SON'S PAIN
The Yorkshire Ripper slaughtered my mum – I found out she turned to sex work to support me when I identified her body
NEIL JACKSON will watch Yorkshire Ripper drama The Long Shadow with mixed emotions – and could be forgiven for switching channels when it hits TV screens on Monday.
The programme will replay his torment after his beloved mum Emily, 42, was murdered by Peter Sutcliffe — leaving him to identify her body aged 17 and face the harrowing revelation that she had turned to sex work to support their hard-up family.
6
6
But, in one sense, he can’t wait for the seven-part series to begin because he wants the nation to get to know the woman he remains devoted to nearly 50 years after her brutal death.
Speaking in the living room that’s become a shrine to his mother, Neil, now 65, says: “To me, she was the best mother in the world — and I want everyone else to see that too.
“Yes, she made some really tough decisions, but that was because she would do anything to support her family.
“Money was tight and she was desperate, but she did it for us.
READ MORE ON YORKSHIRE RIPPER
“We were very close. If I needed something she made sure I had it — and she was a joyful, happy person who would do anything for anyone.
“I want to keep her memory alive and The Long Shadow will help to do that.”
Sutcliffe murdered 13 women and tried to kill seven more in a five-year reign of terror across the north of England between 1975 and 1980.
He was finally caught in 1981 after cops spotted him in a car with fake number plates. He had a sex worker in the vehicle with him.
Most read in News
Subsequent searches of his motor and the arrest scene uncovered a knife, hammer and screwdrivers, which were the Ripper’s trademark weapons.
Sutcliffe got 20 life sentences in 1981 but, in 2010, The High Court ordered he should NEVER be freed.
After 39 years under lock and key, he finally died of Covid in 2020, aged 74.
Neil — played by former Emmerdale actor Shaun Thomas, 26 — was shown the first two episodes of The Long Shadow by producers.
And he hailed the series for highlighting Sutcliffe’s evil as well as honouring Emily’s memory.
‘I had to identify her, my dad was in shock’
He adds: “It’s weird to see all of those events from nearly five decades ago portrayed on television.
“And it’s really odd to watch someone playing your 17-year-old self.
6
6
“But I reckon they’ve got it just right. These events should never be forgotten.”
Neil will never forget how his life was turned upside down when police called at the family home in Churwell, near Leeds, in January 1976 to say his mum was dead.
He said: “I can remember it like it was yesterday.
“I’d had my breakfast and I was ready to go to work, and then in one sense my life ended.
“The police took me and my dad into the front room and told us.
“They said they believed she had been murdered. It took days for it to properly sink in, even though I identified her body.
“They took us to where Mam had been taken and asked my dad to view her body. But he was in such shock he couldn’t go in, so I did it.
“Dad did eventually go to see her but it was me who had to identify her, and I was only 17. I would not wish that on my worst enemy.”
Emily had worked alongside her husband Sid in his roofing firm.
He couldn’t drive, or read and write, so she took him to jobs and kept the accounts.
Before that, the determined and hard-working mum had held down a job at a mill, where she was nicknamed Smiler because she always enjoyed a laugh and a joke with colleagues on the weaving looms.
Emily was the driving force behind the family’s move away from the cramped terraced streets of Armley, Leeds, to their new house in Churlwell, on the edge of the city.
But times were tough and they couldn’t even afford new furniture, bringing old items from their previous home, including a second-hand sofa which dated from the 1940s.
Emily even made curtains for the children’s bedrooms on her sewing machine to save money.
By late 1975, with the family drowning in debt, she took the difficult decision of becoming a sex worker on the streets of Chapeltown — Leeds’ red light district.
It was close to where she and Sid used to have nights out in the Gaiety Club.
She would charge male clients £5 each time but, soon after starting, she fell into Sutcliffe’s clutches — nearly three months after he had murdered his first victim, 28-year-old Wilma McCann.
The effect on Emily’s family, unsurprisingly, was devastating and long-term, helping to trigger a rift which continues to this day.
One sad consequence is that Emily still has no headstone in the cemetery where she is buried on the edge of Leeds.
Retired roofer Neil said: “When Sutcliffe killed Mam, he didn’t just kill her — he killed the rest of the family too.
“I had a younger brother and sister. My sister went to live with an aunt, my brother stayed with my dad and I joined the Army two months later.
“I had a difficult relationship with my dad. He was a bully and was abusive towards my mum.
“I think he forced her into sex work rather than it being only her decision.
“Years later, I had a daft argument with him over something trivial and I hadn’t spoken to him properly for 25 years by the time he died in 2007.
“My brother and sister took his side, so we have been estranged for years as well.
“My dad remarried after my mum died and she never got a headstone, and still hasn’t to this day.
“I don’t think any of that would have happened if she hadn’t fallen victim to Peter Sutcliffe so, as I say, it wasn’t just Mam who he killed.
“He killed the family.”
Emily is portrayed in the drama by Coronation Street star Katherine Kelly, who grew up in Yorkshire and said: “When you’re from that area, you are in full knowledge of those five years of terror.
“It still lives within those people who lived through that time — it changed everything.
“And it was indeed a long shadow. There was nobody that wasn’t touched by that period of time.”
The case dominated people’s lives until Sutcliffe was finally arrested, none more so than Neil.
He said: “I would watch everything and read everything about the case.
‘I still think of her every single day’
“When I was in the Army, if something came on the telly about it when I was in the room, people would say, ‘Turn it off, Neil’s here’.
“But I would say, ‘Leave it on’. I wanted to know everything that was happening, just in case there was a development that might lead to them catching the person who killed Mam.”
6
Neil remains angry that Sutcliffe spent so many years at the high-security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor, adding: “He had the life of Riley there. It wasn’t punishment, it was like being at Butlin’s.”
His turmoil is set against a backdrop of another family tragedy, which saw his elder brother Derek die in a freak accident.
The 14-year-old had been holding onto the back door when it slammed shut as a gust of wind swept through the house.
He was thrown through the glass, severing an artery in his arm which caused devastating blood loss.
His parents never fully recovered from their loss and the family business also suffered.
Despite the heartache, today Neil tries to focus not on Sutcliffe, but on his beloved mother.
He said: “I’ve got her pictures everywhere now. I feel like I am surrounded by her, which is nice.
“I still think of her every single day. I always like to be reminded of her so, although it might seem odd to some, that’s why it will be nice to see her in The Long Shadow.
“I want to keep her memory alive and this programme helps to do that.”
We told yesterday how Marcella Claxton, now 67, still suffers crippling, daily headaches nearly 50 years after serial killer Sutcliffe hit her over the head with a heavy spanner.
She needed 54 stitches in gaping wounds and also has blackouts.
She claims if cops had paid more attention to her ordeal, the Ripper may have been caught sooner.
MONSTER HAD NO REMORSE
WHEN prisoners on HMP Frankland’s A Wing tune in for The Long Shadow, they will be delighted that inmate A6214DV won’t be watching it with them.
The viewing figures for the Yorkshire Ripper drama will be high at Durham’s top-security prison – its residents love a true-crime story.
6
But, thankfully for them, they won’t have to put up with Peter Sutcliffe’s commentary.
The Yorkshire Ripper spent four years at the jail after his transfer from Broadmoor – and never stopped moaning there.
From his medical care to food quality and how the media portrayed him, Sutcliffe loved a good whinge.
Among the most sickening targets were his own victims.
Experts reckoned he had been successfully treated for the paranoid schizophrenia behind his offending, allowing his move away from Broadmoor hospital.
But, as I revealed in my 2022 book I’m The Yorkshire Ripper, whatever the treatment did or did not achieve, it failed to teach him how to show remorse.
His true feelings were revealed in private moments away from the ears of medics and prison guards, when he would say the most appalling things about his victims and their families.
He referred to one of the women he attacked as “ugly” and said of another that she “had a horrible smell about her”.
He also claimed the survivors were publicity-seekers and that he had done them all a favour by making them part of “an exclusive club”.
On then-PM Margaret Thatcher’s anger at the police’s failure to catch him, and her threat to go to Yorkshire to sort it out herself, sick Sutcliffe smirked: “If she did, she could have been one of my victims.”
READ MORE SUN STORIES
The Long Shadow rightly focuses on the victims and Sutcliffe rarely appears, which he’d have been furious about.
Neil Jackson says it was only when the Ripper died that those whose lives he ruined got justice.
Topics