New information about an unsolved murder in Liverpool 39 years ago will be revealed in a BBC documentary.
Inside Out North West examines police files surrounding the killing of mum-of-two Lorraine Jacob and exclusively discloses that the Yorkshire Ripper was questioned about the killing at the time.
Detectives carrying out a cold case review of the murder in the 1980s interviewed Sutcliffe but eventually ruled him out as a suspect.
The case made headline news again last year when a handwritten confession to the murder was found at the home of retired librarian Harvey Richardson following his death. Richardson, who lived near Wigan, would have faced murder charges had he been alive now, after the confession was found and DNA linked him to the murder.
The case was re-opened with the police having only hours to stop Richardson being cremated in order to obtain a DNA sample.
Also in the programme, a former friend of Richardson tells how she has been haunted for the past four decades after she suspected him of the murder of Lorraine but was too frightened to report him to the police.
In an exclusive interview for Inside Out, Margaret McDermott says that her shocking secret only came to light after the handwritten confession to the murder was found and she finally went to the police.
Margaret, who was studying alongside Richardson at the time of the murder, says he took her for a walk by the murder scene not long after Lorraine was killed and told her things only the killer could have known.
She revisits the scene for Inside Out and tells how she was terrified that she was going to be killed too.
She says: “He pointed and he said ‘this is where the police found the body of the murdered girl’ and I was terrified and I thought how does he know that, it wasn’t in the newspapers and I was petrified.
“I thought I’m going to cop it, there was nobody around… I thought he must have done it otherwise how would he have known.”
Margaret told her husband about what Richardson had said but the couple decided not to report it unless he referred to it again. As he didn’t, the information was kept secret until after Richardson died.
Margaret says she has lived with the guilt ever since. “I kind of think of her because she didn’t have the chance to have a life did she, which I did. So you know, there are all sorts of feelings of regret and guilt and sorrow.”
She also reveals for the first time that Richardson was obsessed by a book about a serial killer and how he would often fantasize about committing a random act of murder.
In the documentary the family of murdered Lorraine also speak for the first time about their grief.
They have never spoken directly to the media before but in an exclusive interview the sister of Lorraine says: “He took that girls’ life, she’d two children, a young mother, 19. She was only a kid.”
BBC Inside Out North West can be seen on BBC One at 7.30pm on Monday, November 16th.
Viewers outside the region can watch on digital channel 978 or at BBC iPlayer www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
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