Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
damning evidence that there were two killers, two Yorkshire Rippers.
In fact, not long before Sutcliffe’s arrest and confession, George Oldfield, the man leading the police inquiry, was quoted by Sunday Times journalists as conceding the point: ‘There is not one Ripper, but at least two.’
No one doubts that Peter Sutcliffe committed at least some of the murders. But it took a long time for even that to be established.
Between November 1977 and February 1980, Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed and eliminated from police enquiries nine times. Over and over again, enquiries about his cars, his movements, sightings of his vehicles in the red-light districts – even about a new £5 note from his pay packet that was found in the handbag of one of his early victims – were apparently contradicted by alibis or because his accent and handwriting did not match the messages from the Sunderland hoaxer.
One bright policeman, Detective Constable Andrew Laptew, had a strong hunch that there was something not quite right about Sutcliffe. DC Laptew and his colleague DC Graham Greenwood didn’t know Sutcliffe had already been questioned about the £5 note. But, as they interviewed him, they realised that he fitted almost everything the police knew about the man they were looking for. He was the right height and build, with dark hair and complexion, a beard and a walrus moustache. He had small feet and the odd gap between his front teeth that one of the attack victims had mentioned. He also worked as a lorry driver.
If Laptew had talked to Sutcliffe’s workmates, he’d have found out his topical, ironic nickname. With his dark, brooding presence, they called him ‘The Ripper’.
‘He stuck in my mind,’ Laptew said. ‘He was the best I had seen so far and I had seen hundreds. The gap in his teeth struck me as significant. He fitted the frame and could not really be taken out of it.’
This was the fifth interview with Sutcliffe. When Laptew followed up afterwards and found Peter Sutcliffe was one of the possible recipients of the telltale £5 note, he wrote an urgent two-page report, recommending Sutcliffe should be re-interviewed by senior detectives. The report was passed on, left in a pile, considered and dismissed nine months later and eventually marked ‘to file’.
The police have always avoided going into too much detail about how and why they repeatedly eliminated Sutcliffe from the investigation. But the answer is straightforward. He was ruled out, time after time, because he didn’t appear to fit the evidence. Despite all the witness descriptions and evidence about £5 notes, vehicles, tyre tracks and boot prints that could have incriminated him, his alibis, mainly provided by his wife, seemed to put him in the clear.
And, of course, if you accept the forensic evidence that there were two Yorkshire Rippers at work, it’s not surprising that the clues didn’t all point the same way.
By early 1981, the pressure on the police to get a result was almost intolerable. The build-up of public anxiety and negative publicity over more than five years of failure blighted the careers of all the senior officers involved. After Peter Sutcliffe was finally arrested in Sheffield – for having false number plates on his car – it was a huge relief to West Yorkshire Police when Detective Superintendent Dick Holland persuaded him to confess to all 13 murders.
Holland, it later turned out, had form. He was the officer who had suppressed forensic evidence five years earlier leading to Stefan Kiszko’s wrongful conviction for the murder of 11-year-old Lesley Molseed. Kiszko spent 16 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and died a year after being released.
There has been no serious legal attempt to establish the identity of the second Yorkshire Ripper, despite occasional complaints by some relatives of the murder victims, who have become increasingly convinced that there was a cover-up.
At present, no one knows whether the second killer, who was presumably a good deal smarter than Sutcliffe, actually ended his murderous career or carried on killing in less obviously connected ways and places. There is one extraordinary, impassioned and controversial book, The Real Yorkshire Ripper, by Noel O’Gara, that denounces the whole conspiracy of silence and names the man O’Gara believes was the killer who got away with it. O’Gara says this man was the ‘real’ Yorkshire Ripper and killed a total of ten women, while Sutcliffe was a copycat, used and manipulated by the first killer and only responsible for four deaths.
Others have given up on trying to do the criminal detective work but still hope for answers about why the police were allowed to pretend Peter Sutcliffe’s conviction tied up all the loose ends.
The conspiracy to declare the case closed, in defiance of the evidence and only a matter of months after detectives were telling national newspaper reporters there were two Yorkshire Rippers on the loose, still leaves a nasty taste. And there must be big questions about how high the tentacles of such a cover-up would reach.
People whose instinct is to pooh-pooh every hint of conspiracy often pour scorn on the lack of damning physical evidence for even some of the more well-founded suspicions.
But that’s not the kind of argument you’ll hear in connection with the claim that half a million coffins can be seen stacked by the roadside in the fields near Madison, in Georgia.
The evidence is there. You can see it. You can touch it. But the question is obvious: what the hell is going on?
To be fair, they’re not actual coffins – just the casket-sized dark plastic vaults or grave liners that are used in most American cemeteries to support the earth on top of a coffin. But there are clearly many, many thousands of them, in full view of the public highway. People say they belong to the US government’s Federal Emergencies Management Agency (FEMA) or even the Centers for Disease Control (the CDC), which is based an hour up the road in Atlanta. What is beyond doubt is that massed rows of these gruesome objects have been lined up waiting in the fields for several years.
Many people in Georgia don’t like the ‘coffins’. It’s a big state, with a population of 10 million. But Madison itself has just 4,000 souls, and even the whole surrounding district of Morgan County has only 20,000. The idea that any foreseeable event or epidemic could create a need for 500,000 grave liners in the region is chilling.
There’s never been a disaster that big in American history. Only the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 and AIDS, over a period of 20 years from the early 1980s, have ever produced a national death toll on this scale. And there’s the logistics angle to think about, too. If FEMA is stockpiling coffin vaults for a nationwide disaster, it would seem crazy to park them all in one place, rather than spreading them out in depots across the country.
REASONS TO DOUBT
If there was anything remotely suspicious about these coffin vaults, it seems obvious that they would have been hidden far away from the public gaze. Instead, they are right there, near the road, stacked one inside the other in piles 17 deep, as numerous video clips on YouTube bear witness (see, for example, bit.ly/coffinliners).
The Air Seal grave liners are made by ‘deathcare professionals’ Vantage Products, a local firm based in nearby Covington. It has leased 12 acres of space in the fields since 1999 and claims there are far fewer vaults stored there than people believe. At various times, Vantage managers have said there are ‘about 50,000’ or, more recently, ‘less than 100,000’.
Vantage explains that, far from being owned by FEMA or the CDC, these coffin vaults already belong to the people who will eventually occupy them.
They have been pre-sold, the firm says, as part of people’s advance funeral plan arrangements, and are technically owned by the individuals involved. When the Morgan County authorities tried to get the company to pay inventory taxes on the liners, Vantage won a legal battle to