pull myself up, falling back again. Then I was screaming and I heard this dog barking, and someone say: “Oh, you’re all right,” and that’s all I remember. When you get hit over the back of the head you can’t remember things. If I hadn’t had beer that night I’d have died of hypothermia.’
The person who attacked her obviously left her for dead. Her clothing was displaced. Her bra had been pulled down to her waist, her tights and pants pulled to her knees. Suffering very severe head injuries, she was rushed by ambulance to Bradford Royal Infirmary, where doctors saved her life. There was a large depressed fracture of the skull, and five stab wounds to the front and side of her trunk and left shoulder. She also had three fractured ribs. Her head injuries were so severe that she required specialist neurosurgery at the Leeds General Infirmary. Professor Gee examined Maureen in hospital at Bradford a few hours after she was admitted. Accompanied by Oldfield and Holland, he stood beside her bed in a cubicle in the casualty department. Her head had been partially shaved by the neurosurgical senior registrar, revealing the severe lacerations to her skull. A police surgeon took various swabs from intimate areas, searching for potential forensic evidence. One of the stab wounds had penetrated her liver, though she had not suffered from gross bleeding. Gee thought her lucky to be alive.
She spent nine weeks in hospital before being discharged but continued as an out-patient for many years because of fits as a result of her head injuries. Maureen couldn’t provide the police with much help. She had woken up in the intensive care ward of the local hospital. That Maureen’s memory was poor did not surprise Holland. He had recently worked on a stabbing case in Bradford where a (non-Ripper) victim’s memory was impaired because of loss of blood and consequently loss of oxygen to the brain. ‘They got her brain functioning again perfectly, she hadn’t brain damage, but everything that was stored on her “disk”, if you like, to use a computer analogy, prior to the stabbing had gone forever.’
Holland’s belief that extensive head injuries made a surviving victim’s memory unreliable was understandable though tragically mistaken. Yet he eagerly grasped at one clue provided by Maureen Long. She described the man who gave her a lift as being a fair-haired white male, aged about thirty-five, thickset, over six feet tall, and having what could have been a white car …
The Ripper squad had already targeted taxi drivers in Leeds and Bradford as potential prime suspects. Many prostitutes, including Tina Atkinson, used taxis. More than 600 cab drivers were interviewed. A taxi driver called Terry Hawkshaw, whose physical appearance was similar to the description provided by Long, was top of their list. He lived with his sixty-seven-year-old mother in an old terraced house at Drighlington, between Leeds and Bradford. He was thirty-six, six feet tall, weighed fifteen or sixteen stone and had rather long fair hair brushed back, a fresh complexion and a round, almost babyish face – a bit saggy and flabby, as was his whole build. He dressed casually, but not scruffily – a typical taxi driver who did his own repairs. He also drove a white car.
Hawkshaw was one of fifteen men at that stage regarded as strong suspects, whose alibis were to be thoroughly checked for the night Jayne MacDonald was killed. Some were flagged to be kept under observation and taken in for questioning the moment another Ripper incident occurred. Hawkshaw, now dead, had been seen in his taxi near the Mecca Ballroom on the crucial night. He came under close scrutiny because he was a taxi driver who drove a white Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof and made a living ferrying prostitutes and their clients. ‘He allowed them to have it off in the back of his taxi,’ Holland revealed. Oldfield suspected Hawkshaw got sexual thrills out of watching the prostitutes at work on the back seat. A search of his accounts revealed taxi receipts proving that he had the opportunity to have carried out several of the Ripper attacks – he was in close proximity to the red-light area at the material times.
There was not enough evidence to hold him in a police cell, so Oldfield arranged for him to help the police with their inquiries without arresting him. He was virtually kidnapped and held incommunicado. Oldfield took him in as a prime suspect despite the fact that legally the police were not allowed to hold him at a police station. So he was kept for over thirty-six hours at the Detective Training School at Bishopgarth in Wakefield, which has a thirteen-storey accommodation block just across the road from the force headquarters. No student courses were being held and the flats on the top floor were empty.
This was not the first time this had happened. Suspects in other serious cases had previously been questioned at the Detective Training School when there was a danger of leaks to the media. Oldfield was anxious also that other police officers were kept in the dark about the fact that they were questioning a ‘prisoner’ who was not a prisoner. It was a high-risk strategy and could have landed some of West Yorkshire’s most senior detectives in hot water had it backfired. Hawkshaw’s civil rights were clearly denied in the belief they had a strong suspect for five murders. Nowadays, he could probably have sued for wrongful imprisonment; the officers involved would have been disciplined, the Police Complaints’ Authority involved, questions asked in Parliament, with the media becoming self-righteous and the civil rights lobby having a field day. Today, without question, someone’s head would have rolled, probably several. That it was done at all was a measure of the sheer desperation the Ripper’s reign of terror had caused among the senior detectives. The cost of the inquiry so far was approaching £1 million.
‘He was not arrested, and I’m playing with words here,’ Holland admitted. ‘There was a detective who slept at his door to make sure he went nowhere, but he was not arrested. It was a long way down, thirteen storeys, if he’d gone out of the window. We took him there because there wasn’t enough evidence for putting him in one of the cells. We found a way of holding him, without “holding him”. In the euphemism of the day, he was “assisting police with inquiries”. He knew where he was going. I would have defended it to his lawyer by saying he was just being interviewed. The legal test then was that if he had chosen to go, if he had said, “I’m leaving”, would you have stopped him? I would have said, “No.” He agreed to come, so he couldn’t have made a complaint that we had kidnapped him. We did not give him the impression he was under arrest. We didn’t read any caution, but the law was different then. You only had to caution when you had some real evidence, but we felt we had strong grounds for suspicion. We had all day on him verifying his story, verifying what he was doing, forensically checking his car. He really fitted the bill as described by Long, and had the car described by the night watchman, so we hadn’t dreamed his name up. He had also visited the pubs and clubs frequented by Richardson and Jackson. He also had two hammers which were checked – so circumstantially he was a strong candidate. Forensic later gave us a negative report [on the hammers].
‘He didn’t get rough treatment. We’d been going all day and well into the night. This is typical George. Hawkshaw was quite open. He was talking to us and he was saying, “Yes, I do run prostitutes. I get paid, they pay a bit more than the standard fare if they use my taxi. I might help prostitutes, but I am not a murderer.” That was his line and he was quite frank and he was softly spoken. He might have had a kinky streak and I think he was a soft touch for the prostitutes. But he made a bit more money.’
Information provided by Hawkshaw was checked with the files. Oldfield, convinced that he’d got his man, cross-questioned him for hours on end. For Hawkshaw, the whole experience was terrifying: ‘It was a nightmare,’ he said. ‘When George Oldfield sits behind his desk and tells you he thinks you are the Ripper, blimey, it turns your stomach over. They told me: “Come and sit here. Terence, this fellow wants catching. He is not bad, it’s just his mind.” The police nearly convinced me I was out of my head. They said someone with a split personality could be like the killer. He could be normal in the day and all of a sudden his mind goes click and he kills someone.’
After a considerable time – by now it was 3.45 in the morning – Oldfield decided: ‘It’s crunch time.’ Holland was unsure whether Hawkshaw was out of the frame. Looking at his watch, Oldfield decided to defer a decision which wasn’t going his way. He thought they should snatch some sleep in the empty training school study/bedrooms. ‘We will start
