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Long shadow of the Ripper still haunts the children whose lives he tore apart
ON a freezing cold January morning back in 1976, Neil Jackson was awoken by police knocking on the door with the news that a woman's stabbed and mutilated body had been found on waste ground in Leeds.
His mother, Emily, had been the second victim of the man who was to become known as the Yorkshire Ripper, and later Neil had the gruesome task of going with his father to identify her body as she lay on a cold slab.
Neil was then 17, and working with his father, Sid, in the family's roofing business. Emily did the books and drove the van, and
in between looking after Neil's younger sister and brother, this hardworking and resourceful woman did a fruit and vegetable round.
On the night Emily died, the children thought their mother had gone to a game of bingo. After the brutal killing and discovery of the 39-year-old on waste ground, it quickly came to light that at the time she met Peter Sutcliffe their mother had been soliciting, and that she had been involved in prostitution for some weeks before her death. The quiet suburb appears to have been as shocked by the news of the respectable mother-of-three being "on the game" as it was by how she met her terrible end at the hands of Sutcliffe, whose killing spree was to last six years, killing 13 women and attacking at least seven more.
Neil didn't believe that his mother had been working as a prostitute, and would continue to question the story for more than a decade after her death. After all, the family had a comfortable home and their own business, the children had all they needed plus the odd treat and generous gifts on birthdays and at Christmas. What reason could Emily have had for soliciting in the notorious Chapeltown area of Leeds?
With the loss of the gentle, joyful Emily, the family fell apart. Sid went into his shell and wouldn't talk about his wife's death or the events leading up to it; Neil's much younger brother and sister, Chris and Angela or "Bubs", went to live with an aunt and uncle.
Not long afterwards Emily's father died, it was widely acknowledged, of a broken heart.
Emily's close-knit family had unravelled, and her own sisters were at loggerheads with her widower Sid over what they saw as his part in the activities that led to her meeting the Yorkshire Ripper on that January night.
After a while Neil joined the Army to get away from the pressure of facing the barrage of press and public attention each time another woman was attacked or there was another twist or turn in the police investigation.
Neil kept every newspaper cutting about the Ripper that he could find in his locker at the barracks. He tried to work off his anger and frustration by pumping iron or running for several hours each day.
"When mum's death was first being investigated, the man in charge was Det Chief Supt Dennis Hoban," says Neil. "He showed some genuine caring for the family and how we were coping. He kept us informed of what was happening.
"But after a while Mr Hoban was promoted and moved to Bradford, and we were left on our own. Today you'd have care offered by victim support and family liaison officers. We were just left on our own with the agony, and going through the torture over and over again each time Sutcliffe struck another woman."
Eighteen months into his Army career, Neil was contacted by his father, who asked him to go home and help to cope with his brother, Chris, who was back at home, but showing signs of going off the rails. Sid bought Neil out of the Army, but a fortnight later threw Neil out of the house because he was still demanding to know what his father knew about why Emily had been soliciting for prostitution.
Neil went to live in a bedsit, became depressed, returned to work and later married, had a son, and divorced. Meanwhile, Peter Sutcliffe was finally picked up in Sheffield's red light district and sentenced by the Old Bailey to 20 life sentences for 13 murders and seven attempted murders.
As he watched the scenes of mayhem outside the courthouse in London, on a television in his auntie's living room in Leeds, Neil finally broke down and cried for the first time since his mother had died five years before. But even when the Yorkshire Ripper had been put behind bars he couldn't let go and move on. There were still too many unanswered questions. His father, brother and sister were estranged to him, but the tortured young man was still watched over by his mother's sisters, who had suspicions but no clear answers to all his questions.
Then, 10 years ago, Cambridge University criminologist Jane Carter Woodrow advertised in local newspapers, trying to contact the children of Peter Sutcliffe's victims for a proposed academic research project on the long-term effects of high-profile murder cases on the families of the victims.
Carter Woodrow had previously published important work on the children of women in prison.
Neil Jackson contacted the academic, and she has helped him to find and piece together the missing details of his mother's story. Together they talked to a wide array of Emily's family and friends, and Carter Woodrow went back over reports of the Ripper case as well as evidence given at the trial.
"I was struck, among many
other things, by how the police referred to the victims who had not been prostitutes as 'innocent victims'," says Carter Woodrow. "The clear implication was that the other women, Emily included, were somehow guilty. That must have been terrible for those women's families to hear."
It turned out that the story of how Emily finally came to be on the street could be traced back many years, to the death of Neil's beloved older brother Derek in a freak accident when he fell through a glass window.
After the initial despair and grief, the family said, Emily and Sid had decided to live life to the full, and they began to go out more, to the pub or to bingo. It also transpired, though, that the outwardly happy couple's marriage was not all it seemed. The moody Sid had regularly beaten Emily, and at one point when Neil was small, she had left him. She met someone else and had come very close to divorcing Sid.
But he had wooed Emily back and they had two more children. With the roofing business apparently thriving, Emily strove to give her three remaining children the kind of creature comforts she hadn't been able to give Derek – even if buying treats meant running up debts.
None of the children knew at the time that the reason Emily did the books and all the driving of the roofing van was that Sid was illiterate. Nor had they known that, not long before her death, Emily had taken the drastic measure of spending the odd night turning tricks because the business was about to go under.
Neil's aunties told him that Sid had apparently been fully aware of how Emily was trying to bail out the family fortunes, and had allegedly gone off to the pub while his wife was soliciting nearby or sometimes waited in the van for her to return. Neil challenged his father, and Sid didn't deny it.
"Each of the children of the Ripper's victims had a very moving story to tell," says Carter Woodrow, who also writes crime screenplays for television. "I was particularly drawn to Neil's story because he was 17 at the time of his mother's death, which gave him more of an insight and awareness than might have been the case had he been a younger child.
"My purpose in helping Neil to discover the missing part of his own story was to help provide some insight into the plight of the forgotten victims of violent crime."
Neil's story has now become After Evil, a book which, even before publication, has aroused some interest from film makers.
"For years before the Ripper was caught it had been a torment, knowing the man who killed my mum was still doing it to others," says Neil. "But I was still tormented when he was put in prison, because my family had been torn apart by him.
"After that, things got worse because it took so long for me to find out the truth... I couldn't get on with my life."
Neil has a new partner now, but is out of work. He feels he can at last look to the future rather than dwelling on the past, and has a grandson he dotes on. His estranged father died a couple of years ago, and he hopes to be reconciled with his sister and brother.
"I try not to feel bitter, but I do. Here I am, unemployed and on benefits, yet Peter Sutcliffe has been much more comfortable and looked after, hasn't he? It's time people knew more about what he did to families who've suffered ever since."
After Evil by Neil Jackson (as told by Jane Carter Woodrow) will be published on July 23 by Hodder & Stoughton, 12.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or order at www. yorkshirepostbook shop.co.uk
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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