day and night so he shouldn’t escape the net tightening round him. Finally, as is so often the case, forensic scientists provided the proof. Despite the fact that the man had washed his bloodstained clothing at his kitchen sink, the Home Office laboratory in Harrogate found thirteen fibres on trousers belonging to the suspect exactly matching those from clothing the victim was wearing when she was killed. Moreover, two hairs, similar in colour and appearance to those of the Irishman, were found on the dead woman.
Another protected inquiry masterminded by Hoban began on 2 April 1974, the day after Leeds City was amalgamated with the West Yorkshire force. Lily Blenkarn, an eighty-year-old shopkeeper known to everyone as ‘Old Annie’, had been brutally killed in a burglary that went wrong. She was severely beaten and suffered horrendous injuries, including a broken jaw and broken ribs. One fingerprint was found on a toffee tin and another on a bolt on the rear door of the premises, a sweet and tobacco shop in a terraced street. Hoban was convinced they belonged to the killer and organized a mass fingerprinting of all males in the area. They were invited to come to two local police checkpoints to provide their fingerprints.
It was the first major operation for the newly amalgamated force and it involved 150 detectives and the task force, a handpicked team of mobile reserves trained to work in major incidents. Some 24,000 people were interviewed in house-to-house inquiries, but some sixty men were unaccounted for. Some on the list had travelled abroad to Canada, Australia, Iceland and Hong Kong. Through Interpol they were traced and eliminated. The mass fingerprinting attracted huge media attention, including TV crews from America.
The killer turned out to be a cold, calm, sallow youth aged seventeen. He had persuaded a friend to give fingerprints in his place, allowing him to slip through the net. The one who impersonated him was the same who had given him an alibi early on in the inquiry. None of this came to light until the murderer gatecrashed a local party. When an argument ensued, he threw a brick through a window. Under arrest, his fingerprints were taken, and after a routine examination by the murder squad fingerprint experts they realized they had their man and someone must have impersonated the killer and given his fingerprints twice. Hoban said it taught him a valuable lesson. Never take anything for granted. ‘Should mass fingerprinting be required again – people would be fingerprinted in their own front room.’ It had been too easy for a killer determined to cover his tracks to collude with someone else to cover up his crime. Hoban’s inquiry had been thrown completely off the trail for a while.
Dennis Hoban’s bid to find the killer of Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson was an ambition that completely eluded him. He felt utterly frustrated, but he had other concerns. The huge volume of crime on his patch never stopped growing. Other women were randomly murdered in similar style and for a while he briefly flirted with the idea that the same man might have struck again. Then his handiwork was ruled out. The file on the McCann and Jackson murders remained open, but resources eventually had to be switched elsewhere. There was a horrible but unremitting truth he had to reconcile himself to: unless the killer struck again the chances of catching him were slim. So long as the murderer kept his head down, the investigation would go nowhere. Another poor unfortunate soul was probably going to die before this man could be put away.
3
‘A Man with a Beard’
In 1963, a seventeen-year-old youth called Peter Sutcliffe appeared before local magistrates accused by Keighley Police of driving unaccompanied while being a provisional licence holder and for failing to display L-plates. There was a similar traffic conviction against him in May the following year at Bradford City Magistrates Court. They were the first of his eleven motoring convictions and an innocuous introduction to the judicial process. But a year later came a more serious encounter. Peter Sutcliffe’s first criminal conviction.
On 17 May 1965 he was fined £5 with £2 7s. 6d. costs at the Bingley West Riding Magistrates Court for attempting to steal from an unattended motor vehicle. The brown-eyed labourer, with black curly hair and (at that time) a fresh, clean-shaven complexion, had been caught ‘bang-to-rights’ trying to break into cars. It had happened on a quiet Sunday night the previous March, in Old Main Street, Bingley, beside the river Aire, not far from his home on the other side of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Cornwall Road, in the Gilstead area of Bingley. He and another youth, Eric Robinson, had been seen trying the door handles of a locked car that had property left on the rear seat. They were disturbed by two people who saw the pair then try the door handles of other cars parked near by. Police were called and a Constable Thornley quickly arrested the youth who would, ten years later, start a series of murderous attacks that became notorious in the annals of crime.
This conviction generated two separate official records: the first at the West Riding Regional Criminal Record Office at Wakefield, the second at the Central Criminal Record Office at New Scotland Yard in London. Each record detailed Sutcliffe’s name, age, date of birth, address, description and information about the offence. More motoring convictions followed in 1965 and 1966, but these were never filed at the criminal record offices.
The next recorded criminal violation by Peter Sutcliffe was during the early hours of 30 September 1969, in the Manningham area of Bradford, close to the city’s red-light district. He was seen late at night sitting in a motor vehicle deliberately trying to be unobtrusive, with the engine running quietly and the lights switched off. When a police officer called Bland approached the vehicle, Sutcliffe immediately drove off at high speed. A search was carried out and the officer later found the car unattended a short distance away. When nearby gardens were searched, Sutcliffe was caught and arrested. In his possession was a hammer.
Questioned by police, he could not provide a satisfactory explanation for having the hammer, but denied criminal intent. He was charged only with the banal offence of going equipped to steal rather than being in possession of an offensive weapon. We now know from Peter Sutcliffe’s own words that he fully intended attacking a woman that night, but the police had no inkling of this. Two weeks later he pleaded not guilty at Bradford City Magistrates’ Court, but the case against him was found proved by the bench and he was fined £25, to be paid at £2 per week. The West Riding CRO based at Wakefield and the Bradford City Police, which had its own separate criminal records office, both listed this offence in their files as ‘Going equipped for stealing’, whereas their counterparts in the Central CRO at New Scotland Yard in London made crucial reference to: ‘Equipped for stealing (hammer)’ and listed under the heading ‘Method’ the words: ‘In possession of housebreaking implement by night, namely a hammer [my italics]’. The Bradford criminal record office carried a passport-size head and shoulders photograph of the offender, whereas the West Riding CRO had three pictures of Sutcliffe in his file – one full length, one head and shoulders facing the camera, a third in profile. All three clearly showed Sutcliffe had dark curly hair, a dark-coloured beard and moustache.
For his next court appearance several years later, Sutcliffe presented the dapper and somewhat discordant colourful image for which he had become infamous within his circle of friends and family. He wore black trousers, brown platform shoes, a leather jacket with a multicoloured shirt and a red tie. By now he was married to the daughter of Czech émigrés and living with his parents-in-law at Tanton Cresent, Clayton, Bradford. He and a friend, Michael Barker, had stolen five second-hand car tyres worth 50 pence each from Sutcliffe’s employer, the Common Road Tyre Company, where he worked as a driver. Sutcliffe had been employed as one of the firm’s tyre fitters. On 15 October 1975, the company reported him to the police, claiming he had stolen tyres from them. When arrested and questioned Sutcliffe immediately admitted the offence and opened up the boot of his car to reveal his booty. By the time he appeared at Dewsbury Magistrates Court on 9 February 1976 to admit a charge of simple theft, Sutcliffe was already a double murderer. But there was nothing to connect him with those crimes. He was fined £25.
The name of Peter William Sutcliffe would not, in fact, feature among the complex index card system in the murder incident room of the West Yorkshire Police ‘Ripper Squad’ until November 1977. Even
