Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 Read Free Page A

returned to the terraced
two-up, two-down opposite my grandmother. There was no bedroom for me, so I slept on a camp bed underneath the stairs in the living room, still spending a lot of time with my grandmother, whose
health was declining (she died when I was 21). I was also playing the saxophone in a band, and devoting more time to this than to college work: I took two A levels, in Biology and Chemistry, and
when the results came out I had an F (fail) for Biology and an O (O-level grade) for Chemistry. I stared at them: FO. At that moment, I felt the letters were spelling out a message to me, to give
up my academic hopes and just get on with life.
    One thing that both my parents unconsciously handed to me was a desire to be my own boss. My dad ran his own guest house, my mum and stepdad made and sold soft toys on market stalls. I’d
been helping them since I was thirteen, I knew everything I needed to know about making teddy bears and other popular stuffed toys, and I was soon running two market stalls of my own. It was my
first taste of business success. I was nineteen, I had seven outworkers (women who made the toys), two stalls, and a business supplying soft toys as arcade prizes to all the concessions along the
seafront at Rhyl.
    With my girlfriend, I was also soon buying property, jumping at the chance to buy a rundown place in Toxteth, Liverpool, then another one in Birkenhead, where we lived, then another one. The
band took up all my spare time: we were punk rockers, and we went by the name of Dust Choir, which makes me cringe today. But it was good fun.
    Then I crashed and burned: I lost it all. My girlfriend split with me, and I was devastated because I did not see itcoming. At the tender age of twenty-two I
couldn’t deal with the rejection. I needed to get away, and with a mate we left Merseyside in an old red Escort van which I bought for £200 from a bloke in a pub, which needed a pair of
pliers to keep the choke out, and which I had to rev up at traffic lights in case it stalled. I had £130, a suitcase of clothes and a tent. We more or less stuck a pin in a map and decided to
go to Cambridge, because it sounded like it would be a beautiful place, which it is. But what I saw for the next few months was not the lovely city, but potato fields, where we worked as pickers, a
car components factory, where I worked on a production line, and a campsite where we pitched the tent.
    Even the campsite did not last: when my mate bailed out and went back home, I couldn’t pay the site rent and I wasn’t allowed back to get my tent and my possessions. The van had been
towed away by the police as it had no tax and MOT, and was, after the journey down, undriveable. I was, for a short time, truly homeless. I switched my shifts at the factory to mainly nights, and
during the day dozed on a bus shelter seat, and occasionally in a trench halfway from the town centre to the factory. I was washing at the railway station and walking to work. In desperation one
cold night I asked a couple of policemen in a police car to arrest me, just so that I could get warm: they declined. I was so rundown and filthy that I actually caught scabies, which was horrible,
and I felt ashamed because to me scabies meant dirt and poverty. I must have been a bit smelly because my workmates at the factory showed me where there was a shower to clean myself up.
    It was a very bleak time, but when I look back it was important. It reinforced my need to be successful, to make something of myself, and my strong feeling that I would always have todo it myself, without any help. It also gave me a great empathy with people who find themselves at the bottom of the heap, with nobody to turn to and nowhere to live: eventually, years
down the line, this helped me understand the dire poverty of the Ripper victims. I knew, as they knew, the overpowering drive for the basics of life: shelter and food.
    Luckily, I kept on working and with my wages could