Kitabı oku: «Wicked Beyond Belief», sayfa 12
On one occasion they were on the Mecca dance floor. Suddenly Maureen stood stock still and stared at a man across the room. ‘I said, “What’s the matter?” She shook her head and said, “Nothing.” I said, “Yes there is, what is it?” She said, “It’s him over there.” I’ll never forget him. He didn’t have a gap in his teeth and it wasn’t Sutcliffe, but he did have a lot of jet-black curly hair. Obviously her subconscious had said: “The hair.”’ The man was checked out and eliminated quickly.
Another time the pair were pub crawling in Manningham Lane, close to where the prostitutes hung out. A young colleague of Winterburn’s, in the dark about the operation, came into the pub. ‘I recognized him and he was looking at me and I was looking away, trying to make him not look at me. Eventually he plucked up courage and walked over to me and said: “What are you doing here, Sarge, dressed like that?” I remember taking the lad out to the toilet to have an appropriate word. I pinned him against the wall and told him to leave. It was serious and I couldn’t afford to let my guard slip.’
The undercover operation with Maureen Long, though it showed commendable courage on her part, went nowhere. She failed to recognize her would-be killer. The rest of the murder squad had plenty of other avenues to explore. The bosses knew proactive policing was working, for the clampdown against prostitutes and the covert operations in Chapeltown were clearly having an effect, the most important being that they appeared to have driven the Ripper back to strike again in Bradford.
Oldfield immediately stepped up the covert observations recording the registration numbers of vehicles in the red-light areas, extending them from Chapeltown to Manningham in Bradford. The attack on Long was treated as attempted murder. A major effort was mounted to find everyone who had been at the Mecca Ballroom on the Saturday night. Thousands were interviewed during the inquiry. It led nowhere. The information provided by the security guard was critical. In response a search was launched for Mark II Ford Cortina owners in West Yorkshire. Three thousand owners were interviewed and no positive evidence obtained.
More crucially, Jim Hobson’s ‘tracking’ inquiry was, over his profound objections, brought to an abrupt halt because the Mark II Ford Cortina was not on the list of vehicles which could have left the tyre marks at the Richardson murder scene. (As we now know, the Ford Cortina inquiry was a complete red herring. The security guard had seen Peter Sutcliffe’s car leaving the scene of Long’s attack, except he was driving a white Ford Corsair – which was on Hobson’s list of ‘tracking’ inquiry vehicles waiting to be eliminated.) But Oldfield was faced with a massive problem – lack of manpower. Eliminating 30,000 vehicles had been a colossal task, and Oldfield felt the remaining 20,000 vehicles would take forever to check. Experience had shown that, as you got nearer the end of such an inquiry, progress on eliminating one vehicle took far longer than the straightforward checks at the beginning. As an inquiry continued, the man hours that went into it got higher and higher in relation to the finished product, while the actual productivity of the investigating team got lower and lower. All the difficult vehicle checks were those that had dragged on and were left to the end. They were cars that had been sold to gypsies six times under false names, had gone through car auctions, had changed owners, had been stolen, written off or not correctly recorded on the fledgling PNC.
Oldfield thus found himself in a complete bind. He had major murder inquiries involving a maniac on the loose going on in Leeds and Bradford, and the tyre inquiry seemed never ending, with no assurance of success. ‘We were desperate for men,’ Holland said. ‘If you were warm and breathing you were on the bloody Ripper case. We had checked roughly 30,000 vehicles and eliminated those, but there were in fact 22,000 to go … Sutcliffe’s vehicle was in there and unfortunately it was missed.’
Hobson took the cancellation of the tracking inquiry very badly. In the incident room for the Long investigation at Bradford police headquarters, a few senior officers, including Holland, Oldfield and Hobson, were standing in a corner late one afternoon when Oldfield broke the news as a fait accompli. Hobson had seen the tyre inquiry as the one good chance to find the killer. They had a positive clue from a murder scene and his inquiry ought to run its course. Now they were suddenly looking for a Ford Cortina. Oldfield believed the Ripper had changed cars. There was a good chance the one which made the tyre tracks in Roundhay Park had been destroyed. Hobson was furious, visibly angry and muttering under his breath. But the decision had been made. The Leeds murder squad believed Oldfield was being deliberately partisan because of his known disagreements with the senior city detectives. It was a fracture in relationships that never really healed.
The Ripper by now had murdered five women: McCann, Jackson, Richardson and MacDonald in Leeds; and Atkinson in Bradford. The police believed he had attacked Long, intending to kill her, and were now casting an eye over several other serious assaults on women. In reality there were eight other women that Sutcliffe had almost certainly attacked in the West Yorkshire area, though the squad had ruled most of them out as Ripper attacks because they could not rule them in for certain. Indeed, they were gripped almost by a phobia of putting an attack into the Ripper series, for fear it would turn out not to be his handiwork and might contaminate the investigation with erroneous evidence. Moreover, if the Ripper was caught and prosecuted for one murder he did not commit, he could escape justice. Thus Tracey Browne and Marcella Claxton along with several other victims were never included in the series, though there was an extraordinary similarity in the photofit descriptions they had given, which now lay unnoticed in police files. Day by day the cost of the investigation was assuming mountainous proportions: 300 officers had worked 343,000 man hours; 175,000 people had been questioned, 12,500 statements taken and 101,000 vehicles checked. The attempt to find the man with a ginger beard said to have been seen by witnesses in the MacDonald and Jackson inquiries was stepped up. Police had 117 tips of men who bore such a description. They traced fifty-six such men and eliminated them; the rest were never found because there was no real clue to their identity. Already inside the mountain of paper were the clues and the evidence that could have identified the Yorkshire Ripper.
7
Punter’s Money
In the mid-1970s the backbone technology of British industry, its businesses and institutions, was still a Victorian invention: the typewriter and shorthand note. Computers were as yet the hugely expensive private tools of government, vast number crunchers gobbling up and spewing out punchcards. They occupied whole floors to do the work a child’s toy can perform today, but the world was still only on the verge of the revolution.
Within a year or two advertisements began to appear in colour supplements offering home computers to be built by hand, whose programming language needed to be learned before simple mathematic problems could be solved and tic-tac-toe games played. Pocket calculators, costing the equivalent of a working man’s weekly wage, were finding their way on to the market. But the white heat of silicon technology was still ten years from our desk tops. The Home Office, the government department primarily responsible for the security and policing of Britain, wanted to be at the forefront of this revolution. The computer, when it arrived, would be a vital tool in the battle against crime, reducing the burden on manpower and budgets and speeding up detection. But the use of computers and the application software would have to be tailor-made to the task, specifically designed to handle, sort, cross-check and deliver information.
In August 1976, the House of Commons learned that the Police Scientific Development Branch at the Home Office was studying the use of computers to assist the investigation of major crimes like murder. Computers, according to the Home Office minister, Dr Shirley Summerskill, would organize the collection of information and the identification of key elements in murder inquiries. Parliament was debating criticism of the police handling of the Black Panther inquiry when Dr Summerskill reiterated a key principle of British justice affecting any criminal inquiry – that overall command in an investigation rested ultimately with the chief constable: ‘It is for him to decide when to call for assistance and help and what to call for.’ So if a chief constable wanted a computer, he had to ask for one. For the overburdened West Yorkshire Police in the summer of 1977 it seemed like a lifeline – or at least a straw to clutch at.
Ronald Gregory therefore set up a working party at his headquarters in Wakefield to look at ways of using computers in the Ripper inquiry. The force’s new Computer Project Unit in turn approached the Home Office to see how close its scientists were to achieving the goal of a computerized incident room which could actually handle a complex murder investigation. They had been working on the problem for three years. After several meetings, the West Yorkshireman learned that more development work was needed by government scientists and the Police Research Services Unit before they could hand over a computer they were certain was reliable. The only experimental working police computer in the country was in Staffordshire, in the Midlands. The working group and Gregory paid a visit, but the project was still in its infancy and the budget for the experiment was prohibitive, already running at more than £1 million.
Breakthroughs were being made in pushing back the frontiers of computerized systems, but in August 1977, when the West Yorkshire force needed one as a matter of desperate urgency, no machine was available. The writing of programs of such complexity was in its infancy. Moreover, three of the most senior Home Office scientists had just departed from the project, leaving only a junior colleague to work on the necessary research.
Then West Yorkshire Police were given the chance to use spare capacity on the mainframe computer at the Atomic Energy Authority Establishment at Harwell in Berkshire. It was a rare opportunity. Even the suggestion of such an offer was a clear indication that at least someone in Whitehall recognized the importance of catching the ‘Ripper’ and the difficulties the police in West Yorkshire were facing. Whether the senior officials in the Police Department of the Home Office appreciated that the murder investigation was not just a little ‘local difficulty’ facing their friends in the north is open to question.
It wasn’t the first time a branch of the Home Office, faced with a major investigation, had received help from atomic scientists with access to the country’s best computer technology. In the early 1960s, the Security Service (MI5) approached the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, which at the time had the biggest computer facility in Britain. MI5, in conjunction with the code breakers at GCHQ, were trying to decipher intercepted Soviet Union espionage messages intended for Eastern bloc agents in Britain. The traffic was known by the code name ‘VENONA’. The AWRE began a top-secret project, with its computer running code-cracking programs for six hours every night for two months.
To help catch a serial killer, the AEAE at Harwell was now willing to allow its mainframe computer to be accessed via telephone lines by the Ripper squad directly from West Yorkshire, with additional information on cassette tapes being sent physically to Harwell by courier. There were huge problems with this imaginative plan. To back-convert existing records held at Millgarth would taken thirteen man years of effort, costing a nominal figure of £25,000, which the Home Office was prepared to fund. But West Yorkshire would have to stump up £3,000 a week to run the system. Finally, Ronald Gregory decided, on the grounds of budget and the experimental nature of the project, to turn the offer down. At this stage the experiment would have involved using equipment not yet proven at the operational level. Gregory was later backed by the hierarchy of the police service for making a brave decision to stick with the manual system of managing information within the incident room. Though the volume of material grew larger every day, it was at least a tried and tested method. The problem was there had been nothing like the Ripper case before.
Gregory authorized his working party to contact the private sector to see whether the nominal index in the incident room could be computerized. IBM suggested a mainframe computer called STAIRS. The quote was in excess of half a million pounds. Again back-record conversion would be a mammoth task. A number of the biggest multinational computer firms and local government agencies in Britain were also approached, but could not come up with a viable scheme to automate the incident room. As the amount of information in the system grew, the problem of back-record conversion became the biggest obstacle to computerization. At that stage no one had designed a full-text retrieval system that could solve the incident room problems. Another worry by some senior officers was that serious money would be wasted if the murderer should be apprehended quickly.
Home Office officials knew the urgency of the West Yorkshire problem, which became worse as the years went by and the toll of yet more Ripper victims began to rise. Yet development of a police incident room computer system was never a priority, and it took several more years before one was available. An increasing number of attacks by the Ripper meant greater information-overload both for the incident room and the men and women having to manage it. The more the documentation piled up, the less likely the chance grew of back-converting it into a computerized system. The West Yorkshiremen seemed to be chasing their tails. And their problems were about to be compounded by the very next, and sixth, Ripper murder, across the Pennines, in Manchester, England’s second largest city. Here he murdered another prostitute on 1 October 1977 – a twenty-year-old mother of two children, Jean Jordan. Then he hid her body under bushes, where it lay undiscovered for over a week. The killer’s decision to strike in a completely different town reflected a pattern of sorts. When the heat was on in Leeds, with Hobson’s undercover teams keeping watch on Chapeltown’s red-light area, he moved to Bradford and found a victim in Manningham. With the pressure on in both Leeds and Bradford, he visited Moss Side, the red-light district of Manchester.
Positioned in the north-west of the country, some two hundred miles from London, Manchester spreads itself over sixty square miles. With local government reorganization in 1974, it had become Greater Manchester, absorbing a number of local towns like Salford. Within five miles of the city centre lived a million people; within ten miles, two and a half million. Manchester dwarfed the Leeds-Bradford conurbation and was the hub of many industries – not least as the northern headquarters of the national newspapers, who all had offices and printing plants there. It was also home to one of Britain’s great liberal institutions, the Manchester Guardian. In the nineteenth century, as in Leeds and Bradford, the manufacture of textiles was a dominant industry, the humid air apparently assisting in the production of cotton products.
In the 1950s and 1960s redevelopment schemes swept away the old and the derelict to produce a modernized city centre. A new road on stilts was built, the Mancunian Way, designed to ease traffic congestion. Piccadilly, a large square in the heart of the city, became a central shopping area, dominated on one side by a towering modern hotel designed to appeal to a fast-moving, international clientele. Around the periphery of the city were arterial road links – the M6 and M62 motorways – taking traffic north and south, east and west. In no time at all, a driver could speed from Bradford and Leeds, over the Pennines and into the heart of Manchester. From there to Moss Side took ten minutes by car. Just like Chapeltown in Leeds, and Bradford’s Manningham, Manchester’s red-light district was a formerly prosperous area fallen on hard times where large terraced houses had long been converted into flats. Together with Hulme, where Jean Jordan lived in a run-down council block, it was, and remains today, among the poorest areas in the country. In twenty-first century Britain, Moss Side and Hulme score first and fifth on the government’s most recent index of urban deprivation. A high concentration of ethnic minorities form a third of the local population. Lone parent households abound and the area has had high levels of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion for years. Sixty per cent of households receive social security and a third of local people are long-term unemployed. Fifty-four per cent of local youngsters leave school without qualifications, and only 3.7 per cent of them manage to get five GCSE passes at grades A–C.
Nine days after Jean Jordan was murdered, her body lay on an old allotment site off Princess Road in the suburb of Chorlton, near Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, two miles from where she had lived. It was found at lunchtime on 10 October. Adjacent to Princess Road was an iron gateway opening on to a track, bordered on both sides by trees. The track led into an area of disused allotments, measuring roughly a hundred yards square. The murder scene was between the cemetery and a new area of ground recently provided for allotment holders by Manchester Corporation. The new allotments had been fenced off from the disused land, which then became quickly overgrown. It was well known as a place where prostitutes took clients for sex. Those among the Greater Manchester Police murder squad who saw the body claim it as one of the most horrific crime scenes they have ever witnessed. And for twenty-three-year-old Bruce Jones, the unfortunate local dairy worker who called the police, the sight left him with nightmares for years to come. He held an allotment on the adjoining land and had merely been looking for disused house bricks with a friend.
The man who would investigate Jordan’s murder was forty-four-year-old Jack Ridgway, the detective chief superintendent in charge of Central Manchester. He had been in the job a month, having been recently promoted following several years as head of the force Serious Crimes Squad. While he was having lunch with his deputy, Detective Superintendent Grange Catlow, the call came through that a corpse had been found near the Southern Cemetery. His first task was to view the body and call out the Home Office pathologist, Dr Reuben Woodcock, a consultant to the Bolton Group of Hospitals and lecturer in forensic medicine at Manchester University.
Ridgway was at the crime scene a good ninety minutes before Reuben Woodcock arrived. A uniformed constable was already there, along with a local CID officer from Chorlton-cum-Hardy police station. It took Ridgway only seconds to realize they had a really savage murder on their hands. ‘Jesus – what a bloody mess,’ he said to his deputy. He had been involved in umpteen murder investigations during his twenty-three-year career with Manchester police, and he had long since learned to bring a high degree of emotional distancing to the job of murder investigator. Objectivity was essential and he tried to engender it in members of his team, but this was an indelible experience. ‘It was a really bad body,’ he recalled. ‘I had never seen anything like it before. It was in an advanced stage of decomposition. The weather was quite warm and it had laid there over a week and it was heaving. It was clear she had been murdered. Half her guts were hanging out.’
The body lay in grass near a wooden hut, next to a cinder track. It was completely naked, the head twisted to the left, the trunk and legs in a semi-prone position with the arms spread apart. A coil of intestine was wrapped around the waist. The head was blackened due both to injuries received and changes brought about by putrefaction. The rest of the body was clean and white. The skin on the trunk and the upper legs showed numerous yellowish areas caused by physical damage and degeneration. There were clear wounds to the abdomen and scalp, and small pieces of paint on the skin matched that on an old door found near by. There was a large area of bloodstaining under the bushes.
Soon at the scene was Manchester’s fingerprint expert, Detective Chief Inspector Tony Fletcher. His immediate thought was that someone had robbed a grave at the nearby cemetery, then mutilated the corpse. In the long grass near by he found scattered randomly items of women’s clothing – pants, bra, tights, boots, cardigan, coat, skirt and jumper. ‘Most of the top clothing was badly bloodstained and crawling with fully developed maggots. Under the privet hedge which separated the allotment from the pathway there was a depression which was absolutely teeming with maggots. Leaning next to the adjacent shed was a wooden interior house door.’
Ridgway realized fairly quickly that the corpse must have been recently moved. The body had at one stage been underneath the bush out of sight. Anybody walking along the path wouldn’t go looking under the bush and it could have escaped notice. ‘But lying where it was when we saw it, there is no way it could have escaped notice. It stuck out like a sore thumb. You looked at the body and you thought: “I know this is a fairly isolated place but there is no way this body has lain in this position a week.” The state of decomposition told you it had to have been there a long time. So I thought it couldn’t have lain in this position without it having been discovered. However, at that stage it didn’t occur to me that the killer had gone back to move it.’
Now a full-scale murder hunt kicked into action. A suite of offices on the third floor at Longsight Police Station in Stockport Road, Manchester, was permanently on standby as a murder incident room. It was fully equipped with the kit needed for a major inquiry. The four-storey Edwardian building was very big, having started life as St Joseph’s Approved School, where young tearaways, seventy years before, were sent to be weaned from a life of crime. The police station’s cleaner’s cupboards were located in rooms that years earlier had been used as punishment cells. Some of the rooms were huge, and had been partitioned with chipboard and wooden panelling to make them smaller and more useful as offices and workrooms for the police force. Ridgway had a hard core of officers he wanted to man the incident room. They had done it many times before and knew the ropes.
A brief story about the murder appeared that night in the Manchester Evening News. It prompted a man living in nearby Hulme, Alan Royle, to walk into his local police station. He said his ‘wife’ had been missing for a week. His initial thought had been that she had taken herself off on one of her jaunts to Scotland. He identified items of clothing found at the murder scene as belonging to Jean Jordan. He was advised by DCI Fletcher not to view the body. An identification was very quickly made with the briefest glimpses of the face in the mortuary by Jean’s friend, Anna Holt, who sometimes worked the streets with her. Dental records later confirmed the identification.
No one on Ridgway’s murder squad was surprised by the story which soon unfolded. Alan Royle and Jean had met some four years earlier, in October 1973, when Jordan, then aged sixteen, ran away from her parents’ home in Motherwell, near Glasgow, and headed south. Royle was then a twenty-one-year-old chef who, travelling home from work, spotted her wandering about alone on Manchester’s main Victoria Station. After buying her a cup of tea and something to eat, he took her under his wing and they started living together. But Jean and Alan had a strained and turbulent relationship and grew tired of each other, going their separate ways while still living together. Royle later told police they drifted apart when Jean started going out with her ‘girlfriends’. It was a familiar tale. They had no money and she turned to prostitution to feed her children, working the streets of Moss Side and Cheetham Hill for a couple of years. Sometimes, especially in the winter, she and Anna Holt used the same flat where they took men for business. It was rented by a mutual friend.
Previously the couple had lived in a small flat in the suburb of Wythenshawe. They were anxious to find somewhere bigger, to give the children more room to play in, and had been in their council flat in Hulme only a matter of weeks. Royle said that occasionally Jean would take off for several days at a time, hitch-hiking to Glasgow and leaving him to care for the two children, Alan, aged three, and James, aged twelve months. Jean had once actually left him and gone to live with relatives, but later returned. She was an attractive woman – slim with a pretty face, about five feet six inches tall, with long auburn hair. On her pitch in Moss Side she was known to the other working girls as ‘Scotch Jean’. In the summertime she, like the other street girls, took men to the quiet patch of land near the Southern Cemetery, once part of the original Manchester Airport. But according to Anna Holt, Jean was growing tired of selling herself for sex and was trying to settle down. She had twice been arrested and cautioned for soliciting by the vice squad. ‘Jean was not really cut out for it,’ she said. ‘She was guilty about her kids.’ Neighbours described her as ‘quiet’, ‘shy’ and ‘timid’.
On Friday, 1 October, at 9.30 in the evening, Jordan left her children in the care of a babysitter, saying she was going to get a breath of air and buy cigarettes from the local off-licence. Royle, who had no job, was already out. When he returned from having a drink she had gone. ‘When she didn’t come back on Saturday morning I wasn’t too alarmed,’ he said. ‘I thought she had taken one of her trips to Scotland again. I didn’t think to tell police because she had done it so often before. It wasn’t until I read the description in the paper that I began to worry.’
DCI Tony Fletcher and a fingerprint specialist then proceeded to search the family home for a print to match ones taken from the dead body. A five-hour search of all the likely places yielded nothing. Finally, at around midnight, he instructed all remaining items to be collected in tea chests and taken to the fingerprint bureau. A team of six specialists began work next morning at 8.30. Within five minutes a left thumb print matching Jean Jordan’s was found on a lemonade bottle removed from under the kitchen sink. None of the other articles removed from Jordan’s flat yielded a trace of her fingerprints. Why? Because Alan Royle did all the cooking and most of the household chores.
Royle told detectives that Jean Jordan had a fake leather handbag which appeared to be missing. Police flooded the area with printed notices about the murder, specifically mentioning the dark-brown vinyl handbag, which had two carrying handles and a shoulder strap made of the same material. It was believed to contain about £15 in cash, a few cosmetics and some yellow tissue paper. Every person who used the allotment site was interviewed and a fingertip search of the disused allotment site failed to find the handbag.
The post-mortem was carried out by Reuben Woodcock at the brand-new, purpose-built central police mortuary in Rachel Street, Manchester, Jack Ridgway at his side. They had worked closely together many times and an easy-going familiarity resulted. The police officer always found the pathologist thorough, not to say painstaking, and quite approachable. He would discuss his findings with Ridgway, and more importantly from the detective’s viewpoint thoughtfully listened to what he had to say. ‘Some tend to be a little remote,’ Ridgway reflected. ‘They are the pathologist and not particularly interested in what your views are, whether they may or may not be valid. I always found Mr Woodcock was quite prepared to listen to your views, and if they didn’t coincide with his findings, he would explain why it couldn’t be right medically.’
Woodcock began to itemize the injuries – first to the head. There were eleven in all, some causing depressed fractures of the skull, some fairly superficial, others in a cluster of wounds each about one inch in diameter and all with fractures of the skull beneath. The woman had been hit with enough force in the mouth to loosen the middle four teeth in her upper jaw and there were tooth fragments in her mouth. He had little doubt that a heavy weapon with a rounded end, such as a hammer, had been used.
Moving to the shoulder, neck and trunk, he found a series of nineteen massive injuries, dark brown in colour, on her arms and upper chest. He believed they were also caused by blows from a hammer. Further down were more savage wounds – incisions to the front of the trunk. Other slashing wounds were found on her right thigh. As he examined the body, Woodcock felt sure the wounds were made in a series of slashes from the left shoulder to the right knee. He noted in his report: ‘Eighteen wounds were seen on the abdomen and chest and six on the right thigh. The largest wound on the abdomen was seven inches long and the intestine protruded through it.’ There was a neighbouring large wound through which gut protruded. It had been made with such ferocity that the intestine had been cut, the wound extending deep into the abdomen and into the front of the backbone. He could see fly eggs present but no maggots in this wound. ‘This indicates that the wound had not been exposed to flies as long a time as the head,’ he wrote. More wounds were on the left side of the trunk.
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