Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [52]
The following day, an allotment owner found Jean Jordan’s naked body. The damage to her head made her unrecognisable and there was no evidence to identify her among her scattered clothing She was eventually identified from a fingerprint on a lemonade bottle she had handled before leaving home for the last time.
The police also found the five-pound note. They set about tracing it. In three months they interviewed 5,000 men. One of them was Peter Sutcliffe. But after leaving Sutcliffe’s well-appointed house, detectives filed a short report which left him free to go about his gruesome business.
Sutcliffe’s next victim was 18-year-old Helen Rytka, who shared a miserable room by a flyover in Huddersfield with her twin sister Rita. The two of them worked as a pair in the red-light district around busy Great Northern Street. They concentrated on the car trade.
The Yorkshire Ripper murders scared them, so they had devised a system which they thought would keep them safe. They based themselves outside a public lavatory. When they were picked up separately, they took the number of the client’s car. They each gave their client precisely twenty minutes and then returned to the toilet at a set time. But their system went terribly wrong.
On the snowy night of Tuesday 31 January 1978, Helen arrived back at the rendezvous five minutes early. At 9.25 p.m., a bearded man in a red Ford Corsair offered her the chance of a quick fiver. She thought she could perform her services quickly and make it back to the rendezvous before Rita returned. She could not. Rita never saw her again.
Helen took her client to nearby Garrard’s timber yard. There were two men there, so he could not kill her straight away. Instead, Sutcliffe had to have sexual intercourse with her in the back of the car. When they were finished, the men were gone. As she got out of the back seat to return to the front of the car, Sutcliffe swung at her with his hammer. He missed and hit the door of the car. His second blow struck her on the head. Then he hit her five more times. The walls of the foreman’s shed a few feet away were splattered with blood.
Sutcliffe dragged Helen’s body into a woodpile and hid it there. Her bra and black polo-neck sweater were pushed up above her breasts. Her socks were left on, but the rest of her clothes were scattered over a wide area. Her black lace panties were found the next day by a lorry driver, pinned to the shed door.
Back at the lavatory, Rita was desperately worried, but fear of the police prevented her from reporting her sister’s disappearance for three days. A police Alsatian found the hidden body. It had been horribly mutilated. There were three gaping wounds in the chest where she had been stabbed repeatedly.
The Ripper’s latest victim had disappeared from a busy street. Over a hundred passers-by were traced, and all but three cars and one stocky, fair-haired man were eliminated. The police appealed on the radio to any wife, mother or girlfriend who suspected that they were living with the Ripper. No one came forward.
A few weeks later, a passer-by spotted an arm sticking out from under an overturned sofa on wasteland in Bradford’s red-light district. At first he thought it was a tailor’s dummy but the putrid aroma soon sent him rushing to a telephone.
The body was that of 22-year-old Yvonne Pearson. She was a high-class prostitute, who serviced a rich businessman trade in most of Britain’s cities. She had been killed two months earlier, ten days before Helen Rytka. The killing bore all the hallmarks of the Ripper. A hammer blow to the head had smashed her skull. Her bra and jumper were pulled up exposing her breasts, and her chest had been jumped on repeatedly. Her black flared slacks had been pulled down. Horsehair from the sofa was stuffed in her mouth.
Yvonne