Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [51]
Sonia knew nothing of this and on 10 August 1974, after an eight-year courtship, she and Peter were married. They spent the first three years of their married life living with Sonia’s parents, then they moved to a large detached house in Heaton, a middle-class suburb of Bradford, which they kept immaculate.
On the evening of Saturday, 25 June I977, Peter dropped his wife off at the Sherrington nursing home where she worked nights. With his neighbours Ronnie and Peter Barker, he went on a pub crawl around Bradford, ending up at the Dog in the Pound. At closing time, they went to get some fish and chips.
It was well past midnight when he dropped the Barker brothers at their front door. But instead of parking his white Ford Corsair outside his house, Sutcliffe drove off down the main road towards Leeds. At around 2 a.m., he saw a lone girl wearing a gingham skirt in the street light of Chapeltown Road. As she passed the Hayfield pub and turned left down Reginald Terrace, Sutcliffe parked his car, got out and began to follow her down the quiet side street.
The girl’s body was found lying by a wall the next morning by a group of children on their way into the adventure playground in Reginald Terrace. She had been struck on the back of the head, then dragged 20 yards and hit twice more. She was also stabbed once in the back and repeatedly through the chest. The trademarks were unmistakable.
However, the victim was not a prostitute. Jayne McDonald was 16, had just left school and was working in the shoe department of a local supermarket. On the night of her death, she had been out with friends in Leeds. When she was attacked, she was on her way back to her parents’ home, which was just a few hundred yards from where her body was found.
The murder of a teenage girl gave the investigation new impetus. By September, the police had interviewed almost 700 residents in the area and taken 3,500 statements, many of them from prostitutes who worked in the area.
Two weeks after the killing of Jayne McDonald, the Ripper savagely attacked Maureen Long on some waste ground near her home in Bradford. By some miracle she survived, but the description of her assailant was too hazy to help the inquiry.
The staff of the investigation was increased to 304 full-time officers who had soon interviewed 175,000 people, taken 12,500 statements and checked 10,000 vehicles. The problem was that they no idea of the type of man they were looking for. Certainly no one would have suspected Peter Sutcliffe. The 3l-year-old was a polite and mild-mannered neighbour, a hard-working long-distance lorry driver and trusted employee, a good son and a loyal husband. He was the sort of man who did jobs around the house or tinkered with his car at weekends. Nothing about him suggested that he was a mass murderer.
Those who knew him would even have been surprised if they had seen him out picking up prostitutes. But that’s what he did, regularly. On Saturday, 1 October 1977, Jean Jordan climbed into Sutcliffe’s new red Ford Corsair near her home in Moss Side, Manchester. She took £5 in advance and directed him to some open land two miles away that was used by prostitutes with their clients. They were a few yards away from the car when Sutcliffe smashed a hammer down on to her skull. He hit her again and again, 11 times in all. He dragged her body into some bushes, but another car arrived and he had to make a quick getaway.
As he drove back to Bradford, Sutcliffe realised that he had left a vital clue on the body. The £5 note he had given Jean Jordan was brand new. It had come directly from his wage packet and could tie him to the dead girl.
For eight long days, he waited nervously. In that time, there was nothing in the press about the body being found. So he risked returning to Moss Side to find the note. Despite a frantic search, he could not find Jean Jordan’s handbag. In