Book Review: After Evil by Neil Jackson & Jane Carter Woodrow

Review by Carol Anne Davis

After Evil by Neil Jackson & Jane Carter Woodrow

At a time when it’s been suggested that the Yorkshire Ripper may one day be released, this book is particularly important. It reminds the reader just how heinous Peter Sutcliffe’s crimes against women were. It’s written with the help of Neil Jackson, whose mother, Emily, was the serial killer’s second victim, suffering a shattered skull and numerous puncture wounds to her torso, probably made by a screwdriver. Her son has told his story to criminologist Jane Carter Woodrow who has a Phd in criminology from Cambridge University.

It’s a harrowing tale.

Neil, who had already suffered more than his fair share of family tragedy, was seventeen in 1976 when his parents said that they were going out to play Bingo. In reality, his father drove his mother to the Red Light District so that she could supplement the family income by having sex with men. Peter Sutcliffe, who hated women, picked her up in his vehicle, and the rest is history.

Many of the victims were part time prostitutes, and, as a result, the public were unsympathetic to their fate but Neil paints a picture of his mother as a hard working woman and something of an entrepreneur who helped her husband with his roofing business. She also sold eggs, fruit and vegetables from a van, did all the paperwork, baked, sewed and generally looked after her four children. At one point she was able to buy her family a horse and she let all of the neighbourhood youngsters have free rides on it. The Jackson’s also had the first colour television in town.

But they fell on hard times and she pacified her violent husband (now dead) by agreeing to occasionally sell her body. Neil refused to believe, for many years, that she’d done such a thing.

Only with maturity did he understand the many difficulties that she’d faced.

The police also faced numerous difficulties in solving the case. At the time, computers weren’t widely used by detectives so they had to rely on a cross-indexing system. They knew, for example, that the killer had size seven feet, that he drove a lorry, that he had a gap between his teeth and a large moustache. All of these pointers, and more, led to Peter Sutcliffe, a known misogynist.

The police set up various boxes of cards, one with the names of suspects with the right size of feet, another box with details of men with moustaches etc. If the one man appeared in a sufficient number of boxes, he was supposed to go to the top of the list of suspects and be questioned at length. The system broke down because a detective would take cards from the system to study them, so, when another detective went to look at the box, he wouldn’t find the relevant name so the suspect would drop down the list.

Eventually, after he’d killed and posthumously mutilated thirteen women, and attempted to murder several more, the lorry driver was caught by chance when a policeman noticed false number plates on his vehicle. The prostitute sitting next to him had had a very lucky escape.

This is a fascinating account of Neil Jackson’s childhood and its sad aftermath, the story of a family torn apart by bitterness, shame and domestic violence. Jane Carter Woodrow has vividly brought his story to life.