall, was slightly built and lived on Tyneside or Wearside in a street named Berwick or Bewick. His name was either Johnny or Ronnie and his surname began with the letter M, while Edwards’ portrait showed a clean-shaven man with collar-length straight hair parted on the right with ‘a small bald patch which he tries to cover up’. Stokes also felt that the killer had at some point received mental treatment at the Cherry Knowle psychiatric hospital at Ryhope, just outside Sunderland. At one point it seemed that the police might have got their man in the shape of Ronnie Metcalf, a long-distance lorry driver from Berwick Avenue in Sunderland’s Downhill neighbourhood, but Metcalf was quickly eliminated and, with hindsight, it is plain to see that the voices in Doris’ ear were hopelessly wide of the mark: as well as the complete inaccuracy of the name, Peter Sutcliffe was thirty-four at the time of Doris Stokes’ sitting for the
People
, wore a distinctive full beard and lived at 6 Garden Lane, Heaton in Bradford, and, not surprisingly, detectives acting on her information got nowhere.

Like many television and celebrity psychics, Doris Stokes remains a controversial figure nearly twenty-five years after her death, with sceptics putting much if not all of her mediumistic abilities down to ‘cold reading’ and luck. Ian Wilson, a historian and writer on paranormal subjects from Bristol, attended one of Stokes’ sell-out platform demonstrations at the London Palladium in November 1986, not long before the medium’s death, while researching for a book on the evidence for life beyond the grave, and together with two television journalists, Beth Miller and Siobhan Hockton, came away unimpressed. In his
The After Death Experience
(1987), Wilson notes that the reality of the medium’s performance that night (split into two parts separated by an interval) was not all that it seemed: members of the audience who in the first half received lengthy messages, ostensibly from beyond, were known to the medium and had been invited to attend the performance, while enquiries with the Palladium management revealed that Stokes booked the front three rows, where some of these people were sitting, ‘for her own purposes’. ‘No longer was there need to believe that Doris’s information in any way came from the dead,’ Wilson concludes. ‘All the hard and really impressive material Doris produced during the show had been known or available to her beforehand … It was no accident that Doris’s second-half free-for-all messages for non-pre-arranged individuals were much less convincing. For these she had to rely on intelligent guesswork and “fishing”.’ For those working at the CSICOP level of scepticism these kind of revelations are grist to the mill, but to explain away the entire mediumship of Doris Stokes (and platform mediums in general) in this way is giving the subject only superficial consideration. The workings of mediumship, whether it be clairvoyance, clairaudience or even materialisation, are a subtle and seemingly unknowable, but ultimately real, process and the experiences of Ian Wilson and his colleagues go to show that when this process is elevated to the level of ‘psychic entertainment’ the pressures for a medium or sensitive to deliver the goods at every sitting are enormous, particularly as in this case at such a prestigious and sold-out venue as the London Palladium. We have already discussed ‘mixed mediumship’ in this context, and, as there exists many supportive testimonials to the genuine psychic abilities of Doris Stokes that the people involved were adamant could not have been picked up or effected by trickery or ‘cold reading’, it is best to leave the medium, and the subject, there for the moment.

Another psychic who turned detective in an attempt to bring the Yorkshire Ripper to justice was none other than the ‘wizard of Utrecht’, Gerard Croiset. Working with
The Sun
newspaper, the Dutchman gave a profile of the killer which was passed on to West Yorkshire police and also appeared in the paper on 28 November 1979. Croiset said the Ripper lived in the centre of Sunderland in a block of flats over a garage. He wore his hair long and cut straight across the neck, had a squashed nose and, due to a damaged right knee, walked with a limp. Like Doris Stokes, Croiset felt that the murderer had received some form of psychiatric treatment in the past, possibly in a children’s home; he was also fooled by the ‘Wearside Jack’ hoaxer and his pronouncement was one of several high-profile late-career failures that were to give Piet Hein Hoebens the ammunition he needed to shoot down the clairvoyant’s posthumous reputation not long afterwards. Where the Yorkshire Ripper was concerned, Croiset was no more successful than medium Patrick Barnard, who had stated four days before in the Southend
Evening Echo
that the killer was a crewman on a submarine, clairvoyant Flora MacKenzie who was certain the Ripper lived in Barnsley, Wim Virbeck, an engineer from Holland who claimed he was a washing-machine repair man from Aberdeen, Dutch psychic Dono Meijling who felt he was related to the temporary head of the West Yorkshire CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson, and occultist Alex Sanders, the self-styled ‘King of the Witches’ from Notting Hill Gate who, through magical divination, described him as a single man living alone near railway arches in South Shields.