03/11/05 - The Ripper Case: 'The feeling of terror was in every home'
By The Huddersfield Daily Examiner
Examiner news editor NEIL ATKINSON was the paper's crime correspondent when the Yorkshire Ripper was on the prowl. He was one of the first on the scene after Peter Sutcliffe struck in Huddersfield, killing teenage prostitute Helen Rytka.
Here he recalls those dark days.
IT WAS a routine call, made like so many hundreds before.
But it was a call which was to ensure Huddersfield entered criminal notoriety.
My Friday afternoon call to the CID office was one that was to change my life - and the lives of thousands of people in Huddersfield.
The policeman on the other end of the line was a well-respected detective whom I had known for many years.
And his response to my routine query "Anything stirring?" was the catalyst for a madcap spell which saw the world's Press and other media descend on Huddersfield.
Ten minutes after that fateful call I was standing in the January rain in Huddersfield's red light district, waiting for confirmation that the Yorkshire Ripper had struck again.
It was a little before 4pm as dusk settled that I joined a knot of grim-faced detectives and police officers outside a timber yard in Great Northern Street, Hillhouse.
Less than 40ft away lay the battered and mutilated body of Helen Rytka, partially concealed beneath a filthy sheet of corrugated iron, alongside a semi- derelict wooden garage.
The teenager had become the Ripper's latest tragic victim.
Helen, 18, was a prostitute by necessity. She dreamed of a career in art, but needed money to survive.
Sadly, that need led her to a fatal encounter with Bradford lorry driver Peter Sutcliffe three days earlier as she plied her trade in the cold January nights.
Sadly, it was only hours before her body was found that her disappearance had been reported to police by her anxious twin sister, Rita.
The girls, who shared a dingy flat in Highfields, overlooking Huddersfield ring road, had a system of checking each other's punters as they were picked up in Great Northern Street.
It was a system that worked until that January night, when Helen climbed into a car driven by a bearded stranger.
The girls had worked as prostitutes for only a few weeks, arriving in town from Leeds, where they had been in foster care.
Up to that point, Huddersfield had seemed immune to the Ripper's killing spree.
He was a man who haunted the twilight streets of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester - not towns like Huddersfield.
But from now on the effects of his reign of terror would be felt in every home and every workplace in Huddersfield.
Women no longer felt certain about venturing out at night.
Night-time social events were cancelled. Husbands and fathers became willing taxi drivers, picking up wives and daughters from work and college.
And many, many men fell under suspicion. They were stopped in the streets by the huge army of police drafted into town.
They were questioned in a massive house-to-house inquiry which went through street after street across many Huddersfield areas.
And they were stopped in their vehicles by officers carrying likenesses of Britain's most wanted man.
They were looking for a bearded man, a man with dark hair, a man with a moustache, a man with strange "piercing" eyes.
All this came to light in the days and weeks after Helen's murder. Hundreds of reporters and TV crews arrived in Huddersfield and the town's image of a friendly, busy textile town was swept aside as newspapers and television films painted a squalid picture.
Ripper hunt chief George Oldfield - who lived at Grange Moor - had arrived at the scene that January night with the then West Yorkshire Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, and Peter Bottomley, a Huddersfield detective.
They viewed Helen's final resting place - and confirmed everyone's worst fears.
Hours later, a tired-looking Oldfield would repeat the same mantra that had occupied his life for three years.
He confronted the gallery of TV cameras, photographers' lenses and notepads and admitted that the man he sought so desperately had struck in his home town.
He sat in the social club bar at Huddersfield police headquarters - a place more used to happy retirement parties - to admit: "No woman is safe while this man is on the streets."
It was to be only a couple of weeks before the Ripper hunt moved to Bradford, where another body was found.
But it would be years before Sutcliffe was caught and the people of Huddersfield could get back to something like normality.
He had left a stain on Huddersfield that would never vanish. |
