His wife Sonia was ordered to sell the place to pay for compensation for

His wife, Sonia, was ordered to sell the place to pay for compensation for two of her husband’s surviving victims, but later bought back the house, a large pebble-dashed detached home in Garden Lane, in the middle-class suburb of Heaton, Bradford. The house, which a police officer at the time of Sutcliffe’s trial described as sterile and lacking “the touches that women usually give a house” ,was later described by Mrs Sutcliffe as “not a house of horrors but a very nice home”. Since then Mrs Sutcliffe has divorced and married a local hairdresser (known to the local press, inevitably, as the Yorkshire Clipper) and moved on, yet cars still slow as they pass, so that rubber-neckers can gaze. Some have even been known to stop and steal plants from the garden as ghoulish mementoes.A sad character of that bent – a collector of murderers’ autographs and personal possessions – once tried to buy one of the two north London flats (at 23 Cranley Gardens and 195 Melrose Avenue) to which Dennis Nilsen lured more than a dozen men in order to drug, murder and dismember them and bury their remains beneath the floorboards and in the back yard. Both flats were sold cheaply after his conviction in 1983 to investors who renovated them and put them back on the market.Today the houses, divided into flats, look much as they did then.

But the once-shabby bedsit area has now been gentrified and the places have changed hands several times. Some of their owners have been blithely unconcerned at their history. Others have cursed their purchase, finding them hard to re-sell. “I could not sell it for love nor money, it was impossible,” said estate agent Barry Steer, who tried to sell Nilsen’s Cranley Gardens flat during the Eighties property boom, “People seemed to think that something was still there, lurking under the floorboards.”Perhaps there is. “After all, if people return again and again to places where the feeling for them was good, why would they not do the obverse in places where they feel some taint lingers,” said Philip Sheldrake, a professor of theology at Sarum College who has made a special study of “the spirituality of place”.”It may not be possible to measure this scientifically, but it speaks to something real in human experience,” he says.There are some sad souls, however, for whom such experiences are not about tapping into archetypes or psychological metaphors. Anna-Marie Davis was the only one of Fred West’s children who came forward to testify against her father and step-mother when the couple were first charged.She had much to testify on, having been subjected to a childhood of arbitrary violence in which she was forced to have sex with her father since the age of eight, and to have sex with her step-mother (and with the black clients with whom her father was obsessed) from the age of 12.The last time she saw her half-sister Charmaine was when she opened the door to the bedroom at Midland Road and saw the eight-year-old naked, tied to the bed, lying on a piece of waterproof sheet.

The next day she was told Charmaine had “gone away”.”Yes, her sister was murdered in the house,” said Anna-Marie’s husband, Phil Davis, yesterday. “But you have to remember that, like everyone, Anna-Marie also has fond memories of the house she grew up in and of the good relationship she had with her sister there That’s what she cherishes and holds on to She gets upset with all this house of horrors stuff It’s more complicated than that.”Indeed. Outside the house yesterday the estate agent’s board was covered with a flash which said “Sold” It was a victory for common sense (Or it was a cackle of triumph) It was, either way, far more than an assertion of fact.. Proposed increases in the state pension to be proposed today by Conservative leader William Hague have been criticised as “robbing Peter to pay Paul” by veteran pensions campaigner Jack Jones. Proposed increases in the state pension to be proposed today by Conservative leader William Hague have been criticised as “robbing Peter to pay Paul” by veteran pensions campaigner Jack Jones.
The 87-year-old told BBC Breakfast News: “His proposals of a £10 a week increase is not an increase at all.

It is pensioners’ own money transferred from one pocket to another.”The Tories took away our link with earnings back in 1980 – that is what we want back.”Mr Hague’s proposals are part of a concerted attempt to win back the “grey vote” by capitalising on pensioners’ anger over this year’s increase of just 75 pence a week in the basic pension.Mr Hague is due to dismiss such “gimmicks” as Chancellor Gordon Brown’s plan to give free TV licences to the over 75s. He believes the money which funds them should go straight into pensioners’ pockets to spend as they see fit.But Mr Jones, a former trade union leader and chairman of the National Pensioners Convention, said the only policy vote winner would be an immediate restoration of the link with average earnings.He said if the link had never been taken away, the basic pension would now be over £90 instead of £67.He said this year’s pension rise under Labour was “derisory” and had led to pensioners staying away in the recent local elections, letting the Tories back in many local authorities across the country.Mr Hague’s plans are to be disclosed in a speech at the London School of Economics.Social Security Secretary Alistair Darling claimed the plans would leave the oldest and poorest pensioners worse off.Liberal Democrat social security spokesman Steve Webb said: “No one trusts the Tories on pensions.”These figures are breathtakingly dishonest. All but 70p of this money would have gone to pensioners anyway under existing plans.”. A man who preys on elderly women living on their own has raped four victims, sexually assaulted 20 and committed more than 60 burglaries, police said yesterday. A man who preys on elderly women living on their own has raped four victims, sexually assaulted 20 and committed more than 60 burglaries, police said yesterday.
Scotland Yard has appealed for help in catching the rapist, amid fears he could kill. The assailant, who selects women in south-east London, has struck over the past eight years; his victims were aged 67 to 96 He often cuts phone lines and the electricity The most recent victim, 88, almost died. DNA samples are believed to have linked five of the assaults.