The Yorkshire Ripper
At the time of writing, politicians are threatening great upheavals in the police force throughout Britain. Following the disasters of the Black Panther, the Yorkshire Ripper and the Soham murders, there are calls for a specialist police team to investigate these types of high profile murder cases in the Provinces. Why has it not been done before? The answer, as is often the case: money.
In Chapter 3 of I'm Jack - the Police Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, Pan books 1980 we stated: "Each provincial county, city or borough force had its own watch committee which, among other things, regulated police expenditure. If Scotland Yard's assistance was requested within twenty four hours of a murder being discovered the expense devolved upon them, and not the local rates. A longer delay meant that the locals bore the brunt.
In the summer of 1979, with my colleague, the late Frank Smyth (from the same Yorkshire town as the Black Panther, Morley, near Leeds) we met Sergeant Barry Shaw of the West Yorkshire Police Headquarters, Wakefield, who had known Frank Smyth since schooldays, and was in London for a conference. Pan books had agreed to an advance of £6,000 ( £2,000 each) for a book on the Yorkshire Ripper case which had made new headlines with the revelation by Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) Mr. George A. Oldfield of a tape recording which he said was the "voice of the Ripper", plus letters postmarked Sunderland from the same source. This turned out to be the gravest error in the long and arduous hunt for the killer. But there were others...
Barry Shaw telephoned my flat in Hampstead to say that the Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, had told him that if he went ahead in collaboration with us, he risked his job and his pension. Sergeant Shaw told him that I was a former Scotland Yard accredited crime reporter and Smyth was an author and quite an expert on forensic medicine, so there was little chance of litigation, but Gregory told him that his job was in jeopardy, and he had a lot to lose. Sergeant Shaw's real rank was Chief Superintendent, and he had a Cambridge University law degree, but he preferred to keep the lower rank so that he could edit the West Yorkshire police newspaper and continue writing plays for television. When we told the Pan editor, Kyle Cathie, that he had bowed out, she immediately reduced the advance to £4,000. She expressed a wish to tour the red light area of Leeds, and was met in Leeds by one of Pan's local salesmen, invited us to lunch, and paid with an American Express card, looking annoyed when I told her that at a recent party two publishers were in one corner discussing the merits of the latest Rolls Royce while in another corner two authors discussed the cheapest method of commiting suicide. The advance would not cover our three months stay up North, hoofing around Lancashire and Yorkshire, interviewing and drinking with detectives, prostitutes, witnesses and news and radio reporters.
We rented a house in Otley and started work, pin-pointing the sites of all the murders on a large wall map and compiling a file on each of the dead women. In the office of the Yorkshire Post the file on one of them had a photofit of a man with black hair, a beard, sideburns, and what was known as a "Jason king moustache" Alongside this photofit was a large red sticker with the words DO NOT USE on it. The police had told the editor not to print it again.
This was another serious error in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper because now it was assumed that he had a Geordie accent, and the women who had identified him as having the beard and moustache had given no indication of this and said he had a local or Yorkshire accent. The police chose not to believe them. They were, after all, just prostitutes.
George Oldfield began telling the Press that it was between him and the Ripper, a cat and mouse game, and asked him to give himself up. The stress of the case was beginning to ruin Mr Oldfield's health, and he was a whisky drinker. Frank Smyth had seen a photograph of the detective at a scene of crime drinking from a whisky bottle. When he had a heart attack he asked his wife for a large whisky before the ambulance arrived. The strain of the manhunt had finally brought him down. For it was a strain, and the mind boggles at the thousands of facts, statements, interviews, questionaires, the horrifying details of each murder and the thousands of detective hours spent trying to catch the piece of human ordure called Sutcliffe.
Do not make the mistake of thinking he was not clever: he was intelligent (I.Q. 110) cunning, careful, and answered police questioning with aplomb, talking his way out of nine interviews. He believed he was infallible. Roger Cross, chief crime reporter of the Yorkshire Post, and the son of a police officer, quotes a poem Sutcliffe wrote and was found in the cab of his lorry:
"In this truck is a man, Whose latent genius if Unleashed would rock the Nation, whose dynamic energy Would overpower those Around him. Better let him sleep?"
The police being led astray completely by the letters postmarked Sunderland and by the tape recording played over and over again fixing in everyone's mind that the killer was a Geordie, made Sutcliffe even more confident, using workman's tools (his ball pein hammer, Phillips number 6 screwdriver and Stanley knife) on any woman walking alone after dark.
Yet the letters had been written and posted by someone in Sunderland and the tape made by a man with a local accent.
After comparing the wording of the letters with the letters sent to the police by the original Jack the Ripper in London, I telephoned the Sunderland library. Quote from I'm Jack - the Police Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (Chapter 15):
During the summer of 1978 the librarian at Sunderland central library discovered that all the books on the original Jack the Ripper had been stiolen from the library. He told the police, and detectives questioned the staff, although the staff were unable to help them, and they were told to treat the matter as confidential.
Then there was the clue of the £5 note, and that was another serious error in the police manhunt.
On the tenth of October, 1977, Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Ridgeway, head of Manchester C.I.D., with the local Home Office pathologist, Reuben Woodcock, went out to the city's sprawling necropolis, Southern Cemetery, and saw the remains of Jean Royle. The local paper gave a description and her husband phoned in, but was advised not to view the body, so she was positively identified by a fingerprint she had left on a lemonade bottle at home. A bizarre and horrifying series of events had led to her discovery. Sutcliffe had moved to a new house on 26 September. After tinkering with a Ford car he had just bought, he set off on Saturday 1st October for Manchester. By 10 p.m. "Scotch Jean" was dead, from 13 hammer blows to the head, and her body pushed into a hedgerow. But a horrible thought troubled Sutcliffe during the week that followed: he had given her a £5 note and it was new, and traceable, from his pay packet. On Sunday evening, 9th October, after driving relatives home from the house-warming party, when his wife Sonia had gone to bed, he took a chance and drove back to find the note. But he could not find the handbag. In a frenzy of frustration he stripped the corpse, stabbed it 18 times all over the body, and slashed it from shoulder to knee. He tried to cut the head off to avoid her being identified, but failed with the tools he had, and returned to Bradford. At mid-day on Monday 10th October an allotment holder found the body and called the police.
Quote from Chapter 7 of I'm Jack - the Police Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper: Detective Superintendent Jack Ridgeway's first press conference was cautious to say the least. Questioned as to whether or not the dead woman had been a prostitute, he said: "There is nothing to suggest it." Was it the work of the Yorkshire Ripper? "There are several similarities beteen our case and theirs, but there are also noticeable dissimilarities."
Five days after the discovery of the body, on Saturday 15th October, the handbag was found 100 yards from where the corpse had lain. In a secret pocket, commonly used by prostitutes fearing robbery, was the £5 note, serial number AW 51 121565, and before the weekend was over the Bank of England told the police that it was part of a consignment sent to the Shipley and Bingley branches of the Midland Bank. It had been issued on 27th September, just four days before the murder. It was brand new, but it had taken a valuable five days to find it. At this stage, Sherlock Holmes would have said: "Time is of the essence, Watson. We have not a moment to lose..." and he would have issued the serial number of the £5 note to "the linens" as they called the newspapers. .If this had been done on the 15th of October Sutcliffe would have been caught, but the police prevaricated over the possibility of the note having been given in a shop or betting shop or pub and then passed on. Sutcliffe had the note in his pay packet on Friday 30th September. Workmen then did not have bank accounts. The note was part of a bundle of £500, and five from the end of a sequence of 69 notes. Even if Sutcliffe, alerted, had destroyed or hidden notes he still had or others he had given to his wife for housekeepig, other employees at the firm where Sutcliffe worked or their wives would most llkely still have held onto notes saved from the Friday the 30th September paypacket.
Instead, in the two weeks that followed there was a truce in the war of the roses. Red joined white as 30 detectives from Manchester linked up with 30 hand picked men from West Yorkshire, and they set up an HQ in a disused schoolroom in Baildon, an outlying district of Shipley. Their initial enthusiasm sank when they discovered that the £500 bundle was part of a batch of £17,500 and they would have to interview 8,000 men.
In mid-October Mr. Ridgeway told the Press that they were questioning workmen in Shipley, Bingley and Bradford.
Quote from I'm Jack: "At this stage we are not interviewing women, although we may do so at a later stage. As to whether there's a link with the unsolved murders in West Yorkshire, it is far too early to draw any conclusions."
In mid-November the serial number of the £5 note was issued to the Press by Mr. Ridgeway.
On 17th January, 1978, he closed the incident room, stating that he hoped that in the 5,000 interviews was a clue which would lead them to the killer.
He was right about Sutcliffe being interviewed, but he brazened it out and his wife gave him an alibi for all the dates.
What were the clues the police had at this stage?
Anna Rogulski, 34, Keighley 5/7/75
Survived. Three blows to back of head.
Slash marks on stomach, clothes put back in position. Handbag untouched.
Olive Smelt, 46, Halifax 15/8/75
Survived. Worked as office cleaner for firm
of Solicitors. Two blows to head. Cuts 6"8" long, top of buttocks.
Two cuts above eyes. About 30 years of age, 5ft 10ins, slightly built, dark
hair, some beard. Said to her: "Weather's letting us down, isn't it?" Local
Yorkshire accent. Said "weather" not "the
weather".
Wilma McCann, 28, Leeds 30/10/75
Two blows to head. Bra pulled up, trousers
pulled down, pants in place, 14 stab wounds to chest and stomach, one
in neck. Handbag, white purse with child's writing "Mumiy" written
on it, missing Handbag wrapped around her left wrist. Semen on back
of trousers and pants.
Joan Harrison, 26, Preston, 20/11/75.
Violent blow to head. Stamping and
kicking marks on face, body and legs. Semen, rare blood group B, in vagina
and anus. Bite marks on left breast clearly indicating gap in upper front
teeth. Purse hidden in bush in nearby park. Handbag found on refuse tip 7
months later, 400 yards from scene of crime. Rings, a key ring, man's wristwatch
missing.
Emily Jackson, 42, Leeds, 21/1/76.
Two blows to head, with ball-pein hammer.
51 stab wounds to neck, chest and abdomen made with Philips No.6 screwdriver.
Body stamped on, with heavy-ribbed Dunlop Warwick size 7 wellington boot.
Right thigh stamped on, leaving ribbed pattern of boot. Similar bootprint
in sand nearby. Handbag also nearby, nothing taken.
Marcella Claxton, 20, Leeds, 8/5/76.
Survived. Two blows to head requiring
52 stitches. Black crinkly hair, beard. White car, red upholstery. Man looked
down on her, masturbating, as she bled. Watched her from his car and drove
past several times as she dialled 999.then sat on floor of phone kiosk.
Irene Richardson, 28, Leeds, 6/2/77.
Three blows to head with hammer. Bra
in position, but skirt pulled up. Stabbed in neck and throat and stomach.
Moulage of tyre tracks but could have come from 26 vehicles, of which 100,000
were registered. Detective Jim Hobson linked Joan Harrison killing in Preston,
and the attack on Marcella Claxton in Leeds.
Patricia Atkinson, 33, Bradford, 24/4/77.
Killed indoors. Four blows to
head. Bra pulled up, jeans and pants pulled down. Stabbed 6 times in stomach,
knife slash marks on left side. Clear print on bottom of bedsheet where body
lay: of a size 7 Dunlop Warwick wellington boot.
Jayne Macdonald, 16, Leeds, 26/6/77
Worked in supermarket. Three blows to
head. Stabbed repeatedly in same wound in chest. Stabbed once in the back.
Handbag intact.
Maureen Long, 42, Bradford, 10/7/77.
Survived. One blow to head. Stabbed
4 times in stomach, chest and back. Girdle, pants and tights pulled down,
and slashing stab wound on stomach. Doctors treated her for hypothermia and
possible brain damage. Nightwatchman saw Ford Cortina II, white with black
roof, being driven at high speed from the wasteland at 3.27 a.m. Gave George
Oldfield description of the man who had offered a lift at a taxi rank: White,
36-37 years of age, collar length blond hair, drove white Ford Cortina with
black roof.
General review of descriptions by survivors and clues found by police: Slightly built man. 30-ish, black beard and moustache and crinkly hair, gap in front teeth, size 7 workman's boot, occasional robbery, occasional sex, drives white saloon car with black roof, red upholstery, uses workman's tools: ball pein hammer, Phillips No.6 sharpened screwdriver and Stanley knife. Speaks with local Yorkshire accent. N.B. Not one of the survivors said anything about a Geordie accent.
Nor did his next victim, who had a long conversation with him. Marilyn Moore, 25, was trolling near the Gaiety pub in Leeds when she was followed by him and then saw him standing near his car, about the size of a Morris Oxford, maroon in colour, and when she got in she saw that it had two rear-view mirrors on the windscreen. A lynx-eyed newspaperman would have spotted this as an unmarked police car, or a car that had been bought in auction from the police, who always make the mistake of not putting AA or RAC badges or objects that would indicate it was a normal car, thus making it easy to spot by villains. The man standing next to it, however, did not have the build of a police officer. He was about 30 and 5 ft 6ins tall with dark wavy hair and a beard, and he turned to her and said: "Are you doing business? Five pounds?" He told her his name was Dave and he had been waving to his girlfriend when she saw him. He was relaxed, friendly, and mentioned the names of other prostitutes working the area, which he knew very well. On some spare ground, she got out but could not open the back door to get to the rear passenger seat, so he said he would come round and open it for her. He struck the back of her head with his ball pein hammer and she fell, screaming loudly, grasping his blue jeans as she fell. There were more blows but a barking dog frightened him off. She heard the back wheels of his car skid as he drove off at speed. When she came out of hospital she left Leeds, but now the police had another vital clue which linked her attack to the murder of Jean Royle (maiden name Jordan), in Manchester: the tyre tracks were the same, half-worn India Autoway cross-plys on the two front wheels. And the photofit from her clear description was that of the Yorkshire Ripper, who spoke with a Yorkshire accent.
His modus operandi varying only slightly the Yorkshire Ripper continued the trail of murder in Yorkshire and Lancashire: Helen Rytka, 18, in Huddersfield, Yvonne Pearson, 22, in Bradford, Vera Millward, 40, in Manchester, and 19 year old Josephine Whitaker in Halifax, who worked for the Halifax Building Society. It was now that the feminists and women's lib. organisations started an outcry: the police referred to her as a "decent girl", unlike the prostitutes who had been slain. And she was the third "decent" woman attacked by the Ripper, the others being Olive Smelt, an office cleaner, and Jayne MacDonald, supermarket worker. This distinction by the police made people think there was a bit of a cavalier attitude to the deaths of common prostitutes, but this killer did not discriminate. He attacked any female walking alone at night. George Oldfield, assisted by Dick Holland, head of the Halifax C.I.D. and also of the newly formed "Ripper Squad" took charge of the case. There had been some frowns at the notice put up on the door of the new squad's office in Wakefield HQ. In large letters the word S.H.I.T. was on the card. It stood for Special Homicide Investigation Team. Some thought this was taking police cynicism too far.
There was still snow on the ground on the 4th of April 1979 in Halifax, but when my colleague Frank Smyth and I made our investigations in the summer of '79, the local people had scarcely recovered from the harsh grilling they had received from the police. "They gave us hell" said a woman in a street nearby. Naturally, the police were frustrated and angry at not being able to catch the man who had committed 11 murders and attacked and almost killed 3 other women in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Their vigil at red light areas no longer applied: every woman walked in fear after dark. His next victim was a happy, much loved and popular student at Bradford University, Barbara Leach, aged 20, on 2 September 1979. There was national outrage at her murder, near where she lived, near the pub she drank in and played darts with fellow students, and just around the corner from Bradford Police Headquarters.
I'm Jack - the Police Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, was written at the time of this murder, September 1979.
Peter Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield on the second day of January 1981 -- 16 months later.
We had all been led astray by the hoaxer from Sunderland, but I had surmised this about the wanted killer (the actual facts in parenthesis):
"...his hobby was probably tinkering with a bicycle, motor-cycle or, later, an old car for he appears to be a skilful motorist, maintaining at low cost an old 'banger' over a four-year period. (he had a motor-cycle as soon as he had a licence, and changed cars several times before he was caught)
"His mother may be a religious woman who turned him away from 'bad women' as a young boy, or his father may have gone with prostitutes and flaunted the fact before his wife and son, causing a break-up in the marriage, a ruination of the boy's security. He has a burning hatred of prostitutes..." (His mother was a staunch Roman Catholic, taking her son to mass every Sunday. His father went off with a woman who was a mute, rupturing the marriage. Sutcliffe had caught gonorrhoea when he first went with prostitutes, and later was humiliated by prostitutes in the Leeds bar when he went in and asked one of them for his money back, and was laughed out of the pub.)
"Although he is a loner, he probably wants to be 'one of the boys' in the public house when a 'dirty' joke is told...he probably pretends his sex life is normal, or jokes about the 'conquests' he has had with prostitutes, and may make remarks like 'If I want a woman I rent one - by the hour' or something to indicate a masculinity which he knows in secret he does not possess." (Although he got on with 'the lads', girls and women tended to shy away from him, not liking his eyes and the way he looked at them. He never attempted to have sex with a girl friend. He joked with his workmates who laughed at him calling his truck 'Wee Willie'. He boasted of an on-going affair with a woman in Scotland)
"He may have access to a boiler house or heating appliance where he can either wash and dry clothes quickly or destoy them in a furnace after each killing...washing the clothes and workbench tools under a running cold tap -- cold water being the easiest way to soak out blood." (He washed his own clothes at the kitchen sink, hung them out to dry in garden, watched by his neighbours)
"The police say he is an 'engineer' -- in the widest sense, and he would probably be flattered to be called an engineer. He does not bother to dress up when he goes out on his Saturday night expeditions in search of a victim -- does not even bother to change his work boots or work trousers (probably blue jeans) while driving around the streets." (He changed his tyres more often than he changed his boots, for the moulage of boot prints near the body of Josephine Whitaker matched those found at the scenes of crime of Emily Jackson and Patricia Atkinson, so between January 1976 and April 1979 he wore the same size 7 moulded rubber boots, the right sole showing strong wearing in the centre, from being pressed constantly on the gas pedal and brake of a car or truck.
One clue always puzzled me: the green imitation leather handbag with the £5 note and a £1 note in the secret pocket on the side, found, one early report said 100 yards from the body of "Scotch Jean" Jordan, and, according to a later report 183 feet from the corpse. Alan Royle, her common-law husband, told the police that £14 or £15 was in her handbag when she left the house. In his police statement Sutcliffe said he went back for the handbag but could not find it, and he had thrown it diagonally to the right with his back to the hedge after the murder. The bag was found, open, hidden under a fence, with make-up, cigarettes and matches in it. Who had hidden it there? Not Jean, she was dead. Not Sutcliffe, he had hurled it into the field. When I surveyed the scene of the crime with my colleague Frank Smyth, I discovered a large hole made inside the hedge, with an armchair in it. It was like a huge bird's nest with furniture, all rounded out and hidden from prying eyes. To think that a human being lived there, destitute, sleeping in the battered chair. I asked a passer-by about it. "An old tramp lived there," he said. "The police gave him a hell of a bad time after that body was found, but he had nothing to do with the murder." Someone had seen the handbag in the field, taken the notes (unless Sutcliffe had stolen the notes and lied to the police) and then hidden it under the fence, and a later report said it was 189 feet from the body, and "outside the search area". 189 feet is 60 yards -- not much of a "search area". But this vital clue with its hidden fiver held up the police investigation for five days and the only one to the benefit was Sutcliffe.
Despite all these clues, the modus operandi, the matching descriptions for photofits, the voice with a local accent, the forensic revelation of the implements of murder, his height, build, and shoe size, the gap in his front teeth, the moulage of his work boot, the moulage of his two front tyres, the five pound note pinpointing his workplace in Bradford, the nine interviews and the constant stopping of him in the red light area of Leeds (he simply said he was passing through to go to his workplace), and even one detective's report naming him as the ripper, lost in the files in HQ, Halifax, it all went belly-up because of the hoaxer. The title of any report or book about him should be: Malice in Sunderland.
Even though George Oldfield said privately that he believed he was dealing with a local man, he would not climb down and say that he had been fooled by the letters and tape. Policemen and lawyers (and judges) seem unable to bring themselves to admit: "I was wrong. I made a mistake. I apologise." The hard-working police foot-slogging around and doorstepping thousands and thousands of men were hampered by what they were given as fact: he has a Geordie accent. Even when police officers stood inches away from that incriminating pedal-worn boot, as Sutcliffe, unmoved by their questioning, climbed on the mesh step and into the cab of his lorry, with his gap--toothed grin and confident manner, knowing they had searched his house and found nothing, the officers had to believe their chief -- the ripper has a Geordie accent. And even Sutcliffe's best friend Trevor Birdsall, who sat in the car while Sutcliffe attacked Olive Smelt in Halifax, and suspected him, but stopped believing Sutcliffe was the ripper when assured by the police and the newspaper headlines that the murderer had a Geordie accent, he only reported his suspicions to the police on the insistence of his girl friend, in November 1980 after the murder of Jacqueline Hill, first by an anonymous letter then going in person to the Bradford HQ and naming Sutcliffe to the officer on the desk. But again the report was "lost" in the mountainous files.
A week after the Jacqueline Hill murder, however, Chief Constable Ronald Gregory at last made the decision to sack Oldfield and replace him with Jim Hobson, an experienced detective who had worked on the Irene Richardson and Barbara Leach murders, and Hobson had the sense to tell the 5,000 officers who read Barry Shaw's police newspaper The West Yorkshireman: "...there can always be a question mark and it would be wrong for officers to eliminate suspects because they had not got a Geordie accent."
The rest is part of crime history: The Yorkshire Ripper was caught by an alert police officer who returned to bushes and found the murder weapons in January 1981. Sutcliffe was heard to say to his wife Sonia, during a prison visit: "If I can show them I was mad, I could get off with only 10 years." But he got 30 years and ended up in Broadmoor*
Britain leads the world in advanced forensic science, but a change is needed in a police system which allows watch committees to save ratepayers money by refusing to call in experts until it is too late. That must be changed, and a force something like the FBI in America should be formed with highly experienced and intelligent officers who can deal with cases like the Black Panther and the Yorkshire Ripper and the two little girls who were murdered by a paedophile in Soham. Local police forces are tribal and insular, and they hug their secrets to themselves and distrust the Press, but they are beginning to realise that the public is there to help them solve crime, and newspapers, the radio, and television with programmes like Crimewatch are there to help them.
* Sutcliffe was not mad. He was evil, a born killer. He is in Broadmoor because it is "a high security prison". But Straffen the notorious child murderer escaped from Broadmoor and murdered another little girl, and Mitchell ("Mad Mitch") the axe murderer also escaped. I landed near Hartley Wintney in a helicopter hired by the Daily Express, where Mitchell was in the local police cell, having been taken off a bus. The day before, with Alfred Draper, a fellow crime reporter, we searched the rhododendron bushes near the Broadmoor prison with the psychiatrist who knew Mitchell as his patient in the prison, and he said: "If you see him, don't raise your voice, just say: 'Hello, Frank, how are you? Come on, let's have a nice cup of tea...' and he'll come quietly, cos he's not a bad lad, really.' A few minutes later Alfred said: "There's a movement in the bushes there, doctor...." The psychiatrist looked around, picked up a stout wooden stick which was lying in the grass and walked slowly towards the rhododendron, saying: "Is that you, Frank? Would you like a nice cup of tea.......'
Four psychiatrists diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers recommended that the prosecution accept the reduced plea from murder to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Sutcliffe pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 7 attempted murders. The prosecution said Sutcliffe had made monkeys out of the psychiatrists and had copied or faked the symptoms of schizophrenia, claiming God had told him he had a divine mission to kill prostitutes. The plea was rejected by the Judge, but two jury members had been influenced by the defence, and a majority verdict found Sutcliffe guilty of the 13 murders and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 30 years. He was transferred from prison to Broadmoor in 1984.
The year before, Doreen Hill, mother of Jacqueline, took out a writ against West Yorkshire police accusing them of "negligence and incompetence" She had written to the Queen and received support for her campaign to stop Sutcliffe's family and friends profiting from his crimes by selling their stories to newspapers. Sonia Sutcliffe was awarded £600,000 in damages against Private Eye magazine, later reduced to £60,000. She lost a claim against the News of the World and she had to pay £150,000 in costs, and still, today, 30 years after Sutcliffe's first brutal murder, snippets appear in the televison programmes about the case: early in 2006 Jack Windsor Lewis and Stanley Ellis, the Northern voice experts who pinpointed the hoaxer's location, revealed that they had told the police that the tape was a hoax, and had not been believed so they put it in writing, and a police officer reported a telephone call saying: "Tell them it's a hoax" from a man with the same voice that was on the tape, and he was not believed. A woman police psychological profiler said in the same programme that Sutcliffe was the kind of man she would sit next to in a train if about to be threatened by hooligans! And Dick Holland, once a much-admired detective, said: "he had a boot... of a certain size..." Even now, after 30 years a policeman cannot bring himself to say "He wore a size seven boot". Still hugging his secrets. A man cannot change his boot size.
That red star sticker is still on the Ripper file in the office of the Yorkshire Post: and when, at the end of the case, it was suggested that they pin on a wall all the photofits of the Ripper, the officers at Halifax HQ stared into all those extremely good likenesses to Sutcliffe with his goatee beard and "Jason King" moustache!
But the one who really profited from the crimes committed by Sutcliffe was West Yorkshire Chief Constable Ronald Gregory, who was paid £40,000 by the Mail on Sunday for a book that readers said "contained nothing new", and Mr Gregory, who had threatened Sergeant Barry Shaw that his job was in jeopardy if he wrote about the Yorkshire Ripper, back in 1979, was laughing all the way to the bank. Just as he had laughed at the Press conference, shown in the television programme, after Sutcliffe's capture, when asked by a reporter: "Does he have a Geordie accent?" and Gregory replied: "I cannot tell you now, because I haven't heard him speak."