By night, though, it becomes a different kind of habitat, a venue for courting couples and lovers seeking seclusion for amorous recreation. Prostitutes in the 1970s brought their clients here, so it would have been nothing unusual late on a Saturday evening in 1977 for the residents living in the great Victorian mansions along Park and West Avenues, which over-look this part of the park, to see a car pull off the road and stop, and for the headlights to be switched off. Opposite these grand homes with names like ‘Woodlands’ and ‘The Clockhouse’ stands Soldier’s Field, nowadays a recreation area for organized sport, so-called because the army used it as a training ground in the 1890s.
Standing amid a number of beech trees on the periphery of this vast expanse of playing fields was a large flat-roofed pavilion, built of York stone and used as changing rooms by visiting amateur football teams. Sunday morning, 6 February 1977, was bitterly cold with a clear sky. The beech trees stood denuded of leaves, and cast across the ground long shadows in an unexpected burst of warmth and light from a winter sun that hung low in the temporarily cloudless sky behind the houses in West Avenue. Lying on muddy ground in the pavilion’s shade, and hidden from the road, was a body, discovered by a man out jogging at 7.50 that morning. John Bolton, a forty-seven-year-old accountant, lived a stone’s throw from the park. Most mornings he got in a run before breakfast and it was on one of these that he spotted the corpse. At first he wasn’t sure what it was. Then, as he got closer, he could see it was a woman lying on her side. Her face, turned downwards towards the grass, was concealed by her shoulder-length brown hair. ‘I brushed the hair to one side,’ he said, ‘and then I saw the blood on her neck. Her eyes were glazed and staring. She was obviously dead and I ran to one of the houses to call the police.’
Dennis Hoban, as deputy ACC (crime), attended the scene with his longtime friend and colleague Jim Hobson, now detective chief superintendent in charge of the Eastern Area CID. This was Hobson’s patch and he was senior investigating officer. Hoban wore his traditional suit and a Burberry trench coat, but had abandoned his usual trilby or peaked cap, leaving his balding pate that morning devoid of headgear and exposed to the balmy rays of the sun, which after a long winter was something akin to a tonic. Hoban wasn’t treading on anyone’s toes. He saw it as a courtesy to Hobson more than anything else, or so at least he would have convinced himself. Living only a few minutes’ drive away, Hoban could not possibly have passed up the opportunity to visit a crucial crime scene like this, particularly with the murders of McCann and Jackson unsolved for a year and fresh in his mind. The most superficial examination had made it clear to everyone that this young woman had suffered severe head injuries. However, it was not until Professor Gee arrived at the scene that the full horror became apparent.
Gee arrived at 10 a.m., followed fifteen minutes later by Edward Mitchell, a forensic scientist from the laboratory at Harrogate. By then the standard murder investigation procedures had swung into action. The crime scene was taped off, duckboards laid on the muddy ground, the twenty-strong uniformed task force alerted to conduct a fingertip search; and a black plastic screen about thirty-five feet long was placed in front of the body to veil it from prying eyes. In the distance, officers in uniform began alerting the football teams arriving to play their fixtures that the matches would have to be cancelled while the pitches were minutely examined for clues. When Gee first saw the body it lay on the grass with the face directed towards the left shoulder. The upper part was clad in a long brown, machine-knit woollen cardigan with a zip fastener; the lower part, from the waist downwards, was covered by a short brown imitation suede coat with fur trimming. The feet protruded beyond the end of the coat and there was a sock on the left foot but the right foot was bare. Blood soiled her head, hair and cardigan as well as her neck. Leaves beside the body also had a little blood on them. Beside the body was a tampon. Later laboratory analysis confirmed she was having a period at the time she was killed. The tampon was lightly covered in blood, showing she was nearing the end of her monthly cycle. On the other side of the body, nearer to the pavilion, a trail of blood ran between the body and a handbag lying on leaves nearly four feet off. The flap of the handbag was open and a cosmetics bag and a lipstick were next to it. Beneath the handbag was a mortice key and a 1p coin.
Tyre tracks from a vehicle could clearly be seen between the body and the back of the pavilion in an area of muddy ground clear of trees. The tracks led from the roadway, along the back of the pavilion, and stopped close to the body. Mitchell began to examine the surrounding area, collecting his array of samples and taping the woman’s face. Adhesive tape was stretched across areas of bare skin on her arms, legs and back to pick up fibres, possibly from the killer’s clothing. These fibres would be examined under powerful microscopes and compared with the woman’s clothing. Anything ‘foreign’ would be possible confirmation of Locard’s theory of contact and exchange.
After the body had been photographed in situ, the coat covering the lower part of the body was removed to reveal some bizarre details. Originally the woman had worn two pairs of pants, one pair over her tights, as well as a pair of long light-coloured socks over the tights, presumably to make her footwear more comfortable. Now the woman’s long brown leather boots, with three-inch block heels and two-inch soles, lay along the backs of her legs. As she lay dead on the ground, they had been deliberately placed on her legs, stretching from her thighs down to her calves. When the boots were lifted off, the left leg only was found to have a rolled-down pair of tights bunched up around her left knee. Rolled up into the tights was a pair of red pants and the missing sock from her right foot. There were also fragments of leaves and ground debris tucked into the top of the tights. The woman’s other pants, a small brown nylon pair, were in position over her backside and covering her genitalia.
Once the cardigan was pulled upwards towards the woman’s head, her yellow skirt was found bunched up around her waist, together with a blue underslip. She also wore a yellow jacket beneath which her yellow bra was still fastened. After her temperature was recorded and the body photographed once more, she was turned on her back on to a large white plastic sheet. Her hands were crossed over the lower part of the body, the left wrist overlaying the right. Around her right wrist were four metal bangles. There was a seventeen-jewelled fake-gold watch with a narrow expanding strap on the left wrist, its glass partly obscured by droplets of water inside. It was no longer working and the hands were stopped at the 8.50 position. Time had literally run out for her.
Now Gee, Hoban, Hobson and the others could see there was a large wound at the front of the throat, with soiling of the surrounding skin and the front of the jacket, which was fastened with one button. Beneath her hands in the lower part of the abdomen was a truly shocking wound. A large slashing cut on the left side of the stomach had sliced through the abdominal wall. A number of coils of intestine protruded and these were slightly soiled with blood, matted with leaves and pieces of twig. Still more photographs were taken before the body was wrapped in the plastic sheet, ready to be taken to the mortuary for Gee to carry out a more detailed six-hour examination.
Hobson’s team had meanwhile been examining the contents of the woman’s handbag to see if they could identify her. As the senior investigating officer he quickly needed to know as much about her as possible. The handbag yielded a vital clue: a name and address in Roundhay. From this it transpired that the dead woman was called Irene Richardson; that she had applied for a job as a nanny with a family in Roundhay a week or two previously. The person who advertised for the nanny was then able to provide Irene’s home address, a miserable rooming house in Cowper Street, Chapeltown. Apart from a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches, a few bus tickets and a Yale and mortice key, Irene Richardson’s entire wealth lay in her purse – all 35½ pence of it.
Everyone agreed that what was learned from inquiries over the next few weeks about the lost soul who was Irene Richardson amounted to an immensely sad story. She had been twenty-eight years old, penniless, and fending for