Hey weirdos, it's Ash here, ready to share a little secret.
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I have been listening to the Martha's Vineyard Beach and Book Club, which actually Elena recommended to me.
She did not listen to it, but she said, girl, this title sounds so you.
And let me tell you, it did. I've been listening to it while I walk, and I am absolutely loving it.
I love all the different narrators. I love Audible.
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Visit audible.com slash morbid. On November 13th, 2022, four University of Idaho students were murdered.
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Students and townspeople describe that terrifying night.
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You've never read a true crime like James Patterson and Vicki Ward's The Idaho Four.
The true story, it's finally here. Hey weirdos, I'm Elena and I'm walking back to my microphone.
Oh, I was like, what else are you doing?
I was like, you're just Elena. I am. And I'm Ash.
Thank you. And this is Morbid. 🎵 I was just like, I have to get out this complete thought before I say this.
Listen, it just be like that sometimes. It does.
It is absolutely like that sometimes. Yes.
I'm in a silly, goofy mood. Silly, goofy mood today.
Perhaps it's because. I'm going to bring you all down after that, by the way.
But we might as well cruise on through with this light, fluffy stuff in the beginning.
Here I am. Here we are. Here the light, fluffy stuff sitting across from you is.
I am in a silly, goofy mood because I got my Spotify wrap today and I love when that happens.
It's just fun. It is fun. It's fun, fun, fun.
Even if sometimes it doesn't make total sense, sometimes you're like, where did that song go, though, that I listened to about 100,000 times?
Did you have that experience? I only have it with like a couple things.
Like, I mean, like, like, I think it's a surprise to no one that my entire rap is ghost.
What? They have a chokehold on my life. Your entire?
The entire one. But I was more concerned about my top songs because Faith wasn't in there.
And I listened to that song about 10 times a day.
Also, Marionette. Was Marionette on there?
No. I wouldn't think Marionette would be on there.
No? What about Monstern's Clock? Was that on there?
Faith, absolutely. Monstern's Clock wasn't either, and that's one of my girls' favorite songs.
Yeah. So she makes me play it every single morning multiple times.
And then she says, my jam. My jam. She's so funny.
Yeah, so we were looking through our Spotify wrapped.
Ash has one of the funniest descriptions I have ever heard.
So it says like what you start the day with, what the middle of your day is, and then the end.
And they give you like a vibe for each one.
Yeah. You seized the day with intense poetic sad boy.
Boy with an I. Intense poetic sad boy. And you know what?
Sometimes I am an intense poetic sad boy.
No, it described perfect. I was like, yeah, your music is intense poetic sad boy.
Yeah, it is. It made me cackle. I was dying.
Mine, the morning started with spooky moody mayhem.
Correct. Which I was like, wow, I've never been described better in my life.
No, who has really? To be quite honest. I love it.
In my middle of the day, I seized it with playful, hardcore mayhem.
Mayhem all over the place. But then when it's bath time here at our house, it transitions into I embrace the night because that's when I play music at the bath time.
Theater kids, silly nostalgia. Yeah. theater kids silly nostalgia wait now i want to go and see what my like beginning and end were it's funny when you can tell to like i like that they do those time of day ones because you know what you're doing yeah so you're like oh that actually checks like we're doing dinner time and we play music or we're doing bath time we play music and it's usually like silly theater kid nostalgia Yeah, usually in the middle of the day, I've had enough and I'm an intense poetic sad boy.
Absolutely. But I don't think it will surprise many people that my top artist was Harry Styles.
No, I don't think that surprises anyone.
But we had some Mac, we had some Megan, Mrs. Stallion in there, we had Lizzo.
And for the second year in a row, my girly girl, Britney Spears.
Britney is always in there. Oh, if she's not next year, like I got to reevaluate.
Yeah, you got to take a real step back. I do want to point out because I think it's kind of a badge of honor here.
Oh, you have. I know exactly what you're about to say.
That I am in the top 0.05% of ghost listeners.
John said that Alayna listens to ghosts more than ghosts listen to ghosts.
And he is correct. I was in the top 2% of Harry listeners, which I found to be very surprising.
That's intense. I felt geriatric at that concert, so I'm very surprised about that.
I was just real. I was happy. 0.5 is. 0.05.
Oh. Shit. That's even wilder. You were like, no, no.
Step back. No, no, no. Zero five. Were you guys happy with your raps?
Let us know. We've been seeing people tagging in the podcast portion and all that.
I want to see who else is on the ghost train with me because you guys, we've been bonding over this, all of us together.
I feel like I'm like, ooh, my friends who listen to ghosts.
I love it. So let me know. Tag me in your shit.
And there were so many people I saw that like their lineups were all of the Morbid Network shows, which made me so fucking proud of all my little babies.
And I saw so many people that had Morbid and Nighttime podcasts with Jordan in it.
And I was like, yeah. Shout out to Jordan Bonaparte.
I'm so glad that you guys jumped on the Jordan train with all of us.
Yeah, you should have been there long ago.
You know what I'm saying? And if you haven't, time to start your end of the year off with Jordan.
Hell yeah. But yeah, so that was fun. That was lighthearted.
I hope everybody's feeling good. We're feeling like we want to listen to a jaunty song.
Yeah, it's like you feel so good when you climb to the top of a hill, but then you realize you have to go all the way down now.
Yeah. That's kind of where I feel like we're at.
That's where we are. We are in part two of the Yorkshire Ripper.
This one's going to be, I mean, they're all tough, but this one's just going to be like, I'm sorry.
I was actually thinking about, and oftentimes I like can block out what we've talked about during the day.
Last night, for some reason, I also slept like shit last night.
I slept great last night. You told me. Which, honestly, like you deserve.
Thank you. No problem. Kids and stomach bug, but yeah.
But yeah, no, I couldn't get this case out of my head last night.
It was. It's a tough one. And I also was looking further into it, just like getting some like extraneous stuff.
And I was looking into seeing that there's been a lot of like the, and I'll get more into it later, but the police department actually apologized recently for the mishandling of this case.
And it's police officers and detectives that weren't on the case back then, but they are apologizing now on behalf of, Because it is so mishandled.
They talked to Peter Sutcliffe several times during the investigation.
Yeah. Those descriptions that got put out, like I think we mentioned in the first one, a Land Rover and all that.
He didn't have a Land Rover. He does later, which is weird, but not when this was going on.
Did somebody say he had like a red beard?
Yeah, it was like red sideburns or something.
It was like light hair at one point. He has black hair.
And they just kind of like went with every single one and shot it out into the ether.
And it's like you really got to take a step back and do this.
Like calculate it and they didn't. And I guess...
Also, a lot of the senior detectives at the time and a lot of the senior officers really were shitty to the victims' families as well.
Like the way they talked to them, the way they talked about them.
Like as we'll see in this, there was a very big innocence and not innocence in this case.
Okay. Where if it was a sex worker... Well, you know, that happens.
But then if it happened to be one where nobody really knows if he, he came out later and said if he did kill somebody who wasn't a sex worker, it was an accident.
No, it wasn't. You're a piece of shit. I don't think it was.
I think he just hated women. Yeah. And it's like, I think that was his way of trying to go with the attitude of the time, which was, well, I thought she was a sex worker, guys.
That, right? That's fine. Yep. So it's like they would they would basically be like, you know, yeah, these sex workers were killed like in the press and the police would talk about it this way.
These sex workers were killed. But, you know, these innocent girls were killed, too.
And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like like human beings across the board, many of the mothers of several children.
Like, are you fucking kidding me talking about them that way?
It's so ridiculous. And it's sad that it's not that different these days.
Like, it's really not. But it was nice to see that at least like there was an apology that came out after the fact when it was people who weren't originally on the case and they weren't like being like, you know, I'm sorry I said that.
They were just saying like, you know, that doesn't reflect who we are now.
Yeah, recognition. And at least there's that.
But the families really had to go through a lot of shit and they really had to deal with a lot of like really big disrespect and really like nonchalance for their loved ones.
That's really fucked up. These murders are horrible.
Horrible. And the sad thing is, too, it's like these families had clearly already gone through a lot.
Yeah, that's the thing. Like a lot of these women were in desperate times, which called for desperate measures.
Going through a lot of stuff. Right. That's why they turned to sex work to begin with, you know?
It's just sad. Yeah. It really is. It's sad all around.
And it is very much reminiscent of the original, the Jack the Ripper case, where the press kind of treated them like that, too.
They were just kind of talked about as like these throwaway, you know, less than victims.
I don't understand how you can look at anybody like that.
It's a human. That's the thing. Like, how do you look at someone and not just think like, oh my God, that poor human.
Because of what they do for work. Right.
And it's like, that's not my business. Not at all.
It's not my business. As long as you're not hurting anybody, that's not my fucking business.
No. Like, oh, it just makes me crazy. Makes me crazy, you know?
I'm saying. But here we are. We ended on a survival tale, I believe, or we at least tried to last time.
Yep. I'm going to start on a murder, and there's going to be a lot more murder after this.
He got a lot of women. Okay. These are really, they're tough, they're graphic.
He did terrible things just to put it out there ahead of time.
Also, this series is probably going to be four parts.
I'm sure the fourth part won't be as long as the first three, but I don't want to crunch a bunch into the third part instead.
I'd rather it like take the time for each victim.
I told you. You did. I'm happy that it's four parts.
Yeah, so it's necessary. That fourth part is probably going to be a little shorter and maybe more discussion-based, but then we'll close it out and on to a next true crime tale.
I know you so well. But you do. So we're going to start.
We're in 1977 at this point, and 28-year-old Irene Richardson was a single mother of two children.
She had gone through a real time by February 1977.
Her kids had been temporarily placed in foster care and she had turned to sex work to make ends meet.
She was staying in a rooming house in a very bad part of Chapel Town or Chapel Town, excuse me, which was akin to the kind of the White Chapel of the 70s a little bit.
Okay. On February 5th, she left the rooming house a little before midnight, and she told her landlady that she was going to the Tiffany's Club in Leeds.
While Irene was out that evening, so was Peter Sutcliffe.
He was doing his usual haunting of the red light district near Gaiety Theater, where he murdered Wilma McCann.
He noticed Irene and immediately asked her, are you working tonight?
She agreed to get in the car and they began to look for a place with a little more privacy.
And Peter told her he had a place and drove her to Roundhay Park.
Irene got out of the car and told Peter she had to go to the bathroom.
This seems to be a very like he goes through a very similar pattern each time.
Yeah. There were no there were public restrooms there, but they were locked.
So she ended up having to go behind a bush.
And it was then when she was in a vulnerable position with her back turned to him that he snuck up behind her and hit her with a ball peen hammer in the top of the head.
That's the thing that I just can't get over is the hammer.
Yeah, you got to really take that and like digest it for a minute.
On the morning of February 6th, 1977, 47-year-old John Bolton was out for an early morning jog in Roundhay Park.
Suddenly, he saw something that no one wants to stumble upon.
He saw a body lying in the grass. He immediately thought it was a woman who needed help, like maybe had passed out or hurt herself.
So he ran up to her and said, can I help you, miss?
And like he moved her hair to the side because she was kind of laying face down or on her side a bit.
And that's when he saw that her face and neck were covered in blood and her eyes were completely glazed and fixed.
Oh. He called 999 and Detective Jim Hobson and David Gee arrived on the scene.
It was quickly noted that she had suffered a massive fracture of the skull by three blows from the hammer.
Holy shit. One of the wounds was so bad that the skull had actually broken and been driven into her brain.
Hobson also immediately connected this scene to the others, luckily.
She was lying face down, and when they moved her head, they saw that also her throat had been slit and had been stabbed in the side as well.
Her skirt had been pulled up over her abdomen, and she was stabbed three more times in the stomach.
This time, escalation had occurred, with the stab wounds being more like slash marks.
Yeah. He had ripped her stomach open to the point of her intestines coming out.
Wow. So he is like really starting to escalate here.
And he is just so angry. Like these wounds are so rage filled.
It's so scary. Like he just... frenzy stabs these women like in a frenzy her coat had been draped over her legs and under it he had placed her brown boots across her thighs that's the other thing he like arranges them in weird ways that don't actually mean anything yeah it's weird And he likes to leave them exposed as well.
Like he loves to do that. Because he thinks he's clever.
The scene revealed tire marks at the body and then leading away from it.
And they were able to tell that these came from a mid-sized sedan or smaller vehicle.
Not a Land Rover. Not a Land Rover. They brought these impressions to tire manufacturers and ended up having to work from a list of 26 possible vehicle matches, like brand matches.
And these matched 100,000 cars registered in West Yorkshire.
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Why are there ridges on Reese's peanut butter cups?
Probably so they never slip from her hands.
Could you imagine? I'd lose it. Luckily, Reese's thought about that.
Wonder what else they think about. Probably chocolate and peanut butter.
So they went hard at first, and they were checking going down the list.
They were hitting every person that these cars matched.
Months were going by. They're going, going, going.
No one's hitting. Nothing's going. So come July, five months after they started this task, they abandoned it with 20,000 cars left unchecked.
Guess whose white Corsair was one of those 20,000 that was left unchecked? course it's also like i'm sorry how many you said there's a hundred thousand hundred thousand cars you got more than halfway through and we're just like ah fuck it you had twenty thousand left like what just finish it out man also did none of you have some any kind of type a personality where that would drive you absolutely mad because i would i am so stressed out yeah for them thinking of having twenty thousand lingering out of a hundred i'm like no you gotta hit that I don't even know what it is about me because I don't really think I'm type A. But that would make me crazy.
That would make me insane. Yeah. And to think that they sat there as detectives and said, yeah, we have 20,000 left.
And no one said, yeah, and one of those might be him.
One of those might be him. Well, that's the thing.
We have 20,000. And it would have been, like, way less people would have had to die, clearly.
Yeah, there's a good chance out of 20,000 people that he is in there.
Like, that's not a small number. No. What the fuck are you doing?
And also, it's just like, put a rookie on that.
Yeah. Like, put an intern on that. Just get a couple officers to just do that round the clock.
You'll get it done. Like, come on. Exactly.
How do you just sit there and bring that to the top and they're like, yeah, whatever.
I just can't imagine the chain of command there.
It's like you narrowed it down and then you just fucked the whole thing up.
You could have narrowed it so much further.
That's just wild. And I can't believe... that like out of those 20,000 left, that he was one of the ones that they hadn't checked yet.
Makes sense. It's like, oh, and he was on the list.
It was right there. Right. But it's the first of many times that he is right there and he just gets away.
Yeah. So an autopsy was conducted and David Gee noted that the time of death was very close to midnight.
So it was very close to when she had left.
Right. And she had been killed by one of the blows to the head that killed her.
There were no drugs and no alcohol in her system.
Right. Hobson went back and told everyone about the connections to other cases, and no one agreed.
So Hobson goes back to the force and is like, guys, there's clear connections here between those attacks, between the murders of, you know, the Jackson murder, the McCann murder.
You've also found how many people next to Bush is at this point.
And it's like with the hammer, like, like hammer and stab wounds and like exposed.
Like what? What? What doesn't ring here?
And it's like, and they were like, nah. Like, that's wild to me.
They didn't even make any public statement.
That's just, I think. Nothing. Not wanting to work.
Not caring. Yeah, that's just like not giving a shit.
That's nonchalance. She was a sex worker.
They didn't care. That's so fucked up. So unfortunately, he was allowed to continue his reign of terror with even more confidence because look, he got away with it again.
And this one was massive. Mm-hmm. By April 1977, sex workers in the area were on edge, to say the least.
Yeah. Just like Jack the Ripper. They were like, shit, something's going on.
It was clear that someone was coming into their territory and dispatching them in the most brutal ways possible.
It also reminds me of the Hillside Stranglers.
Yeah. And there was purpose here. And the police were not connecting things quick enough.
Right. And they knew this, and they were like, what do we do?
We're helpless. Right. So the investigators did hand out papers with the killer's description on it, but we're talking about the description with the Land Rover and the scars on the hands and all that.
Yeah. Yeah. Where did the scars on the hands come from?
Whoever that person was that they saw, whatever that description was, that was someone else.
That was someone with scars on their hands and with that.
Because I was like, what? He did have little scars on his hands, but they said it was not something you would be able to see or tell him by.
Yeah. Yeah, and the way they described the scar was that it was like a big, long scar.
Yeah. Weird. But they put numbers on these papers and pamphlets and, you know, they had billboards with information and the things on the side of vans that were like, call these numbers with more information.
I imagine this gave him kind of even more of a boost considering they hadn't caught him yet and he was freely trolling without consequence. all while he could watch the entire area of Leeds and beyond shaking in their boots.
Yeah. And he knows, that's not my description.
They're putting out, that's not me. Right.
But everyone's shitting their pants and look at everybody going crazy and I can walk freely through here.
No one's looking at me. And no one will even look at me.
It's so frustrating. It's very, again, I know I keep saying this, it's very reminiscent of Jack the Ripper, which is why the press now dubbed him officially the Leeds Ripper.
This is when that came out. So, in fact, one newspaper went as far to write this, and it is so, it's just foul how people were talking about this case.
But I think it's important to say because you need to know the context.
One of the newspapers, The Cross, from 1981, actually wrote, cuts them open, pulls their insides out, even cuts their tits off.
Jesus Christ. Which he didn't. So that's also a lie.
But yeah. Media loves to embellish. But I was like, what a foul way to talk about someone.
That's disgusting. About like a human being and also about like a mother.
Right. Like, okay. Just anyone. Yeah. Now, around this time, Sonia, his wife, was receiving her diploma.
Oh, my God. Yeah, he's married. Yeah, forgot about that.
I was like, oh, yeah, he has a whole ass wife at home.
Yeah. Now, Sonia was receiving her diploma, her teaching diploma.
She was just doing her shit. She was just doing her thing.
Finally becoming a teacher in the summer.
And they had saved a lot of money to move into a home of their own.
So everything with them seemed like it was on the up and up.
They were going to look for a home. But that's also because Peter was satisfying another side of him that no one knew about.
Right. So things with them were just fine.
Right. He's getting all his rage out elsewhere.
He's getting everything he wants. So Patricia, also known as Tina Atkinson, was living in an apartment on Oak Avenue in Bradford.
Her husband had left and taken their three kids sometime before, and she had also turned to sex work just to make ends meet.
She, like everyone else, had read the recent attacks and murders in the area, but she was thinking that she was probably safe because although she was in sex work, she took her clients back to her apartment and didn't do her work on the streets.
So she was like, that's different. That's a little less risky.
I'm in a controlled environment. He's never killed someone in a place before.
He does it outside. He does it on the streets, in parks.
She's convincing herself that she can still make money, basically.
That stresses me out because it's like that's even more secluded.
But he's never done it before, so it would be a deviation.
I can see where her head was at. But by the time April 1977 had rolled around, she was running short on funds and she needed to make some money ASAP.
Because she had been hesitant to go back out.
She had saved up money, so she was kind of taking her time being like, you know what, I'm not going to dip into this anymore.
But she was running low and she literally, out of desperation, had to risk it.
I was going to say desperate times call for desperate measures.
So on April 23rd, she went down to the Carlisle to see if she could find any new potential clients.
Around 10.15 p.m., the bartenders there said that they remember her saying goodnight, and then they watched her, quote, stagger towards the door.
Other people in the bar that night remembered seeing her at this time, too, and also saw her walking toward Church Street a little before 11 p.m.
All of them said she appeared to be pretty drunk.
Okay. Now, at the same time, Peter was on his bullshit and he spotted Tina walking toward Church Street at this time.
He eventually saw her standing on the corner of St.
Paul's Road. And according to Peter, she was visibly drunk.
He said she was screaming obscene things and banging on the roof of the car.
I doubt it. The other thing that I want to point out, too, is that all these people are like, oh, she was drunk.
She was staggering. She was this. She was that.
You don't think you'd have to get drunk to do that kind of work?
Like, she doesn't want to be there. And I think, honestly, I think the bartenders and stuff weren't being like, oh, she was drunk.
I think they were literally like, she was vulnerable.
Yeah. Like she staggered out of here. But like even him being like she was belligerent.
Oh, he definitely. You know what I mean?
Yeah. I would definitely say he is using that like kind of judgment on her being like she was drunk.
In fact, he said later, it was obvious why I picked her up.
No decent woman would have used that language.
To which I say, fuck. Fuck off. Fuck you, sir.
Get fucked. So he asked her if she wanted a ride, and she accepted.
And they started making their way to her apartment in his Ford Corsair.
I don't know why I couldn't say that. And she offered him her services as well.
They made a deal, and they went to Tina's apartment.
When they got there, Tina went over to the windows and closed the curtains while Peter hung up his coat.
And as he did that, he slipped the ball-peen hammer from his pocket.
Tina sat on her bed and removed her own coat.
As she sat down, she turned her back briefly to Peter.
That's all he needed. He took that ball-peen hammer that he slid from his coat pocket and he quickly hit her in the back of the head with it.
She fell to the floor and he hit her in the head and face as hard as he could with the hammer a second time, then a third, and then a fourth.
Then he picked her up off the floor and placed her back on the bed.
This is very graphic, just to let you know.
And pulled her pants and underwear down.
He, for some reason, attempted to pull them back up before he left that night.
Nobody can really understand that one. He wasn't able to very much, but it was clear that he had tried to.
Weird that he couldn't do that. Yeah, I don't know if it was just like a weird position, but he also pulled her bra up to expose her chest.
He then stabbed her six times in the stomach and covered her body with blankets and left the apartment.
The next day, Tina's friend, Robert, had decided to pay her a visit around 6.30 p.m.
So he knocked on the door. No one was answering.
And he thought this was weird because it was a Sunday.
And she was always home on Sundays. And she made it a point not to work on Sundays either.
So he was hoping to just hang out. Yeah.
So he was like, this is weird. He keeps knocking, no answer.
And then he decides to try the door and it was unlocked.
And he was like, that's weird too. He had some kind of feeling.
Yeah. So he slowly opened it and he went inside and he was met with chilling silence, he said.
And as he made his way to the bedroom, he saw Tina alone on the bed and a massive pool of blood that was also all over the floor.
Most of her body was covered in blankets, but one side of her face was very visible and very bloody.
Okay. Robert ran to the apartment manager and he shouted for him to call the police.
DCS DeMille, I believe it's pronounced, and I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing that right, Detective Chief Superintendent, from the Western Crime Area was called in to lead the investigation.
And David Gee, of course, acted as a pathologist on this case.
When he arrived at the scene, Gee looked at the body, he examined her on the bed, and was able to say that she sustained four massive blows to the head and that her face was almost unrecognizable.
Ugh. He was able to note the weird underwear and pants thing too.
He was like, I don't know why he did that.
And the stab wounds. And he also found scrapes and scratches all over, which he theorized were unsuccessful attempts to stab the body.
So she was like writhing around. She was moving and also he was like, he didn't use a knife.
Huh. Like so some of these where he went to stab and it just didn't go through.
Yeah. And what was he stabbing with, do you think?
Well, Tina's body was brought to the ME office and they determined, one, that her blood alcohol level showed that she had drank that evening and she had not been raped.
They looked further at the stab and scrape wounds and they determined the weapon was a half-inch wide chisel.
What? He used a chisel to stab her. What?
Like if you look up a chisel, a half inch wide chisel.
I don't even know if I know what a chisel is to be honest with you.
Now it makes a lot more sense and what the fuck, guys.
A chisel? Is that what you use to like mess with ice?
Like chisel stuff. You're thinking of an ice pick.
No, like a chisel would be like to. Oh, shit.
Like you would use a hammer and chisel. I'm sorry, how wide did you say?
A half inch wide chisel. Oh my God. So it would be like this one.
Oh my God. Yeah, guys, look it up because it's, like, you need to get a full grasp of how fucked up and how brutal this was.
That's insane. And that's why those scrapes and, like, attempts at stabbing make sense because a chisel is not meant to stab into human flesh.
No. It's really fucked up. Finally, the cause of death was definitely one of the four blows to the head, and they believe the time of death was around midnight.
So the only thing we can say here is at least she wasn't alive for any of those stab wounds or couldn't feel them.
Thank goodness. While the autopsy was taking place, investigators were searching her apartment, and thankfully, they did find something a little useful.
They found a size 7 Wellington boot print on the bed sheet.
That might sound familiar. There was also a size 7 Wellington boot print found at the Emily Jackson crime scene.
I was going to say, I remember that. On her thigh.
Yep. And on the ground. Yep. So leads were still completely elusive at this point.
Like that was a good piece of evidence, but like what do you do with it?
Right. And even evidence, you know, even getting any evidence was really not happening.
That was it. Like there was no DNA happening here.
There was no fingerprints they could find.
And a footprint is so difficult because it's like how many of those boots are made a year?
Are those a specific kind? How many people wear them?
All it's really going to do for you right now is to connect those crime scenes.
And then if you were to get a lead, you could compare that to their foot.
But at this point, you don't even have a lead.
So it's like, it's just sitting there waiting.
What do you compare it to? It's just there.
And also, Tina usually took cabs around.
That was her method of travel. So they ended up interviewing 1,200 cab drivers in the area.
Oh, wow. nothing no no information a cab driver did he i'm sorry did he have a job at this point yeah he was a lorry driver oh he was taking uh driving lessons for to become a truck driver i'm like what did he do again this would be the crime scene that i would worry they wouldn't connect to the rest of the scenes because of the location like i when i first read this i think they're not going to connect this they did luckily that's good The town of Agde in France is famous for sun, sand, sea and sex.
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Domali, I feel like I'm saying that wrong, but I'm trying.
Domali did immediately connect this to the other scenes, and he even released a statement to the public saying there was a new scene from the same killer.
Do you think they would have connected the scenes had it not been for the boot print?
I don't know. I feel like they might have.
I think he was immediately like, something's ringing.
It was that the hammer, I think, is starting to ring true to them finally, that this is a strange object to use as a weapon.
Yeah. The media was really picking this up and the stories were being broadcast everywhere around and they were being talked about by a lot of people.
It was huge news. Now, because of this, tips were beginning to come in.
And it was at this time a sex worker from Leeds named Barbara Miller came forward and said she had actually been attacked herself but didn't report it.
And she had been attacked March of 1975 in Leeds.
She said she was picked up by a, quote, 35- to 40-year-old bearded man with a scarred hand driving a Land Rover, and that he had brutally and violently attacked her.
Okay. Now, that description may sound familiar because it's very similar to the description given by witnesses at Gaiety in the Jackson case.
Right. With this in mind, Domali put out a special notice on May 9th saying that Tina's murder was connected to the others, and they put that similar description out again.
Peter Sutcliffe was not a suspect at this point.
He wasn't even a person of interest. People didn't even know who he existed.
The description wasn't going to help because that wasn't him.
He didn't own a Land Rover at the time. He didn't have a big scar on his hands.
I don't know who that guy is. I was going to say, clearly there's another fella who's...
Armed and dangerous. Unless Barbara had heard that original description and been attacked, maybe it had gotten her head or who knows.
Now, in 1977, Sonia, Peter's wife, had earned finally her teaching certificate officially.
She was teaching part-time. She got a job.
This allowed them to finally, finally be able to get a house.
I'm like, what does that mean? On Saturday, June 26, 1977, Sonia and Peter viewed a house on Garden Lane in the Heaton neighborhood of Bradford.
Sonia was in love with it. This was the house for her.
This moment in Peter's life, finding his dream home with his young wife, was happening on the same day as one of his most talked about crimes.
Really? Yeah. Now, we're going to talk about that crime right now.
Sutliff was already causing a lot of waves in the news and around the area that he was haunting for sure.
But by 1977, he had killed four women at least and attacked another five, which were definitely failed attempts at murder for the most part.
People were very on edge, very scared. It was the fact that he was so elusive that was really bothering everyone and no leads or evidence was becoming a thing where people were like, what's going on here?
Like, why aren't the police getting anything?
Yeah. His next crime would be the one that would catapult him into international news.
Oh. It was not a big news internationally right now.
Like, it was really just talked about in the area.
This is the one that we would hear about over here.
Is there a reason for that? Yes. Jane McDonald was a 16-year-old girl. who was living with her family on Scott Hall Avenue in Leeds.
16 years old. She was happy. She was smart.
She was loved. If you Google a picture of her, she was beautiful.
She looked just so sweet. She excelled at school.
She worked hard at everything she did. She had a lot of friends.
She was very close to her parents, especially her father.
She also held down a job at the shoe department in a Leeds department store, and her father would later said, quote, she was almost bursting with optimism and the sheer joy of life.
Of course, she's 16 years old. Now, on Saturday, June 26, 1977, remember, Sonia and Peter had found their dream home that day.
At the same time on that same day, Jane was set out to go dancing with some of her friends.
Aww. She was wearing a blue and white gingham skirt and left the house with a kiss for her father like she always did.
She was beautiful. She really was. You look at all of these women, like if you look at a big list of these women, they're all beautiful.
Yeah. And they all like when you look at them, you're like, you had so much life in there, like all of them.
And then you look at the 16-year-old and you're like, you had your whole life ahead of you.
Yeah. So she went off after giving her dad a kiss and saying, I'll be back later.
She went off and met friends at Hofbrauhaus, I think it's called.
Okay. Which was a German beer hall kind of place in Leeds.
There were drinks and dancing and live music, and they had fun there until about 10.30 p.m. when she and a friend, Mark Jones, decided to get some fish and chips at a nearby restaurant.
Sounds good. They went and had a nice time together.
They sat and chatted, but she realized that she missed the last bus home.
Oh, no. It was too late. So around midnight, Mark and Jane began to walk back to Mark's house because Mark was like, my sister will be home.
She can drive you home from our house. So when they get to Mark's, his sister wasn't home.
So they just kind of hung around, seeing if she would get home.
And they both lay in a field together for about 45 minutes, just like talking, just being adorable, like 16-year-olds who liked each other kind of thing.
And she walked back. She was probably having like the best night.
It was like a great evening. I know. The boy you like, you get more time with him because his sister's not home.
And you broke off and went to this restaurant together.
It's so exciting. Yeah. Like she had everything going.
So after the 45 minutes, she walked Mark back to the main gate at St.
James Hospital where they said their goodbyes because that was where he lived, near where he lived.
And they made plans to meet up again next Wednesday.
They were going to go on another date. Mm-hmm.
During the same evening, Peter Sutcliffe had gone from looking at the home Sonia and he wanted to buy to dropping her off at work and then going out drinking in Bradford with his neighbor, Ronald Barker, and his brother.
They were hopping from pub to pub, and then around 1 a.m. he dropped the brothers off at their home, and he went back out to troll around Leeds and Chapleton and Roundhay Park.
It was a little before 2 a.m. that Peter saw Jane walking alone on her way home.
He just watched her from his car for a bit, and then he parked in a hotel parking lot.
He got his hammer and a kitchen knife, and he followed her on foot.
Apparently, the streetlights on Reginald Road where she had gone, where she was walking on, they go out at 11.30, so it was pitch black.
Ugh. Why would they go out at 1130? I don't know, but she never saw him coming.
As he crept up behind her, she was passing by a children's playground.
Oh my God. And he struck her in the back of the head with the hammer.
She immediately fell to the ground and he continued to hit her with it.
He then dragged her toward the playground where he hit her at least two more times in the head and then pulled up her blouse and stabbed her over and over through the same wound in her chest.
Oh my God. Unfortunately, according to the pathologist later, he determined Jane was still alive when Peter left her thinking that she was dead.
Oh, my God. It was 9.45 the next morning that two children on their way into the playground between Reginald Street and Reginald Terrace found Jane lying face down by the playground wall.
Her coat was pulled up around her shoulders and her skirt was pulled up.
Her black stockings were torn up. There was blood leading to the entrance of the playground where he had dragged her.
A closer look revealed the head wounds, a stab wound to her back, and the horrific stab wounds to her chest.
This murder was different because she was much younger.
Yeah. And she wasn't a sex worker. Sutcliffe would later say he thought she was because she was in an area known to be traveled by sex workers at that time of night.
And he only realized he was wrong as he was attacking her.
And he couldn't stop then. I don't even know what to say.
Like... I think he's a bullshitter. I think he's an absolute liar.
He did the whole, I was on a mission to kill sex workers and God told me to do it thing.
He did that whole defense of like, I was doing that.
And if he had admitted that he killed a 16-year-old girl just because he wanted to, he would lose that defense that God made me do it because I'm supposed to kill sex workers.
And he also wouldn't do very well in prison.
And it's like, and he knows that the attitude at the time, unfortunately, the reality of the attitude at the time was people looked at sex workers differently.
And he knew that. So he had to claim that he thought every one of these women were sex workers because he would never just kill a woman.
Right. And it's like, are you fucking kidding me?
It's like, so people that live in that area and are walking those streets are all sex workers.
Yeah. Oh, okay. And it's like, we see through you, you piece of shit.
Yeah, it's just obvious. Like, we see through you.
You hate women. You're a murderer. Like, you're not on a mission.
You're a murderer. And you're murdering women because you hate women.
And this girl looks 16. He realized she was 16.
Yeah. Even if she was a sex worker, you see a 16-year-old girl and you don't think, like, if she is, what got her here?
My God. Yeah, exactly. Human empathy. How do you – I just – like, clearly something happens in these brains where it just is like, like, the lights out.
So this is really sad, too. Jane's family suffered immensely after this, obviously.
Her father especially felt the loss. They were very close.
Yeah, and he was the last one to see her, too.
He developed, he actually developed, quote, nervous asthma, had been unable to work, and simply lost the will to live.
And just 28 months after Jane was murdered, Wilfred McDonald died.
And his wife said, killed by a broken heart.
Absolutely. I fully believe in that. And it, like, destroyed me.
Like, reading, I'm like, I don't know how...
Like, I don't know how you don't die of a broken heart.
I really don't. It's so sad. And if you don't, you're just in hell on earth.
Exactly. So it's like there's, oh, I just want to like reach out and just like hug these people.
I do too. And even like Wilma McCann's son, Richard.
Yeah. And like, because she had like four kids, I believe it was.
Three or four kids. Like she was one of, she was the first murder.
And the way the press treated her, he came out later and was like, it's fucking awful.
That's disgusting. Like, that was my mother.
Like, who gives a shit what she did for it?
Like, that's my mother. And it's like, what the fuck?
It's also none of your fucking business how people make their money.
Exactly. Nobody gives a shit about your opinion about their work.
Do you have food in your refrigerator? Are your bills paid?
Yeah. Then shut the fuck up. Then shut the fuck up and let people live.
If they're not hurting anybody, then let them do what they have to do.
Exactly. It's so weird that we all think that we can have some kind of judgment on what other people do and what they, you know, it's like so weird that as a society we do that shit.
If you're okay and like you're not hurting someone, I don't care.
Yeah. If you're not hurting yourself or anyone else.
Exactly. Then who am I to tell you you can't do it?
No. It's just so wild to me. And I think we were all brought up like it's like so ingrained and like conditioned to like almost automatically like judge and like want to give an opinion.
But you have to break out of that as you evolve.
Like it's part of becoming a better adult and a better human.
People don't want to do the work, though, to break the cycle or people don't have access to the tools to break the cycle and stuff like that.
You know, it really is generational trauma and generational baggage.
Yeah, generational bullshit. It is. But it's like you got to look at it and be like, I need to change this.
Yeah. You know, because like we've all done it.
We've all judged people harshly. Of course.
We've all put an opinion on something that we have no fucking business putting an opinion on.
But you have to learn from that. All of us.
But it's like, learn. Just decide, you know what?
That's not my fucking business. Yeah. I'm out here.
I'm going to do what I'm doing as long as you're okay and you're happy and you're not hurting anyone.
Then get it, girl. Yep. Like, that's all that matters.
Not my business. It's just such a happier way to live.
That's the other thing. Why? Yeah. There are so many bum out things in the world to hear about every day.
If you're annoyed by people and you're judging people constantly, I don't know why you're adding that to your list.
Truly. It's like, that's not helpful. It's like, yeah, we can all kiki from time to time and be a little judgy.
Of course. But, like, come on. Yeah. And especially in these kind of cases.
Like, my God, these are human beings. Like, they have entire lives.
And people who loved them, depended on them, would have done anything to have them back.
You also don't know them from a fucking hole in the wall.
That's the other thing. Mind your business.
Like... All we know of these women are what we can find, what we can research about.
The people who know them are the people who they gave a kiss to at the end of the night, that they tucked into their bed.
The people who raised them, the people who worked with them, the people who were there with them.
The people who were out here doing this so that they could keep a roof over their head, their children's head.
Those are the people who know who they are.
And it's like really shitty to kind of display them as like subhumans.
And to take that away, like take away all the things they were and narrow it down to one thing about them.
Yeah, just one little pinpoint. It's just really fucked up.
And all right, so this goes right and dovetails nicely into this because this is when the case became international news.
Right. It was the distinction between what they were referring to as an innocent victim and the not innocent victims.
That's when the world took notice. That's when the language around the crimes changed and the headlines became less salacious, less cold.
It put every woman on alert at this point because before, we thought it was just sex workers.
Now it's everybody. Nobody's safe. Even though before it also wasn't.
Yeah, exactly. But that's how they were portraying it.
The way the media presented it, it was that they were out looking for clients.
And if you weren't doing that, then you were okay.
Yeah, it's your fault. That's how they presented it.
The murder of Jane McDonald showed that it was just women.
That he was after. Just women existing past a certain time of night when he deemed it inappropriate for you to be existing.
Like I can't be outside at night? That's all it was.
It's ridiculous. So the investigation ratcheted up a notch as well because now we have an innocent victim, quote unquote.
Quote unquote. Which I'm not saying Jane wasn't an innocent victim.
No, of course not. I'm saying the other ones were also innocent victims.
Anybody murdered is usually pretty innocent.
We have a handful of innocent victims now.
We don't just have one. And now the entire world is watching.
It's not just across the pond. It's now over here we're watching as well.
And people in the area are finally becoming like they're paying attention and they're scrutinizing the case or scrutinizing the investigation.
And now they're wondering why the hell are there no leads?
Why has no one been chased down for this?
What the fuck are you guys doing over there at the West Yorkshire police station?
Right. Like this is it's taking this like what the fuck?
What the hell? So West Yorkshire police started talking to everyone in the area.
They're talking to neighbors, shop owners, sex workers.
They collected over 3,500 statements. And at this point, the case was assigned to an investigator, a new investigator, which is also their problem.
They keep just handing this to different people instead of having one consistent person who has a connecting thread.
Yeah. So the new one was somebody who Chief Constable Ronald Gregory really felt could handle this case, and he was in charge.
He assigned it to Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield.
So George Oldfield was that classic detective that you think of.
He was mouthy. He was abrasive. Chain-smoking.
Chain-smoked. I knew it. Had a glass of scotch at any given time.
He was a former veteran. He had actually stormed the beach in Normandy during D-Day.
Holy shit. He had also lost his oldest daughter at one point to leukemia.
So he had a personal connection. A specially equipped deal would have the empathy needed to investigate the death of a child.
That's great. I'm glad somebody capable is on the case at this point.
That's the thing. Hopefully. I put all my eggs in his basket.
I was going to say, maybe pluck a few of those out.
I don't know. I'll take these. The idea was nice.
The idea was nice, but many mistakes were made during the course of the investigation.
And actually, West Yorkshire Police, like I said earlier, actually two years ago made an apology to the victims.
It was two years ago. Two years ago. Very recent.
And like I said, how they spoke to victims' families, all of that stuff.
I'm going to get more into that towards the end because I do want to talk more about that.
Probably the end of the, like in the fourth episode.
But it's notable to point this out as the investigation kicks into gear here because they put together a force of 304 officers who worked full time on this case at this point.
The first mistake was that Oldfield made a public statement about Jane's death but refused to acknowledge that it was connected to the other murders or attacks.
Oh? Question mark? Why he did this is unknown because they had already connected them at the scene.
But this sucked. And it really set the whole thing back.
Because we're still playing on that innocent victim thing.
We're not connecting it because the other ones are sex workers.
No, no, no. One thing they all have in common is they're all women.
So that's the only thing we need to be concentrating on here.
And next, they requested a profile of this killer.
And it was way off. It basically said...
They might as well have said, look for an aggressive madman skulking around in the shadows and covered in, like, bunions and waving a hammer.
Oh, okay. Peter Sutcliffe at the time was a happily married, gainfully employed lorry driver who did his doings at night under the cover of darkness with a lot of cunning and a lot of sneakiness.
He also looks like... A regular average Joe.
Any old guy. I would pass that man on the street, and if I didn't know what I know now, smile at him, wave at him.
You'd just be like, there's that guy. How are you?
You know? Yeah. He just is what he is. And if I ever were to hitchhike, I guarantee you, I would have been like, oh, he looks safe.
And if you think about it, all of these instances, he's going out with his friends, you know, Trevor Birdsall or Ronald Barker and his brother.
He's going out with them to pubs all the time, staying out till about 12 or 1 a.m., then driving them home to...
And then he goes out. Right. Most of the time, he has an alibi.
Exactly. Purposefully. Exactly. Because now, I was with that guy until like 1 a.m.
Like, he was going home. And then times get confused, of course, the more and more people you involve.
Exactly. So the bartender, oh, I don't know, they left about this time, could have been later.
Exactly. Fucks it all up. Exactly. Now, this whole thing, the whole, like, you know, this profile that was completely off base and had everybody looking for, like, just this bridge troll human who you could easily spot.
And also the whole not acknowledging that Jane McDonald was connected.
Yeah. That was throwing everything off.
But then they also paired this with the Land Rover and the other description.
We've got so, it is so far off. You couldn't be further away from Peter Sutcliffe at this point.
And the manhunt was massive now. And at this point, over 175,000 people were interviewed.
10,000 vehicles were checked after that initial big burst of them.
And no leads were found. But are they checking Land Rovers now?
They're checking Land Rovers now. Exactly.
By July 1977, Sonia and Peter had bought that home they fell in love with on Garden Lane.
And on July 9th, he went out with Ronald Barker and his brother in Bradford to celebrate the actual purchase.
Who the fuck do you think you are? For real.
Of course, they headed to the red light district and hung around until about 1 a.m.
At this point, Peter dropped them off in Clayton and went back towards Leeds because this is what he does.
I just love that this man is so morally superior, but then goes to the red light district.
Like, what are you talking about? But he thinks he has any kind of, like, moral compass here.
He's not better than anyone else. Yeah. Like, who are you to judge?
Exactly. Like, nobody's judging you for doing what you're doing.
Like, I also just can't get this image of him, like, walking through an open house and then that happening later in the day.
Celebrating buying the house. I can't. Like, yay, clink, clink.
Okay. I can't get that out of my head. That's such a dichotomy.
Yeah. Like... Wow. It's like from a movie.
You'd see it in a movie and be like, whoa.
Yeah. Why do I love that so much? Like just partying with Ronnie.
She's like, I am hanging out with Ronnie.
Just Ronnie, my ex-husband. In a black evening dress like killing it.
She got fancy. After that, she went to the Bali High discotheque and drank and danced some more.
Witnesses saw her dancing there with a lot of different men.
She was very visibly tipsy, like pretty drunk.
How many times? She had been outside waiting for a cab at the time just to go home.
And when Peter pulled up, he asked her, are you going far?
Yeah. So she figured, why the hell not take this free ride?
Yeah. She's drunk as well. Yeah. So she's not making decisions she probably would have made sober.
So she got in and told him to take her to her ex-husband Ronnie's apartment.
She was giving him the directions. On the way there, they kind of started talking.
And according to him, he said Maureen ended up asking if he fancied her.
She's also drunk. Like, who cares? Yeah, and they agreed to go to a private spot just off of Bowling Back Lane, it's called.
No, I doubt that. So when they got there, Maureen said she needed to pee.
This seems to be the same story over and over again.
That's the other reason I don't believe this.
I think he's just using that story. No.
And also, I'm sorry, she's not going to go pee behind a bush in an evening.
No. That's not happening. And she went to a small embankment behind a bush.
Peter crept up behind her and hit her on the top of the head with the hammer as hard as she could.
She slumped down to the ground and Peter dragged her to a waste disposal site.
Wow. Where he again hit her on the head with the hammer.
He then pulled down her dress, stabbed her five times in the abdomen, and after that, he wasn't done.
He made long incisions from groin to almost sternum.
Oh, my God. Then he flipped her over and stabbed her four more times in the back.
Oh, my God. Also, the force that takes to stab someone in the back.
Mm-hmm. He was now sure she was dead, and so he dragged her brutalized body to a darker part of the waste disposal area and covered her with a filthy old mattress.
Gross. As he walked away, he almost fell.
Good. But he caught himself on a broken sink that was on the ground, and he left a bloody partial palm print on the porcelain.
Oh, yeah. I just got the scene in my head from The Lovely Bones when he starts falling down that embankment.
Yes, that's exactly what I thought of. That, like, slow motion, just, like, hitting everything.
The ice pick falling, yep. Yes. I loved that scene.
Oh. Now apparently a dog barked and startled him because he left without wiping it, which he normally would have.
And he said later that the dog bark startled him.
The barking dog was also confirmed by a night watchman because that was his dog.
He was barking like crazy around 3.30 a.m.
And this night watchman saw a white car speeding away, but he didn't investigate it further.
He was just like, what the fuck was that?
Like he just thought it was somebody like dumping something and leaving.
Yeah. At 3.30 in the morning? He was like, it's a waste disposal site.
It's in a bad part of town. Like, people do shit all the time.
Sir, there's a serial killer on the loose.
What the fuck? I'm saying. And so he didn't look further.
He was later able to give a description of the vehicle.
But unfortunately, he thought it was a white Ford Cortina and it was a white Ford Corsair.
So again, we are getting the wrong thing.
Can we just look at, like, all the white cars that exist, please?
It wasn't... Yeah. Wow. It wasn't until early the next morning that two women near Bowling Back Lane heard soft cries that they believed were a baby.
Oh my god. They followed the sound and found Maureen Long alive.
Does she live? Under the mattress, crying out for help.
Oh my god. god ambulance and investigators arrived and took her to the hospital where they saved her life oh and you know her ex-husband ronnie was out for you right i believe in ronnie i believe i don't know anything about ronnie by the way i just i feel right about him they had a great night so i'm i want them to yeah she had head injuries hypothermia she had three broken ribs and horrific stab wounds but she lived she She had been split from groin to almost sternum.
And she had been laying under that mattress for hours and hours.
I wonder if the pressure of that mattress had anything to do with clotting, you know?
Maybe. George Oldfield, the new investigator on the scene, he ran to the hospital after her surgery and immediately wanted to interview her because he was like, holy shit.
Fresh in the mind. Yeah. But she couldn't remember barely anything from the evening.
She was like, one, I was drunk. Like, I don't remember a lot about the evening anyways.
And obviously head trauma. Like, I don't, I just came out of surgery.
PTSD. But she did remember, she said, I do remember that I did get a ride from a man.
And she said a man of about 35 years of age who had light brown shoulder length hair.
Do you think it's possible he was wearing wigs at all?
That's what I was wondering. Because, I mean, I will say his hair is kind of... Shaggy.
Or shaggy and also just like obvious. You know what I mean?
Like he has an obvious hairstyle. Exactly.
He does. It's like... He didn't have light hair.
No. That's definitely not... And it wasn't shoulder length either.
It wasn't. So that's interesting, but we'll hold on to that.
And also now Oldfield put out a special message to look out for a white Ford Cortina and that was not his car either.
This is when his name went from the Leeds Ripper to the Yorkshire Ripper.
Okay. September 26, 1977, Peter and Sonia officially moved into their home, and Sonia was obsessed.
She was so proud. She was so happy. She had never had a real home before.
That makes me so sad for her, too, because I'm sure at some point it just gets absolutely sullied.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure. And she literally called it her castle, neighbors said.
They called her house proud because she was just so happy.
Well, she was young to buy a house. Yeah, she was.
Good for her. And this is also when Peter started to lose his air of invincibility a bit.
And he took notice of the news reports where Maureen was giving descriptions and the night watchman was giving his car description.
He decided the car, even though it was the wrong type, it was going to be an issue.
Yeah. So he sold it to Ronald Barker and he bought a red Corsair.
So now he could be even further out of here.
A red car? Yeah. Damn. Damn. Jean had run away from home at 16 and had met her partner, Alan Royale, when she had appeared in Manchester.
They took to each other right away and they had moved into Alan's apartment in Linbeck Crescent.
They never got officially married but were like living as husband and wife.
Yeah. They had two small children together.
Unfortunately, by 1977, they were in dire straits financially.
And unbeknownst to Alan, she had met some sex workers and was doing it on the side.
Trying to support her family. Yeah. Yeah.
As she walked towards the grass that evening, Peter snuck behind her and hit her 13 times in the head with the hammer.
Oh, my God. When she fell, he began stabbing her over and over and over before he was scared off by headlights.
As he was leaving for home, he realized that he had left, so he had given her that five pounds.
He's getting sloppy. So he realized that the five pound note he had left with her was part of his pay packet from that week's work.
And he was worried that the little serial number on it could be traced back to where that was.
Ah, okay. He didn't want to go back, though, so he just kind of hoped it wouldn't be an issue, and it wasn't, you know, and it really wasn't for a long time.
He was watching the news. No one was finding Jean.
Uh-huh. Days went by. Jean's body wasn't even found, and it was laying behind an abandoned shed.
And she wasn't even reported missing by Alan.
He explained it later, but, like, whoa. October 9th, Peter and Sonia had friends over their new house for a housewarming party.
I... I'm so angry about this. Eight days later, he's having a housewarming party.
Just like, welcome, playing kind toast man.
And around midnight, Peter offered to drive some of his friends home.
So he dropped them all off. And then he went back to Manchester after he drove them off.
Damn. He went to Jean's body eight days after he had left.
She was still there. No one had found her.
God. She was still there, but her purse with the five pounds note was gone.
Oh, so somebody had seen her and robbed her?
That's what I thought initially, but no.
He just didn't find it. Oh. He was pissed, though.
He lost it. And he dragged her body out from the hiding place, tore her clothing off, and started stabbing her body over and over again in a rage.
My God. He slashed her chest and stomach over 20 times.
Her intestines and stomach were exposed at the end of this.
Wow. Once he had calmed himself down, he decided he had to make this look less like a ripper kill, so he figured he would try to remove her head to stop her from being identified.
Whoa. He tried, but he failed because he did not have the proper tool.
He's like already cool nuts bananas, but like going off the fucking rails.
And he brutalized her body in this process.
So he just left her there and just went home.
He couldn't get her head off. Also, like, where are all his bloody clothes going?
Like, what are you doing? That's the thing.
This man must have been fucking covered in blood.
That's the thing. I wonder if he had clothes in the car or something.
He had to have. He had to have. October 10th, only 12 hours after Peter had moved her, Jean was found by a worker coming in to do gardening work in the area.
He had literally tripped over her body and called police.
Ugh. DCS Jack Ridgewater was on scene and he immediately knew it was the Ripper by the hammer blows and the stab marks, despite what he tried to do.
That evening it was on the news and Alan heard the description and he knew it was Jean.
He called police and told them he had actually thought Jean had gone to Scotland to visit family because she would do that.
Oh. Like she would just pop off to Scotland for a few days.
Oh. So he was like, that's the only reason I didn't call her in missing.
So that makes sense. Yeah. Fingerprints at their apartment matched the victim, so they were able to confirm it.
Also, a fellow sex worker and friend, Anna Holt, identified her in person.
It was five days later that someone who lived in the area found Jean's purse.
Okay, tell me. It was 150 feet away from where her body was discovered.
Okay. I'm assuming it was likely an animal moved it because the five pound note was still in it.
Okay. Like no money was taken. Nothing was taken from it.
Yeah. I'm sure it was animals picking away and they just dragged something away.
Makes sense. Yeah. But they were able to trace the bill back to Shipley and Bingley, which were branches of the Midland Bank, which is in Yorkshire.
They were able to narrow it down where these bills went out.
Wow. By interviewing over 5,000 men who worked in places where they did get circulated.
They did start to interview men from the place Sutcliffe worked as well.
He was interviewed directly. But remember, he had a housewarming party that night.
So his friends were able to provide him an alibi that they were with him.
I'm saying he, he had, he had that figured out.
Like that makes me so angry. I hate when it's something like that where you're like, he fucking had it figured out.
Fuck you. That like, that does make sense.
Like, fuck you that you thought of that.
This venture also didn't really help because it ruled out the real killer, like he was passed by now, and also spread the information way too far.
So it made it hard to connect pieces and make one cohesive investigation.
Now it was just getting messy. A mess and a half.
This was one of the times Peter would come very close to getting caught, but found himself once again untouchable.
Police in his face and he still walked away clean.
I'm glad the department apologized now about how mishandled this case was because, my God.
But that is where we are going to leave it for part two.
Are you kidding? Because... This is a lot.
And these are very gruesome. They are very stressful.
They are. But part three, we are going to dive right back in and it's not going to get better.
I'm on the edge of my fucking seat. But just know he's going to get caught at the end of this.
Because you also said that he, there's like multiple times that the police get him and let him go.
And this seems to be the first. Yeah. One of the first.
Yeah. One of the times. God damn it. Yeah.
This is a rough case. It's a lot. It'll stay with you.
Yeah, it has been. And I just fucking hate him.
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