Ripper victim's Orkney roots
Orphaned son plans poignant visit to county
(Story dated: Thursday, May 12, 2005)

The Yorkshire Ripper’s first victim hailed from Orkney, it was revealed by her son this week.

Richard McCann was just five when his mother, Wilma, was found murdered just yards from the family home in Leeds.

After an abusive childhood following her death, Richard had a desperate need to discover more about the woman - dubbed a prostitute by the press - but to him just “mum”.

“Her parents Betty and George Newlands were married on Flotta and my great-grandparents, William and Wilomena, nee McPhee, last lived at 26 Wellington Street, in Kirkwall. William died in 1944 and Wilomena in 1952. Mum was named after my great-grandmother,” Richard told The Orcadian this week.

Betty and George, who had four daughters and seven sons, left Orkney shortly before Wilma, as she preferred to be known, was born.

“Some of my uncles were born on Orkney but they left to look for work elsewhere before my mum was born.”

Richard, 35, has a great desire to visit the county, and plans to travel north with his girlfriend Helen as soon as he can.

“I feel like I know where I have come from now,” he said. “I want to go to the place where my grandparents were married - it is a significant place in my history which was kept from me.”

For 30 years Richard and his sisters have been haunted by what Peter Sutcliffe - known as the Yorkshire Ripper - did to their family.

They have had to come to terms with the fact that she was brutally killed and mutilated by a man who has become infamous for preying on prostitutes.

Wilma was 28 and a mother of four when her body was found on October 30, 1975, lying on an embankment, just yards from her council home in nearby Scott Hall Avenue, Leeds.

Sonia, Richard’s older sister, woke him in the early hours of the morning to go and look for their mum who hadn’t returned home.

Detective Chief Superinten-dent Dennis Hoban was in charge of the inquiry. When the pathologist, completed his report, Hoban learned that Wilma had been struck twice on the back of the head, and then stabbed in the neck, chest and abdomen 15 times.

Fuelled by media and police investigation, the public remained concerned for women for over five years. That was until January, 1981, and the arrest of Olivia Reivers and her client, Peter Sutcliffe. Olivia was supposed to have been the Yorkshire Ripper’s 14th victim.

But she was lucky.

The 24-year-old was plying her trade in Sheffield when she got into Sutcliffe’s car. The police approached them and became suspicious. It was 11pm on January 3, 1981. The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was over.

But the search for answers was only beginning for the four young children left as orphans after Wilma’s murder - Sonia, seven, Richard, who was nearly six, Donna, four, and the youngest Angela, who was just two.

They were shipped off to a children’s home for three months after her death, and then to live with their father, who had split up with Wilma the year before she was killed.

“We thought that was a new start but we all suffered at his brutal hands. He was a violent man in drink. We all fled the house eventually in our teenage years,” Richard, who is studying social policy at Leeds University, continued.

He did not know where his mum was buried until he turned 16.

Richard and Sonia have become almost obsessive in their need to know more about why Peter Sutcliffe did what he did.

Part of that has been to take part in a television documentary - the BBC’s The Ripper Murdered My Mum, which was shown on Tuesday night.

Richard tried to make contact with Sutcliffe by writing to him in Broadmoor hospital. He wanted to understand what drove him to kill and kill again.

“Up until recently I tried not to think about him. If I sat thinking about revenge, it is such a negative thing, I thought it might damage me in some way.”

Richard met a couple of women who befriended Sutcliffe in a bid to get more information out of him for the police.

They told him that he had shown no remorse for what he had done and, in fact, went as far as to say that the children of the victims were better off without their mothers.

“I am starting to feel hatred for the man, now it is starting to sink in just what he has done,” Richard continued. “Up until now it has been a bit of a surreal nightmare. The reality is he went out and took my mum’s life.”

They were so young when their mum died that they only have hazy memories of her - but are adamant that she was not a prostitute.

“All we have are nice memories, she never raised a hand to us. She was always out there trying to survive. She used to make crepe roses and would go knocking on doors selling them.”

Of the 13 women Sutcliffe killed, seven had children and Richard and Sonia were determined to trace others left motherless by the Ripper.

Finally, after writing hundreds of letters and hiring a private detective, they met up with the son of victim Irene Richardson and have forged a special friendship that only they can understand.

Richard is in the process of writing his second book, Into the Light, about coming to terms with his traumatic past.

“Our lives have always been overshadowed by Peter Sutcliffe, but now we must leave him behind and concentrate on what matters - our future and our memories of mum. He can never take them from us.”