Peter Sutcliffe

She was rushed to hospital in Bradford where she underwent emergency surgery. Later she was transferred to Leeds for major neurological surgery. Oldfield begged doctors for an opportunity to talk with Maureen before they commenced surgery. Maureen tried hard to recall as many details as she could. She remembered leaving Tiffany’s and the car that had stopped to give her a lift. The man, as she recalled, was white, with a large build, about thirty-five with light brown, shoulder-length hair; he would have been about six foot, with puffed cheeks and big hands. She wasn’t sure about the colour of the car, it was white or yellow, or blue. She would not remember anything when she came out of surgery.

It would be six weeks before Maureen could leave hospital, only to spend a further three weeks in a convalescent home, before returning home. All she had to live on was her thirteen-pound-a week social security payment. In 1978, she appeared in the Bradford Magistrates Court, charged with stealing from three shops in the city centre. She told the court that she was waiting for compensation for the attack, having only received £300. She was fined seventy-five pounds. In April 1979, the Criminal Compensation Board offered her £1500. She appealed. She was later awarded £1250 as an interim payment, while her case would be held under medical review. To help make ends meet, Maureen sometimes received payment for interviews about the attack.

While Maureen recuperated in hospital, the police investigation began. Detectives set up interview rooms at Tiffany’s nightclub in an attempt to glean as much information as they could from the patrons who had been there the week before. The investigation into the attack on Maureen Long would involve 304 officers working full-time. They interviewed 175,000 people, took 12,500 statements and checked 10,000 vehicles. The nightwatchman’s description of the killer’s car as a white Ford Cortina Mark II matched the thousands of cars used by taxi-drivers in the area.

Police had already contemplated the possibility of the killer being a taxi driver. He would have a good knowledge of the area, enabling him to know the best haunts for prostitutes and the quiet, secluded areas that he could take them to. They had started questioning taxi drivers after Tina Atkinson’s murder and now they increased that line of investigation. Most were quickly cleared, but one taxi driver, Terry Hawkshaw was not. The police were not completely satisfied with his explanations about his whereabouts on the nights of the murders. He lived alone with his mother in a central location to all of the killings. He was thirty-six years old and his appearance fitted the general description of the killer.

Terry Hawkshaw was placed under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Police followed him as he drove his taxi and drank at local pubs. Armed with a search warrant, they entered his home, searching it from top to bottom, including dustbins and his uncle’s tool shed. They removed all of his clothing from his home, cut locks from his hair and took blood samples. They even took the carpets from his car.

He was taken in for questioning a number of times. On one such occasion, he was held from eight o’clock in the evening until eight o’clock the following morning. Meanwhile the real killer continued to elude police and drove freely through the streets of Yorkshire looking for his next quarry.

For Peter and Sonia Sutcliffe, life was really beginning to improve. On August 18 1977, they had exchanged contracts for the purchase of their lovely new home and Sonia began her first teaching position at Holmfield First School in Bradford two weeks later. Then on Monday 26, they moved into their home and Peter bought himself another second hand Ford Corsair, a red one to replace the white Corsair he had sold on 31 August.

Sutcliffe's home in Bradford

The following Saturday, 1 October 1977, after spending the day working on his new car, he decided to take it out for a test drive. By 9:30 pm, Jean Bernadette Jordan was climbing into the car with him near her home in Moss Side, Manchester. Jean, born in Scotland, had moved to Manchester after running away from home at the age of sixteen. She had met Alan Royle on the day of her arrival and moved in with him. Two years later they had their first child, Alan. Two years after that, their second son James was born. Although they were still living together when she was murdered, they had mutually agreed to live separate lives.

Earlier on the evening of 1 October, as Jean poured Alan a glass of lemonade, he told her that he would be going out for the evening. He left her watching television but she was gone when he returned later. He assumed that she had decided to go out with her girlfriends who were also "on the game." Instead she had taken Peter Sutcliffe to a quiet area of vacant land between allotments and the Southern Cemetery where she was to have sexual intercourse with him for £5. Before getting out of the car, she put the £5note in a hidden compartment of her handbag. Once out of the car, Peter used his hammer to hit Jean over the head a total of thirteen times. He then hid her body in undergrowth near the fence between the cemetery and the allotments.

Peter, now fully recovered from the burst of frenzied anger, calmly drove home across the Pennines to Sonia and his new house, and anxiously awaited the headlines that would announce his deed to the world. As he and Sonia planned the house-warming party to be held on Sunday evening, Peter began to worry about the £5 note he had given Jean. It was a brand new note and it may be possible to trace it back to him. By Sunday 9 October, there still had been no word of the discovery of Jean’s body in the papers. If he was at all troubled by the events of the week before, his party guests could not tell. It was almost midnight when Peter offered to take some of his relatives home in the red Corsair, while Sonia went to bed.

After dropping his guests at their homes, Peter did not immediately return to Garden Lane, instead he drove over the Pennines once again. He found Jean’s body exactly as he had left it, but her handbag was missing. As he searched the area, he became frantic at the prospect of the police finding the £5 note. When his frustration and fury was at its peak, he dragged the lifeless and already rotting body away from its hiding place. He tore Jean’s clothes from her body, and then stabbed her over and over again. Eighteen times he stabbed at her breasts, chest, stomach and vagina. They were fierce slashing swipes, some 8 inches deep. One extended from her left shoulder down to her right knee. When the rage subsided, he thought again of the £5 note, and attempted to cut off Jean’s head. His intention was to divert police attention by disposing of her head somewhere else. When he realised that it was an impossible task with the tools he had, he gave up and went home.

It hadn’t occurred to Alan to report Jean as missing. She had often just taken off from home without notice to visit relatives in Scotland, so he assumed that it was the same this time and that Jean would turn up in her own good time. It wasn’t until he read the report in the paper on the evening of 10 October that he became concerned. The report described the young woman, who had been found by a neighbour at midday, as having shoulder-length auburn hair and listed some of the clothing found. What the report didn’t say was that her blackened head was unrecognisable. It had been flattened with the severity of the many blows she had received. Her belly was gaping open and putrefaction was evident.

At the Manchester C.I.D. Headquarters, Alan showed Det. Chief Supt. Jack Ridgeway a recent photo of Jean, but it was impossible for Ridgeway to tell if it was the same woman that he had seen earlier that day. Reluctant to subject Alan to the sight of Jean’s mutilated body, Ridgeway suggested that there might be something in the house that would have Jean’s fingerprints on it. Alan immediately remembered the lemonade bottle that was still sitting where Jean had placed it over a week before. The prints on the bottle were a definite match with those of the corpse.

A friend of Jean’s, Anna Holt, had also gone to the police after reading the report in the paper. She insisted on seeing the body and positively identified her as Jean Jordan. Anna told police that Jean had only recently decided to give up "the game" and settle down with Alan and the children to lead a decent home life.

Alan was devastated by the tragedy and would lose his job as a chef because he found it impossible to concentrate on his work. Thoughts of Jean and how she died would constantly torment him. Their son Alan, considered a bright boy before his mother’s murder, was retarded by the trauma of the ensuing months. By his fifth year he was still only able to speak a few monosyllabic words.

On Saturday 15 October, Jean Jordan’s handbag was found only 100 yards from where her body had lain the week before. The money that Alan believed she'd been carrying was missing, but in a hidden pocket at the front of the bag, police found a five-pound Bank of England note. The note, with the serial number AW51 121565 was brand new, issued only a couple of days before Jean was killed. The Bank of England established that the note was part of a consignment sent to the Shipley and Bingley branches of the Midland Bank, right in the heart of the Yorkshire Ripper area.

Ridgeway was confidant that the Yorkshire Ripper could be found if they could trace the owner of the five-pound note. With this aim in mind, Ridgeway, along with thirty handpicked Manchester officers, travelled to Bradford and opened a special incident room at the Baildon School.

It was quickly established that the note in question had been part of a bundle of five hundred pounds and had been the fifth last note in a sequence of sixty-nine. Ridgeway’s excitement soon abated when he learned that the note had been part of a batch of £17,500 pounds, which had been distributed to a number of firms in the Bradford and Shipley area that employed almost 8,000 men in total.

It would take Ridgeway and his men three months to interview 5000 of those men. One of the firms they had concentrated on was T & WH Clark (Holdings Ltd) in Canal Road, Shipley. Just before Christmas, they interviewed the men that worked there, including Peter William Sutcliffe of Garden Lane, Heaton. There had been nothing about Peter, or the other 5000 men, that had seemed suspicious. They had even spoken to his wife, Sonia, who had not contradicted in any way Peter’s account of the nights they asked him about.

Even as the police were interviewing those 8000 men, one of them, the Yorkshire Ripper struck again, but this time he would leave his victim to provide a strong identification of him and his car. It had started on 14 December when Marilyn Moore left a friend’s home in Gathorne Terrace, near the Gaiety pub at 8.00pm.

Marilyn Moore

As she walked along Gipton Avenue towards her home, she noticed a dark coloured car drive slowly toward her. Sure that the driver was a potential client, she began to walk to Leopold Street where she assumed his car would next appear. Her assumption proved correct when she found his car parked near a junction known as Frankland Place. The driver was leaning against the driver’s door. He was about thirty, stocky build, around 5’6" tall with dark, wavy hair and a beard. He was wearing a yellow shirt, a navy blue/black zip-up anorak and blue jeans, and appeared to be waving to someone in a nearby house.

He asked her if she was "doing business" and they set a price before she got into the car with him. As he drove her to a vacant lot in Scott Hall Street, about a mile and a half away, he told her that his name was Dave and that the person he had been waving to was his girlfriend. When they arrived at their destination, "Dave" suggested that they have sex in the back seat, but when Marilyn got out of the car she found that the back door was locked. As "Dave" came behind her to open the door, Marilyn felt a searing, sickening blow on the top of her head. She screamed loudly and attempted to protect her head with her hands. As she fell to the ground, frantically grabbing her attacker’s trousers as she fell, she felt further blows before losing consciousness.