Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Michael Bilton

hotel designed to appeal to a fast-moving, international clientele. Around the periphery of the city were arterial road links – the M6 and M62 motorways – taking traffic north and south, east and west. In no time at all, a driver could speed from Bradford and Leeds, over the Pennines and into the heart of Manchester. From there to Moss Side took ten minutes by car. Just like Chapeltown in Leeds, and Bradford’s Manningham, Manchester’s red-light district was a formerly prosperous area fallen on hard times where large terraced houses had long been converted into flats. Together with Hulme, where Jean Jordan lived in a run-down council block, it was, and remains today, among the poorest areas in the country. In twenty-first century Britain, Moss Side and Hulme score first and fifth on the government’s most recent index of urban deprivation. A high concentration of ethnic minorities form a third of the local population. Lone parent households abound and the area has had high levels of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion for years. Sixty per cent of households receive social security and a third of local people are long-term unemployed. Fifty-four per cent of local youngsters leave school without qualifications, and only 3.7 per cent of them manage to get five GCSE passes at grades A–C.

      Nine days after Jean Jordan was murdered, her body lay on an old allotment site off Princess Road in the suburb of Chorlton, near Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, two miles from where she had lived. It was found at lunchtime on 10 October. Adjacent to Princess Road was an iron gateway opening on to a track, bordered on both sides by trees. The track led into an area of disused allotments, measuring roughly a hundred yards square. The murder scene was between the cemetery and a new area of ground recently provided for allotment holders by Manchester Corporation. The new allotments had been fenced off from the disused land, which then became quickly overgrown. It was well known as a place where prostitutes took clients for sex. Those among the Greater Manchester Police murder squad who saw the body claim it as one of the most horrific crime scenes they have ever witnessed. And for twenty-three-year-old Bruce Jones, the unfortunate local dairy worker who called the police, the sight left him with nightmares for years to come. He held an allotment on the adjoining land and had merely been looking for disused house bricks with a friend.