Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton

Many prostitutes, including Tina Atkinson, used taxis. More than 600 cab drivers were interviewed. A taxi driver called Terry Hawkshaw, whose physical appearance was similar to the description provided by Long, was top of their list. He lived with his sixty-seven-year-old mother in an old terraced house at Drighlington, between Leeds and Bradford. He was thirty-six, six feet tall, weighed fifteen or sixteen stone and had rather long fair hair brushed back, a fresh complexion and a round, almost babyish face – a bit saggy and flabby, as was his whole build. He dressed casually, but not scruffily – a typical taxi driver who did his own repairs. He also drove a white car.

      Hawkshaw was one of fifteen men at that stage regarded as strong suspects, whose alibis were to be thoroughly checked for the night Jayne MacDonald was killed. Some were flagged to be kept under observation and taken in for questioning the moment another Ripper incident occurred. Hawkshaw, now dead, had been seen in his taxi near the Mecca Ballroom on the crucial night. He came under close scrutiny because he was a taxi driver who drove a white Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof and made a living ferrying prostitutes and their clients. ‘He allowed them to have it off in the back of his taxi,’ Holland revealed. Oldfield suspected Hawkshaw got sexual thrills out of watching the prostitutes at work on the back seat. A search of his accounts revealed taxi receipts proving that he had the opportunity to have carried out several of the Ripper attacks – he was in close proximity to the red-light area at the material times.

      There was not enough evidence to hold him in a police cell, so Oldfield arranged for him to help the police with their inquiries without arresting him. He was virtually kidnapped and held incommunicado. Oldfield took him in as a prime suspect despite the fact that legally the police were not allowed to hold him at a police station. So he was kept for over thirty-six hours at the Detective Training School at Bishopgarth in Wakefield, which has a thirteen-storey accommodation block just across the road from the force headquarters. No student courses were being held and the flats on the top floor were empty.

      This was not the first time this had happened. Suspects in other serious cases had previously been questioned at the Detective Training School when there was a danger of leaks to the media. Oldfield was anxious also that other police officers were kept in the dark about the fact that they were questioning a ‘prisoner’ who was not a prisoner. It was a high-risk strategy and could have landed some of West Yorkshire’s most senior detectives in hot water had it backfired. Hawkshaw’s civil rights were clearly denied in the belief they had a strong suspect for five murders. Nowadays, he could probably have sued for wrongful imprisonment; the officers involved would have been disciplined, the Police Complaints’ Authority involved, questions asked in Parliament, with the media becoming self-righteous and the civil rights lobby having a field day. Today, without question, someone’s head would have rolled, probably several. That it was done at all was a measure of the sheer desperation the Ripper’s reign of terror had caused among the senior detectives. The cost of the inquiry so far was approaching £1 million.

      ‘He was not arrested, and I’m playing with words here,’ Holland admitted. ‘There was a detective who slept at his door to make sure he went nowhere, but he was not arrested. It was a long way down, thirteen storeys, if he’d gone out of the window. We took him there because there wasn’t enough evidence for putting him in one of the cells. We found a way of holding him, without “holding him”. In the euphemism of the day, he was “assisting police with inquiries”. He knew where he was going. I would have defended it to his lawyer by saying he was just being interviewed. The legal test then was that if he had chosen to go, if he had said, “I’m leaving”, would you have stopped him? I would have said, “No.” He agreed to come, so he couldn’t have made a complaint that we had kidnapped him. We did not give him the impression he was under arrest. We didn’t read any caution, but the law was different then. You only had to caution when you had some real evidence, but we felt we had strong grounds for suspicion. We had all day on him verifying his story, verifying what he was doing, forensically checking his car. He really fitted the bill as described by Long, and had the car described by the night watchman, so we hadn’t dreamed his name up. He had also visited the pubs and clubs frequented by Richardson and Jackson. He also had two hammers which were checked – so circumstantially he was a strong candidate. Forensic later gave us a negative report [on the hammers].

      ‘He didn’t get rough treatment. We’d been going all day and well into the night. This is typical George. Hawkshaw was quite open. He was talking to us and he was saying, “Yes, I do run prostitutes. I get paid, they pay a bit more than the standard fare if they use my taxi. I might help prostitutes, but I am not a murderer.” That was his line and he was quite frank and he was softly spoken. He might have had a kinky streak and I think he was a soft touch for the prostitutes. But he made a bit more money.’

      Information provided by Hawkshaw was checked with the files. Oldfield, convinced that he’d got his man, cross-questioned him for hours on end. For Hawkshaw, the whole experience was terrifying: ‘It was a nightmare,’ he said. ‘When George Oldfield sits behind his desk and tells you he thinks you are the Ripper, blimey, it turns your stomach over. They told me: “Come and sit here. Terence, this fellow wants catching. He is not bad, it’s just his mind.” The police nearly convinced me I was out of my head. They said someone with a split personality could be like the killer. He could be normal in the day and all of a sudden his mind goes click and he kills someone.’

      After a considerable time – by now it was 3.45 in the morning – Oldfield decided: ‘It’s crunch time.’ Holland was unsure whether Hawkshaw was out of the frame. Looking at his watch, Oldfield decided to defer a decision which wasn’t going his way. He thought they should snatch some sleep in the empty training school study/bedrooms. ‘We will start again at nine o’clock,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, we’ll have an extra half-hour, we’ll start at 9.30!’ He had laid on breakfast and an early call.

      ‘Now that was the sort of boss he was,’ said Holland. ‘He thought he’d given us the earth because he’d given us an extra half-hour and paid for our breakfast. He hadn’t paid himself, he’d authorized the force to pay for our breakfast. So we got a free cooked meal and an extra half-hour in fucking bed! We had worked all day until a quarter to four in the morning.’

      After thorough searches of his taxi and his mother’s home, in the end Hawkshaw was allowed to return home: ‘We had no evidence, forensic had turned up absolutely nothing; because it wasn’t him, they’d done their job. Forensic can be a two-edged sword to the investigator, but it’s a good thing from the point of view of the innocent person. It revealed absolutely nothing to connect him [with the attacks] and we would have expected something. The hammers he had were not of the same dimension and weight we were looking for. We needed time to have those things examined. We had him for the best part of forty-eight hours when the point came when we had to say: “Thank you, Mr Hawkshaw,” and let him go. Then we fixed up a team of detectives to shadow him discreetly night and day. That was done chiefly with crime squad cars supplemented by murder squad detectives. There were twelve men a day on this. Eventually he realized he was being followed. We checked with his books and records of taxi runs and he was in the right area to have the opportunity to have committed eight of the attacks.

      ‘I don’t think we did anything illegal. In order to do our job, we were deliberately sailing as near to the wind as we could. We were just on the side of legality. We planned to interrogate him and keep him away [from any potential leak of information]. You’ve got to appreciate, it would have been all over the media if we had a suspect in for the Ripper.’ The surveillance on Hawkshaw lasted for some considerable time until he was completely exonerated and alibied for one of the Ripper murders.

      John Domaille decided he could not afford to wait for the Ripper to strike again in order to move the inquiry forward. He decided as a new tactic to enlist the help of the latest victim herself. So, several months after the attack, Maureen Long cooperated with the Ripper Squad in mounting an undercover operation to see if she could recognize the Ripper and help them arrest him. For three weeks running she went out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in Bradford, accompanied by a woman detective sergeant, Megan Winterburn. To the uninitiated they were two women out on the town together, and Winterburn, then in her thirties, found Maureen affable and pleasant. ‘She didn’t deserve what happened to