Episode 4 of The Long Shadow tells the real-life story of Terry Hackshaw, a cabbie who became the prime suspect in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
Hackshaw — who's played by Ian Lloyd Anderson in the ITV series — came to the attention of ACC George Oldfield after he took over the investigation from DC Jim Hobson.
The Long Shadow shows ACC Oldfield (David Morrissey) taking Hackshaw to a police training centre and interrogating him illegally over a number of hours, before eventually releasing him. Despite not being charged, we see Hackshaw's relationship with his elderly mother become tarnished, yet what is his real story?
When Oldfield took over the investigation in 1977, he decided to reexamine the area's taxi drivers, as depicted in the ITV drama. Police had already contemplated the possibility of the killer being a cabbie, believing a man of that profession would have a good knowledge of the area, the best places to pick up sex workers and the quiet, secluded areas where they were often taken.
The Ripper Squad started interviewing taxi drivers after Tina Atkinson’s murder in April of 1977 and while most who were brought in for questioning were soon eliminated from the police's enquiries, Terry Hackshaw wasn't.
Hawkshaw was a taxi driver from Drighlington, a town near Bradford, who carried some of these sex workers in his cab, as The Long Shadow depicts. It's also true that the police were not completely satisfied with his explanations when asked about his whereabouts on the nights of the murders.
Furthermore, they noticed how Hackshaw matched a description of the killer, given by a member of the public back in 1976, which described the man Emily Jackson (Sutcliffe's second victim) went with as being Irish and having a "bushy beard". Despite being English, Hackshaw fitted this individual's physical profile perfectly.
He also lived alone with his mother between Leeds and Bradford, in a central location to all of the killings, while the perceived case against him was made even more persuasive when Maureen Long was attacked in the summer of 1977 and lived to tell the tale.
She gave a description of her attacker, that bore a resemblance to Hackshaw (and of course Peter Sutcliffe), an event that led Oldfield to bring him in for questioning in the series.
Ian Lloyd Anderson (below) plays Terry Hackshaw in The Long Shadow
In real-life, Hawkshaw was eventually placed under surveillance twenty-four hours a day, with police following him as he drove his taxi and drank at local pubs. Armed with a search warrant, they then entered his home, searching it from top to bottom, including dustbins and his tool shed. They removed all his clothing from his home, cut locks from his hair and took blood samples. They even took the carpets from his car.
Unfortunately for Hackshaw, he was also a member of the rare B secretor blood group, which matched some of the samples left at crime scenes by the killer.
He was taken in for questioning a number of times. On one such occasion, he was held from eight o’clock in the evening until eight o’clock the following morning, an episode depicted in The Long Shadow.
"I realised that I was being followed all the time and then it got to the stage when I knew the cars, the CID men knew me and we just followed each other around all night," said Terry in an interview some years later.
"Each time there was a new murder, the next day or the day after that they'd be knocking at my door and searching my house and searching the car and taking the carpets out. One of the top detectives was George Oldfield and he was sitting across the desk from me... and when he's saying that he thinks you've done it... and he's the top man, he's intelligent .... you don't know what to do, you just don't know what to do."
Whether he was being held by the police on the night of Helen Rytka's murder — as portrayed in the ITV series — is doubtful, but he did have a solid alibi that finally eliminated him from the inquiries.
Although even after he was officially ruled out, some detectives were still sure it was him and actively included him in future investigations.
In later years, Terry spoke of his anguish at being hounded for over two years by the Ripper squad in an interview with The Sunday Mirror with the headline "MY RIPPER NIGHTMARE — Probe wrecked my life, says cabbie."
