Yorkshire Ripper - The Secret Murders by Chris Clark

Author:Chris Clark
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781784184186
Published: 2015-06-28T23:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

‘A CHARMING MAN’

O fficially – in the files of the Central Criminal Record Office and the accounts of West Yorkshire Police – Peter Sutcliffe’s career of murder and attempted murder began on 5 July 1975 with the attack on Anna Rogulskyj in Keighley. Those same official accounts record two further offences that year: the nonfatal hammer assault on Olive Smelt in August and the killing of Wilma McCann – his first killing – in October.

There is no mention in that authorised version of the 1969 stone-in-the-sock attack on a Bradford prostitute; nor does it mention the names Fred Craven, John Tomey, Mary Judge, Lucy Tinslop, Jacqueline Ansell-Lamb, Barbara Mayo, Gloria Booth, Judith Roberts, Wendy Sewell, Rosina Hilliard, Kay O’Connor, Caroline Allen, Gloria Wood, Eve Stratford or Lynne Weedon – despite there being very strong evidence pointing to Sutcliffe.

But there is another name to add to that list: the name of a young girl who in the summer of 1975 was – unquestionably – attacked and left for dead by the Yorkshire Ripper. Her name is Tracy Browne, and her story reveals much about Sutcliffe’s methods – and the remarkable catalogue of police errors and dubious decisions that explain how the official account of his murderous reign has been censored.

The village of Silsden sits at the point where the rough moors of Brontë country meet the softer hills and valleys of the Yorkshire Dales. It was recorded in the Domesday Book as ‘Siglesdene’, but to many of its older inhabitants it is, and always was, ‘Cobbydale’: a reflection, perhaps, of the local determination to establish an identity more rural than its proximity to the industrial West Riding might suggest.

That historic county appellation had itself been abolished in 1974, when a major administrative reorganisation created the new county of West Yorkshire. It was a change that accompanied another major restructure: the neighbouring (and often intensely rivalrous) city police forces of Leeds, Bradford and other urban centres had been folded, along with their more rural counterparts, into a new service – West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police.

This change was intended both to improve financial efficiency and to recognise the importance of intelligence sharing on criminals who paid no heed to the arbitrary boundaries of the old police districts. It may have succeeded in the former – the traditional local bobbies’ substations would soon disappear from villages such as Silsden – but by the summer of 1975 the latter was still little more than an optimistic ambition.

Upper Hayhills Farm is a little way outside Silsden, up the long steep road that leads out of the village and on towards the moors and dales. In August 1975, it was home to Anthony and Nora Browne and their four daughters.

Theirs was a close and warm family, maintained by love and sensible parental discipline. One of the rules was that, when the Brownes’ twin teenage daughters, Mandy and Tracy, went out of an evening, they had to be home by 10.15 p.m.

That summer had been a good one – long and warm days, with pleasant balmy evenings.

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