Page 44 Daily Mail, Friday, August 23, 2019
Oldfield, the head of West Yorkshire
Police’s CID division, have forgotten
it. Indeed, to the millions who listened
as it was played on a news bulletins,
at the height of the Yorkshire Ripper’s
murderous reign in the summer of
1979, it was the personification of
pure evil.
‘I’m Jack,’ the speaker intoned, his
gruff North-East accent made eerier
by the whirring spool of the tape
machine on which he had recorded
his sickening message.
‘I see you are having no luck in
catching me. I have the greatest
respect for you, George, but Lord you
are no nearer catching me now than
four years ago, when I started.
‘I reckon your boys are letting you
down, George. Ya can’t be much good,
can ya?’
He warned he would strike again,
and would murder so many women
that he would claim a place in the
Guinness Book of Records.
The man ‘Jack’ was taunting,
Assistant Chief Constable George
Oldfield, had been desperately trying
to trap the Ripper for four years.
And after delivering his mocking
two-minute message — in which he
alluded to some of the Ripper murders
in seemingly intimate detail — he
signed off with a jaunty pop song by
Andrew Gold, called Thank You For
Being A Friend.
The recording, following three
similarly audacious letters sent by the
same faceless man to the police and a
national newspaper, transformed
what had become the biggestmanhunt in British criminal history.
Until they arrived, the Ripper Squad
had been convinced they were looking
for a maniac living close to the Pen-
nines, in and around which the grue-
some serial murders of at least ten
young women had been committed.
But as the letters and envelope
containing the tape were postmarked
Sunderland, and voice experts were
able to pinpoint ‘Jack’s’ accent to a
particular area of the city, Oldfield
became convinced the killer was
from Wearside.
This opinion was cemented when
forensic scientists discovered the
man who had licked the stamps and
sealed the letters was from the type B
blood-group. He was also a so-called
‘secretor’ — a man whose blood group
can be identified by traces in his
semen and saliva.
Only six per cent of males are ‘B
secretors’, and among them was the
killer of a Preston prostitute named
Joan Harrison, who was then thought
— mistakenly it transpired — to have
been one of the Ripper’s victims.
Thus, despite being warned by some
senior colleagues that the messages
might be bogus, Oldfield ordered hisT
O THOSE who knew his true identity he was just
a pathetic petty criminal. He didn’t spill a drop of
anyone’s blood, and was too much of a coward to
attack people unless he was rolling drunk, when
his wife was usually the target of his temper.
Yet John Humble, who was revealed this week to have died aged 63,
from ‘chronic alcohol abuse’, will be forever remembered as one of the
most wicked criminals of modern times.
For in playing a chilling and utterly gratuitous hoax on the police, he
was indirectly responsible for the murder of three women and
life-threatening assaults on at least two others. Furthermore, he
brought a shameful end to the careers of several senior detectives and
trashed the reputation of their force.
Few people who heard Humble’s chilling voice, as he taunted Georgeby David
Jones
His chilling Ripper
tapes fooled police
and cost three women
their lives. Now he’s
gone to the grave with
one enduring mystery:
why DID he do it?
THE HOAXER WITH
BLOOD HANDS
ON
HIS