The Ripper (2020) s01e01 Episode Script

1
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.
She wouldn't be the first prostitute
to be murdered in Leeds or attacked.
And we thought, well that
might be, sort of, the end of it.
I don't know what's goin' on ♪
It gives me reasons to sing this song ♪
Out of the blue
a couple of months later
a body of a woman was found
at the rear of a bakery
in Chapeltown.
We went to do the search there.
They were getting organized
to preserve the scene.
"How long're we gonna be boss?"
"For as long as it takes."
"Okay."
At the present time, we don't know
the identity of the lady,
and we would like anyone who
recognizes the description
She'd rather light brown hair,
in her mid 40s.
We don't know the motive.
We don't think it's sex and we don't think
it's robbery at this stage.
Body identified as that of
43-year-old Emily Jackson, mother of 3.
The coroner's officer phones
and says, "Can you please
come to the scene?
This needs looking at."
She was up this rather muddy alleyway,
lying with her head away from the road
and her feet towards the road.
So that when somebody
came around the corner,
the first thing they would see
would be Emily Jackson
laid out, legs splayed
with the feet pointing towards them.
You cannot help speculating
of the victim,
how on earth must they have felt
in the last few minutes of their life
while this was happening.
Just like Wilma McCann,
the body was found
near to the Chapeltown red-light area
only a short distance from the Gaiety.
The Gaeity was
one of those strange anomalies
that every city has,
and the main feature
of it would seem to be
that the striptease went on
from dawn till dusk.
Not just striptease,
we're talking about people with whips
and God knows what.
It obviously was a gathering place
for people who were interested
in that sort of thing.
So obviously,
it would attract prostitutes.
Gradually, it became clear
that Emily Jackson
was working as a prostitute.
She used to take the family's van
uh, into Leeds and use that
as her place to do business.
She had small children and a husband
in danger of being declared bankrupt
and prosecuted,
and they had to earn some money somehow.
The police came to the door
and told me about Mum.
Being at 17 and a half years old,
it was all new to me.
And
Uh
I didn't realize how serious it was.
And that's how I found out
that she was on the game.
It really hurt deep down.
I got asked to go identify me mum.
They pulled the cover off her face
to identify her.
I got told about the injuries
of what she'd got.
and she'd been stabbed 56 times.
When the body was examined
at the mortuary,
there were two obvious,
circular depressed fractures
of the skull at the back of the head,
very accurately placed.
So, from
the forensic pathologist's point of view,
this is when similarity
with Wilma McCann became clear.
Is there any link
with previous murders in Leeds?
Well, there are distinct similarities
between this murder
and the murder of Wilma McCann,
which happened, uh,
on the 29th of October.
And we are
looking into these possibilities.
Ever since Mrs. Jackson's body
was discovered here,
and ever since her killing was linked
with that of Wilma McCann last October,
the prostitutes of Leeds
have walked in fear.
Have you altered your opinion
in this past week
of the sort of man you're looking for?
No, we're quite certain
that this man hates prostitutes.
Some of the stab wounds
were cross-shaped
others were rounded.
The possibility was immediately raised
that this instrument
was a Phillips screwdriver,
rather than a flat blade.
In addition to this,
there was what was, obviously,
a forceful step
of a boot
on one of the thighs.
Shoe size
it was, uh, seven,
which is small for a man.
So, it was a good clue.
It gave an indication
of his mental state at that time.
There was no reason
for an assailant
to stamp on the lady's thigh.
Uh, more than enough
had been done already.
Killing her wasn't enough.
He had to show his disgust as well.
I mean
Why?
Smooth, lustrous,
hard-wearing
and easy to clean,
velvet is an exquisite material.
West Yorkshire, from the Second World War
onwards, and probably earlier as well,
was the was the powerhouse of England.
Trains were built here, in Leeds.
Um, Bradford was the textile capital
of the world.
Over the wire go the loops.
Into the loops goes the knife.
Cut cut cut cut
The mills never stopped running,
24 hours a day.
There was vast wealth.
By the '70s, a decline was beginning.
Heavy engineering started to fall apart,
because of foreign imports.
Textiles started to fall apart
because of foreign imports.
It was obvious they were not going
to stagger on a lot longer.
Britain brought
the industrial revolution,
and now is the first nation to suffer
the sickness of the post-industrial age.
With unemployment rising,
the number of vacancies
has dropped to only about half
It was bleak for a lot of people.
The women who were selling sex
in Chapeltown were tough people,
who'd hit desperate times.
The people with the money
were drifting out of this area
Back to London, a lot of them.
Uh, pockets full of cash.
It was the start of the end, really.
Good evening. Her Majesty, the Queen
has invited me to form a government,
and I have accepted that invitation.
People in this area felt strongly
that the central government in London
didn't want to know.
Look after yourselves.
I think it was James Bond who said,
"Once is happenstance,
twice is coincidence,
but three times, it's enemy action."
Body identified as that
of 28-year-old Irene Richardson.
Irene Richardson
was found by a dog walker
on Sunday morning in Roundhay Park.
She was lying partly face down
with her feet towards the road
and her head away from it.
Her boots were laid neatly on top
of the back of her legs.
Her handbag was to one side of her
and the contents of the handbag
were next to the handbag,
but they'd not just been
tipped out of the handbag.
They'd been laid out fairly neatly.
A pattern is now
definitely emerging
of blow
death
mutilation.
No evidence of
penetrative sex.
No evidence of seminal fluid either.
And display
to maximum effect afterwards.
The similarities were there.
There was no doubt this time
that we had a serial killer on the patch.
What you're looking for
is that attention-grabbing,
eye-catching title
that's going to pull people in.
If we can apply that title to these
rather gruesome murders
Well, that should really get people
reading shouldn't it?
So, you're looking for a handle.
Well, "The Ripper."
Because this is all
a little bit similar, isn't it,
to Whitechapel in the 1880s.
No one has ever conclusively proved
who "Jack the Ripper" was.
He operated in the East End of London.
Same type of injuries,
similar type of women.
People developed an almost instant
fascination with the idea
that you got a reincarnation
of a legendary Victorian killer.
And here he is in Yorkshire.
During that period,
Dennis Hoban was promoted
and so he left the inquiry.
And, uh, Jim Hobson, who had been
his deputy in Leeds,
was moved upwards.
Well, I'll bear in mind probably two
previous murders that happened in Leeds
that are still not-- Still unsolved.
There are great similarities
between the two,
but I'm keeping an open mind.
This woman was living fairly respectable,
up to about ten days
before she met her death.
She then seems to have down in status
and been wandering about the streets.
And she could well have got
into a person's car
and may have well been acting
as a prostitute.
Jim Hobson was an old-style bobby
with a very sharp edge.
He was a very able
and skilled police officer,
who you thought would get the job done.
But the police force, mind you,
was in some
some element of disarray.
Nobody quite knew
from one day to the other
who was in charge, quite honestly.
In 1971, I was on home leave
from the Merchant Navy.
I was kicking me heels
around the town center of Bradford,
and really quite bored.
And I came across this board
advertising the police.
"Join Bradford City Police.
You won't be bored."
And I did. And I wasn't.
I was a coal miner
in Huddersfield
and I'd been going out with my wife
for a number of years and
when I was 20, she said:
"You need a decent job."
So I joined the police.
There were probably a hundred
police forces throughout this country.
The large cities,
Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham,
had their own police forces.
But then the towns,
the little towns
Huddersfield, Barnsley,
Dewsbury, Wakefield, Halifax,
all had their own small forces.
And the cities were all seen
as much tougher
in terms of detectives,
and the way we interviewed.
We were quite big-headed,
I suppose,
because we were the elite city police
and we considered the county police
as donkey wallopers, turnip pullers
agricultural types, basically.
They used to call us city flyboys.
They used to say:
"You know a Leeds cop 'cause
they talk out of the side of their mouth."
They talk like this wa wa wa
This sort of thing.
"And they always
have a lot of money."
"D'you know,
I've got an apartment in Marbella."
"Sir, very nice."
By '74, the small boroughs,
Leeds City, and Bradford City
were amalgamated with the county.
The larger force
became more detached, I suppose.
Officers were moved around.
And therefore, the knowledge
and the closeness with the community,
knowing the criminals,
knowing the prostitutes in the area,
knowing the informants
who gave them information,
a lot of that was lost with amalgamations.
And now, for the first time,
we have a serial killer on our hands.
In those days,
policing was your life. It wasn't a job.
So the whole of the force
was frustrated, worried, anxious,
because they can't solve it.
Three murders, all in the same area,
similar circumstances,
body left in a similar way.
The only thing they did find
was a tire mark.
There were various car tracks,
which were of interest to the police.
But tens of thousands of vehicles
could have been fitted with those tyres.
So, investigation is difficult.
You take a photograph
of the tyre mark.
You take a plaster cast of the tyre mark.
You've got thousands of actions
to try and trace these people.
You also don't want them to know
that you're looking at their tyres,
because, clearly,
they would change the tyres.
So what kind of a picture
have you been able to build up?
Well, there's no doubt
that this is a violent person.
It may be a man, 25 to 35.
Uh, just an ordinary man in the street,
that has certainly been going around
the Temple Town Road area
and has been asking
women to get into his car
"He's clearly got a means of transport.
Let's start putting teams
into Chapeltown,
taking number plates of cars that
were in that area at the relevant times."
There was a lot
of police taking
registrations of men
in a vehicle who are on their own.
I suspect that
he was aware
that the police interest
had increased.
I moved to West Yorkshire from Devon.
I'd been promoted
to Detective Superintendent.
"Who the hell is this Cornish pixie?"
I wasn't Cornish
and I wasn't a pixie.
I remember being
in the Yorkshire Dales with the family.
They came home, uh
through Wakefield
and then there was this call.
"You got a Ripper murder."
In her own ground-floor flat in Bradford,
the body
of 33-year-old Patricia Atkinson
We got this serious
set of murders, which have been in Leeds,
and now we've got one in Bradford.
Today, the number
of policemen
hunting the killer of Patricia Atkinson,
last seen alive leaving the Carlisle Hotel
shortly before
closing time on Saturday night
was doubled to a hundred.
She was a prostitute.
Prostitute murder
is a particular sort of murder.
Most murders that you ever deal with
are people who are murdered
by people who know them.
When you've got a murder
that is pretty obviously,
from the start,
murdered by somebody
who doesn't know them
then it makes the investigation
so much more difficult.
She was the fourth woman
to be murdered in a radius of ten miles
within the last 18 months,
and I asked Detective Chief Superintendent
Domaille, whether he thought
there was a connection
between her death
and the other three unsolved murders.
-Brutal murder, wasn't it?
-Oh yes, it was. Very brutal murder.
Could it be that the man
you're looking for is a maniac?
It could be so.
I realized that I'd bitten off a big chunk
and they were gonna be looking closely
at me, and I went for it.
What leads then are you following?
Well, there are a number of people
in this area that I know
that, uh, knew this lady.
I have her diary.
And this lists a lot of people,
names of a lot of people.
I'd like to see all those people.
I shall make inquiries to trace them.
And I would think it might
be helpful to some people
if they came forward to see me,
rather than have me making inquiries
about some of the facts that I know.
To hear about Patricia's murder
immediately resonated.
I went to dancing school just
just a little bit further on the road,
so I knew exactly where the flats were.
I knew that it was an area
of really rundown derelict bedsits.
And Patricia's vulnerability
did really strike a chord with me.
Suddenly
it started to move closer
to me, personally.
This was not late at night
in a plain field.
This was somebody
who went into a block of flats
and into somebody's room.
She must have looked him in the eye
and believed she was safe.
And invited somebody in
to kill her in the privacy
of her own surroundings.
Patricia Atkinson
was the first victim
who was killed in her flat.
There were boot prints and footprints
in blood
on the carpet leading to the door.
And you could see
from the distribution of the prints
that whoever had done this
had walked to the door
looked at the layout and then gone back
and readjusted the position of the body.
The footprints matched
the print left on Emily Jackson.
Emily Jackson,
mother of three.
But there were so many boots of that sort
that they decided that would not have been
a particularly profitable
area to go down.
To learn that a woman had died
in such horrific circumstances
made me realize that
I knew nothing
about what was happening.
I was some naive,
closeted, lucky young girl.
And that was probably
the first time I thought:
"I need to know how women live
and how poverty will affect them."
I wanted to be a reporter.
I was coming into an era
as an 18-year-old, full of hope.
I was going to change the world.
When I went to work in newspapers
it was a disappointment,
because we were so categorized.
We did the golden weddings,
and the WI meetings, the flower shows.
The men did the crime.
The men did the interesting stories.
That's when the seeds of doubt
as to how these women
were being described were planted.
The press and the police had inferred
that this was a man
who hated prostitutes.
A description that implanted in your mind,
that if you are not that kind of woman,
who had many "boyfriends,"
then you were fine.
This was the moment
where everything changed.
This was on another scale completely.
Jayne MacDonald
sixteen years old
a wholly tragic business.
Jane's body was found
in this adventure
playground off Reginald Street.
But the police deduced
that she hadn't been killed here.
From marks on the grass, they could tell
that the body had only been dragged
to this spot, after the murder.
When I got in, I just says
to the policemen
before they could say anything,
I said, "Jane's dead isn't she?"
So, they just looked a bit
taken aback, you know, and, uh
But I-- I presumed she'd probably--
you know, what young people are
that the friends had got talking to boys
that maybe had a car and they'd crashed.
That was the worst thing I could think of.
- You--
-I never thought of murder.
Not with Jane.
Unlike the previous four victims,
Jane was no prostitute.
She lived at home
and worked in a supermarket.
But because she was walking home alone,
late at night in Chapeltown,
police believe that the Ripper
may have thought she was a prostitute.
I'm frightened to go
to the shops now
anywhere near the Chapeltown area.
It's very frightening.
You don't let your children play out now.
What's the general view?
Do people here think it is one person
responsible for all these murders?
We don't know, because
Jane weren't like any of the others.
She weren't like any of those.
She weren't in their category.
You don't let your kids
go out in the street.
It's just shocking for a young lass
like that. She was beautiful.
This was the moment
when West Yorkshire police
were pulled up a little bit short,
because, they'd been dealing with
a certain woman
following a certain lifestyle.
A perfectly innocent girl
from a very ordinary family
is dead.
I went to identify her and
I just got upset and then
Well, they're absolutely distraught
They're in a terrible state.
The husband, at the moment, is very bad.
And I've had to give him
a sedative injection this morning,
because he's been
in a state of complete collapse.
You know, this is an awful lot
for a man to have to put up with.
For the first time,
the national press were interested.
Jayne was beautiful.
She was 16.
And more importantly,
the police had made a distinction
between her killing
and the killing of the other women.
They described her
as the first "innocent."
It was the first time,
it had appeared on front pages.
Suddenly, everything that happened before
had happened to prostitutes,
and here was an "innocent" victim.
There was a massive groundswell
of attention.
Uh, people were falling over themselves
to give information.
I-- I-- It turned a local hunt
for a prostitute killer
into a massive national story.
More and more people hours
are being spent on this and focused on it.
It becomes the number one subject.
The number one topic.
So the chief looks,
"W-W- What can I do?
I can't let it go on as it is.
We got to make some changes."
So George Oldfield, who was the head
of West Yorkshire CID, was appointed
as the senior investigating officer.
In response
to the public's dissatisfaction
with the handling of the case,
this week a new team
led by George Oldfield was brought in.
How did she intend
to get home?
We understand that she intended walking
along Beckett Street
um, to the junction of Beckett Street
with Harehills Road.
There was dismay in the police force
when George Oldfield was suddenly
maneuvered into the top seat.
I think there was an element of surprise
that suddenly somebody
had been parachuted into the city
when Jim Hobson seemed to be on the case.
I wouldn't have said
that he was a top, top police officer
to run West Yorkshire.
He was dour,
a sort of dour Yorkshire man.
They see George as a county man
taking over these crimes,
which are largely city crimes.
"We've dealt
with a lot more murders than he has.
How's he gonna solve this?"
Not gonna be easy.
We're gonna have to keep
slogging and slogging.
Knocking at doors, asking questions.
But it's got to be done
if we're to crack this.
-Hello, Love.
-Hello.
We're doing house-to-house inquiries
regarding this murder on Saturday night.
She's called Jayne MacDonald
and she lived at Scott Hall Road.
Did you know her?
-No, Love.
-No.
As 250 detectives continue their inquiries
today in Keighley, Bradford, and Leeds,
local feeling isn't hard to gauge.
It's hard to explain to people
who are not from this part of the world
the effect that this started
to have on people.
The lurking threat
of the Ripper is very real.
Those who live in the areas
where he struck are in constant fear.
How frightened are women here?
They're really frightened.
Everyone talks about it in the pub.
I think it's about time
that he was caught.
This is very, you know, worrying
for all the proper women that live here.
They were no nearer to catching him
at the time
that Jayne McDonald was killed
uh, than they were at the time
that Wilma McCann was killed.
In the 1970s, any identification
on blood and body fluids
basically relied on blood grouping.
Over 50 percent of people
are blood group O.
A is the next most common
then B
then AB.
You got over 60 million people
in the country,
so it's a pretty wide field.
And, of course, in all these cases,
there was no semen, no saliva.
So, there was nothing at all to go on.
I could see why the police
were getting quite desperate.
The police response was to, actually,
sow the seeds as to how they were
going to catch this man.
So, for the first time, we see a letter
in the Yorkshire Evening Post to him.
"You've killed five times now.
In less than two years, you have butchered
five women in Leeds and Bradford.
Your motive, it is believed,
is a dreadful hate for prostitutes.
A hate that drives you
to slash and bludgeon your victims.
But inevitably, that twisted passion
went terribly wrong on Sunday.
An innocent 16-year-old lass,
a happy, respectable, working-class girl
from a decent Leeds family
crossed your path.
How did you feel yesterday
when you learned that your bloodstained
crusade against streetwalkers
had gone so horribly wrong
that your vengeful knife
had found so innocent a target?
Sick in mind, though you undoubtedly are,
there must have been some spark of remorse
as you rid yourself
of Jayne's bloodstains."
Do you think "the Ripper"
will strike again?
I think there's
every possibility that he will.
The big question is when and where?
Um, my fear every Sunday morning
when the telephone rings is:
Are we in business again?
In July 1977
the news broke that a woman
had been attacked in Bradford.
Her name was Maureen Long.
She had been struck
on the back of the head.
She had been stabbed four or five times.
"The Ripper" had struck again.
Not again.
It's just like,
"Oh, no. Not another, not again."
We were familiar with the idea
that you had a brush with this man,
and you wound up dead.
Um, we'd not heard about any survivors.
Maureen Long is the first
of the Ripper's victims to survive.
Finally, a breakthrough.
Here was a woman who had survived
and was capable of talking about it.