WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.600 --> 00:00:04.160
She holds her lighter up high so the flame catches
2
00:00:04.240 --> 00:00:08.519
the metal under the bonnet. It is a small, ordinary
3
00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:12.240
act of kindness. She is kneeling there in the cold,
4
00:00:12.640 --> 00:00:15.779
in the dark, on a patch of waste ground off
5
00:00:15.900 --> 00:00:19.920
Roundhay Road in Leeds, trying to help a stranger whose
6
00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:24.079
car will not start. She does not know the car
7
00:00:24.140 --> 00:00:28.120
was never broken. She does not know the hammer is
8
00:00:28.289 --> 00:00:32.759
already in his hand. I am Marcus, and this is
9
00:00:32.899 --> 00:00:38.009
Case Files, True Crime Stories, episode two of our season
10
00:00:38.130 --> 00:00:42.850
on the Yorkshire Ripper. Tonight, the night of the 20th
11
00:00:42.909 --> 00:00:50.289
of January, 1976, and the pattern nobody saw. Her name
12
00:00:50.630 --> 00:00:55.399
is Emily Jackson. She is 42 years old, from Morley
13
00:00:55.520 --> 00:01:00.340
in Leeds, the wife of a roofer named Sidney. She
14
00:01:00.380 --> 00:01:04.500
has children, a family that loves her, and debts that
15
00:01:04.599 --> 00:01:09.120
do not care. It is just after Christmas, and money
16
00:01:09.260 --> 00:01:14.370
is painfully short. So Emily does something brave and desperate.
17
00:01:15.370 --> 00:01:19.930
She starts soliciting outside the Gaiety Pub on Roundhay Road,
18
00:01:20.530 --> 00:01:24.090
working in Chapel Town to help pay the family's bills.
19
00:01:25.150 --> 00:01:28.409
Her husband does not stop her. He waits for her
20
00:01:28.489 --> 00:01:32.969
in the gaiety while she works the streets outside. On
21
00:01:33.010 --> 00:01:36.799
the evening of the 20th of January, a quiet man
22
00:01:36.920 --> 00:01:41.939
pulls up in his car. She names her price. Five pounds.
23
00:01:42.819 --> 00:01:46.359
She gets in. He drives her to a patch of
24
00:01:46.500 --> 00:01:50.980
derelict land. He stops the car and pretends it will
25
00:01:51.040 --> 00:01:54.939
not start. She picks up her lighter and holds it
26
00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:57.640
above him so he can see what he is doing
27
00:01:57.780 --> 00:02:03.239
under the bonnet. He steps back. Twice. And then the
28
00:02:03.299 --> 00:02:08.629
hammer comes down. Twice. He drags her body into a
29
00:02:08.689 --> 00:02:12.569
yard full of rubbish, and with a sharpened screwdriver, he
30
00:02:12.669 --> 00:02:19.389
stabs her fifty-two times. Fifty-two. Then he stamps on her
31
00:02:19.469 --> 00:02:22.270
leg so hard that his boot print is left in
32
00:02:22.330 --> 00:02:28.539
her skin. A size 7 Dunlop Warwick boot. On the
33
00:02:28.599 --> 00:02:32.979
morning of the 21st of January, a workman finds her
34
00:02:33.099 --> 00:02:37.360
on the waste ground off Manor Street. The police come
35
00:02:37.400 --> 00:02:42.090
to her family's door with news that breaks them. Emily's
36
00:02:42.189 --> 00:02:47.539
husband cannot face identifying the body, So that terrible task
37
00:02:47.659 --> 00:02:51.659
falls to her son, who is only 17 years old.
38
00:02:52.740 --> 00:02:55.939
He goes to the mortuary, looks at what is left
39
00:02:56.000 --> 00:03:00.889
of his mother, and nods. He is haunted by that
40
00:03:01.009 --> 00:03:04.949
nod for the rest of his life. I want to
41
00:03:05.030 --> 00:03:08.129
pause here, because this is the part of the story
42
00:03:08.389 --> 00:03:13.180
that should frighten us the most. Emily Jackson is not
43
00:03:13.319 --> 00:03:17.949
the first woman Peter Sutcliffe has killed. Three months earlier,
44
00:03:18.409 --> 00:03:24.289
in October of 1975, he murdered Wilma McCann on the
45
00:03:24.389 --> 00:03:29.250
Prince Philip playing fields in Chapel Town. The two crimes
46
00:03:29.370 --> 00:03:34.310
look alike. Both women are from Leeds. Both are struck
47
00:03:34.389 --> 00:03:38.680
on the head with a hammer. Both are stabbed repeatedly.
48
00:03:39.740 --> 00:03:43.460
And Emily is not even the first woman Sutcliffe has attacked.
49
00:03:44.400 --> 00:03:49.360
In the summer of 1975, before Wilma, there were three
50
00:03:49.560 --> 00:03:55.139
non-fatal hammer attacks, two in Keeley and one in Halifax.
51
00:03:56.180 --> 00:04:00.610
All three women survived. None of those attacks was linked
52
00:04:00.729 --> 00:04:05.710
to anything. That is the pattern nobody saw, and I
53
00:04:05.789 --> 00:04:11.300
need you to understand why. This is England in the mid-1970s.
54
00:04:12.340 --> 00:04:17.110
There is no DNA. DNA profiling does not exist yet.
55
00:04:18.149 --> 00:04:21.470
The best a crime lab can do is blood group typing,
56
00:04:22.029 --> 00:04:26.629
which can exclude a suspect but can almost never prove one.
57
00:04:27.860 --> 00:04:32.060
There is no national computer linking crimes across police divisions.
58
00:04:33.279 --> 00:04:38.920
Leeds has its investigators. Bradford has its own. Halifax has
59
00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:42.759
its own. A man can hit women in three towns
60
00:04:43.100 --> 00:04:47.139
and be three different strangers to three different police forces,
61
00:04:47.939 --> 00:04:52.649
and nobody's desk has all the pieces at once. And
62
00:04:52.709 --> 00:04:57.949
there is something else, something uglier. The police draw a
63
00:04:58.029 --> 00:05:03.269
line between women they consider respectable and women they consider disposable.
64
00:05:04.290 --> 00:05:09.100
Because Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson worked as prostitutes, their
65
00:05:09.160 --> 00:05:15.339
cases carry a stigma. The investigations move slower. The public
66
00:05:15.399 --> 00:05:18.560
is told, in the language of the time, that these
67
00:05:18.639 --> 00:05:23.290
are not quite like other murders. So when Emily Jackson
68
00:05:23.350 --> 00:05:27.230
dies on the 20th of January, the detectives in Leeds
69
00:05:27.329 --> 00:05:31.170
connect her death to Wilma McCann's. They can see the
70
00:05:31.250 --> 00:05:35.029
link between those two. but they do not connect either
71
00:05:35.110 --> 00:05:39.089
murder to the hammer attacks of the previous summer. They
72
00:05:39.129 --> 00:05:41.889
do not know those women are part of the same story.
73
00:05:42.870 --> 00:05:46.850
The pattern is sitting right there, in plain sight, and
74
00:05:46.990 --> 00:05:50.920
nobody has enough of it to see it. Now let
75
00:05:51.009 --> 00:05:56.939
me tell you about May of 1976. A young woman
76
00:05:57.279 --> 00:06:02.560
named Marcella Claxton is 20 years old. She has been
77
00:06:02.620 --> 00:06:05.980
to a party and she is walking home when a
78
00:06:06.060 --> 00:06:12.139
man stops and offers her a lift. He drives, he stops,
79
00:06:13.100 --> 00:06:19.250
and the hammer comes down. She survives. She is four
80
00:06:19.350 --> 00:06:24.310
months pregnant, and the attack causes her to lose the baby.
81
00:06:25.480 --> 00:06:30.300
But she lives. Years later, she will sit in a
82
00:06:30.399 --> 00:06:34.220
courtroom and give evidence against the man who did it,
83
00:06:35.339 --> 00:06:40.319
and her testimony will help convict him. But in May
84
00:06:40.399 --> 00:06:46.040
of 1976, nobody connects her attack to the murders of
85
00:06:46.180 --> 00:06:54.050
Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson. Nobody connects anything. She is
86
00:06:54.129 --> 00:06:57.819
a victim of a random assault in Leeds, and the
87
00:06:57.899 --> 00:07:02.699
Yorkshire Ripper's investigation does not even know her name yet.
88
00:07:03.740 --> 00:07:06.819
Think about what the killer learns from all of this.
89
00:07:07.740 --> 00:07:12.639
He kills in October, and nothing happens. He kills again
90
00:07:12.699 --> 00:07:17.670
in January, and still nothing stops him. He attacks women
91
00:07:17.730 --> 00:07:19.449
in the summer of 75 and again in the spring
92
00:07:19.470 --> 00:07:26.810
of 76, and he walks free every time. Each time
93
00:07:26.850 --> 00:07:32.110
he gets away, the violence grows worse. Wilma McCann was
94
00:07:32.170 --> 00:07:39.120
stabbed 15 times. Emily Jackson is stabbed 52 times with
95
00:07:39.180 --> 00:07:43.879
a boot print stamped into her body. This is escalation.
96
00:07:44.980 --> 00:07:47.730
This is a man testing how far he can go
97
00:07:48.370 --> 00:07:52.949
and discovering that the answer, so far, is as far
98
00:07:53.029 --> 00:07:57.939
as he wants. And what do the police have after
99
00:07:58.079 --> 00:08:02.899
all of this? They have a boot print. A size
100
00:08:02.899 --> 00:08:07.519
7 Dunlop Warwick. That sounds like a clue, and in
101
00:08:07.579 --> 00:08:11.459
a better case, it would be one. But thousands of
102
00:08:11.560 --> 00:08:17.139
men wear those boots in Yorkshire in 1976. They have
103
00:08:17.180 --> 00:08:22.029
a description of a car. Maybe... They have two linked
104
00:08:22.149 --> 00:08:25.709
murders and a handful of assaults they do not know
105
00:08:25.850 --> 00:08:29.939
are connected. What they do not have is a name,
106
00:08:30.420 --> 00:08:34.059
a face, or a system that can put the pieces together.
107
00:08:35.179 --> 00:08:40.139
The system will stay broken for years. In the meantime,
108
00:08:40.620 --> 00:08:44.639
the man with the hammer is still driving, still polite,
109
00:08:45.240 --> 00:08:53.120
still patient. and the calendar is about to turn to 1977.
110
00:08:53.120 --> 00:08:57.950
Next episode, the killing does not slow down. It speeds up.
111
00:08:58.950 --> 00:09:06.370
February of 1977 brings Irene Richardson in Roundhay Park. April
112
00:09:06.429 --> 00:09:11.370
brings Patricia Atkinson, murdered in her own flat in Bradford.
113
00:09:12.460 --> 00:09:17.799
And then June brings a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Jane McDonald,
114
00:09:18.360 --> 00:09:21.980
walking home because she missed her last bus, and the
115
00:09:22.059 --> 00:09:27.659
whole country finally learns to be afraid. A city under siege.
116
00:09:28.620 --> 00:09:32.809
I will see you there. If this story matters to you,
117
00:09:33.470 --> 00:09:37.590
share it with someone who should hear it. New episodes daily.
118
00:09:38.309 --> 00:09:43.929
One complete case every season. I am Marcus. Good night
119
00:09:44.669 --> 00:09:45.500
and stay safe.
1
00:00:00.600 --> 00:00:04.160
She holds her lighter up high so the flame catches
2
00:00:04.240 --> 00:00:08.519
the metal under the bonnet. It is a small, ordinary
3
00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:12.240
act of kindness. She is kneeling there in the cold,
4
00:00:12.640 --> 00:00:15.779
in the dark, on a patch of waste ground off
5
00:00:15.900 --> 00:00:19.920
Roundhay Road in Leeds, trying to help a stranger whose
6
00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:24.079
car will not start. She does not know the car
7
00:00:24.140 --> 00:00:28.120
was never broken. She does not know the hammer is
8
00:00:28.289 --> 00:00:32.759
already in his hand. I am Marcus, and this is
9
00:00:32.899 --> 00:00:38.009
Case Files, True Crime Stories, episode two of our season
10
00:00:38.130 --> 00:00:42.850
on the Yorkshire Ripper. Tonight, the night of the 20th
11
00:00:42.909 --> 00:00:50.289
of January, 1976, and the pattern nobody saw. Her name
12
00:00:50.630 --> 00:00:55.399
is Emily Jackson. She is 42 years old, from Morley
13
00:00:55.520 --> 00:01:00.340
in Leeds, the wife of a roofer named Sidney. She
14
00:01:00.380 --> 00:01:04.500
has children, a family that loves her, and debts that
15
00:01:04.599 --> 00:01:09.120
do not care. It is just after Christmas, and money
16
00:01:09.260 --> 00:01:14.370
is painfully short. So Emily does something brave and desperate.
17
00:01:15.370 --> 00:01:19.930
She starts soliciting outside the Gaiety Pub on Roundhay Road,
18
00:01:20.530 --> 00:01:24.090
working in Chapel Town to help pay the family's bills.
19
00:01:25.150 --> 00:01:28.409
Her husband does not stop her. He waits for her
20
00:01:28.489 --> 00:01:32.969
in the gaiety while she works the streets outside. On
21
00:01:33.010 --> 00:01:36.799
the evening of the 20th of January, a quiet man
22
00:01:36.920 --> 00:01:41.939
pulls up in his car. She names her price. Five pounds.
23
00:01:42.819 --> 00:01:46.359
She gets in. He drives her to a patch of
24
00:01:46.500 --> 00:01:50.980
derelict land. He stops the car and pretends it will
25
00:01:51.040 --> 00:01:54.939
not start. She picks up her lighter and holds it
26
00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:57.640
above him so he can see what he is doing
27
00:01:57.780 --> 00:02:03.239
under the bonnet. He steps back. Twice. And then the
28
00:02:03.299 --> 00:02:08.629
hammer comes down. Twice. He drags her body into a
29
00:02:08.689 --> 00:02:12.569
yard full of rubbish, and with a sharpened screwdriver, he
30
00:02:12.669 --> 00:02:19.389
stabs her fifty-two times. Fifty-two. Then he stamps on her
31
00:02:19.469 --> 00:02:22.270
leg so hard that his boot print is left in
32
00:02:22.330 --> 00:02:28.539
her skin. A size 7 Dunlop Warwick boot. On the
33
00:02:28.599 --> 00:02:32.979
morning of the 21st of January, a workman finds her
34
00:02:33.099 --> 00:02:37.360
on the waste ground off Manor Street. The police come
35
00:02:37.400 --> 00:02:42.090
to her family's door with news that breaks them. Emily's
36
00:02:42.189 --> 00:02:47.539
husband cannot face identifying the body, So that terrible task
37
00:02:47.659 --> 00:02:51.659
falls to her son, who is only 17 years old.
38
00:02:52.740 --> 00:02:55.939
He goes to the mortuary, looks at what is left
39
00:02:56.000 --> 00:03:00.889
of his mother, and nods. He is haunted by that
40
00:03:01.009 --> 00:03:04.949
nod for the rest of his life. I want to
41
00:03:05.030 --> 00:03:08.129
pause here, because this is the part of the story
42
00:03:08.389 --> 00:03:13.180
that should frighten us the most. Emily Jackson is not
43
00:03:13.319 --> 00:03:17.949
the first woman Peter Sutcliffe has killed. Three months earlier,
44
00:03:18.409 --> 00:03:24.289
in October of 1975, he murdered Wilma McCann on the
45
00:03:24.389 --> 00:03:29.250
Prince Philip playing fields in Chapel Town. The two crimes
46
00:03:29.370 --> 00:03:34.310
look alike. Both women are from Leeds. Both are struck
47
00:03:34.389 --> 00:03:38.680
on the head with a hammer. Both are stabbed repeatedly.
48
00:03:39.740 --> 00:03:43.460
And Emily is not even the first woman Sutcliffe has attacked.
49
00:03:44.400 --> 00:03:49.360
In the summer of 1975, before Wilma, there were three
50
00:03:49.560 --> 00:03:55.139
non-fatal hammer attacks, two in Keeley and one in Halifax.
51
00:03:56.180 --> 00:04:00.610
All three women survived. None of those attacks was linked
52
00:04:00.729 --> 00:04:05.710
to anything. That is the pattern nobody saw, and I
53
00:04:05.789 --> 00:04:11.300
need you to understand why. This is England in the mid-1970s.
54
00:04:12.340 --> 00:04:17.110
There is no DNA. DNA profiling does not exist yet.
55
00:04:18.149 --> 00:04:21.470
The best a crime lab can do is blood group typing,
56
00:04:22.029 --> 00:04:26.629
which can exclude a suspect but can almost never prove one.
57
00:04:27.860 --> 00:04:32.060
There is no national computer linking crimes across police divisions.
58
00:04:33.279 --> 00:04:38.920
Leeds has its investigators. Bradford has its own. Halifax has
59
00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:42.759
its own. A man can hit women in three towns
60
00:04:43.100 --> 00:04:47.139
and be three different strangers to three different police forces,
61
00:04:47.939 --> 00:04:52.649
and nobody's desk has all the pieces at once. And
62
00:04:52.709 --> 00:04:57.949
there is something else, something uglier. The police draw a
63
00:04:58.029 --> 00:05:03.269
line between women they consider respectable and women they consider disposable.
64
00:05:04.290 --> 00:05:09.100
Because Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson worked as prostitutes, their
65
00:05:09.160 --> 00:05:15.339
cases carry a stigma. The investigations move slower. The public
66
00:05:15.399 --> 00:05:18.560
is told, in the language of the time, that these
67
00:05:18.639 --> 00:05:23.290
are not quite like other murders. So when Emily Jackson
68
00:05:23.350 --> 00:05:27.230
dies on the 20th of January, the detectives in Leeds
69
00:05:27.329 --> 00:05:31.170
connect her death to Wilma McCann's. They can see the
70
00:05:31.250 --> 00:05:35.029
link between those two. but they do not connect either
71
00:05:35.110 --> 00:05:39.089
murder to the hammer attacks of the previous summer. They
72
00:05:39.129 --> 00:05:41.889
do not know those women are part of the same story.
73
00:05:42.870 --> 00:05:46.850
The pattern is sitting right there, in plain sight, and
74
00:05:46.990 --> 00:05:50.920
nobody has enough of it to see it. Now let
75
00:05:51.009 --> 00:05:56.939
me tell you about May of 1976. A young woman
76
00:05:57.279 --> 00:06:02.560
named Marcella Claxton is 20 years old. She has been
77
00:06:02.620 --> 00:06:05.980
to a party and she is walking home when a
78
00:06:06.060 --> 00:06:12.139
man stops and offers her a lift. He drives, he stops,
79
00:06:13.100 --> 00:06:19.250
and the hammer comes down. She survives. She is four
80
00:06:19.350 --> 00:06:24.310
months pregnant, and the attack causes her to lose the baby.
81
00:06:25.480 --> 00:06:30.300
But she lives. Years later, she will sit in a
82
00:06:30.399 --> 00:06:34.220
courtroom and give evidence against the man who did it,
83
00:06:35.339 --> 00:06:40.319
and her testimony will help convict him. But in May
84
00:06:40.399 --> 00:06:46.040
of 1976, nobody connects her attack to the murders of
85
00:06:46.180 --> 00:06:54.050
Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson. Nobody connects anything. She is
86
00:06:54.129 --> 00:06:57.819
a victim of a random assault in Leeds, and the
87
00:06:57.899 --> 00:07:02.699
Yorkshire Ripper's investigation does not even know her name yet.
88
00:07:03.740 --> 00:07:06.819
Think about what the killer learns from all of this.
89
00:07:07.740 --> 00:07:12.639
He kills in October, and nothing happens. He kills again
90
00:07:12.699 --> 00:07:17.670
in January, and still nothing stops him. He attacks women
91
00:07:17.730 --> 00:07:19.449
in the summer of 75 and again in the spring
92
00:07:19.470 --> 00:07:26.810
of 76, and he walks free every time. Each time
93
00:07:26.850 --> 00:07:32.110
he gets away, the violence grows worse. Wilma McCann was
94
00:07:32.170 --> 00:07:39.120
stabbed 15 times. Emily Jackson is stabbed 52 times with
95
00:07:39.180 --> 00:07:43.879
a boot print stamped into her body. This is escalation.
96
00:07:44.980 --> 00:07:47.730
This is a man testing how far he can go
97
00:07:48.370 --> 00:07:52.949
and discovering that the answer, so far, is as far
98
00:07:53.029 --> 00:07:57.939
as he wants. And what do the police have after
99
00:07:58.079 --> 00:08:02.899
all of this? They have a boot print. A size
100
00:08:02.899 --> 00:08:07.519
7 Dunlop Warwick. That sounds like a clue, and in
101
00:08:07.579 --> 00:08:11.459
a better case, it would be one. But thousands of
102
00:08:11.560 --> 00:08:17.139
men wear those boots in Yorkshire in 1976. They have
103
00:08:17.180 --> 00:08:22.029
a description of a car. Maybe... They have two linked
104
00:08:22.149 --> 00:08:25.709
murders and a handful of assaults they do not know
105
00:08:25.850 --> 00:08:29.939
are connected. What they do not have is a name,
106
00:08:30.420 --> 00:08:34.059
a face, or a system that can put the pieces together.
107
00:08:35.179 --> 00:08:40.139
The system will stay broken for years. In the meantime,
108
00:08:40.620 --> 00:08:44.639
the man with the hammer is still driving, still polite,
109
00:08:45.240 --> 00:08:53.120
still patient. and the calendar is about to turn to 1977.
110
00:08:53.120 --> 00:08:57.950
Next episode, the killing does not slow down. It speeds up.
111
00:08:58.950 --> 00:09:06.370
February of 1977 brings Irene Richardson in Roundhay Park. April
112
00:09:06.429 --> 00:09:11.370
brings Patricia Atkinson, murdered in her own flat in Bradford.
113
00:09:12.460 --> 00:09:17.799
And then June brings a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Jane McDonald,
114
00:09:18.360 --> 00:09:21.980
walking home because she missed her last bus, and the
115
00:09:22.059 --> 00:09:27.659
whole country finally learns to be afraid. A city under siege.
116
00:09:28.620 --> 00:09:32.809
I will see you there. If this story matters to you,
117
00:09:33.470 --> 00:09:37.590
share it with someone who should hear it. New episodes daily.
118
00:09:38.309 --> 00:09:43.929
One complete case every season. I am Marcus. Good night
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and stay safe.
