A 28 year-old who lived in a shabby rooming house in
Chapeltown. Her two daughters had been fostered a month before her death.
The murder scene
The toilets beside the murder scene
Tracey moved to Ireland from the Yorkshire area on Good
Friday 1976 when the Yorkshire police were looking for a bearded ,
tattooed
Irishman resembling him in connection with the Ripper murders. The local
Sergeant could pinpoint the exact date when I asked him nine years later.
There was an incident in the town involving Tracey which made him remember
it.
It was also significant that he returned to Ireland
voluntarily. Normally he would be deported. A few weeks later Sutcliffe
committed the strange assault on Marcella Claxton in Tracey's area of
operations which made him take an interest. Tracey was well aware of the
arrest of both Mark Rowntree for his murder of Barbara Booth, and Stefan
Kiszko for the murder of Lesley Moleseed. This was his business.
This man had a most unusual insight and predilection for
violent sex crimes. Perhaps Tracey put it together that the mystery man
Sutcliffe was making a statement to the police with the attack on Miss
Claxton. Nobody had a better insight into such amazing behaviour than
Billy Tracey. He determined to smoke this crazy criminal out. This may
sound bizarre but that was the extraordinary Billy Tracey. That is exactly
what he achieved in the end. He played criminal mind games with people and
used the police as his accomplice.
It is incredible, but the whole Ripper story is an
incredible saga. At the start of 1977 he took a job in a meat factory
which was to be the only job he ever had, and with this as a regular cover
to fool the Irish police, he embarked on a campaign of murders in West
Yorkshire designed to arouse this crazy attacker of Miss Claxton into
further retaliation.
The next three murders were done on Saturday nights and he
would be back on the job with B.O.P.A. his employer, on Monday morning,
reading about them in the Daily Mirror. Irene Richardson was killed with
three hammer blows to the head, her stomach was ripped open with the claws
of the hammer, her intestines spilling out, she had her throat cut and her
body was rearranged like Joan Harrison in Preston. There were instant
Ripper headlines.
The police were in no doubt it was him again. There was no
talk about copy cats or assaults. All the Ripper murders were unambiguous
for their sheer savagery. Sutcliffe's lame statement of how he did this
murder is reminiscent of his assault on Marcella Claxton.
