40 years ago, how police ‘let Ripper trail go cold’

Jacqueline Hill was a third year English student at Leeds University. She was returning to her halls of residence from a probation officers’ seminar in the centre of Leeds. Just 100 yards lay between the bus stop on the main road and her front door.

She never made it. Peter Sutcliffe was lying in wait – not for the first time at that spot – and as Jacqueline walked the short distance along Alma Road, he followed her.

No more than half an hour later, another student found her raffia handbag, spattered with blood, and on the advice of an older friend, alerted the police.

The details of what happened next are as fresh in my mind as when they were related to me, 24 hours later, by that friend. A couple of PCs arrived with torches, shone them around for three minutes, and left – clueless in every sense.

“Those few minutes were when they could have had him,” said the older student. “They let the trail go cold.”

What qualified him to pronounce on criminal procedure, I asked. Quite a lot. He was a chief inspector with the Royal Hong Police, taking time out in Leeds to extend his qualifications.

The next morning, West Yorkshire’s embattled chief constable, Ronald Gregory, told us at a press conference that the officers involved had been disciplined.

The scene at Alma Road when Jacqueline’s body was eventually discovered was depressingly familiar. For each of his victims, there were perhaps half a dozen more who might have been. But this was different. Jacqueline could have been anyone’s daughter. If she was not safe, no-one was.

The fear that hung in the air after that night was palpable. A curfew had descended on Yorkshire, and though it was not mandated, no-one dared breach it. Danger lurked on every street corner. Safety was to be found only inside. The parallels with the present time, when a different kind of death stalks the streets, are hard to escape.

Jacqueline was Sutcliffe’s last known victim, yet he was already known to the police. Seven months earlier he had been arrested for drink driving, a conviction that would have cost him his job as a lorry driver. Before he could be tried for that, he murdered not only Jacqueline but also Marguerite Walls, a civil servant, on a well-lit street in suburban Pudsey.

It would be another six and a half weeks before he was finally captured. Squashed like a sardine into the gallery overlooking Dewsbury Magistrates’ Court, I finally saw the man who had terrorised Yorkshire for so long. For too long.

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