struck, probably at this spot, then dragged up the passageway. A chill wind blew strongly and there were intermittent squalls of cold rain. Gee and Hoban quickly agreed that preserving any evidence in these conditions was going to be difficult – particularly contact trace-evidence, which might have been passed from the killer to the victim in the shape of minute fibres of clothing. Gee was reluctant to record the body’s temperature, since this would have involved displacing the victim’s clothing. Instead he instructed that the body be enveloped in large plastic sheets and taken to the public mortuary for a more intensive examination.
Task force officers had begun an inch-by-inch fingertip search among the cobblestones along Elmfield Terrace. Ten officers in overalls, some wearing gloves, got down on their hands and knees in the wind and rain and painstakingly grubbed their way along the street. Among them was a twenty-four-year-old Bradford constable, Andrew Laptew. He had joined the Bradford force after sailing the seven seas as a trainee Merchant Navy officer. After experiencing the delights of South America, the Far East and Australia, he made a determined bid to become a police officer. Joining the Task Force had been an exciting moment, since its members regarded themselves as part of an élite unit. ‘Fingertip searches were back-breaking work because that is what we did – felt with our fingertips to see if we could find any clues,’ he remembered twenty-five years later. They found nothing to help the investigation.
The formal post-mortem began at 11.15 a.m. Until then, no attempt had been made to look more closely at the body, especially at the back. The victim was forty-one years old and slightly overweight, which made her look several years older. She was five feet six inches tall. Donald Craig, the assistant chief constable, stood close to Hoban watching while the normal forensic procedures in a homicide autopsy were applied. Craig was an experienced murder investigator, who had solved all seventy-three murders on his patch during a three-year spell as the West Riding CID chief during the early 1970s. It made him a bit of a legend and people either loved or loathed him. He was tough, uncompromising and, some even said, a bit of a bully at times. He had few social graces and rarely apologized for anything. The West Riding man and the Leeds City man respected one another. You couldn’t take away Craig’s track record, and he had attended dozens of autopsies, so he knew what to look out for. His father, too, had been a policeman.
For nearly eighty years, since the late nineteenth century, the mechanics of identifying and preserving evidence at crime scenes encompassed a process that combined logic with rigorous scientific method. Minute specks of material could prove vital, and in eighty years the technology had changed dramatically. Forensic techniques now encompassed the use of highly expensive electron microscopes and mass photo spectrometers.
The very process of photographing and measuring evidence, particularly in cases of murder, had been perfected initially in France in the 1890s by the clerk to the premier bureau of the Paris Préfecture of Police, Alphonse Bertillon. He had photographed the bodies of victims and their relationship to significant items of evidence at the crime scene, including footprints, stains, tool marks, points of entry among other details. Even today one of the cornerstones of forensic science remains the ‘exchange principle’ first developed by one of Bertillon’s students, Edmond Locard: ‘If there is contact between two items, there will be an exchange.’ When anyone comes into contact with an object or someone else, a cross-transfer of physical evidence occurs. They will leave evidence of that contact and they will take some evidence with them. The job of the forensic scientist is to locate this material to help ultimately identify the criminal and achieve a conviction in a court of law. ‘The criminologist,’ Locard maintained, ‘re-creates the criminal from the traces the latter leaves behind, just as the archaeologist reconstructs prehistoric beings from his finds.’
The process was necessarily painstaking, time consuming and expensive. What Gee, Hoban and their close colleagues hoped to achieve during the next seven and a quarter hours in the Leeds city mortuary was to lay the vital groundwork to help them find and convict the murderer. The application of scientific rigour was not the only process at work. A further ingredient was also required: an attitude of mind or, in more familiar terms, ‘a hunch’, born out of years of experience. Hunches were not mere guesswork. Even at this stage, Dennis Hoban was already speculating out loud privately to Gee that the murderer of McCann was likely to be ‘a long-distance lorry driver’. This intuitive judgement by the senior detective was based on several factors: the possibility that the killer carried tools in his vehicle; the failure to trace the likely killer from among McCann’s boyfriends, with whom she sometimes had sex for money; and the fact that many lorry drivers travelled through Chapeltown from the A1 to the M62 motorway.
As with the McCann autopsy, the process of garnering evidence was protracted. Outtridge examined the clothing, taping the material, looking for fibres or other contact traces; the fingerprint specialist looked for possible evidence that the skin had been touched. Swabs were taken in the search for semen; samples of hair were removed from the scalp, the pubic region and eyebrows. The outer clothing showed no sign of having been penetrated by stabbing. Two areas of dirt soiling on the woman’s tights were closely examined. They measured roughly three inches by four, on the inner and outer right thigh, and appeared several inches above the right knee. These were the marks resembling the sole of a boot, similar to the footprint found in sandy soil close to the murder scene. A plaster cast of this ridged impression at the scene had already been made by the time the post-mortem started. The area of the boot impression on the tights was carefully cut out before the rest of the clothing was removed from the body, which rested on the autopsy table. Along with all the other samples, these were later taken back to the Harrogate laboratory by Outtridge for microscopic examination.
As the clothing began to be removed, it swiftly became apparent that the woman’s bra had been lifted above her breasts and there was a huge number of stab marks to the trunk and back, some so close together as to give the impression of the holes in a pepper pot. They were very small, about one eighth of an inch in diameter, some round, some oval and a few very definitely cruciform in shape, leaving a strange impression on the skin, as if caused by an ‘X’-shaped instrument. Gee thought the wounds ‘very odd’ and subsequently contacted a series of eminent colleagues around the country to see if they could throw light on what had caused them.
Those who had previously attended the post-mortem on Wilma McCann immediately realized the significance of the injuries. It was clear her clothing had been raised to inflict the injuries and then put back in position. Moreover, when Professor Gee examined the head, two significant lacerations were found, one on top of the head, the other at the back. In the first the full thickness of the scalp was penetrated and in the depths of the wound a depressed fracture of the skull was visible. In the second, at the back of the head, a depressed fracture was found beneath the wound. Gee concluded both injuries had been administered with a flat round instrument with a restricted striking surface, like a hammer. A number of bruises and abrasions to the face and throat made it obvious she had been dragged on her face along the ground. When Gee probed deeper, minutely trying to trace the track of a particular wound, he found the blow had passed through the sternum and there reproduced the cruciform shape in the bone. There was also evidence that the neck had been compressed and the victim had been menstruating slightly.
On the body itself Gee counted a total of fifty-two separate stab wounds – in five separate groups – two at the back and three at the front. On the back thirty of the stab wounds were concentrated in an area roughly six inches by eight – hence the impression of a pepper pot. Twelve stab wounds were counted in the abdomen. The killer had turned Emily Jackson over and repeated his frenzied attack. There were so many stab wounds to the trunk situated close together that it was impossible to assign individual tracks to most of them. Since tracks of wounds passed both from the front and from the back of the body into the interior, and many passed into soft tissue, it was impossible for Gee to ascertain the length of any of the tracks with any precision. He thought the weapon might be between two and four inches long. Several people, observing the professor’s precise handiwork in trying to track the wounds, commented that a Phillips cross-head screwdriver was the most likely cause.
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