How I helped trap Wearside Jack

MY mobile telephone rang at about 9pm. The voice at the other end was a journalist for BBC TV's 24-hour rolling news programme. A 49-year-old Sunderland man had been arrested in connection with the sending of hoax letters and a tape to police during the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, she told me.

"What's your reaction?" she asked.

I was stunned. It was October 2005, and for more than seven years I had attempted to track down the man who had become known as Wearside Jack.

My own journalistic inquiries into the case had started in 1998 but my interest was sparked a lot earlier when I worked as The Northern Echo's crime correspondent. A woman in North Shields, a pen pal of the Ripper, claimed she knew who Jack was and she allowed me to read about 300 of her letters penned by Sutcliffe.

I left her house with a headache, enough material for a series of features, and an almost insatiable appetite to discover more. The hunger stayed with me after changing jobs and, as news editor at my own local newspaper, the Sunderland Echo, the hunt for Wearside Jack began.

For seven years, away from the news desk, in my spare time, I travelled almost the length and breadth of Britain following leads.

I had knocked on doors in Hampshire, Wales, Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, Halifax and Darlington and had even made telephone inquiries in New York.

I had teamed up with a respected former Lancashire detective and kept observations on a hostel in Hackney, East London, hoping to catch sight of a possible murder suspect.

And I had trawled through newspaper archives in Leeds, Darlington, Sunderland and Preston, straining my eyes for that one nugget of information that would tell me I was on the right track. Every bit of information I uncovered I passed on to police in West Yorkshire and Lancashire without receiving - up until last year - even the courtesy of an acknowledgement.

In October 2005, one hour after West Yorkshire Police had revealed the news of the arrest in Sunderland, I hunted down the list of names I had given police from information passed to me by interested newspaper readers.

And there in one of six box files was the name and address of a 46-year-old man I had tracked down three years earlier, who two women, independently, claimed was Jack.

He was now 49. But was he the 49-year-old unnamed man West Yorkshire Police had arrested? Had I given them the lead which had led to a breakthrough in one of the biggest mysteries in North-East criminal history?

The answer came the following morning when it became widely known that the man suspected to be Wearside Jack was chronic alcoholic John Humble who lived on Sunderland's Ford Estate.

Surprisingly, and disappointingly, his name had never featured in my own hunt for Jack. Ironically, after travelling literally thousands of miles in my efforts to track him down, he lived almost on my own doorstep - just half a mile away.

I was disappointed, but I had to laugh. When Humble made his first two appearances - one via video-link from Armley Jail - at Leeds Crown Court on charges of perverting the course of justice I sat in the Press gallery and asked myself: "Is he here because of me?"

The answer, as far as West Yorkshire Police is concerned, is no, officers were going to launch a cold-case review of the Ripper hoaxer case anyway, eventually.

In 2004 the force said it would never be able to catch Jack because he could only be prosecuted for wasting police time and the limitations for bringing such a prosecution had expired. The case was too historic.

In the same year the force revealed it had "mislaid" all the original material - the original letters penned by Jack and the audiotape he sent to the head of the Ripper squad, George Oldfield.

The second-in-command of the Ripper squad, Dick Holland, told me Jack would only be caught if he walked into a police station and gave himself up: "And those things only happen in fairy tales," he said.

So what happened between West Yorkshire Police's public declarations in 2004 and the decision to relaunch the inquiry into the case of Wearside Jack in the spring of 2005, resulting in the arrest of John Humble last year?

It was something that caused the force national public embarrassment and reminded them of their biggest blunder - perhaps the most costly and fatal mistake in British policing history - when they decided to hunt a Ripper from Sunderland.

The answer lies, I believe, in the first letter of acknowledgement I had received from West Yorkshire Police in seven years in December, 2004, and also in my third, and last, book on the case of Wearside Jack, published today.

I have written literally hundreds of newspaper articles during my hunt for Jack and three television programmes - two regional and one national - which I was involved in kept reminding police of the unfinished business, the one loose end, from the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry.

Police hunted a Ripper from Sunderland for 18 months during which time three more women - including Jacqueline Hill, from Middlesbrough - were killed by Peter Sutcliffe, who was arrested, questioned and eliminated several times because he did not have a Sunderland accent.

Might Jacqueline and two of the last three victims of the Yorkshire Ripper still be alive today had Humble not sent his letters and tape? The answer, I think, is quite possibly.

Would the case of the Ripper hoaxer have been allowed to drift into history unresolved if I hadn't banged at the doors of police for eight years, constantly reminding them of the unfinished business? The answer, I think, is quite possibly.

Whatever the history, the shadow of the Ripper that has been cast over Sunderland, and to an extent the whole North-East, for 27 years has finally been lifted. Wearside Jack, the Ripper hoaxer - case closed.

* Wearside Jack is published by Ghostwriters UK and is available from Suite 10, 40 Frederick Street, Sunderland, SR1 1LN, price £9.99 plus £2.40 (P&P). The book is also available at www. ghostwritersuk.net