Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Michael Bilton
the week.
The young couple later set off walking towards Harehills, but when they reached Becket Street they parted company. It was now 1.30 a.m. Mark himself had to go to his home on a nearby council estate. Jayne didn’t seem at all bothered. Close by was Grandways, the supermarket where she worked. If she couldn’t hail a taxi, she was used to walking home. So they bade each other farewell and promised to renew their assignation the following Wednesday. She walked off along Becket Street towards Harehills Road. Several people saw her walking along in her ridiculously high ‘clog’ shoes, including two AA patrolmen in their vehicle parked near St James’s Hospital. At about 1.40 she was seen in Bayswater Mount, walking in the direction of Roundhay Road. She was last seen about five minutes’ walk from the murder scene at 1.45 a.m. walking through Chapeltown. A woman living in Reginald Terrace said that around 2 a.m. she had heard a banging and scuffling from the adventure playground, followed by the voice of what sounded like a Scotsman mouthing obscenities.
The murder squad’s attempts to detail individual people’s movements along a few residential streets at 2 a.m. in the morning might seem reasonably straightforward, given the expectation that most people would be tucked up in bed asleep. But not in Chapeltown on a Saturday night. It was a veritable hive of activity. This was a strong immigrant area. There were people here from Eastern Europe, working-class Jews who could not afford to reside in the northern hills around Leeds. There were families from the New Commonwealth, particularly West Indians, many of whom attended illegal drinking clubs, where the sacred brown ‘weed’ was rolled into six-inch joints for mutual recreation and spiritual enlightenment. Oldfield later estimated some two hundred people were out and about in the immediate vicinity of the route Jayne walked once she left Mark Jones. Of these, some fifty were thought to be in or around the Reginald Street/Reginald Terrace area at the crucial time. Oldfield was desperate to identify and eliminate any of these people. Forty revellers were drinking in a West Indian club and left to attend a party in nearby Sholebroke Avenue.
A free-phone telephone service was set up in the incident room in the hope that someone might just have seen Jayne or the killer. But this was a time preceding the inner-city riots of the 1980s by only a few years. There was a recession, with rising unemployment, government cutbacks and little funding for the inner cities or urban renewal. There were tensions between police and some in the immigrant communities, particularly the younger element. They tended to avoid each other if possible, so it was not surprising if witnesses from among this section of the community were not flooding forward to help in the Ripper investigation.
On the blown-up wall map in the incident room were two hundred taggings of people and vehicles from 1 until 4 a.m. Some were individuals, some groups. Each was represented by a flag. Some were positive sightings where police had identified or interviewed a particular person. But there were also blanks. Oldfield was anxious to fill them in: ‘My problem is in identifying those people. Once I can identify them and eliminate them I am hoping I shall be left with one or two or three, or a handful of individuals, who have not come forward and have a reason for not coming forward. The trouble I am having is that we are getting cooperation from certain members of the public who are feeding this information of having seen people there, but some sections of the public, for reasons best known to themselves, are reluctant to come forward and admit they were in that area on this particular night. They are the ones who represent the blank spaces I cannot fill. It is frustrating … I am not interested why they were there. The only individual I am concerned about who was in that area at that time is the killer. Anyone else I want him to come forward so I can eliminate him, and find that killer.’ Oldfield told the local TV news: ‘I believe the man we are looking for has a good knowledge of the Leeds area but he does not necessarily live in Leeds.’
Oldfield began to get more and more desperate in his appeals for help. They had a paucity of evidence. The finger-tip search of the area around the playground revealed absolutely zero. In Jayne’s handbag there were some bus tickets on which the forensic lab found fingerprints that could not be identified. A cigarette packet discovered near the body bore fingerprints which were never eliminated. The Ripper had appeared and disappeared like a phantom, and this in itself added to the gossip-driven mythology surrounding both his identity and the supposed ‘ritual’ slaying of his victims.
Oldfield’s greatest fear was that the killer would strike again – and soon. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that he will strike again. The big questions are when, where and who is going to be his next victim.’ He was convinced there were many people living in the immediate area who had not come forward. He made several urgent public appeals for witnesses before there was another murder, asking local church and community leaders for assistance. The murder squad also began re-examining old files of attacks on women.
Oldfield believed the killer had definitely taken four of his previous victims in his car after picking them up for sex. He was positive other women who probably were not prostitutes may have been propositioned or offered a lift and had turned the killer away. He hoped the man’s face peering out of the car window would still be fresh in their minds. ‘We believe the man we want must have tried it more than once and been turned down.’ One case they focused on closely was a serious assault on a thirty-four-year-old woman in an alleyway in Keighley two years previously in July 1975. Mrs Anna Rogulski had been assaulted and left badly injured. Oldfield told journalists she had been struck over the head with a blunt instrument and had injuries to her body similar to those of the Ripper’s victims. Sadly they failed to listen to Marcella Claxton from Chapeltown, who was convinced it was the Ripper who attacked her. The day after Jayne was killed, she told a reporter she was sure the man who bludgeoned her was also responsible for the girl’s murder.
A ten-year-old boy and a housewife, both living in Chapeltown, contacted the incident room. The woman had started noting down the registration numbers of kerb crawlers after being pestered by a man in a car. The boy had been collecting car numbers – hundreds of them. Officers were detailed to check the owners. Oldfield, by now very much the public face of the police investigation, asked residents to jot down the registration number of any vehicle acting suspiciously or kerb crawling and ring the police. ‘They will not be wasting our time,’ he said. Nothing more clearly reflected the desperate situation he was in as senior investigating officer.
Finally Oldfield made a firm decision to bring the documentation for all five murders under one roof. The paperwork for the four previous killings was integrated into a major incident room on the top floor at Millgarth. A few doors down from the purpose-built incident room, Oldfield shared an office with Dick Holland and another superintendent, Jack Slater. They were working an average thirteen hours a day, arriving at 9.15 a.m. in time for a ten o’clock briefing at which they updated officers conducting house-to-house inquiries. Top priority was trying to maintain their morale. They left to go home between 10 p.m. and midnight. At that stage Holland and Slater were reviewing the paperwork, dispensing actions to the troops on the ground, checking follow-ups. They filtered the stuff Oldfield ought to see, and the paperwork began to pile up. Occasionally his other job at the Wakefield HQ held up his work on the Ripper inquiry. Suddenly he would announce: ‘I’m stopping tonight.’ He would make sure he had half a bottle of decent whisky on hand, taking frequent sips until he had cleared the backlog. Then he would go and bed down in the section house of the police station, where a number of single constables had rooms, so he would be ready and available for work first thing the next morning.
Holland directed that a detective inspector or detective chief inspector trained in the West Yorkshire murder system should work on every shift in the incident room. Their job was to check incoming statements. The Leeds staff hadn’t taken kindly to the changes Holland made. ‘Their reaction was hostile to start with,’ he said. ‘They were moaning and trying to get away. At that stage I actually worked in the incident room seeing that everything that went there was done in the West Yorkshire style. Now that had never been done in Leeds until then.’
The house-to-house inquiries were widened until the occupants of 679 homes in twenty-nine streets were seen and interviewed. Many houses were in multiple occupation. Nearly 3,700 statements were taken. Checks were made on all men taken into police custody for offences of violence, particularly if they involved women. Oldfield also organized a seminar with twenty-five psychiatrists from Yorkshire in an unsuccessful effort to get assistance