Wicked Beyond Belief by Michael Bilton

Author:Michael Bilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

MOUNT: I can’t hear you, it’s a bad line.

CALLER: Tell him it’s a fake.

MOUNT: What’s a fake?

CALLER: The tape recording.

MOUNT: What one is this, the one he’s just received?

CALLER: The Ripper tape recording.

MOUNT: How do you know that?

CALLER: Just tell him.

MOUNT: Just tell him?

CALLER: The one in June.

MOUNT: Pardon?

CALLER: The one in June.

MOUNT: Sorry, it’s a bad line, you’re going to have to repeat it.

At that point the phone call terminated.

‘The caller was trying to tell us that the tape was a hoax, that the person who made the tapes obviously wasn’t the Ripper,’ Mount said. ‘He was trying to say, tell them the tape is a hoax. It was like listening to the radio or television, knowing the person very well and then meeting them face to face. You recognize the voice. It was just him, I can’t explain anything else, I knew it was him, the person who made the tape, he was trying to tell me the tape was a hoax. There had been a murder recently and he had taken an awful long time to phone up. I am sure to this day that that was the person I spoke to. He was trying to convince me in a very short burst, not chatting. He was trying to say, “the tape is false, tell them the tape is false”. I had played the tape to so many people I was brainwashed with that voice, brainwashed with it. I knew it better than my own voice.’

After the phone call, Mount got through to the local telephone exchange to have it traced. This meant not replacing the handset to avoid disconnecting the line at his end. The hope was an engineer at the exchange could manually follow the call back to where it originated. Nevertheless the line was lost and they were unable to see where the call had come from. Zackrisson heard the tape of the phone call first thing next morning and went to consult with senior officers. Those who listened to the tape were completely convinced it was the same voice as that on the tape sent to Oldfield. It was confirmation that their approach of trying to find the tape sender without alibiing him for the murders was the correct one. The ‘tell him’ on the tape was definitely a reference to Oldfield.

Within twenty-four hours the Sunderland incident room was buzzing with the news. It was the only time Sunderland police ever received a call suggesting the tape was a hoax. Eventually the tape was passed to a Home Office laboratory at Sandridge, where a phonetics expert declared there were significant differences between the Oldfield tape and the phone call to Sunderland. However, there is evidence from many years later when the tape of the phone conversation with Keith Mount was examined by another phonetics expert, Dr Peter French, in York, for analysis. In the intervening period the science of voice printing had technologically moved on apace. In the 1990s, Dr French took over

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