THE DEAL
Kerry MacGill
Kerry Macgill is a Bradford based solicitor who legally represented Peter Sutcliffe after his arrest. He brokered a deal with detective Chief Superintendant Dick Holland which was designed to get the best possible treatment for his client. In this he was hugely successful. MacGill is a Crown Court judge sitting in Leeds and Bradford presently and has been for several years already. Such are the rewards for serious crime.
Peter Sutcliffe had murdered Jacqueline Hill in Headingly Leeds only six weeks before his arrest in Sheffield and this murder was still fresh in peoples minds. Sutcliffe was well described as a suspect and his car was equally well described.
He had driven the wrong way up a one-way street and made no attempt to hide when he attacked Jacqueline ,allowing another student Andree Proctor to get a good look at him. The student reported the assault and the police came but didnt make a thorough search.
Andree Proctor
Jacqueline died of exposure on a frosty November night and had she been found when the police searched the area shortly after the attack she would have survived ,as did two of his earlier victims only weeks before, one of whom, Miss Lee was also a student in Leeds university. The details of this attack were never revealed to the press by the police for “operational” reasons.
Sutcliffe, the seriously disturbed madman who had told his friend Trevor Birdsall that he was the Ripper,who had told a private detective Jim Lyness that he was the Ripper, who phoned Olive Smelt in the vain hope that the police would trace the call to him, whose workmates openly called him “the Ripper” because the police had been checking so much on him, who had been in touch with clairvoyants telling them he was the Ripper ,who had brought Leeds to a standstill when he phoned the police to say the Ripper would strike in Leeds on a certain night, who had attracted so much police attention that they were certain he did not fit the Ripper frame was finally being taken seriously. Forensic science and solid evidence were being discarded in favour of confessions with the backing of four eminent psychiatrists who would certify his insanity .
Dr Hugo Milne
The police needed to bury the Ripper to cover up all the glaring blunders they had been exposed to by him. They had much to hide ,not the least of which was their failure to hold Sutcliffe since January 1980 when they knew he was the copy-cat killer. This resulted in three more murders and at least three more assaults by him which could have been avoided. They were much more interested in getting their hands on Billy Tracey and couldn’t risk alerting him to the arrest of his copy-cat. The public paid the price.
Kerry Macgill brokered a deal which included no trial, a place reserved in a mental hospital with room service and choice of meals and a good likelyhood of parole within seven years, for his client who was willing to confess to anything, to a receptive policeman, Dick Holland.
Holland was able to relay to Sutcliffe his story about the arrest ,the subsequent trial and conviction of Mark Rowntree, another disturbed maniac who had stabbed two people in Leeds in 1975 and was at large and knew the police were looking for him . Rowntree phoned Holland who was then based in Bradford, to arrange to give himself up and Holland subsequently arrested him. Coincidentally two brutal murders were committed in Leeds the day before his arrest and by the time Holland was finished with Rowntree he had admitted to these also, a coup for Dick Holland who was clearing up unsolved crimes in record time. The Leeds police hadn’t had time to get their forensic results back from the laboratory before the crimes were solved with Rowntree’s confessions. He was ordered to be held without limit of time but was freed on parole seven years later. Sutcliffe was given all these details and went along with the deal.
Holland also secured the confession and subsequent conviction in Court of Stefan Kiszko for the murder of eleven year old Leslie Moleseed. Forensic evidence which could clear Kiszko was never revealed at the trial and Holland basked in the glory of a successful conviction stemming largely from the confession he had extracted out of the terrified Kiszko who admitted the crime under the duress of many hours of repeated threatening behaviour by the bulky Holland. All these successful cases led to his promotion to Detective Chief Superintendant of police and this was the policeman who headed up the Yorkshire Ripper investigation and brokered the deal with Sutcliffes legal team. Holland’s record of fitting up fall guys for murder was something that Billy Tracey was all too well aware of.
This murder of Leslie Moleseed is now an unsolved case once more. Ironically it bears many resemblances to the admitted and fully corroborated attacks on Peter Sutcliffe’s other victims ,namely Mrs Smelt, Mrs Rogulsky, Tracy Browne and Marcella Claxton. Semen was found on Miss Brown’ clothing indicating her assailant had masturbated on her. Miss Moleseed received the same treatment four months later in the same general vicinity. Because the semen was not B secretor blood group Miss Brown’s assault was never in the Ripper frame. Even when her photo fit description of her assailant closely matched those of Sutcliffe’s later victims in the investigation, her attack was never in the frame. Marcella Claxton saw and accurately described Sutcliffe who masturbated over her after battering her over the head. He wiped himself with tissues and threw a fiver on the ground beside her, telling her not to go to the police. She also described his white car with red upholstry . A similarly described car was sought after the Moleseed murder. It would be conclusive now, to compare Sutcliffe’s semen with the evidence which cleared Stefan Kiszko in 1992 but was witheld at his trial. The Claxton assault was never in the Ripper frame until after Sutcliffe’s arrest when they wanted to clear everything associated with him including the Ripper murders. Needless to say when he was confessing to all his crimes the Moleseed murder would not be of interest to Dick Holland because Kiszko was convicted for that.
Sutcliffe, after his arrest was very anxious to conceal his perverse sexual motive in his crimes preferring to portray that he was on a mission from God. The sexual evidence in these early assaults is clear. Perhaps when he realised that the Ripper was manipulating him later in the game, he committed attacks in his efforts to be arrested and this was his mission.
After Sutcliffe’s trial I put most of these facts to Kerry Macgill in a letter. He never replied.
Nine years later he was assisting Sonia Sutcliffe to pursue a magazine, Private Eye, in a libel action in the High Court in London for alleged damages to her. I travelled there and when I approached him he rebuffed me and refused to talk. She was awarded massive damages by a sympathetic jury even though she perjured herself. Kerry Macgill succeeded again.
When Dick Holland faced criminal charges for the wrongful conviction of Stefan Kiszko, who better to turn to for legal advice than Kerry Macgill, the Bradford solicitor who had negotiated the sweet deal for Sutcliffe years earlier.
Macgill’s handling of this case got Holland off the charges on the technicalities of time and memory lapse..
All in all Kerry Macgill has played a major role in this debacle by his blinkered vision of wanting to win the best possible deal for his client without consideration for the victims who were treated like pawns in his legal dealings.
Evidence has been ignored, justice has been perverted, the real Yorkshire Ripper, Billy Tracey has been facilitated to remain free to commit crimes against other innocent victims unaware of the implications of Macgill’s deals.
