in a protracted inquiry prove crucial in mounting a successful prosecution. Prior to amalgamation, most provincial borough and county force murder inquiries involved bringing in a senior detective from Scotland Yard, because historically the Metropolitan Police was the only force in the country with wide experience of dealing with homicides. County forces tended to adopt the Metropolitan Police way of doing things. The bigger cities, like Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, had the manpower and experience to run murder inquiries without help from the Yard. Each had its own system for tackling murders. The Manchester force took very few statements in a major crime investigation until they were needed for court proceedings. In Leeds, Hoban operated a similar system. Like a general on the battlefield, he was in charge of strategy. He relied on his middle managers to keep him briefed on those lines of inquiry most likely to yield results. He never immersed himself in detail until it was absolutely essential, and as a consequence rarely needed to read reams of paperwork.
Most murders in Britain are solved quickly because there is some domestic involvement such as the victim being known to the killer. In Leeds, Hoban could throw a hundred officers into a murder inquiry and blitz the local area in terms of finding crucial evidence. Over time in Leeds, this method proved very efficient because it found the link between the victim and the killer. Hoban solved nearly all the fifty murders he had tackled, but by the time he was moved to force headquarters at Wakefield, the killer of McCann and Jackson still totally eluded him. He realized that the man who killed these two women had struck at random. They had simply been unlucky victims. In terms of solving murders, finding killers without a personal motive was a nightmare for everyone – the public as well as the police.
One senior officer from outside Yorkshire reckoned that Hoban was the best detective he ever met: ‘He had that great amalgamation of all those qualities that it takes. He had an ability to pick, which is very important. He had an ability to listen to you even though he might not agree with you. He made you feel comfortable in his presence. He had all the qualities you require in a man who is trying to do that job. He has confidence in his team, to let his team deal with the dross and to say to him: “Here you are, boss – this is the one you should look at.” Not for him to be in the sea of what is going on but to be looking at the one aspect really likely to produce a result. He had the ability to pick people round him who were really good and that is a great quality in any senior policeman: “Can you pick the people who’ve got qualities you haven’t got that can support you well?”
‘Dennis Hoban was a very pragmatic, hands-on murder investigator. A lot of people say he overplayed the PR, but I personally don’t believe that. Crime detection is about the senior detective being good at PR. There are all those members of the public out there who can help you, yet you have only a few men to make inquiries, so that mobilization of the public is very important, and Dennis did it.’
In Hoban’s view, public support was at its most crucial in murder inquiries. As a detective, he had too often seen the results of the sudden impulse to kill. As a father, he was absolutely strict with his own sons and he despaired of the way young people were surrounded by violence, seeing it almost as an illness of society: ‘The trouble is that youngsters today see violence all around them, every day. It’s becoming the norm. They see a man getting hit over the head with an iron bar on a television programme, and the man shakes his head and walks away. But it’s not like that in real life. What can and does happen is that the man probably ends up with a steel plate in his head, brain damage, deafness or blindness. He loses his job and his family can break up. I have come across many a criminal who, when faced with the reality of his crime, has had a change of heart. The criminal should be made to pay for his crime. I am a believer in the deterrent effect of hanging, I believe it works.’
Each year Leeds saw, on average, ten homicides, most of them solved because of some link between killer and victim which Hoban’s team managed to uncover. The difficulty came when no such link was found. Most colleagues who knew Hoban well felt he had an extraordinary knack for solving murders and getting the best out of his men, often working on hunches which proved amazingly accurate. He rarely pulled rank, because he didn’t need to, and he displayed remarkable qualities of leadership because he earned the respect of his troops as both man and detective. His key ability was to weigh up the suspect psychologically, a knack which proved him right time and time again. These hunches were the result of years of experience, observation and a deep understanding of people. He always gave credit to the team who worked for him, leading from the front, showing a sense of humour and often pushing himself for forty-eight hours at a stretch, particularly with serious crimes like murders, where he knew you had to crack it early while people’s memories were still fresh.
A perfect example of his approach came in the early 1970s when he masterminded a murder inquiry and threw every resource he had at the problem for thirty-three days. Within a few minutes of the body of Mrs Phyllis Jackson, a fifty-year-old mother of two, being found brutally murdered at her home in Dewsbury Road, Leeds, a master plan for homicide investigations was put into operation. A vehicle equipped with a radio went to the murder scene to act as a control point and a hundred detectives were drafted in immediately. There was evidence she had been raped.
The answer would most probably lie close to the victim and her lifestyle – find the motive, then find the link to the killer. A murder incident room was opened at the police HQ in Westgate. One vital clue emerged from the post-mortem. Mrs Jackson had been strangled, then stabbed with a knife which probably had a serrated edge. A massive search began that included bringing in the army with mine detectors, which made for great photographs and local television news footage that Hoban knew would keep the murder in the public eye. Corporation workmen searched the drains, and every conceivable place where a fleeing killer might have hidden the murder weapon was searched. Much of this was standard in an unsolved homicide, but the procedure was galvanized by Hoban’s sense of urgency, enthusiasm and inspiration.
Experience had shown him the killer was most likely a local man. The victim lived in a new housing scheme within a development area, but with no local facilities to attract people from outside – no cinema, shops or places of entertainment. Anyone present in the area was most likely to be there because they were acquainted with someone locally rather than having stumbled on the place by accident. When the search for the weapon proved fruitless, Hoban tried another tack. A survey of every home in the vicinity was carried out. Every day detectives went to local houses armed with a questionnaire to establish exactly where every man in each household had been at the time of the murder and to see if anyone had noticed anything suspicious.
By such painstaking methods are murders traditionally solved. Reports filtered in about other attacks on women in the city, and while each was carefully probed, none could be linked to the murder of Phyllis Jackson either by method or motive. Fear among women in the city became palpable. There was a run on people buying door locks and safety chains, and stocks at hardware shops ran out in some areas. Special lifeline buzzers were distributed to the elderly so they could summon help if frightened. Some two hundred calls a day were coming in to the incident room offering information, and each call was followed up by detectives working long hours. At that time police officers were very poorly paid, so a chance of overtime was rarely turned down. Murders frequently made the difference for a young detective between having or not having a week’s holiday with his kids at Bridlington, Scarborough or Filey.
Every house within a half-mile radius of the murder scene was visited – without a breakthrough. So Hoban extended the search area by another half-mile. A twenty-year-old illiterate Irish labourer living with his wife in a corporation flat in Hunslet filled in a questionnaire that attracted attention. This former altar boy from County Wicklow, one of twenty-two children, learned many passages from the bible by heart, but he was a womanizer. He had been working on a sewer scheme near the murder scene and claimed that on the afternoon of the murder he saw a man running down Dewsbury Road. He identified the individual involved. But when the other man was checked, his alibi for the time of the murder was perfect – witnesses confirmed his presence in Leicester.
The Irish labourer had recently been released for larceny in
