Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton

were questioned in detail about regular clients even as the Leeds police began clamping down on soliciting in Chapeltown. On the one hand, they wanted the women’s cooperation; on the other, they were trying to put them out of business. At the same time Jim Hobson was mounting a covert operation of static observations, with officers recording registration numbers of vehicles trying to pick up women in the red-light district. Lists of registrations numbers could then be examined after any future murder and the drivers traced and interviewed. Over the next few months, 152 women were arrested and reported for soliciting, and sixty-eight more cautioned.

      It was a measure of Oldfield’s frustration and desperation that he virtually begged people to support the police effort: ‘The public have the power to decide what sort of society they want. If they want murder and violence then they will keep quiet. If they want a law-abiding society in which their womenfolk can move freely without fear of attack from the likes of the individual we are hunting, then they must give us their help.’

      A month after the murder the trail had gone cold, but the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, MP for a Leeds constituency, seemed to have full confidence in the West Yorkshire force. He paid a visit to the incident room in Leeds and was asked how concerned he was that ‘The Ripper’ had been at large so long. ‘I am no more concerned than the chief constable,’ he replied. ‘Often piecing evidence together, considering it, analysing it, does take time unless someone is there with a camera when the murder is committed.’

      Considering that five women had been killed by the same hand within a small geographical area, this answer appeared somewhat flippant. But as the law stood, the Home Secretary could have said little else. He simply could not interfere. His own Home Office colleague, Dr Shirley Summerskill, had made the position clear during a debate on the Black Panther case twelve months previously. Britain’s criminal justice system relied on the operational autonomy of the police.

      The press at this stage was describing ‘The Ripper’ as Yorkshire’s most wanted killer. No policeman pointed out to the Home Secretary during his visit that this was a national problem rather than a little local difficulty. Neither did they reveal they hadn’t a hope of catching the man – unless he tried to kill again. In such a hopeless situation there were few words of comfort that Oldfield or his colleagues could find for the MacDonald family when they buried Jayne. Those who have never suffered bereavement in such circumstances can have no comprehension of the feelings of the families. Wilf MacDonald later described in a television interview the moment he learned of his daughter’s death:

      The police came in and said ‘Are you the father of Jayne MacDonald’, I said ‘Yes’. I said ‘I’ll kill her when she comes home because she didn’t phone last night’. They said you may not have to … and that’s as much as I knew … if she had died of you know illness or accident but when it happens like it did, mutilation and everything, I went to identify her and … I just collapsed there and then. He has murdered the whole family you can almost say.

      Oldfield’s surviving daughter was about the same age as Jayne, and a pupil at Wakefield Girls’ High School, hoping to go on to university to study dentistry. His heart went out to Wilf MacDonald, and soon after her murder he made a private visit to the family to pledge he would not rest until the man who killed Jayne was caught. In October 1979, Wilf MacDonald too was dead, aged sixty. He was buried in a grave next to his beloved daughter. His family emphatically believed he never recovered from Jayne’s murder and died of a broken heart.

      In the months following the death of Jayne MacDonald, Oldfield’s nightmare scenario, that the killer would go on attacking women again and again, came true. Two weeks after he struck down Jayne, Mrs Maureen Long became his latest victim. She survived the attack but at a terrible cost. Twenty-five years later, in her sixties, she still suffers as a result of the head injuries she received. In conversation she is very nervous, clasping her hands to stop them shaking. She cannot watch anything on television that involves violence. She has bouts of depression and anger.

      In July 1977, Maureen was forty-two, the mother of several children and separated from her husband. She hadn’t had an easy life by any means. At various times she had been in trouble with the police. She enjoyed the company of men but was certainly no prostitute. She lived with another man in Farsley on the borders of Leeds and Bradford. According to a police report, although she and her husband were separated, they continued to have a friendly relationship and she still held a good measure of affection for him. On Saturday night, 9 July, they met up in a Bradford pub and she drank four pints of lager in his company. When the pub was closing, around 11.10 p.m., she headed alone in her long black dress for the Mecca Ballroom in Manningham Lane. She was a woman who loved dressing up in her finest and going out for the evening, especially to a night out dancing. Maureen was a regular at the Mecca and well known to many of the staff. The music played, she danced with several men and continued drinking. Her last clear memory was of going to the cloakroom at about 2 a.m. on the Sunday morning. Outside a ‘hot dog’ salesman preparing to close up his pitch for the night saw her leave the Mecca heading for the city centre.

      Her recall of subsequent events is hazy. Police believe that, infused with alcohol and in a befuddled state, she may have been going to see her husband, who lived in Reynell Street. Later, at around 3.15 a.m., a security guard, Frank Whitaker, who worked at the Tanks & Drums Ltd factory abutting on Bowling Back Lane, heard his dog bark. He went to the main entrance and looked up the lane. An engine revved up and he saw a car without lights initially drive off at high speed out of Mount Street. He was certain it was a white Ford Cortina Mark II with a black roof. He thought there might have been something heavy in the boot.

      Next morning, at around 8.30, the residents of a gypsy caravan site off Bowling Back Lane heard shouts for help coming from near by. Police were called and on a patch of rubbish-strewn open land they found Maureen Long in a deeply distressed condition.

      ‘All I remember was trying to pick myself up,’ she said. ‘I kept falling and then I wondered what was wrong with me, and I kept falling back and as I were trying to pull myself up, falling back again. Then I was screaming and I heard this dog barking, and someone say: “Oh, you’re all right,” and that’s all I remember. When you get hit over the back of the head you can’t remember things. If I hadn’t had beer that night I’d have died of hypothermia.’

      The person who attacked her obviously left her for dead. Her clothing was displaced. Her bra had been pulled down to her waist, her tights and pants pulled to her knees. Suffering very severe head injuries, she was rushed by ambulance to Bradford Royal Infirmary, where doctors saved her life. There was a large depressed fracture of the skull, and five stab wounds to the front and side of her trunk and left shoulder. She also had three fractured ribs. Her head injuries were so severe that she required specialist neurosurgery at the Leeds General Infirmary. Professor Gee examined Maureen in hospital at Bradford a few hours after she was admitted. Accompanied by Oldfield and Holland, he stood beside her bed in a cubicle in the casualty department. Her head had been partially shaved by the neurosurgical senior registrar, revealing the severe lacerations to her skull. A police surgeon took various swabs from intimate areas, searching for potential forensic evidence. One of the stab wounds had penetrated her liver, though she had not suffered from gross bleeding. Gee thought her lucky to be alive.

      She spent nine weeks in hospital before being discharged but continued as an out-patient for many years because of fits as a result of her head injuries. Maureen couldn’t provide the police with much help. She had woken up in the intensive care ward of the local hospital. That Maureen’s memory was poor did not surprise Holland. He had recently worked on a stabbing case in Bradford where a (non-Ripper) victim’s memory was impaired because of loss of blood and consequently loss of oxygen to the brain. ‘They got her brain functioning again perfectly, she hadn’t brain damage, but everything that was stored on her “disk”, if you like, to use a computer analogy, prior to the stabbing had gone forever.’

      Holland’s belief that extensive head injuries made a surviving victim’s memory unreliable was understandable though tragically mistaken. Yet he eagerly grasped at one clue provided by Maureen Long. She described the man who gave her a lift as being a fair-haired white male, aged about thirty-five, thickset, over six feet tall, and having what could have been a