True Stories of Crime and Detection: Usborne True Stories by Gill Harvey

Author:Gill Harvey [Harvey, Gill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

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Thirteen women dead, all brutally murdered, and another seven seriously injured. It was a shocking total. For over five years, Yorkshire, in the north of England, had been terrorized by a man who became known as “the Yorkshire Ripper”. The first attack had been in July 1975, but it was now January 1981, and the police seemed no closer to tracking down the killer. Surely, in this age of modern forensic science, it must be possible to work faster than that? But, on January 2, when the police eventually arrested a truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe, it was by little more than a lucky chance. So where had they been going wrong for so long?

Unfortunately, violent attacks on women are not unusual, and they are often carried out by someone that the victim knows. When, in July 1975, Anna Rogulskyj was attacked viciously from behind, given a massive blow to the head and left for dead, it was her boyfriend that the police questioned first. But it soon became clear he had nothing to do with it.

Anna Rogulskyj survived, but she could remember nothing about her attacker. He hadn’t robbed her. In fact there didn’t seem to be any motive for the assault at all. It was a mystery. Then, in August, a similar attack was carried out on 46-year-old Olive Smelt. She too survived, and was able to give a description of her attacker to the police. He was about 30, she said, and about 5 feet 10 inches tall. He had dark hair and possibly a beard.

In October, the attacker struck again. This time, the woman didn’t recover. Wilma McCann died from a huge blow to her head, made with something like a hammer. She had also been stabbed repeatedly. January 1976 came along, and with it the frenzied murder of Emily Jackson, which followed the same pattern as the other attacks.

A year passed without another case, and the police wondered if the attacks had stopped. But they hadn’t. The next victim was Irene Richardson, in February 1977. By now, the police were aware that a particularly nasty killer was on the loose, and the search for him intensified.

The strange thing was, though, that there was very little forensic evidence to go on – or, for that matter, evidence of any sort. Unlike many murderers, this man never left his weapons behind. There were no fingerprints. The only shreds of information available to the police were the prints left by the wheels of his car, and the imprint of a size 7 or 8 Wellington boot.

The Wellington boot was pretty useless, as clues went. Thousands of men have feet of that size, and Wellingtons are hardly unusual. But the car wheels, at least, might offer a way forward – they were in a particular combination that could be pinned down to just a few types of cars. It wasn’t much, but it was something. The police began to carry out checks on parked cars at night, secretly, in case the killer caught on and changed his wheels.

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