The Ripper

That night...

Mum was going out.

It was midweek....

...and we were put to bed.

I'm five. My sister, she's six.

And the next memory was of Sonya waking me up.

Still dark.

And she told me that,

"Mum's not come home.

Come on, we'll go look for her."

It was around five o'clock.

It was cold.

It was dark.

We crept out through the garden...

through a hole in the hedge onto the field in the back.

I just remember thinking,

"Where the hell's me mum?"

This was the ultimate crime against women.

And at the heart of it was a monster.

By the end of five years, he controlled us all.

I'm never really gonna forget it.

It's... it's never gonna leave me.

Could I have done more? Should have I done more?

It was the biggest crime investigation

that had ever been in the United Kingdom.

No police force had ever experienced that level of pressure.

I would stand there,

look at these cops and listen to them and think,

"Oh, God! They're never gonna catch him.

They're looking for a... a figment of their imagination."

Morning has broken here in Broadasting House.

John Henry welcoming you to Monday's Radio Leeds AM.

In 1975,

I was a PC, a police constable

for West Yorkshire police in the north of England.

What they called a "task force," to deal with major incidents,

area searches, house-to-house inquiries, raids...

anywhere where you needed a large body of officers.

We were in the office one day doing a bit of paperwork...

when the boss got a phone call.

And he said,

"Right, load up the van. We're going to Leeds. There's been a murder."

Police are investigating the discovery of a woman's body.

The woman who hasn't yet been identified

was found on a playing field in the Chapeltown district of Leeds.

We were to do an area search,

hopefully to find something that might assist... in the inquiry.

We had a lot of good morale.

A chance to make a name for yourself, if you like.

It was quite a cold morning.

My knees were absolutely soaked.

But if you don't look...

you don't find.

She'd been brutally battered about the head

and had other horrifying injuries to her body,

which the police will not disclose.

She'd been subjected to terrific injuries.

And her last few seconds on Earth had been awful.

Body identified as that of 28-year-old divorcee Wilma McCann,

found 150 yards from the council house where she'd lived with her four children.

Her children were still fast asleep in bed.

Little did they know that their mother was lying dead just yards away from them.

All I can remember is...

being out in the street,

liking being out in the street, 'cause we could see this commotion.

"Mum's not here, we'll be all right, won't get caught."

And then, being back in the house...

and the police asking us questions.

I remember people giving us cups of cocoa.

And it felt nice.

This was really unusual, coming from where we'd come from

and all of a sudden

these people are making a fuss over us. It was... It was lovely.

But we didn't know what was going on.

And eventually, I can remember...

the officer...

sitting us down.

And just telling us...

that our Mum had been taken to heaven

and we weren't going to see her again.

In 1974,

I was a senior lecturer in forensic medicine

at the University of Leeds.

Wilma McCann had been struck twice on the back of the head.

She had three groups of stab wounds:

two in the breasts, the bra had been pulled up,

and one in the abdomen.

The unusual thing about the stab wounds

was that whoever has done it, has...

taken time to push that instrument around and then time to stand back.

You'd have to draw on your experience

and say that this was done

by somebody who is disturbed to some considerable degree.

There was little in the way of scientific identification evidence

in the case of Wilma McCann.

Nothing in the way of fibers, trace evidence.

So, the cards were stacked on this one,

right from the beginning.

Well, we now know that it had just turned 1 a.m.

on the morning of the 30th, yesterday morning.

Uh, the dead woman, Wilma McCann,

was alive and well and standing on this spot.

She came out of the...

room at the Top Club, which is over the road there.

And she was standing here

and it had just turned 1 a.m.

when a man in a private car

uh, was supposed to stop when she jumped into the road in front of his car.

"Can you give me a lift to Scott Hall Road?"

Which is were she was found dead actually.

100 years before, Chapeltown had been the Highgate of Leeds.

But the men of money departed for more distant suburbs.

With them had gone Chapeltown's splendour.

Today, 21 percent of the adults in the area are unemployed.

So that the whole, um, socioeconomic standard of the area has declined.

Chapeltown was mostly a black community.

Afro-Caribbean.

There was a big scene

and the black guys used to run their own drinking clubs.

They were stamped down on quite heavily by the police.

Relations with the police are, to say the least, strained.

And this has made the murder squad's job doubly difficult.

A lot of these guys had gold teeth... with diamonds in them for goodness' sake.

And when they smiled, you thought: "I'm not gonna mess with him."

-'Morning, sir. -'Morning.

We're inquiring into the murder of Wilma McCann.

Would you mind answering a few questions?

We'd do house-to-house inquiries.

And, they were all right. They were all right with you.

But, I mean, the community, at that time, were being victimized.

You know, sort of, maybe, racial names or... or what have you.

So, they didn't want to assist. The didn't want to help.

A decaying Victorian suburb with a slum problem,

a high immigrant population, and a large number of prostitutes.

And, of course, Chapeltown was the main red-light area.

Wilma McCann's body was found

sufficiently near to the Chapeltown red-light area...

for it to be an assumption almost from minute one,

amongst the attending police, that this could well have been prostitution-related.

She was a prostitute.

And, as the investigation went on,

we discovered that she was a bit of a pest apparently.

Wilma McCann was a girl who liked the nightlife.

Uh, she associated with people at night clubs,

and, uh, she was somewhat of a prostitute.

The press would use references like "good-time girl."

That sort of thing.

But you could easily read between the lines.

People's tastes were very similar then to what they are now.

I don't know why there's this predisposition

to enjoy violence and things.

But murder and mayhem are the two things that attract people.

I've got to admit,

I... I... I spent very little time thinking about people like Wilma McCann.

Um, they were just, uh, another minor story.

It was a "fish and chip" murder.

It was in the paper that day, but two or three days from now

that newspaper would've been used to wrap up somebody's fish and chips.

You read in the newspaper, a prostitute's been killed, been murdered,

and you shrug and you move on to the next story.

My mum's life was hell.

Mum was a survivor.

She did whatever she needed to do to bring some money into the house

and... money was a big issue.

There were occasions when Mum would take us

to the social services and threaten to leave us there...

if they didn't get us some money.

There were a couple of occasions where I went into foster families,

because Mom had breakdowns.

That could possibly have just been that she needed to escape from me dad,

who was violent at times, who was a big drinker, who was a big gambler.

Eventually, Mum and Dad separated at the end of '74.

That was the end of it.

The police knew Mom had been killed and there was a killer out there.

I'll never forget the fear...

fear like we'd never felt before, actually.

We were told to get our things.

We left the house.

I remember that drive through Leeds...

and eventually arriving at this massive enormous building

like a big abbey or something like that.

But it wasn't. It was a children's home.

I think that is when I realized,

I was never gonna see my mom again.

As time went by, the detectives were doing their bit...

we were doing our bit,

but the public...

didn't want to know.

So, as a prostitute, she "gets what she deserved."

There wasn't any sympathy.

Stranger murders are extremely difficult.

Somebody goes out at random

"Right, I'm gonna kill somebody tonight."

And finds an opportunity...

and takes full advantage of that opportunity.

We felt that, uh, if it was gonna ever get solved,

it would be a long way off.

So...

I just carried on, carried on with my normal everyday policing.

It just seemed to be a one-off murder.