Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Michael Bilton
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.
At the end Gee finally gave Hoban his scenario by which the woman had met her death. There were blows to the head, dragging to the site where her corpse was found, raising of the clothes, stabbing, turning over and more stabs, in the course of which the assailant trod on her thigh, then the clothing was pulled down. She hadn’t been drinking. Later analysis by the laboratory at Harrogate found semen on a vaginal swab, but it was thought this was from sexual activity prior to the attack. Gee, the scientist who preferred not to deal in speculation, could not say exactly what kind of stabbing instrument had been used – but among the strong possibilities was indeed a Phillips screwdriver. Neither was he totally sure this was the work of McCann’s killer. There were clear similarities, but he could not rule out coincidence. Hoban, on the other hand, felt more certain he was dealing with the same killer for two murders, a suspicion strengthened when he started to hear details of the lifestyle the woman had led.
The murdered woman’s husband, Sydney Jackson, had a difficult story to tell the officers who interviewed him. He realized he was under suspicion himself, for the circumstances of his marriage were slightly out of the ordinary, even for Leeds. His story came out in dribs and drabs over the course of many hours of questioning. As he told it, and as Hoban initially understood it, she was insatiable and had had many affairs. He turned a blind eye to her activities, which included having sex with many boyfriends because her sexual appetite was such that he could not satisfy it.
Later that afternoon Hoban gave another television interview in the murder incident room at the newly opened Millgarth Street police station in Leeds city centre. Looking extraordinarily dapper for a senior detective, in his Aquascutum suit, red shirt and floral tie, he relayed some of the few facts at his disposal, putting the best possible gloss on the woman’s private life. ‘She was a woman who liked to go to public houses,’ he declared matter of factly. ‘She liked to go to bingo. She led a life of her own, really. We are anxious to contact any friends, lady friends or men friends, who may have seen her last night. She probably went to the Gaiety public house, which is a very popular pub in the area. We know the van she was in finished up on the Gaiety car park this morning … She had severe head injuries. There are other injuries I don’t wish to elaborate on at this time.’
Sydney Jackson at first kept from police the fact that since Christmas his wife had been trying to solve their financial and income tax problems by working as a prostitute. Then, under an intensive interrogation which ended shortly before midnight the day his wife’s body was discovered, he finally admitted that he often accompanied her when she went out looking for ‘business’. No one in the local community where they lived had a clue. The truth was that Emily and Sydney’s marriage was a marriage in name only: they stayed together for their children’s sake. Each, it appeared, went their own way, except that Sydney not only knew of his wife’s secret life, he drove her to her work. He had gone with her in their van, which his wife drove, to the Gaiety pub, a mile from Chapeltown, on Roundhay Road. It was a large, modern open-plan building that became a popular local drinking haunt, particularly for West Indians. The pub was surrounded on three sides by back-to-back rows of small Victorian terraced houses. Strippers danced at lunchtimes and prostitutes regularly gathered there at all hours looking for punters. Sydney had gone into the pub for a drink. Emily went immediately to work. Sydney stayed inside, listening to Caribbean music being thumped out on the juke box until about 10.30 p.m. He then emerged to find his wife had not kept their rendezvous. They had arranged she would drive him home. Assuming she was with one of her men friends, he instead caught a taxi back to Morley and only discovered what had happened when police called at their house in the morning.
His wife had been born Emily Wood in 1933, one of five brothers and three sisters, who lived with their parents in Hemsworth, a mining village. The entire family later moved to Brancepath Place, Leeds. She and Sydney married on 2 January 1953, when she was nineteen and he twenty-one, and during the early part of their marriage lived at various addresses in the Leeds area. Six years later she left him to live with another man. In 1961 they resumed their relationship and eventually set up house in Northcote Crescent, Morley, and became partners in a roofing business which they ran from home. They had three sons and a daughter, but tragedy struck in 1970 when their fourteen-year-old son, Derek, was killed in a fall from a first-floor window.
Emily was a hard-working, energetic woman, quite attractive in her own way. Neighbours remembered her as someone who was always busy. Because Sydney didn’t like to drive, Emily picked up the roofing supplies in their battered blue Commer van. She ferried the men