Peter Sutcliffe
The Five Pound Note
On Saturday 15 October, Jean Jordans handbag was found only 100 yards from where her body had lain the week before. The money that Alan believed she'd been carrying was missing, but in a hidden pocket at the front of the bag, police found a five-pound Bank of England note. The note, with the serial number AW51 121565 was brand new, issued only a couple of days before Jean was killed. The Bank of England established that the note was part of a consignment sent to the Shipley and Bingley branches of the Midland Bank, right in the heart of the Yorkshire Ripper area.
Ridgeway was confidant that the Yorkshire Ripper could be found if they could trace the owner of the five-pound note. With this aim in mind, Ridgeway, along with thirty handpicked Manchester officers, travelled to Bradford and opened a special incident room at the Baildon School.
It was quickly established that the note in question had been part of a bundle of five hundred pounds and had been the fifth last note in a sequence of sixty-nine. Ridgeways excitement soon abated when he learned that the note had been part of a batch of £17,500 pounds, which had been distributed to a number of firms in the Bradford and Shipley area that employed almost 8,000 men in total.
It would take Ridgeway and his men three months to interview 5000 of those men. One of the firms they had concentrated on was T & WH Clark (Holdings Ltd) in Canal Road, Shipley. Just before Christmas, they interviewed the men that worked there, including Peter William Sutcliffe of Garden Lane, Heaton. There had been nothing about Peter, or the other 5000 men, that had seemed suspicious. They had even spoken to his wife, Sonia, who had not contradicted in any way Peters account of the nights they asked him about.
Even as the police were interviewing those 8000 men, one of them, the Yorkshire Ripper struck again, but this time he would leave his victim to provide a strong identification of him and his car. It had started on 14 December when Marilyn Moore left a friends home in Gathorne Terrace, near the Gaiety pub at 8.00pm. As she walked along Gipton Avenue towards her home, she noticed a dark coloured car drive slowly toward her. Sure that the driver was a potential client, she began to walk to Leopold Street where she assumed his car would next appear. Her assumption proved correct when she found his car parked near a junction known as Frankland Place. The driver was leaning against the drivers door. He was about thirty, stocky build, around 56" tall with dark, wavy hair and a beard. He was wearing a yellow shirt, a navy blue/black zip-up anorak and blue jeans, and appeared to be waving to someone in a nearby house.
He asked her if she was "doing business" and they set a price before she got into the car with him. As he drove her to a vacant lot in Scott Hall Street, about a mile and a half away, he told her that his name was Dave and that the person he had been waving to was his girlfriend. When they arrived at their destination, "Dave" suggested that they have sex in the back seat, but when Marilyn got out of the car she found that the back door was locked. As "Dave" came behind her to open the door, Marilyn felt a searing, sickening blow on the top of her head. She screamed loudly and attempted to protect her head with her hands. As she fell to the ground, frantically grabbing her attackers trousers as she fell, she felt further blows before losing consciousness.
A dog barked at the sound of Marilyns screams and "Dave" left before he could finish "the job." Marilyn remembered hearing him walk back to his car and slam the door, and then she heard the back wheels skid as he hurriedly drove away. Slowly, Marilyn managed to get herself to her feet and stumbled towards a telephone. Before she could, a man and woman, noticing the blood running from her head, stopped to help and called an ambulance.
She was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary for an emergency operation. She would stay there until just before New Year's Eve, but it would be a long time before she could face returning to Leeds. Back in Leeds again where she returned to work as a prostitute, she continued to suffer from depression. She still has a hole in the back of her head and scars all over her scalp.
There was no doubt in the minds of the investigators that Marilyn was another of the Yorkshire Rippers victims. This was confirmed when the tyre tracks left by his car were found to match those found at the site of Irene Richardsons death. Despite this new evidence, the hunt for the Ripper continued without success until the third week of January 1978, when Ridgeway pulled his team out of Bradford, knowing that they had probably met the killer and failed to recognised him.
