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.
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