Kitabı oku: «Wicked Beyond Belief», sayfa 10
In dry dock in the minesweeping section of the naval base the water was pumped out of the Albatross. Another fifty dead lay below decks, most still in their hammocks. Members of HMS Acacia’s crew were among those detailed to go below and retrieve the bodies. They included a nineteen-year-old steward/cook from Blackpool, Frank Roberts. ‘Retrieving the trapped bodies was a really gruesome task,’ he remembered. ‘We were given a mask and a tot of rum and told to get on with it. Some of the dead we found stuck in the portholes as they tried to escape. There was a hole in the side of the ship the size of a bus. We wrapped up those still in their hammocks and brought them out. It was very traumatic and of course we had no such thing as counselling in those days.’ The bodies were then transferred to a landing craft and buried at sea off Chichester. Immediately afterwards George Oldfield was sent home on sick leave to Yorkshire, where he remained for six months with a stress-related illness.
In 1946, after demob from the Navy as a petty officer, he arrived back in Cawood as one of thousands of reasonably educated young men throughout Britain wondering what to do with the rest of their lives. The local village policeman recommended a career in the police, and Oldfield joined the West Riding force the following year. It would, he assured his family, provide him with a good steady job and a pension. It was time to get on with life and forget the awful carnage he had witnessed.
Oldfield was to become living proof that it was possible in Britain gradually to rise from humble origins via a meritocratic police service to hold an important position within the local community. Like Dennis Hoban in Leeds, he spent virtually all his career in the CID gradually rising through the ranks. Unlike Hoban, his postings were far and wide, from one end of the West Riding to the other. Harrogate for one job, Barnsley for another. By 1962 he was a detective chief inspector at Dewsbury. Two years later, he returned briefly to uniform at Keighley before being transferred to the CID staff at the Wakefield headquarters as a detective superintendent and deputy head of CID for the whole of the West Riding. In 1971 he went back into uniform as a chief superintendent for two years. Then, in 1973, he returned to West Yorkshire CID as its head, taking the place of Donald Craig, who had become an assistant chief constable. When the major amalgamation with Leeds and Bradford took place in 1974, Donald Craig held the top job in overall charge of CID. Oldfield was his deputy.
Generally he got on well with his senior colleagues. However, he did have longstanding problems with some senior detectives from the Leeds and Bradford force after amalgamation. Some of the city detectives had no time for Oldfield, nor did he for them. A great deal of the mutual distrust had its origins in an official inquiry Oldfield conducted during the mid-1960s into corruption among some city detectives in Leeds. Called in to investigate as a senior officer from outside Leeds, he was utterly ruthless during this inquiry, often undertaking forceful interrogations in an effort to get to the truth. He had the homes of suspected officers put under intense surveillance, then had their homes searched, and thus put pressure on them through their families.
‘The allegations involved taking backhanders from villains, taking things from people. We are talking about detectives,’ said one officer, familiar with the inquiry at the time. ‘Some of the Leeds lads on the Crime Squad were interviewed and they thought they had had a hard time, that they were treated like villains.’ In short, Oldfield did as he was supposed to do: his investigation was run on the lines of an inquiry into criminal behaviour. But the result was an abiding resentment amongst some officers that he had damaged officers’ careers unjustifiably.
Much of Oldfield’s effort during the corruption inquiry had centred on Brotherton House in Leeds, the City Police HQ and also the home of the local Regional Crime Squad in which some of the suspected officers had served. During the Christmas festivities that year, Oldfield was invited by the local RCS boss to their annual dinner. ‘He [the RCS boss] made a tactical bloomer,’ said one of those present. ‘It was a stupid thing to do because you do not invite someone who is conducting an outside inquiry of that sort to a Christmas dinner. George also made a bloomer in that he came to the dinner … when he came in we all walked out and went to another bar to have a drink. We had arranged that if he turned up, we’d leave as a protest. We left him with the boss.’
The same detective, who was seconded to the RCS, felt no personal animosity to Oldfield. Later he came to realize what Oldfield was up against when he returned to his home force and was subsequently himself asked to conduct an inquiry into a corrupt Leeds officer. ‘It concerned several thousand pounds worth of missing metal and an investigation that went bad,’ he said. ‘This officer tipped off the thieves. He didn’t take money for it, he was crafty enough to have gone on a foreign holiday with his wife and kids, paid for by the criminals.’
Oldfield was by nature a private man and remained very much an enigma. He virtually cultivated the image. Few of his colleagues got really close to him over the years. He and his wife Margaret, his longstanding friend from Cawood, had married in 1954. He was thirty, she twenty-six. Tragedy came seven years later when their six-year-old first born, Judith, developed leukaemia. The doctors told Oldfield that their little girl had just six months to live. Unable to give Margaret such heartbreaking news, he told his wife their daughter would live for another year. In the end she did survive another twelve months. It was a heart-aching period in both their lives. His wife saw Oldfield develop a nervous affliction as a result of the child’s death: a twitch in his shoulder, which never left him.
At work he showed the obsessive behaviour traits familiar in many senior detectives: long hours, a devotion to detail and the ability to sit through the night poring over reports, aided by cigarettes and whisky. But his home life provided an important kind of relief from the stresses and rigours of crime and criminals. He was devoted to his wife, who came from farming stock, and their three other children, two boys and another girl. The youngest, Christopher, was born when Oldfield was forty-one. They put the money aside to have them educated privately in Wakefield and all three offspring took up professional careers in, respectively, the law, accountancy and dentistry.
For a good many years the Oldfield family had to move with his job. They lived in a variety of police houses across the West Riding, in Dewsbury, Keighley and Wakefield. In 1968 they bought their first home, a bungalow high up at Grange Moor on the fringes of Huddersfield, 750 feet above sea level. From there it was a relatively quick journey down to the M62 or M1 motorways, which gave him easy access to most places within the force area. His journey to his office at Wakefield was straightforward: down the A642 and through Horbury into the city.
At home when the children were young he played with them and shared their interests as best he could. In truth the family did not see a good deal of him, but one almost sacrosanct occasion was lunch on Sunday, when the Oldfields ate en famille. Most weeks Oldfield checked the fish in the ornamental pond in his front garden, and at weekends he would poke about in his vegetable patch where he grew some of the family’s produce. At the outbreak of the Ripper killings he had just started work on building a greenhouse behind his garage. ‘He loved getting out of suits and into his old clothes to go out into the garden,’ his wife reflected. He also amused himself with old blacksmith’s and tinsmith’s tools, getting the rust off and restoring them to their original condition so he could display them in the home.
Margaret was a keen cook, and like many women from farming families she was good with the pastry and baking. When a police colleague occasionally visited the bungalow, she would bring out the results of her home baking with coffee on a tray, then discreetly take her leave so as to allow the men to discuss police business. Margaret Oldfield saw her role as keeping things normal at home. ‘If anything came up on television we would just laugh it off. We tried to keep quiet about the things he was involved in, so that he didn’t have to talk about it at home.’
His abiding sense of justice and personal knowledge of the fragility of childhood demonstrated itself in one of his inquiries as a detective chief inspector earlier in his career. He was brought in, again as an outside officer, to investigate criminal allegations of sexual assault against two young girls by a uniformed police officer. He particularly asked for a detective sergeant called Dick Holland to act as his bagman during the delicate inquiry. Holland had three daughters of his own. After some while spent gathering evidence, Oldfield determined that the officer was guilty, but they would have grave difficulty mounting a successful prosecution. He told Holland: ‘If we take this to court these girls will not stand up in court in giving evidence against a police sergeant and they will break down. It might ruin their lives.’ Oldfield had had a long talk with the girls’ parents. He wanted to ensure that the police service was not stuck with an officer who had been acquitted on a technicality of a serious offence against young girls. ‘What we want to do is get rid of this bastard. The girls have suffered enough. If they break down in court and he is reinstated, what are we left with?’
‘His whole attitude was that the police service had to get rid of this bad egg, but he was not having anything adverse happen to these little girls,’ Holland recalled. ‘Another investigator may have done it by the book and it would have gone all the way to court.’
While Oldfield was deliberately reticent at home about the crimes he was investigating, it was impossible for his wife not to see how he could be deeply affected by his work, especially when tragedy struck families with children. One night in 1974 the phone rang at 1.30 a.m. It was at the height of a series of IRA terrorist outrages in England. He answered the call and then put the phone down, telling Margaret: ‘They’ve blown up a bus.’ He got dressed and headed for the nearby M62, where a bomb had exploded on a coach carrying army personnel and their families back to Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire. He then led the major inquiry into the murders of a dozen people. Among the dead were two small children. He had witnessed for himself the horrendous aftermath of the bombing. Body parts were spread all over the carriageway. The carnage sickened him.
During murder inquiries, Oldfield always tried to spend as little time as possible at the post-mortem, perhaps as a result of what he had seen aboard HMS Albatross as a young man. He couldn’t bring himself to spend too long at the autopsies on the coach bombing victims, telling a close colleague that the mortuary resembled ‘a butcher’s shop’. Dick Holland, by now promoted to detective chief inspector, remembered: ‘He didn’t like post-mortems. He didn’t shirk his duty, but he did have the minimum contact with the bodies. He was a bloody good commander and gave the right orders [at the scene of the outrage], things like that came naturally to him. The sight of the children blown apart affected him like it affected all of us.’
Oldfield was to describe the coach bombing as the most horrifying scene of mass murder in his experience. It confirmed his view that terrorists deserved capital punishment. ‘I had the misfortune to see the terrible injuries inflicted on the victims … As long as I live I will never forget the grievous injuries suffered by those two children.’
After the first news of the coach bombing, his family didn’t see George Oldfield for several days. A week or so later he appeared to have developed a phobia about alarm clocks. ‘He told me to get rid of the clock in our bedroom,’ said Mrs Oldfield. ‘I know that incident affected him because he simply couldn’t rest, couldn’t sleep properly if he heard the ticking noise of the clock. He couldn’t stand the sound of the ticking.’
6
A Fresh Start
Several weeks before the midsummer of 1977 a key decision had been made by George Oldfield. If there was another murder in the Ripper series, then he would take command as senior investigating officer and continue with his role of ACC (crime), doing the two jobs back-to-back. He didn’t have long to wait. On Sunday morning, 26 June, nine weeks after the death of Patricia Atkinson, a woman’s body was found on waste ground in Chapeltown, Leeds. The discovery was made by two young children. The fact of the body being found in an area frequented by prostitutes was enough to justify a call to Oldfield. He immediately told the control room at force headquarters to contact Dick Holland at home. By now a detective superintendent, Holland was deputy head of CID for the Western Area, operating out of Bradford. Preparing to don an SIO’s hat, he wanted a senior detective at his side who knew how the old West Yorkshire force investigated murders.
‘He knew me and the way I worked, and he knew I would work the West Yorkshire system,’ says Holland. ‘This wasn’t going to be my murder – it was Oldfield’s, but George would be able to keep nipping off to do his job at headquarters and leave me there, knowing his will would be carried out. He regarded me as an extension of himself. If he had left Hobson in charge, it would have been done Hobson’s way.’ Holland was Oldfield’s protégé – they were West Riding men and there was mutual respect and trust. Holland, then a divorcee, would become one of the few officers invited to Oldfield’s home. The two thought alike. In Holland’s view they were ‘a bit like bookends’. A close colleague once told Holland the only difference between him and Oldfield was that, ‘George’s answer to stress and problems is a bottle of whisky. Yours is to go out and buy a steak or a meal.’ Holland – a giant of a man who turned out rain and shine for the force rugby team – was a non-smoking, non-drinking foodaholic. ‘I knew how to switch off and I enjoy the company of women. George was set in his ways. You weren’t going to change George,’ he said.
He drove to Leeds at high speed down the motorway, to find Oldfield had just beaten him to the murder scene. Oldfield came to greet him, then directed him to a patch of derelict land in front of a children’s adventure playground in Reginald Street, next to a dilapidated factory building scheduled for demolition. It was overlooked by two streets. Three-storey Edwardian terraced houses in Reginald Terrace faced the playground on one side; the rear gardens and outhouses of a row of large semi-detached houses looked across on to the crime scene on the other side of Reginald Street. The playground itself resembled a Wild West stockade, its boundary fencing made of timbered railway sleepers driven several feet into the ground, with sawn lengths of barked timber secured at the top to a height of about seven feet. The equipment in the children’s play area was made from large timbers, including telegraph poles. One half of what had been a pair of hinged timbered gates at the entrance into the stockade remained shut. The other gate was missing.
A mobile police command with a tall radio mast had been positioned in Reginald Street, complete with its own power generator. Roads had been cordoned off and detectives with clipboards were already knocking on doors. Milling around were members of the Leeds murder squad, who had received an early ‘shout’ of possibly another Ripper killing. They did not know Oldfield had decided on a change of tactics. Neither, apparently, did Jim Hobson, who as head of the city’s CID was present and expecting to lead another murder inquiry. He was trying to drive along his Ripper investigation, anxiously following the progress of the tyre inquiry and organizing a small proactive undercover operation in the Chapeltown area using a few women police officers as decoys. His team were starting to gear up for a major investigation when Oldfield announced he was taking charge and bringing in his own team of supervisors.
Oldfield wanted a fresh start, using the West Yorkshire murder investigation system drawn up by his predecessor, Donald Craig. Holland’s most important task would be to indoctrinate the Leeds murder incident room team into using the West Yorkshire system of keeping records. It meant more statements would be taken. The Leeds system relied not on paper but on activity, with paperwork kept to a minimum. Oldfield wanted much more detail, especially in terms of descriptions of people seen around the crime scene at relevant times.
Holland explained the reason: ‘If somebody says, “I was saying goodnight to my girlfriend outside No. 14 Reginald Terrace when I saw a man come past in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, pale blue shirt and dark blue trousers,” you want to be able to consult the index system in the incident room to find out who fits that description and see who has been identified and make sure this person has been properly eliminated.’ The Leeds system was excellent at dealing with murders committed by local people. Most were quickly solved because detectives were not bogged down by paperwork; they could put manpower to better use. But if the inquiry became protracted, Oldfield believed, a more thorough system of record keeping based on detailed statements was essential, especially if they were going to mount a successful prosecution. And that was the ultimate goal: to get the guilty man into court and put away.
Inside the playground area was a single-storey, white-painted clubhouse covered in graffiti. A scenes-of-crime photographer stood on the felt-covered flat roof taking pictures, looking down at the corpse on the ground behind the wooden fence, and at the general area of waste ground towards Reginald Street already marked out in white tape. The senior detectives had to wait until the photographer completed his work on the roof before going to see the body. Near the corpse lay an old spring mattress, dumped alongside a pile of rubbish, including a rolled-up length of disused carpet. One of the woman’s shoes, which bore an impossibly long high heel, lay beside her foot.
Because a local pub was a regular haunt of prostitutes, the automatic assumption was that the victim was a street walker. Oldfield and Holland strolled over a tarmac path crossing the waste land, which contained a considerable amount of rubbish. Oldfield pointed out a woman’s imitation leather handbag lying beside the path, a few feet from Reginald Street. Adjacent to it was a piece of rough paper which appeared heavily bloodstained.
The sandy soil leading to the playground entrance was bone dry. A clear trail, consisting of a line of spots and splashes of blood, together with furrows in the soil that looked like drag marks, led down the gentle slope from Reginald Street towards the gateway. Inside the playground on the right side, close to the boundary brick wall of the derelict factory and lying parallel with the timber fencing, was the body of the young woman. From the street she was completely hidden. She lay face down with her head six feet from the brick wall. The legs were stretched out straight and the feet were crossed, the left over the right; the left arm was bent up with the hand beneath her head, the right arm stretched out beside the body. There were large quantities of rubbish and refuse, old tin cans, broken bottles and other material around the corpse.
The body was clad in a grey jacket which had been partly pulled upwards to the shoulders exposing bare skin in her lower back. Her blue and white checked skirt was rumpled towards the upper part of her thighs. One of her high-heeled pale yellow ‘clog’ shoes was still in place; her black tights had a hole visible in the left heel. On closer inspection, the detectives could see blood soiling her head and left hand as well as her jacket and skirt. Vertical trickles of blood ran downwards from the back of the chest across the sides of her body.
By now Professor Gee had arrived. He walked across the wooden duck-boarding into the playground to join the group of officers behind the fence. A fingerprint officer and forensic scientist were making a superficial examination of the body. Green bottle flies buzzed around the victim who they could now see was a young woman, probably in her teens. As the photographer took his pictures flies appeared on her jacket and hair. After a while Gee himself lifted the skirt to expose her underwear. A pale blue underskirt had been raised slightly upwards. Her tights were in the normal position and beneath them she wore a black pair of pants and an external sanitary pad. Peter Swann, the fingerprint expert, wanted some of the woman’s clothing sent away for special examination. The jacket had obviously been pulled up towards the victim’s head by the killer. To prevent contamination, plastic bags were placed over her shoes and hands. The body was then gently raised, the belt of her skirt and the zip fastener at the side were loosened so the skirt could be removed. Her jacket, held by one button across the front of her chest, was also undone and removed, revealing a blue and white sun top bunched up in the upper part of 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 period. She had promised him they would have sex together if he met her during the week.
