to the head, dragging to the site where her corpse was found, raising of the clothes, stabbing, turning over and more stabs, in the course of which the assailant trod on her thigh, then the clothing was pulled down. She hadn’t been drinking. Later analysis by the laboratory at Harrogate found semen on a vaginal swab, but it was thought this was from sexual activity prior to the attack. Gee, the scientist who preferred not to deal in speculation, could not say exactly what kind of stabbing instrument had been used – but among the strong possibilities was indeed a Phillips screwdriver. Neither was he totally sure this was the work of McCann’s killer. There were clear similarities, but he could not rule out coincidence. Hoban, on the other hand, felt more certain he was dealing with the same killer for two murders, a suspicion strengthened when he started to hear details of the lifestyle the woman had led.
The murdered woman’s husband, Sydney Jackson, had a difficult story to tell the officers who interviewed him. He realized he was under suspicion himself, for the circumstances of his marriage were slightly out of the ordinary, even for Leeds. His story came out in dribs and drabs over the course of many hours of questioning. As he told it, and as Hoban initially understood it, she was insatiable and had had many affairs. He turned a blind eye to her activities, which included having sex with many boyfriends because her sexual appetite was such that he could not satisfy it.
Later that afternoon Hoban gave another television interview in the murder incident room at the newly opened Millgarth Street police station in Leeds city centre. Looking extraordinarily dapper for a senior detective, in his Aquascutum suit, red shirt and floral tie, he relayed some of the few facts at his disposal, putting the best possible gloss on the woman’s private life. ‘She was a woman who liked to go to public houses,’ he declared matter of factly. ‘She liked to go to bingo. She led a life of her own, really. We are anxious to contact any friends, lady friends or men friends, who may have seen her last night. She probably went to the Gaiety public house, which is a very popular pub in the area. We know the van she was in finished up on the Gaiety car park this morning … She had severe head injuries. There are other injuries I don’t wish to elaborate on at this time.’
Sydney Jackson at first kept from police the fact that since Christmas his wife had been trying to solve their financial and income tax problems by working as a prostitute. Then, under an intensive interrogation which ended shortly before midnight the day his wife’s body was discovered, he finally admitted that he often accompanied her when she went out looking for ‘business’. No one in the local community where they lived had a clue. The truth was that Emily and Sydney’s marriage was a marriage in name only: they stayed together for their children’s sake. Each, it appeared, went their own way, except that Sydney not only knew of his wife’s secret life, he drove her to her work. He had gone with her in their van, which his wife drove, to the Gaiety pub, a mile from Chapeltown, on Roundhay Road. It was a large, modern open-plan building that became a popular local drinking haunt, particularly for West Indians. The pub was surrounded on three sides by back-to-back rows of small Victorian terraced houses. Strippers danced at lunchtimes and prostitutes regularly gathered there at all hours looking for punters. Sydney had gone into the pub for a drink. Emily went immediately to work. Sydney stayed inside, listening to Caribbean music being thumped out on the juke box until about 10.30 p.m. He then emerged to find his wife had not kept their rendezvous. They had arranged she would drive him home. Assuming she was with one of her men friends, he instead caught a taxi back to Morley and only discovered what had happened when police called at their house in the morning.
His wife had been born Emily Wood in 1933, one of five brothers and three sisters, who lived with their parents in Hemsworth, a mining village. The entire family later moved to Brancepath Place, Leeds. She and Sydney married on 2 January 1953, when she was nineteen and he twenty-one, and during the early part of their marriage lived at various addresses in the Leeds area. Six years later she left him to live with another man. In 1961 they resumed their relationship and eventually set up house in Northcote Crescent, Morley, and became partners in a roofing business which they ran from home. They had three sons and a daughter, but tragedy struck in 1970 when their fourteen-year-old son, Derek, was killed in a fall from a first-floor window.
Emily was a hard-working, energetic woman, quite attractive in her own way. Neighbours remembered her as someone who was always busy. Because Sydney didn’t like to drive, Emily picked up the roofing supplies in their battered blue Commer van. She ferried the men who worked for them from job to job, took the kids to and from school. She also did the paperwork for their business. The day she died one of the neighbours recalled how Emily was supposed to be picking her ten-year-old son up from school. ‘When I got back my husband was waiting for me at the bus stop,’ said the neighbour, who lived just along the road from the Jackson family. ‘I thought something was wrong. And when we got home the boy was sat with a policeman in their house … they [Sydney and Emily] often used to go out but we thought they were going to the bingo in Leeds, we never realized what she was doing.’
After the death of their son, which Sydney said Emily never recovered from, they began to live from day to day. ‘We decided life was too short, we would live for today and not bother about the future. Sometimes she would go out alone, and I would meet up with her for a drink later on. But I do know that she never went in pubs on her own. She’s been in the Gaiety five times at the most, and always with me. We got on together as well as most. We both believed in having a good time – after all, why stop in every night? We believed in having fun while we could.’
Sydney remained strong and reasonably composed for the sake of his children after the murder, but went through a difficult time as he realized he was under suspicion for killing his wife. The day after Emily’s body was found the door-stepping journalists were rewarded when Sydney opened his heart to them. Sitting in the lounge of his semi-detached house, holding his head in his hands as he wept, he told them: ‘I know what people are saying – but I didn’t do it. There’s nothing I want to say to the man who did it, there’s nothing I can say, but if he’s done it once, he’ll do it again. I just pray they catch him.’
The information about Emily’s secret life was clearly an awkward embarrassment. Emily’s married sister refused to believe the things being said about her: ‘It’s time someone denied what is being said about Emily going into clubs and so on. She just wasn’t that kind of person.’ Unfortunately for Emily’s relatives, the press had quickly been let in on the details of her secret life. Hoban had no choice but to admit she had been soliciting about the time she was killed. Moreover, he could not ignore the obvious link with the McCann murder. He believed he had a duty to warn women who earned money by selling sex that they were in mortal danger. ‘While this man is at large no prostitute is safe,’ he declared.
Sydney Jackson made frequent visits to the police station to answer questions, insisting he had not killed his wife in revenge for her becoming a prostitute. Eventually Dennis Hoban went to reassure him that they knew he was innocent. He pledged that his detectives would find the man who killed his wife.
The police had taken away the Commer van containing Sydney’s tools and equipment for his business, so he couldn’t work or earn money. The vehicle had stood, with the ladder on the roof rack, at the Gaiety car park when Emily was murdered. For a while police thought it might have been moved. They were told Emily went touting for business in the van, sometimes taking customers in the back for sex. One look in the rear of the vehicle told them this was an unlikely passion-wagon the night she died. The materials for the roofing business filled up the inside. It was filthy and reeked of bitumen. There was a huge vat for heating tar, gas bottles, cans of paraffin, rolls of roofing felt, half-empty bags of cement, buckets containing trowels and other paraphernalia. Forensic experts gave it a thorough inspection. It was a well-used and abused vehicle, with the front bumper almost hanging off and several dents in the rear nearside panels. Four fingerprints were found that could not be eliminated. They also never determined who left a fingerprint on a lemonade bottle in the van, or another on a sweepstake ticket found in Emily’s handbag.
Two days into the murder hunt Hoban appealed for women who worked the
