summer of 1976 the ‘face’ of the man who had killed twice and would go on to murder another eleven women was buried in a filing system. With the benefit of hindsight we now know he was a serial killer, but successful murder investigations are not about hindsight. They are about foresight, hunches, risks, intuition, leadership, good communication and, of course, a series of standard operating procedures which involve the time-consuming task of knocking on doors, asking questions and comparing the answers with other information in police files.
Yet the ‘face’ of the Ripper, and clues to what he looked like, were lying hidden in the police files of investigations into unsolved, unprovoked assaults on women and a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl at various locations across West Yorkshire during the preceding three and a half years. The victims had been attacked in similar ways by assailants bearing roughly the same description. Tragically for the women Sutcliffe subsequently killed or attempted to kill, for their families and for the children made motherless over the succeeding years, most of these horrendous assaults were never linked as part of any series. More crucially, police ignored the descriptions provided by survivors who had given near-perfect illustrations and helped to prepare photofits of a dark-haired man with a moustache and beard who looked uncannily like Sutcliffe. But in 1976 there was nothing to point to him as being more than a petty thief. When the photofits are seen together today – alongside a police mugshot of Peter Sutcliffe taken in September 1969 – it all looks so blindingly obvious.
It was nearly teatime in Wakefield one day in October 1998. An attractive woman approaching middle age, but whose striking good looks and long dark hair made her appear years younger, answered a knock at her front door. She spoke a few words with a researcher from a documentary film-making company who had called at her home unannounced. Within seconds she was in a state of shock and a feeling of coldness started to overwhelm her. Suddenly she had a flashback at the mention of a terrifying incident that had happened to her twenty-five years beforehand. In the intervening years she had spoken about it to very few people, pushing the subject to the back of her mind. The woman had since married, had two teenage children, and wished to maintain her anonymity. She invited the researcher into her neat, well-kept home. Ushering her into the lounge, she said in her quiet Scots accent: ‘I was sure I had been attacked by the Yorkshire Ripper, but nobody had ever confirmed the fact.’
She was nineteen years old in 1972, working as a clerk-typist in a local firm. It was December, two days before New Year’s Eve. ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’ she went on. She was living on her own in a house in Westgate, at the bottom end of Wakefield. It was a ‘queer’ foggy night. She had been to ‘Dolly Grey’s’ for a drink, but left quite early, about 10.30 p.m., and begun walking down Westgate towards home. As she neared the train station she realized she was being followed. She looked back at the man, noticing his staring eyes, dark longish hair, and beard. She clearly remembers thinking he was up to no good.
With her heart thumping, she carried on walking, thinking carefully about which route to take when she got near home. She planned carefully in her mind which way to get to her house, because there was a beck running at the front of where she lived and she feared the man might throw her in. A few houses near by belonged to prison officers at Wakefield’s maximum security gaol, and she hoped against hope they might not have gone to bed.
Walking past a pub called The Swan with Two Necks, she toyed with the idea of going into one of the bars as people would still be on drinking-up time and she might know them and feel safe in their company. Then she had second thoughts, fearing they might wonder what on earth she was imagining. So she kept walking, still very anxious, and stuck to the middle of the pavement, trying to walk quickly past the ginnels – dark passageways that ran between some of the terraced houses.
She had just reached the row of houses where she lived when she was grabbed from behind. Immediately she screamed loudly and her attacker urgently put his hands over her mouth, telling her: ‘Shurrup, shurrup,’ a couple of times. She still remembered this vividly because his accent sounded local. As a Scot living in Yorkshire, she noticed immediately. She screamed out again and this time he hit her on the back of the head with his fist and pushed her into a low wall, where she received a graze to her face – her only real injury. One of the prison officers opened his bedroom window to see what was happening, and then swiftly came running downstairs to help, chasing after the attacker, but losing him.
The police came and the victim gave a statement. She was told to go to the local police station the following day, to help provide a photofit description. Next morning her sister accompanied her, but while she was there, she said, she felt as if she was the one under suspicion and thought the police did not take her seriously. She was very glad the prison officer could confirm her story. Before she went to the police station she had looked at a photograph of the pop singer ‘Cat’ Stevens – because the attacker looked so similar. He had been a man in his mid-twenties of medium build and about five feet ten inches tall, with long dark hair, dark eyebrows, a beard and moustache, and a similar tuft of beard between chin and mouth. Years later, when the Yorkshire Ripper was apprehended and photographs of Peter Sutcliffe appeared in the newspapers and on television, she said out loud to her family: ‘I’m sure that’s the man who attacked me …’ But after she made her initial complaint she never heard from the police again.
Almost two years later a twenty-eight-year-old student was attacked twenty-five miles away in Bradford. On 11 November 1974 Gloria Wood was approached as she walked across a school playing field some time between 7.30 and 8 p.m. A man offered to carry her bags and then attacked her about the head, causing severe injuries and a depressed fracture of the skull that left a crescent-shaped wound. The weapon was thought to be a claw hammer. According to the victim, the man had worn a dark suit and looked smartly dressed. She couldn’t provide a photofit, but described him as being in his early thirties, 5 feet 8 inches tall and of medium build. He had dark curly hair to the neck, a short curly beard to the hairline. She was unable to remember how he spoke.
The summer of 1975 was long and hot. The sun continued to blaze down all day from clear blue skies for weeks on end. Clothes dried quickly on washing lines, reservoirs emptied, drought warnings were issued, the harvest was safely gathered in and half the country had hay fever. On the edge of the Pennines in West Yorkshire, a mile from the village of Silsden and its early eighteenth-century parish church of St James, lived the Browne family. Upper Hayhills Farm stood nearly 700 feet above sea level. It was there that Mrs Nora Browne bred dogs. She and her husband, Anthony, had four daughters, including fourteen-year-old twins, Tracey and Mandy. Like most parents they laid down house rules and expected their children to abide by them.
One August evening, with only a week or so to go before they returned to school, the twins went visiting friends in the village. Since it was still the school holiday, they were told to be home by 10.30 on what was a balmy, clear and moonlit night. Tracey had hung on too long saying goodbye to her pals while her sister went ahead up Bradley Road, knowing their dad would ‘go mad’ if they were late. As it was a clear summer’s night in a remote rural area, their parents were not unduly concerned that Mandy arrived home first, minus her sister. The girls had walked up and down this country lane on their own dozens of times.
Tracey meanwhile was struggling, her young frame tottering uphill in platform-soled sandals. Her feet ached and as she sat down on a large stone beside the road to take off her sandals and rub them she noticed a stranger, in his late twenties or early thirties, also walking up the lane. He stopped briefly to look at her, standing only a few feet away as he drew level. Then he walked on. She wasn’t afraid and assumed the man was living near by. Her only worry was to get home to avoid her father getting angry with her. The man was clearly dawdling since Tracey soon caught him up again.
‘There’s nothing doing in Silsden, is there?’ he said.
‘Not really,’ she replied, walking beside him.
He then asked how far she had to go, and she answered casually: ‘About a mile.’ When he asked, she told
