Helen Rytka
A dog barked at the sound of Marilyn’s screams and "Dave" left before he could finish "the job." Marilyn remembered hearing him walk back to his car and slam the door, and then she heard the back wheels skid as he hurriedly drove away. Slowly, Marilyn managed to get herself to her feet and stumbled towards a telephone. Before she could, a man and woman, noticing the blood running from her head, stopped to help and called an ambulance.
She was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary for an emergency operation. She would stay there until just before New Year's Eve, but it would be a long time before she could face returning to Leeds. Back in Leeds again where she returned to work as a prostitute, she continued to suffer from depression. She still has a hole in the back of her head and scars all over her scalp.
There was no doubt in the minds of the investigators that Marilyn was another of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims. This was confirmed when the tyre tracks left by his car were found to match those found at the site of Irene Richardson’s death. Despite this new evidence, the hunt for the Ripper continued without success until the third week of January 1978, when Ridgeway pulled his team out of Bradford, knowing that they had probably met the killer and failed to recognised him.
By the end of January 1978, police were beginning to wonder whether the Ripper had been scared off by his unsuccessful attack on Marilyn Moore. What they did not know at the time was that he had in fact killed again on the night of 21 January, but the severely mutilated body of Yvonne Pearson would not be found until the end of March. Any hopes police may have had were soon put to an end in the first week in February, when another of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims was found.
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Helen Rytka |
Helen and Rita Rytka were the twin daughters of an Italian mother and Jamaican father. At the age of eighteen, when Helen was killed, they lived together in a miserable room next to a motorway flyover in Huddersfield. Although they both worked as prostitutes, they had dreams of a much better life in the future. In the meantime they would continue to work the streets of Huddersfield red-light district as a pair. To ensure each other's safety, Helen and Rita agreed that they would always take the car number of every client and meet back at an appointed time after twenty minutes, a system which had worked well for them until the snowy night of Tuesday 31 January 1978. |
Helen came back to the rendezvous point five minutes earlier than Rita at 9.25pm. The opportunity to make an extra £5 before her sister returned was too good to miss, so Helen got into the car with Peter Sutcliffe. They drove to Garrard’s timber yard near the railway, a common haunt of prostitutes and their clients. Peter convinced her to get into the back seat, as she did so, Peter struck her with the hammer. He missed and hit the car door instead, alerting Helen to the danger she was in, but before she had a chance to scream he had hit her again. She immediately crumpled to the ground. It was then that Peter realised they were in full view of two taxi drivers who stood talking nearby. Taking Helen by the hair, he dragged her to the back of the woodyard. Still alive, Helen vainly attempted to protect herself from the hammer as Peter crashed it down onto her head again.
Scared that the taxi drivers would discover them, Peter lay on top of Helen and covered her mouth with his hand, then had sex with her as she lay bleeding. Finally, the taxi drivers left and Peter got up to find his hammer, which he had dropped. While he searched, Helen attempted to escape. As she ran from him, Peter hit her several more times on the back of her head. Still alive, Helen was dragged to the front of the car where Peter stabbed her through the heart and lungs with a kitchen knife he had hidden in his car.
Rita arrived back at the rendezvous point only five minutes after Helen had driven to her death. After waiting for some time in the freezing cold, she gave up and went home, assuming that Helen would be waiting for her there. Fear of the police prevented her from reporting Helen’s disappearance until Thursday. On Friday 3 February, a police Alsatian dog located Helen’s body where by Peter Sutcliffe had left her on the previous Tuesday.
On 10 March 1978, George Oldfield received another letter in which the writer claimed to be the Yorkshire Ripper, again it was post marked as being sent from Sunderland. The murder of Joan Harrison was again mentioned and he promised that the next victim would be old. Uncertainty about the validity of the letter increased when the body of Yvonne Pearson was found on 26 March 1978. If the letter had been from the murderer, why did he not mention Yvonne’s murder, which had occurred two months earlier? A fact that only the murderer could have known, unless of course, the Ripper had not really killed Yvonne.
She had been found on wasteland off Lumb Lane in Bradford by a passer-by who had noticed her arm sticking out from under an old sofa that had been dumped there long ago. The fact that she had been bludgeoned with a large blunt instrument, presumed to have been a rock, caused police to wonder. This was not the Ripper’s usual method, but many of the other characteristics of this murder were similar to the other deaths.
Yvonne Pearson, had left her two girls, aged two years and five months, in the care of a babysitter on the night of 21 January 1978, to see if she could earn some money. Her first stop that night had been the Flying Dutchman Pub, which she was seen leaving at 9:30 pm. Soon after that, Peter Sutcliffe invited her to get into his car to do "some business." At the murder site, he hit her repeatedly on the head with a lump hammer. When she was dead, he hid her body under the sofa and jumped on her chest until her ribs had broken. Fear of discovery by people in the area had cut short his time with Yvonne and he had not stabbed her. A newspaper, dated one month after her death, was placed under her body leading police to believe that the killer had returned to the scene of the crime.
It would be another two months before Peter Sutcliffe would kill again. His next victim was 41-year-old Vera Millward, an older woman, just as the letter from the man calling himself the Yorkshire Ripper had promised.
Vera Millward, a Spanish-born mother of seven, had been living with her Jamaican boyfriend, Cy Burkett, in their flat in Greenham Avenue, Hulme, at the time of her death. Vera had been very ill after an operation, the third in as many years. She left her home on Tuesday 16 May to buy some cigarettes and pick up some painkillers from the nearby hospital. Sometime after purchasing her cigarettes, she met Peter Sutcliffe.
On the grounds of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, in a well lit area, Peter Sutcliffe struck Vera on the head three times, then undressing her in his usual manner, he slashed her so viciously across her stomach that her intestines spilled out. He also stabbed her repeatedly in the one wound on her back, just below the lower left ribs, and punctured her right eyelid, bruising her eye. Her screams for help were heard, and ignored by a man and his son entering the hospital at the time of her attack. People in this area were well accustomed to such cries in the night.
When he had finished with her, Peter dragged her body twelve feet away and dumped her by a chain-link fence, on a rubbish pile in a corner of the carpark. She was found at 8:10 am the following morning, lying on her right side, face down with her arms folded beneath her and her legs straight. Peter had placed her shoes neatly on her body. Tyre tracks were found nearby. They matched those left at the murder site of Irene Richardson and at the site where Marilyn Moore had been attacked.
Despite the number of murders and police warnings of the dangers, there was no visible reduction in the activities of prostitutes in the Yorkshire red-light districts. Although the women were scared, and many had contemplated giving the game up for a while, the reality of poverty, and threats of violence from their pimps soon drove them back onto the streets. Public cooperation in police investigations was minimal. Few who could have given information were willing to get involved and the rest of the community falsely assumed that they were not under threat.
Complacency in this case had always presented a problem for police investigating the Yorkshire Ripper case. The period of eleven months since Vera Millward’s murder had caused the public to relax. Maybe he had stopped? A police psychologist had said that this might happen; the killer might just stop and never be heard from again. The police hoped that was the case.
During that eleven-month lapse, Peter Sutcliffe’s mother had died. It was on 8 November 1978 that Kathleen Sutcliffe, who had suffered from angina for four years, had died of myocardial infarction and ischaemic heart disease at the age of 59. Her eldest son, who had always been closest to her, was grief stricken. He blamed his father for her death. John Sutcliffe had been guilty of many affairs during his years of marriage to Kathleen, which Peter felt had been responsible for his mother’s illness.
Peter and Sonia had been living in their new home for over twelve months by this time and had spent a great deal of time working on improvements. Their neighbours considered them to be an unusual couple that kept very much to themselves. While Sonia spent much of her time working in the garden, Peter would constantly work on his cars. In this time, he had replaced the red Corsair with a metallic-grey Sunbeam Rapier.
At work, Peter was one of Clark’s most conscientious drivers who kept immaculate logs and repair records, but his workmates would see him as a bit of a loner who kept very much to himself and never showed any signs of violence, nor did he swear or speak crudely about sex or women. When police interviewed him again because his registration number had been noted in red-light areas, he was not noticeably concerned. He explained that driving to and from work regularly took him through those areas.
On 23 March 1979 George Oldfield received another letter, supposedly from the Yorkshire Ripper. Although many had doubted the authenticity of the first two letters, a reference made to a medical detail in the Vera Millward murder made them wonder. Saliva tests were taken on the envelope, and this time they achieved a result. Saliva taken from under the envelope flap indicated the rare blood group B, the same as that of Joan Harrison’s killer. Forensic tests confirmed that all three of the letters were from the same source. The writer predicted that the next victim would be "an old slut" in Bradford or Liverpool.
This prediction was to prove incorrect when on Wednesday 4 April 1979, the killer struck again. Josephine Whitaker, a building-society clerk, had walked the short mile to her grandparents' home in Halifax to show them the new watch she had bought. Her grandmother had been out when she arrived, so she watched television with her grandfather to await her return at 11:00 pm. Tom and Mary Priestley always enjoyed their granddaughter’s weekly Sunday visits, and had been pleasantly surprised by this extra mid-week visit. When Jo, as they called her, decided to go home, her grandparents tried to talk her into staying the night, but she preferred to go home. It was only a ten-minute walk, which she had taken many times before.
It was almost midnight by the time she reached Savile Park, an area of open grassland surrounded by well-lit roads. As she walked across the damp grass in the park, Peter Sutcliffe stopped her to ask the time. She looked toward the town clock in the distance and Peter took the hammer from his jacket, crashing it down on the young woman’s head. As she lay on the grass, he hit her again, and then dragged her 30 feet back into the darkness, away from the road. He pulled her clothing back and stabbed her twenty-five times, into her breasts, stomach and thighs, even into her vagina. He left her lying like a bundle of rags. One of her tan shoes still lay at the roadside where his attack had begun. She had been almost in sight of her home when Peter had killed her.
The next morning, at 6:30 am, a woman waiting at the bus stop found her body and called the police. Soon after, Josephine’s younger brother David set off for his early morning paper round. As he neared the park, he saw the police officers huddled around something lying on the ground. Curiosity drew him closer to the scene where it became apparent what the men were looking at, and then he saw his sister’s shoe lying near the roadside. In a panic he ran home, yelling to his mother as he came into the house. Josephine’s mother ran upstairs to check her daughter’s room. Josephine was not there. When she called the Halifax police, they were not able to put to rest her greatest fear.
