Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton

Osborne in the Possilpark area of Glasgow, she had six sisters and three brothers. Their mother was a Roman Catholic and they had a Church of Scotland father. The children were brought up as Protestants. It was said to be a poor, large, but loving family. At primary school Irene was a normal child, though somewhat shy and sensitive. She enjoyed music and loved to laugh. But at Springburn Secondary School she turned into something of a rebel, smoking and playing truant. At some point the entire Osborne clan had settled at various places in England: a brother in Corby, Northamptonshire; a sister at Canvey Island in Essex. Another sister, Helen, worked in the hotel and catering industry in Blackpool, then married a Yorkshireman and later set up home in Sheffield. In 1965, at the age of seventeen, Irene Osborne ran off to London and for the next five years or so completely cut herself off from her family. When her father died, they were unable to contact her and she missed his funeral. Before her teens were out she had two children. Her daughter Lorraine’s father was a man called John Henry Wade. Police believed that Alan, the second child, might have been fathered by someone else, a friend of Irene’s called ‘Dennis’, who was never found. Irene could hardly cope by herself, let alone with two small children. Baby Lorraine was fostered out aged eighteen months in 1968 to a dealer in reproduction antiques and his wife, George and Mary Dwyer, from Croydon. They then adopted her when she was four. Irene’s son Alan was also fostered out.

      Subsequently she moved to Blackpool, where her sister Helen was then working. There she met her future husband, George Richardson, a barman turned plasterer, in November 1970, and married him in June the following year. They set up home in Blackpool and had two daughters. Until the summer of 1975 Irene was working at the local Pontins Holiday Camp. Their daughter, also named Irene, was two years old and Irene was expecting another baby, Amanda. She almost certainly suffered from severe postnatal depression, for very soon after the baby was born she suddenly left Blackpool for London without saying where she was going. Mr Richardson reported her missing to the police, but she made contact a few months later. As a result, George Richardson travelled to London and located his wife in South Kensington, working in a hotel. They set up home in Kensington briefly, in an attempt to patch up their marriage. It did not last long. In April 1976 Irene left again without leaving a forwarding address. George Richardson did not see her alive again and their children, too, were subsequently fostered.

      In London Irene Richardson met and cohabited with a six-foot ex-seaman, Steven Bray, who had absconded from Leicester Prison and was now working as a chef. Irene kept secret from him the fact that she was still married to George Richardson. Bray and Irene arrived in Leeds in October 1976 and moved between various boarding houses in the Chapeltown area. He was employed as a doorman at Tiffany’s Club and Irene began using the name Bray and worked at various hotels in the city as a chambermaid and also as a cleaner at a YMCA hostel, the Residential Boys’ Club in nearby Chapel Allerton. Incredibly she and Bray had organized to get married at Leeds Register Office on 22 January 1977, but neither turned up. Some time later Bray left for London, and then caught a ferry to Ireland, where he remained for several weeks.

      Ten days before her death, Irene failed to turn up for work at the YMCA hostel. She had asked the warden for an advance on her wages because she had a large bill to pay. Mrs Nellie Morrison was only able to give her £1. They didn’t see Irene for a few days and then she came to collect her shoes and overalls and apologized for her behaviour, saying she had to get away from a man she had been living with. A week before she was murdered, a man suddenly arrived at the YMCA and collected the wages due to her. But she never saw the money. Hobson learned that in the last ten days of her life she had been wandering the streets practically destitute.

      A woman in the rooming house in Cowper Street told detectives that Irene and Bray had twice rented an attic room in the house, and shortly before her death the landlord had let her occupy a ground-floor room rent free for a few days. Rent for a room was normally between £5 and £8 a week. Severely depressed and down on her luck, Irene had been hanging around street corners in Chapeltown. She had been living rough on the streets for about two weeks and spent several nights sleeping in a public lavatory. A few friends allowed her to take the occasional bath in their flat. The room in Cowper Street should have been a life-saver for Irene, who was urgently trying to get a job. She didn’t drink a great deal and only went out at weekends.

      On the Saturday night of 5 February Irene spent some time getting ready, trying to dress tidily and applying a considerable amount of make-up, especially around the eyes. At about 11.15 she told her friend Pam Barker, who also had a room in the Cowper Street property, that she was going to Tiffany’s dance hall in the Merrion Centre in Leeds to find Steven Bray. She then briefly visited a house in Sholebrook Avenue and talked to a friend, Mrs Walsh. They parted company at 11.30. Some time before midnight she got into a stranger’s car, apparently willing to have sex with him for money.

      The next time George Richardson saw Irene was at the Leeds City Mortuary. The police arranged for a car to bring him from Blackpool to identify her. It was a sight which was to haunt him for years to come. He was convinced Irene had never been a prostitute. ‘She was sick. She just couldn’t settle down,’ he said. Her funeral in Blackpool the following week, he said, would end two years of a living hell. But George Richardson’s life in subsequent years went from bad to worse. He became an alcoholic.

      Following the post-mortem Hobson had a clearer idea of what had happened to Irene. For a few days at least she had been prepared to resort to prostitution to get money. He knew from forensic lab results that she had had sex with someone in the twenty-four hours before her death. Swabs from her vagina showed the presence of semen. On the inside of her coat an area of seminal staining was also found, from an ‘O’ blood-type secretor, a male who secreted blood cells into his saliva or semen. There were similar seminal stains on her tights and knickers, but in neither case was sperm found in the semen. The man who previously had intercourse with Irene was definitely aspermous.

      It seemed certain she had been picked up in Chapeltown shortly before being killed. Later it was learned that at 11.35 p.m. on the Saturday night another woman had been propositioned on several occasions in Nassau Place, Chapeltown, by a man in a white car. Could the same man have picked up Irene and taken her to Soldier’s Field? She had got out of the car intending to have sex with the driver, but first had to discreetly remove the tampon she was wearing. As she crouched down the killer struck her a massive blow to the head, followed by two more. It was self-evident that if Irene was crouching or kneeling in the split second before she was killed, a hammer raised above the murderer’s head as he stood over her would have been brought crashing down with a greater velocity than if she had been standing. The only saving grace was that Irene would have known nothing about it. The blow would have stunned her and instant unconsciousness would have followed.

      ‘This was an almost circular, punched-out depressed fracture,’ Professor Gee wrote in his autopsy report, ‘with the central disc of the bone driven deeply into the underlying brain.’ He made another chilling discovery: ‘The bevelling up of one edge of the fracture of the skull clearly showed where the hammer had got stuck by the force of the blow into the skull and had to be levered out to get it clear of the bone.’ The nature of the hole indicated it had almost the precise dimensions of a hammer head. Gee thought the woman had then been dragged from the position of the tyre tracks to the spot where she was found and further injured. The murderer had slashed at her throat, causing a gaping wound exposing the larynx. In a frenzy he then tore a wound nearly seven inches long down the left side of the abdomen, which caused her intestines to tumble out, and two more stab wounds to the stomach followed. The weapons used were probably a hammer with a flat circular striking surface and a very sharp knife of some kind. For Gee the importance of this case lay in it being able to confirm they were dealing with a multiple killer. He preferred to deal in certainties rather than speculation. It was essential not to make a mistake because it could confuse the whole investigation. Now he felt sure he knew. ‘Here was a clear pattern,’ he said later, though it took some time for everyone to agree.

      Hobson still wasn’t certain in his own mind that all three murders were linked, but this didn’t prevent speculation in the media. The fact that two other women had been slaughtered in similar circumstances in Leeds, coupled with the grisly detail of Richardson’s throat injury, prompted one tabloid the next morning to splash its story. ‘JACK THE RIPPER MURDER HORROR’: ‘A