Even while the police worked feverishly gathering information in relation to Jayne MacDonald's murder, Peter Sutcliffe prepared to kill again. It was Saturday night 9 July 1977 when Peter left Sonia at home in Tanton Crescent with her parents. Driving the white Corsair with the black roof, he headed for Manningham Lane and the red-light Lumb Lane district of Bradford.

Maureen Long, at home in Farsley, near Leeds, also made preparations to spend Saturday night in Bradford. She spent the first part of the evening visiting various pubs in Bradford, including one where she met her estranged husband and made arrangements to spend the night at his home in Laisterdyke, Bradford. The rest of the evening was spent at Tiffany's, in the Bali Hai discotheque, where she danced and drank until just after 2.00am.

Maureen Long, Victim

As she waited in the long queue at a nearby taxi rank to get a lift to her husband's home, a white car pulled up. The driver, Peter Sutcliffe, offered her a lift. Peter drove Maureen to Bowling Back Lane where he struck her a massive blow to the back of the head. As she lay on the ground, he stabbed her in the abdomen and back. The barking of a dog nearby interrupted his frenzied attack and he left Maureen for dead as he fled the scene. His car was seen leaving the area by a nightwatchman who was working nearby, at 3:27 am. He described the car as a Ford Cortina Mark II, white with a black roof.

Two women living in a nearby caravan found Maureen the next morning. They had heard cries for help, went to investigate and found Maureen Long lying seriously injured on the ground. She should have been dead. The injuries she sustained would have killed most people, but somehow Maureen survived.

She was rushed to hospital in Bradford where she underwent emergency surgery. Later she was transferred to Leeds for major neurological surgery. Oldfield begged doctors for an opportunity to talk with Maureen before they commenced surgery. Maureen tried hard to recall as many details as she could. She remembered leaving Tiffany's and the car that had stopped to give her a lift. The man, as she recalled, was white, with a large build, about thirty-five with light brown, shoulder-length hair; he would have been about six foot, with puffed cheeks and big hands. She wasn't sure about the colour of the car, it was white or yellow, or blue. She would not remember anything when she came out of surgery.

It would be six weeks before Maureen could leave hospital, only to spend a further three weeks in a convalescent home, before returning home. All she had to live on was her thirteen-pound-a week social security payment. In 1978, she appeared in the Bradford Magistrates Court, charged with stealing from three shops in the city centre. She told the court that she was waiting for compensation for the attack, having only received £300. She was fined seventy-five pounds. In April 1979, the Criminal Compensation Board offered her £1500. She appealed. She was later awarded £1250 as an interim payment, while her case would be held under medical review. To help make ends meet, Maureen sometimes received payment for interviews about the attack.

While Maureen recuperated in hospital, the police investigation began. Detectives set up interview rooms at Tiffany's nightclub in an attempt to glean as much information as they could from the patrons who had been there the week before. The investigation into the attack on Maureen Long would involve 304 officers working full-time. They interviewed 175,000 people, took 12,500 statements and checked 10,000 vehicles. The nightwatchman's description of the killer's car as a white Ford Cortina Mark II matched the thousands of cars used by taxi-drivers in the area.

Police had already contemplated the possibility of the killer being a taxi driver. He would have a good knowledge of the area, enabling him to know the best haunts for prostitutes and the quiet, secluded areas that he could take them to. They had started questioning taxi drivers after Tina Atkinson's murder and now they increased that line of investigation. Most were quickly cleared, but one taxi driver, Terry Hawkshaw was not. The police were not completely satisfied with his explanations about his whereabouts on the nights of the murders. He lived alone with his mother in a central location to all of the killings. He was thirty-six years old and his appearance fitted the general description of the killer.

Terry Hawkshaw was placed under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Police followed him as he drove his taxi and drank at local pubs. Armed with a search warrant, they entered his home, searching it from top to bottom, including dustbins and his uncle's tool shed. They removed all of his clothing from his home, cut locks from his hair and took blood samples. They even took the carpets from his car.

He was taken in for questioning a number of times. On one such occasion, he was held from eight o'clock in the evening until eight o'clock the following morning. Meanwhile the real killer continued to elude police and drove freely through the streets of Yorkshire looking for his next quarry.

For Peter and Sonia Sutcliffe, life was really beginning to improve. On August 18 1977, they had exchanged contracts for the purchase of their lovely new home and Sonia began her first teaching position at Holmfield First School in Bradford two weeks later. Then on Monday 26, they moved into their home and Peter bought himself another second hand Ford Corsair, a red one to replace the white Corsair he had sold on 31 August.

Sutcliffe home in Bradford

The following Saturday, 1 October 1977, after spending the day working on his new car, he decided to take it out for a test drive. By 9:30 pm, Jean Bernadette Jordan was climbing into the car with him near her home in Moss Side, Manchester. Jean, born in Scotland, had moved to Manchester after running away from home at the age of sixteen. She had met Alan Royle on the day of her arrival and moved in with him. Two years later they had their first child, Alan. Two years after that, their second son James was born. Although they were still living together when she was murdered, they had mutually agreed to live separate lives.

Earlier on the evening of 1 October, as Jean poured Alan a glass of lemonade, he told her that he would be going out for the evening. He left her watching television but she was gone when he returned later. He assumed that she had decided to go out with her girlfriends who were also "on the game." Instead she had taken Peter Sutcliffe to a quiet area of vacant land between allotments and the Southern Cemetery where she was to have sexual intercourse with him for £5. Before getting out of the car, she put the £5note in a hidden compartment of her handbag. Once out of the car, Peter used his hammer to hit Jean over the head a total of thirteen times. He then hid her body in undergrowth near the fence between the cemetery and the allotments.

Peter, now fully recovered from the burst of frenzied anger, calmly drove home across the Pennines to Sonia and his new house, and anxiously awaited the headlines that would announce his deed to the world. As he and Sonia planned the house-warming party to be held on Sunday evening, Peter began to worry about the £5 note he had given Jean. It was a brand new note and it may be possible to trace it back to him. By Sunday 9 October, there still had been no word of the discovery of Jean's body in the papers. If he was at all troubled by the events of the week before, his party guests could not tell. It was almost midnight when Peter offered to take some of his relatives home in the red Corsair, while Sonia went to bed.

After dropping his guests at their homes, Peter did not immediately return to Garden Lane, instead he drove over the Pennines once again. He found Jean's body exactly as he had left it, but her handbag was missing. As he searched the area, he became frantic at the prospect of the police finding the £5 note. When his frustration and fury was at its peak, he dragged the lifeless and already rotting body away from its hiding place. He tore Jean's clothes from her body, and then stabbed her over and over again. Eighteen times he stabbed at her breasts, chest, stomach and vagina. They were fierce slashing swipes, some 8 inches deep. One extended from her left shoulder down to her right knee. When the rage subsided, he thought again of the £5 note, and attempted to cut off Jean's head. His intention was to divert police attention by disposing of her head somewhere else. When he realised that it was an impossible task with the tools he had, he gave up and went home.

It hadn't occurred to Alan to report Jean as missing. She had often just taken off from home without notice to visit relatives in Scotland, so he assumed that it was the same this time and that Jean would turn up in her own good time. It wasn't until he read the report in the paper on the evening of 10 October that he became concerned. The report described the young woman, who had been found by a neighbour at midday, as having shoulder-length auburn hair and listed some of the clothing found. What the report didn't say was that her blackened head was unrecognisable. It had been flattened with the severity of the many blows she had received. Her belly was gaping open and putrefaction was evident.

At the Manchester C.I.D. Headquarters, Alan showed Det. Chief Supt. Jack Ridgeway a recent photo of Jean, but it was impossible for Ridgeway to tell if it was the same woman that he had seen earlier that day. Reluctant to subject Alan to the sight of Jean's mutilated body, Ridgeway suggested that there might be something in the house that would have Jean's fingerprints on it. Alan immediately remembered the lemonade bottle that was still sitting where Jean had placed it over a week before. The prints on the bottle were a definite match with those of the corpse.

A friend of Jean's, Anna Holt, had also gone to the police after reading the report in the paper. She insisted on seeing the body and positively identified her as Jean Jordan. Anna told police that Jean had only recently decided to give up "the game" and settle down with Alan and the children to lead a decent home life.

Alan was devastated by the tragedy and would lose his job as a chef because he found it impossible to concentrate on his work. Thoughts of Jean and how she died would constantly torment him. Their son Alan, considered a bright boy before his mother's murder, was retarded by the trauma of the ensuing months. By his fifth year he was still only able to speak a few monosyllabic words.