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She holds her lighter up high so the flame catches
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the metal under the bonnet. It is a small, ordinary
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act of kindness. She is kneeling there in the cold,
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in the dark, on a patch of waste ground off
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Roundhay Road in Leeds, trying to help a stranger whose
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car will not start. She does not know the car
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was never broken. She does not know the hammer is
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already in his hand. I am Marcus, and this is
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Case Files, True Crime Stories, episode two of our season
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on the Yorkshire Ripper. Tonight, the night of the 20th
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of January, 1976, and the pattern nobody saw. Her name
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is Emily Jackson. She is 42 years old, from Morley
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in Leeds, the wife of a roofer named Sidney. She
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has children, a family that loves her, and debts that
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do not care. It is just after Christmas, and money
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is painfully short. So Emily does something brave and desperate.
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She starts soliciting outside the Gaiety Pub on Roundhay Road,
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working in Chapel Town to help pay the family's bills.
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Her husband does not stop her. He waits for her
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in the gaiety while she works the streets outside. On
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the evening of the 20th of January, a quiet man
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pulls up in his car. She names her price. Five pounds.
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She gets in. He drives her to a patch of
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derelict land. He stops the car and pretends it will
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not start. She picks up her lighter and holds it
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above him so he can see what he is doing
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under the bonnet. He steps back. Twice. And then the
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hammer comes down. Twice. He drags her body into a
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yard full of rubbish, and with a sharpened screwdriver, he
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stabs her fifty-two times. Fifty-two. Then he stamps on her
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leg so hard that his boot print is left in
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her skin. A size 7 Dunlop Warwick boot. On the
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morning of the 21st of January, a workman finds her
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on the waste ground off Manor Street. The police come
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to her family's door with news that breaks them. Emily's
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husband cannot face identifying the body, So that terrible task
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falls to her son, who is only 17 years old.
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He goes to the mortuary, looks at what is left
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of his mother, and nods. He is haunted by that
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nod for the rest of his life. I want to
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pause here, because this is the part of the story
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that should frighten us the most. Emily Jackson is not
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the first woman Peter Sutcliffe has killed. Three months earlier,
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in October of 1975, he murdered Wilma McCann on the
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Prince Philip playing fields in Chapel Town. The two crimes
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look alike. Both women are from Leeds. Both are struck
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on the head with a hammer. Both are stabbed repeatedly.
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And Emily is not even the first woman Sutcliffe has attacked.
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In the summer of 1975, before Wilma, there were three
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non-fatal hammer attacks, two in Keeley and one in Halifax.
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All three women survived. None of those attacks was linked
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to anything. That is the pattern nobody saw, and I
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need you to understand why. This is England in the mid-1970s.
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There is no DNA. DNA profiling does not exist yet.
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The best a crime lab can do is blood group typing,
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which can exclude a suspect but can almost never prove one.
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There is no national computer linking crimes across police divisions.
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Leeds has its investigators. Bradford has its own. Halifax has
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its own. A man can hit women in three towns
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and be three different strangers to three different police forces,
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and nobody's desk has all the pieces at once. And
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there is something else, something uglier. The police draw a
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line between women they consider respectable and women they consider disposable.
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Because Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson worked as prostitutes, their
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cases carry a stigma. The investigations move slower. The public
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is told, in the language of the time, that these
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are not quite like other murders. So when Emily Jackson
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dies on the 20th of January, the detectives in Leeds
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connect her death to
Load full transcript
Wilma McCann's. They can see the
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link between those two. but they do not connect either
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murder to the hammer attacks of the previous summer. They
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do not know those women are part of the same story.
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The pattern is sitting right there, in plain sight, and
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nobody has enough of it to see it. Now let
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me tell you about May of 1976. A young woman
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named Marcella Claxton is 20 years old. She has been
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to a party and she is walking home when a
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man stops and offers her a lift. He drives, he stops,
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and the hammer comes down. She survives. She is four
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months pregnant, and the attack causes her to lose the baby.
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But she lives. Years later, she will sit in a
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courtroom and give evidence against the man who did it,
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and her testimony will help convict him. But in May
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of 1976, nobody connects her attack to the murders of
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Wilma McCann and Emily Jackson. Nobody connects anything. She is
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a victim of a random assault in Leeds, and the
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Yorkshire Ripper's investigation does not even know her name yet.
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Think about what the killer learns from all of this.
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He kills in October, and nothing happens. He kills again
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in January, and still nothing stops him. He attacks women
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in the summer of 75 and again in the spring
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of 76, and he walks free every time. Each time
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he gets away, the violence grows worse. Wilma McCann was
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stabbed 15 times. Emily Jackson is stabbed 52 times with
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a boot print stamped into her body. This is escalation.
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This is a man testing how far he can go
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and discovering that the answer, so far, is as far
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as he wants. And what do the police have after
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all of this? They have a boot print. A size
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7 Dunlop Warwick. That sounds like a clue, and in
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a better case, it would be one. But thousands of
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men wear those boots in Yorkshire in 1976. They have
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a description of a car. Maybe... They have two linked
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murders and a handful of assaults they do not know
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are connected. What they do not have is a name,
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a face, or a system that can put the pieces together.
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The system will stay broken for years. In the meantime,
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the man with the hammer is still driving, still polite,
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still patient. and the calendar is about to turn to 1977.
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Next episode, the killing does not slow down. It speeds up.
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February of 1977 brings Irene Richardson in Roundhay Park. April
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brings Patricia Atkinson, murdered in her own flat in Bradford.
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And then June brings a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Jane McDonald,
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walking home because she missed her last bus, and the
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whole country finally learns to be afraid. A city under siege.
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I will see you there. If this story matters to you,
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share it with someone who should hear it. New episodes daily.
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One complete case every season. I am Marcus. Good night
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and stay safe.