The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman Read Free Book Online Page A

the case of a random killer, the ‘traces’ left behind are useless, since they afford no clue to his identity. The police had to hunt the Yorkshire Ripper with the ‘needle-in-the-haystack’ method – checking thousands of remote possibilities. In this case, the numberplates of all cars seen regularly in red-light districts were noted, and the drivers interviewed. When one murdered prostitute was found to be in possession of a new £5 note, the police traced the batch of notes from the bank to twenty-three factories in Bradford, whose employees they interviewed. These included T. & W.H. Clark (Holdings) Ltd, an engineering transport firm, and among those they interviewed was a bearded, powerfully-built young man named Peter Sutcliffe; but they were satisfied with his alibi. In the following year Sutcliffe was again questioned because his car had been seen seven times in a red-light district, but he was believed when he said that he had to drive through it on his way to work. The car registration numbers had been fed into the police computer at Hendon; but the names of suspects interviewed were not fed into a computer. So the constable who talked to Sutcliffe about his car numberplate had no idea that he had also been interviewed in connection with the £5 note. It had been noted in reports at the Leeds police headquarters, but a huge backlog meant that these had not yet been processed – after all, 150,000 people had been interviewed and 27,000 houses searched. So Peter Sutcliffe was enabled to go on killing for two more years. When further investigation of the £5 note reduced the number of firms who might have received it from twenty-three to three, Sutcliffe was questioned yet again, and his workmates began jokingly to call him Jack the Ripper. In fact, when Sutcliffe was interviewed this time, he was wearing the boots he had worn when murdering his tenth victim, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Josephine Whitaker; the police had taken a mould of the imprint, but the police who questioned him did not think to look at his feet.
    After the thirteenth murder – of a student named Jacqueline Hill – the police decided to set up an advisory team of experts to study the murders all over again. These went to examine all the murder sites and used a computer to estimate their ‘centre of gravity’. This led then to the conclusion that the killer lived in Bradford rather than Leeds, where many of the murders had taken place. The next obvious step was to interview again every suspect who lived in Bradford – especially those who had already been interviewed in connection with the £5 note. Since the clues now included three sets of tyre tracks and three sets of footprints, it seems certain that this latest investigation would have identified Peter Sutcliffe as the Yorkshire Ripper. In fact, he was caught before that could happen. On 2 January 1981 two policemen on a routine patrol of the red-light district of Sheffield stopped their car to question a couple in a parked Rover. The man identified himself as Peter Williams; a check on the car with the police computer at Hendon revealed that it had a false numberplate. Taken in for questioning, Sutcliffe soon admitted his identity. In the Ripper Incident Room at Leeds, it was noted that the size of his shoes corresponded to the imprints found by three bodies. The constable who had arrested him recalled that he had requested permission to urinate before accompanying the police. His colleague, Sergeant Robert Ring, returned to the spot – an oil storage tank – and found a knife and a hammer. Faced with this evidence, Peter Sutcliffe finally confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper. The initial motive of the attacks had been a brooding resentment about a prostitute who had cheated him of £10, which had become (in the illogical manner of serial killers) a desire to punish all prostitutes. After a while, violence had become an addiction, and he attacked any woman he saw walking