Murder of Carol Wilkinson

Murder

Carol Wilkinson (age 20) was killed as she walked to work in October 1977. The attack took place in a field at the back of the bakery where Carol worked, about fifteen minutes' walk from the estate where she lived. Her best friend at work had heard her say she would not be walking the "muck road" route which Anthony Steel was said to have described in his confession. She was found lying in a pool of blood, with her clothes ripped off. She had been battered with two heavy stones.

Her body was found by hospital cook Stephen Smith. She was taken to Bradford Royal Infirmary and placed on a life support machine for three days before the machine was turned off. This was the first time in Britain that a murder victim was certified dead while on life support.

Conviction and acquittal of Anthony Steel

18 months after the killing, Anthony Steel's mother-in-law told the police he was the killer, and she gave them a keyring in the shape of a fish. The keyring was said by the Crown to have been taken from Carol Wilkinson's handbag by the killer. This keyring was alleged to have been given by Steel to his future wife at the time of the murder. At the time of the murder, Steel was working as a council gardener on the Ravenscliffe estate where the victim lived. The police based their case on two points:

1. Four youths who knew the victim had told the police that she had possessed a keyring very like the one the police had been given.
2. The police said that Steel had signed a confession.

The investigation was led by Detective Inspector Norman Mould together with:

At the time of the murder West Yorkshire Police were under a great deal of pressure due to the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Steel had been subjected to two days of intense questioning by Mould and Falconer.

Speaking in an interview about signing the confession, Anthony Steel said:

I was young and I'd never had experience of being in custody or anything like that. That pressure builds up on you so much and there's only so much you can take, so to ease that pressure you do something to get them off your back and that's what I did. They kept intimidating me, telling me what I did that day, and I think I ended up believing what they were telling me. They were saying 'We know you've done it. We've got the proof, we've got the evidence'. I think that, because the case had been going on that long, they were out to get somebody to get it off their books, to put somebody inside. It didn't matter who it was as long as it fitted in some way or they could make it fit in some way and they could put that person inside.

Acquittal

Anthony Steel was initially released on licence in 1998 before finally having his sentence quashed at the Court of Appeal in February 2003, due to new evidence from both defence and Crown consultant psychologists indicating that Steel "is and was mentally handicapped and at the borderline of abnormal suggestibility and compliability. He was therefore a significantly more vulnerable interviewee than could be appreciated at the time of the trial."

Anthony Steel received an official police apology and about £100,000 in compensation from the government, but he was in poor health following his release from prison. He died from a heart attack aged 52 in September 2007. None of the police officers involved in the wrongful conviction were reprimanded or prosecuted.

Links to Peter Sutcliffe

In 2008, David Yallop put forth the theory that Peter Sutcliffe was the true killer. Professor David Gee, the Home Office Pathologist who conducted all the post-mortem examinations on the Ripper victims, said that there were similarities between the murder of Carol Wilkinson and the murder of victim Yvonne Pearson by Peter Sutcliffe, committed just three months later. Sutcliffe did not confess to Carol's murder at his Old Bailey trial. However, a man answering Sutcliffe's description was also seen running away after an attack on a Bradford schoolgirl just 24 hours after Carol's death.