Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [54]
Then, on the morning of 18 June 1979, two months after Josephine Whitaker’s death, a buff-coloured envelope arrived. It was addressed in the same handwriting and contained a cassette tape. On it, there was a 257-word message in a broad Geordie accent.
A huge publicity campaign was mounted. The public could phone in and listen to the ‘Geordie Ripper Tape’, in the hope that someone might recognise the voice. Within a few days, more than 50,000 people had called.
Language experts confirmed the accent as genuine Wearside, and pinned it down to Castletown, a small, tightly-knit suburb of Sunderland. Eleven detectives were installed in a Sunderland hotel and 100 officers combed the town. Only 4,000 people lived in Castletown, but the police could not find their man. The letters and tape turned out to be a hoax and in October 2005 a Sunderland man was charged with perverting the course of justice.
In July 1979, Detective-Constable Laptew visited Sutcliffe. His car had been spotted in the red-light district of Bradford on 36 separate occasions. This time Laptew felt suspicious of Sutcliffe but, because all eyes were focused on the Geordie tape, his report was not followed up and Sutcliffe went back to Bradford for his eleventh victim.
On Saturday, 1 September 1979, Sutcliffe cruised the streets around Little Horton, a residential area. At about 1 a.m., he saw Barbara Leach, a student, moving away from a group of friends outside the Mannville Arms. Just 200 yards from the pub, he attacked Barbara Leach and dragged her body into a backyard. He stabbed her eight times, stuffed her body into a dustbin and slung an old carpet over it. It was found the following afternoon.
Two high-ranking officers from Scotland Yard were sent to Yorkshire but got nowhere. A taskforce from Manchester reviewed the £5-note inquiry. They narrowed the field down to 270 suspects, but could get no further.
Like everyone else in Yorkshire, Sutcliffe spoke to family and friends about the Ripper. He would make a point of picking up Sonia from work to protect her and told a workmate: ‘Whoever is doing all these murders has a lot to answer for.’ Once his colleagues at the depot made a bet that he was the Ripper – but Sutcliffe just laughed and said nothing.
The Ripper took another break of nearly a year. Then on Thursday, 18 August 1980, he struck for the twelfth time. The victim was Marguerite Walls, a 47-year-old civil servant. She was working late at the Department of Education and Science in Leeds, tidying up loose ends before going on a ten-day holiday. She left at 10 p.m. to walk home. Her body was found two days later, under a mound of grass clippings in the garden of a magistrate’s house. She had been bludgeoned and strangled, but her body had not been mutilated so the police did not realise that she was one of the Ripper’s victims.
Three months later, Sutcliffe had just finished eating a chicken dinner when he saw Jacqueline Hill, a language student at the University of Leeds, get off the bus outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. His fingers were still greasy from his supper when he viciously struck her down. He dragged her body to the waste ground behind the shops and attacked it savagely. Death had struck Jacqueline so suddenly that one of her eyes had remained open. Sutcliffe stabbed it repeatedly with a rusty Phillips screwdriver specially sharpened into a fine point.
The Home Office appointed a special squad to solve the case. But six weeks after Jacqueline Hill’s murder, it reached the same conclusion as the West Yorkshire force – it had no idea how to crack the case. What was needed was a little bit of luck.
On 2 January 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring and Police Constable Robert Hydes started their evening shift by cruising along Melbourne Avenue in Sheffield’s red-light district. They saw Olivia Reivers climbing into a Rover V8 3500 and decided to investigate. The driver – a bearded man – identified himself as Peter Williams. He said he wanted no trouble. Then he scrambled out of the car and asked if he could relieve himself. He went over