Did Peter Sutcliffe have 'secret victims' he was never convicted of killing? And did they include two young hitchhikers? It's a chilling theory which Manchester Evening News chief reporter, Neal Keeling, explores here, in the last of a series of special reports, the first of which looked in detail at the case of Jacci Ansell-Lamb, and the second of which told the story of Barbara Mayo.
Former police intelligence officer, Chris Clark, is convinced two young women hitchhikers were murdered by the same man. He believes they are among many 'secret' victims of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
The body of Jacci Ansell-Lamb, 18, was found in a copse near Square Wood, at Mere, Cheshire, on the morning of March 14h 1970. After going to a party in the capital she had set off from Hendon in London to thumb a lift back to her new attic flat in Manchester on March 8th.
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Seven months later, on October 18th, the body of Barbara Mayo, 24, was discovered in a wood at Ault Hucknall, near Chesterfield. She had been trying to hitchhike from Hendon to Catterick to pick up a car from a garage.
Both women had been raped and strangled. Both were found in secluded rural locations, near to motorways. Both had suffered wounds to the head.
Chris believes the geography attached to Sutcliffe's private life at the time, and the way in which both were killed, and how the crime scenes were left, point to him as being responsible.
By the time of Jacci's murder Sutcliffe’s relationship with his future wife Sonia Szurma had become serious. Sutcliffe would often accompany Sonia when she attended her music graduate sister Marianne's piano recitals in London.
He would sometimes then drive back to Bradford alone. Marianne had three addresses in West London, including two in Alperton, close to the north circular A406 road and a link to the start of the M1 at Hendon.
Sonia began attending McMillan Teacher Training College in Deptford, London, in September 1970. Sutcliffe would drive down to see her most weekends. Clarke believes these visits ‘opened up the entire country and offered fresh opportunities to kill’.
He also says that the ‘sheer number of parallels’ between the deaths of Jacci and Barbara and the known 13 Yorkshire Ripper victims ‘make it statistically impossible for their attacker to have been anyone other than Peter Sutcliffe’.
In a book, with Tim Tate, Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Victims, Chris says the method of killing Jacci and Barbara was ‘notable’, with strangulation or asphyxiation being the cause of death in around just 15 per cent of homicides. He adds that the posing of Jacci's body after her death is "an extremely rare phenomenon present in less than one per cent of homicides".
Chris says Sutcliffe’s proven MO in several attacks for which he was eventually convicted matched almost exactly the circumstances of Jackie's death.
"Jacci Ansell-Lamb’s partially stripped body lying spread-eagle face down was discovered in Square Wood, Mere, some half a mile from the Chester to Manchester Road. Her blue and white miniskirt was lying beside her and her body was wrapped in her purple coloured maxi-coat.
"It was reported that she had been beaten about the head and she had been strangled - garotted. This is the method which Peter Sutcliffe used in the 1980 confirmed Ripper murder of Marguerite Walls and the attempted murder of Dr Upadhya Bandara."
On September 24th, 1980, Sutcliffe followed Dr Bandara, 34, from Singapore, before attacking her in Headingley, Leeds, as she walked down a cobbled alley as a shortcut. She was hit twice over the head and knocked unconscious, and a length of rope was looped around her neck.
Sutcliffe began dragging her down the road. But he was disturbed by a woman whose house backed onto the alley and fled. Dr Bandara survived. When Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield on January 2nd 1981, a rope was found in his possession.
In his confession to the aborted murder attempt of Dr Bandara, Sutcliffe said: " Yes I used it (a 3 feet length of blue and pink nylon plaited knotted cord) on that girl at Headingley not so long ago. She was walking slow like a prostitute; I followed her down the narrow road…. I didn’t have any tools on me to finish her, so I used that rope to strangle her.”
Chris Clark thinks that the investigations into Jacci and Barbara's killers were derailed by false sightings - and that the use of a ligature in both is yet another piece of evidence pointing to Sutcliffe.
"Back in 1970 hitchhiking was commonplace across the UK. In all probability, the young woman seen was not Jacci and this blinkered the investigation, much as it did with Barbara Mayo," Chris said.
"Both Jacci and Barbara and Marie Burke - attacked in St Albans - fitted Sutcliffe's known victimology, picking up a woman in his car, both victims were taken to the two secluded deposition sites and there hit on the back of the head with a blunt instrument. Both Jacquie and Barbara were garrotted as in Margurite Walls and Dr Bandara in 1980."
In his attack on Marguerite Walls, Sutcliffe parked his car and then caught up with and overtake her. He stunned her with a hammer blow to the back of the head, as he struck further blows he looped a length of rope around her neck, tightening it as he half-carried, half-dragged her up a driveway and into a high-walled garden. There, while kneeling on her chest, he strangled her.
Chris said: "I know of no other UK offences from the 1970's outside of Sutcliffe's scope where a stranger murder involved a garrotte."
Chris said: "Both Jacci and Barbara were moved from the first blitz attack on a quiet lane to a more secluded spot in a wooded area, before being left covered with their coat. As was Maria Burke, and confirmed Ripper victims Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Vera Millward, and Josephine Whitaker."
Former Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, Keith Hellawell, included Jacci's, Barbara's and Marie's cases in his analysis of murders and attempts he believed Sutcliffe had committed outside of West Yorkshire.
Mr Hellawell, a former detective, spent ten years visiting Sutcliffe in Broadmoor Hospital in an attempt to get him to admit to more, unsolved, crimes. Keith Hellawell actually got Sutcliffe to admit to two unsolved attempted murders. He believes Sutcliffe committed eight more murders.
In 1992, Sutcliffe admitted attacking 14-year-old Tracey Browne at Silsden, near Bradford, with a hammer in 1975. He also confessed to trying to kill Irish student Ann Rooney, 22, in Leeds.
Chris said: "With regard to the Barbara Mayo case I received some information during 2013 from a retired West Yorkshire detective who had cause to visit the Derbyshire Barbara Mayo Incident Room in Derby during 1978. He was told then that the consensus of opinion was that Barbara was murdered as a result of a drugs dealing dispute and never linked to Sutcliffe by Derbyshire Police although West Yorkshire Police thought that there was a link."
As well as being convicted of 13 murders Sutcliffe also attacked at least nine other women, leaving them with devastating injuries. He first struck in 1969 when he attacked a prostitute in Bradford while searching for a sex worker, who he claimed had conned him out of money.
He hit the woman over the head with a sock filled with a rock, leaving her badly hurt. However, his victim did not want to pursue charges and Sutcliffe went unpunished. The first of his 13 victims, Wilma McCann, was murdered on October 30th 1975. But in the July and August before he had attacked three women - leaving them with horrific injuries.
At his 1981 trial Sutcliffe was asked by a barrister: “How were you during the period 1969 to 1975 yourself?” Sutcliffe replied “Just the same, I suffered from depression. I came to live in London for a year and then went to work on nights because I didn’t like carrying on with the mission and I was in turmoil a great deal of the time."
He told the Judge, Mr Justice Boreham, that he went to live in London for a year in 1970 while Sonia was at training college. But, before she finished her course in 1972, he returned to Bradford during the autumn of 1971.
He was asked at his trial whether during the years 1969 and 1975 he asked himself about "the mission" which he said God had given him to kill prostitutes. He replied: "Yes. Why it should be me that did it because I found it so difficult? When I went to live in London, I saw Sonia practically all the time and it never had a chance to get on top of me. Then I went to work nights for about three years and this kept me busy every night, and at weekends. I saw Sonia, so I was able to overcome it."
Asked by Justice Boreham: "In London, when you were seeing Sonia, did you still get messages and resisted them, or what?" Sutcliffe replied: "I didn't see any prostitutes."
The Marie Burke case has chilling similarities to that of Jacci and Barbara, but she survived. On April 18th 1972 the 22-year-old, who had hitch-hiked from Liverpool to London attempted to do the return journey.
She started to thumb a lift, again at Hendon, at the beginning of the M1, and was seen at about 6.30pm. Later, at 8pm the same evening she was seen thumbing a lift towards St Albans on the A4147 outside the White Horse public house at Leverstock Green, near Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire.
About a mile away and half an hour later - at 8.30pm the same evening, an off-duty policeman travelling along the A4147 Hemel Hempstead Road on the outskirts of St Albans saw a pair of bright pink trousers some 30 yards off the road in a lorry drivers layby.
He found the unconscious body of Marie covered with her own imitation fur coat, and this ultimately saved her life. The attack upon her was described as ‘particularly savage’ and her attacker as a ‘maniac’ by senior detective.
She had extensive serious head injuries and had been left for dead. Chris said: "The placing of the coat over the body after attack is significant as this was how both Jackie Ansell-Lamb and Barbara Mayo were found and it became a feature of the later ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ series."
"Marie was rushed to the Mount Vernon Hospital in St Albans and remained in a coma for nearly three weeks before starting to recover. Having recently spoken to a retired Hertfordshire detective who was on this case, Marie was brain damaged to the extent that she was never able to remember who picked her up from outside the pub in Leverstock Green, but her injuries are consistent with being hit on the back of the head with a hammer."
In 1991 a detective from Cheshire Police announced on the BBC Crimewatch programme that fragments of carpet found on Jacci's body had been identified as coming from a sample or roll of carpet rather than her travelling in a vehicle.
He said he believed her killer was connected to the carpet industry and added that the smart dressed man she was reported to have been seen with at the Poplar Transport cafe near Warrington on March 8th 1970 - the day she was killed - may have been a rep or salesman in the carpet industry. He added there had been a carpet exhibition that weekend at Earls Court in London.
But Chris questions this theory. He says the carpet fragments could be from when Jacci had met a young man at the party she attended - which was at Earls Court on the same weekend.
Ten months after Barbara Mayo's death, Scotland Yard announced they were investigating the possibility that Jacqueline’s murder, plus that of Barbara, could be linked to two others - Susan Long, aged 18 found strangled in a lane in Norfolk on March 10th 1970; and Rita Sawyer, 18, who was stabbed to death and found in a cornfield near Harbury, Warwickshire, between the M1 and M5 on September 5th, 1970.
It was suspected the killer of all four could have used the motorway system as a rapid escape route. Yet, to date, there is no forensic evidence linking the Yorkshire Ripper to the killings of Jacci and Barbara. The identity of the culprit - or culprits - is now a mystery more than half-a-century old.
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