with whom she had spent a lot of time during the holidays playing at a local park. She believed this must be a coincidence, but kept the thought to herself. He then asked if she had a boyfriend and she said she had and that he lived in the village.
They continued walking in silence for a while, so Tracey got a good look at the man, who kept blowing his nose, as if affected by the high pollen count. His knitted V-neck cardigan with two pockets at the front was worn over a light blue open-necked shirt. He had dark Afro-style crinkly hair and beard. He wore flared, dark brown trousers with slit pockets at the front, and brown suede shoes. Suddenly, in his quiet, high-pitched voice, he said: ‘My pal normally gives me a lift home but he’s in the nick for drink driving.’ That term ‘the nick’ stuck in her mind. The man seemed to be dropping back to tie his shoelace or blow his nose. He said he had a summer cold. Otherwise, he never took his hands out of his pockets. Tracey still had no reason to feel fear. Indeed, at times she stopped and waited for the man to catch her up. Finally they reached the gateway to the family farm and he hung back yet again. The pretty schoolgirl was about to turn towards the farmhouse. As well-brought-up kids do in the countryside, she intended to part on pleasant terms by thanking the stranger for his company. Instead she came under ferocious attack. Suddenly he rained down blows on her head and face. In his hand he held something heavy.
At that time a popular hero among young girls the world over was a handsome American tennis star who featured in the finals at Wimbledon. His name was Jimmy Connors and when he power-served to an opponent, he did something he became famous for. He let out an extraordinary grunt, ‘eeeu-uuuugggghhhhhh’, as he unleashed an excess of forceful energy through arm and shoulder and simultaneously exhaled air from his lungs. Tracey Browne remembered how, with each blow to her head, the man trying to kill her made a similar grunting noise.
‘Please don’t, please don’t,’ she cried as the first blow drove her to her knees beside the tarmacked road. Her immediate thought was that this was the notorious ‘Black Panther’ – an as yet unapprehended multiple killer being hunted by police for the kidnapping and murder of the heiress Leslie Whittle. She even shouted out the name, ‘Black Panther’, several times in the hope someone would hear her. To no avail. By now, lying at the roadside, she was in a dreadful state, blinded by both the shock of the attack and blood from her head filling her eyes.
Ultimately a car coming up the lane with its headlights on saved her life. The attacker put an arm under her legs, another round her waist. Scooping Tracey up, he tipped her like a sack of potatoes over a barbed-wire fence and into a field. Then he ran off. She heard his footsteps as he made good his escape. As she lay in the grassy field, she felt numbed by the force of the blows. Staggering around the field, she became disorientated, fearing the man might return and attack again. Covered in blood, she staggered towards a farm worker’s caravan, pleading for help. An elderly man took her in, then helped her to her parents’ farmhouse. She almost fell through the door, her mother gasping at the dreadful sight confronting her: ‘When she came through the door her jumper was squelching with blood.’ At first she thought someone had thrown a pot of paint over her daughter. But then her family saw a severe wound that appeared to leave a hole in the top of her head.
Tracey was rushed to Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds for emergency neurosurgery. She had a fractured skull. Doctors removed a sliver of bone from her brain. She remained in hospital for a week, and later recalled the moment the bandages were removed. Nurses gave her a mirror and told her to take her time. When she looked at herself she saw the truly shocking extent of the injuries to her face. Her eyes were blackened and she had extensive bruising. ‘I never expected it to be so bad,’ she said much later. She stayed off school for six weeks and wore a wig over her shaven head. For the next two years she had brain scans, and drugs to prevent seizures.
The victim had survived the assault and was able to give an excellent description of her attacker. It therefore seems extraordinary that Sutcliffe remained at large. The accuracy of Tracey Browne’s description and photofit was confirmed by another witness who provided police with details, and a photofit, of a dark-haired man with a beard and moustache seen in the neighbourhood. But while Tracey’s photofit description of her attacker appeared briefly in the local press, the one provided by the other witness was never shown publicly. In some ways, it was even more accurate. The man had been seen standing near a ‘white’ Ford car, and Sutcliffe was at that time apparently the owner of a lime green Ford Capri. While searching the area, police found a distinctive ‘hippy’-style bracelet with wooden beads, and a paper handkerchief, which the attacker was thought to have used to blow his nose on.
Taking charge of the case was Detective Superintendent Jim Hobson, who had spent almost all of his career in the Leeds City force as a detective, working frequently with Dennis Hoban from the days when they were constables in uniform. Indeed, he was godfather to Hoban’s son, Richard. At first it was suspected that Tracey’s head had been smashed with a large stick. Later, after a more thorough forensic analysis, a claw hammer was thought to have been used. Through the local press, Superintendent Hobson appealed for anyone who had been in Silsden between 10.15 and 11.15 on the night of the attack to come forward. He was fairly confident, because of the lateness of the hour, that the attacker was a local man. But one particular thing puzzled the police. The man had told Tracey he was living at ‘Holroyd House’. They wanted the help of the public in finding Holroyd House.
Since ‘Holroyd’ is a common enough West Yorkshire surname, dating back to the early fourteenth century, it could be expected that there are any number of places called Holroyd House. In fact, there were very few. Almost certainly the nearest was a 200-year-old house at Micklethwaite, on the outskirts of Bingley, the town which had been Sutcliffe’s home until he married and moved in with his parents-in-law at Clayton, near Bradford. Holroyd House stood adjacent to Holroyd Mill, built in 1812, which for generations had manufactured fustian, a coarse twilled cotton fabric with a nap, like velveteen. Jim Hobson’s early instincts were right: the attacker of Tracey Browne was probably a local man.
Two weeks after the attack, Tracey, wearing a wig and accompanied by a woman detective, made a tour of pubs and discos in the Silsden and Streeton area of Keighley, looking for the man who had tried to kill her. The search proved fruitless. (It appears that Sutcliffe immediately left with his new wife, Sonia, for a holiday visit to Prague with his parents-in-law to visit relatives, stopping off in Rome on the way.)
In recent weeks there had in fact been two other assaults on West Yorkshire women who suffered severe injuries which left crescent-shaped wounds to their skulls, but neither of these was linked with Tracey Browne’s attempted murder. The first was on a thirty-seven-year-old woman, Anna Rogulskyj, in an alleyway in Keighley. Five weeks previously she had been attacked from behind with a hammer and left on the ground suffering head injuries and a number of superficial slash wounds across her body. And on Friday, 15 August 1975, an office cleaner, living at Boothtown, Halifax, received two depressed fractures of the skull, one on the midline at the top of the head, the second at the back. Mrs Olive Smelt, aged forty-five, said she had before the assault been talking to a man aged about thirty, slightly built, dark haired and with a beard or some hair growth on his face. She did not think there was anything unusual about his accent, which again indicated that he was probably a ‘local’ man. One other feature of the attack became clearly visible when Mrs Smelt was examined in hospital. There were two abrasions on her back. One, twelve inches long, ran upwards from the small of her back; the other, four inches long, ran backwards on the right side.
Dr Michael Green, a Home Office pathologist based at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds who examined both women’s injuries, came to a startling conclusion: ‘It might be interesting to look again at the case of Mrs Rogulskyj, who was assaulted on 5 July, and compare the photograph of a wound on the abdomen with a wound on the back of Mrs Smelt,’ he wrote in his report to the police. Unfortunately, it would take two years for the attacks on Rogulskyj and Smelt to be linked to the murder series by the Ripper Squad.
Yet further assaults, by virtue of their modus operandi very similar to those
