Barbara Booth was a prostitute who advertised her services
in contact magazines and on post cards in shops. Her common law husband
was her pimp, and left the house while she entertained her customer, who
had come to murder her. A stocky middle aged man was seen to leave the
house before her husband returned to find the scene of horror. Her body
was slumped against the door to hold it shut and his young son Alan was
slaughtered along with her. Tracey, the violent pimp, knew he had a short
time alone with his victims. The same knife used to mutilate Wilma McCann
10 weeks earlier was planted in her skull firmly by her killer to link the
murders.
While the Leeds police were still waiting for forensic
results and studying the scene of this horrific crime, Superintendent Dick
Holland who was based in Bradford had just arrested Mark Rowntree, a
disturbed youth who had gone berserk and stabbed a few people to death,
then fleeing. After a few days on the run, he phoned the police to give
himself up and Holland made the most of his "capture". When Rowntree
confessed to the killings he had done, Holland persuaded him to admit to
the murder of Barbara Booth which was front page news that day. He got a
good deal in return for his extra confessions and was freed as promised by
Holland within about 7 years because the Courts accepted a plea of
diminished responsibility or madness at the time. The Leeds police hadn't
time to start their investigations and were just about to link the Booth
murder to that of Wilma McCann, through the knife, but the confession
stood. This cavalier approach to the clearing up of crime statistics by
the police led in no small way to Tracey's broad day light pick up of Mrs
Jackson, two weeks later, in Leeds, whom he murdered with unprecedented
violence in what was to be known as the Yorkshire Ripper investigation.