Life in the wake of the Ripper

8:50am Monday 1st December 2008

When Richard McCann’s job with a ladies wear import firm was made redundant, his reception of the notice and final pay check surprised his manager.

“That’s brilliant. I can do something else now,” he told him.

Many people who have either faced job rejection or are facing it may find Richard McCann’s attitude to misfortune a touch strange; but as a six-year-old he had to come to terms with something far worse than losing a job: he lost his mother to the murderous onslaught of the Yorkshire Ripper, Bradford lorry driver Peter Sutcliffe.

In October, 1975, Wilma McCann’s battered and stabbed body was discovered yards away from the house in Leeds where young Richard and his sisters slept. He and one of them, Sonia, had gone out looking for their mum at 5.30am. The body of the 28-year-old was mistaken for a Bonfire Night guy.

Mrs McCann was the first of Sutcliffe’s 20 officially-accepted attacks (13 were murders). Sonia, who never came to terms with the killing of her mother, was Sutcliffe’s last victim. She hanged herself in Leeds just before Christmas last year.

In his comic novel About A Boy, Nick Hornby has the youngest character, Marcus, declare that in any relationship, two is not enough. “You need a support group,” he adds.

Support Against Murder and Manslaughter (SAMM) is just such a group which helped Richard McCann deal with the demons released by the murder of his mum.

This Thursday, the second memorial service on behalf of SAMM will be held at St Aidan’s Church, Roundhay Road, Leeds, starting at 7.30pm.

Tonight, Richard is in Bradford, giving the final Hope In The City talk in the cathedral at 7.30pm. Since the publication of his best-selling book Just A Boy: The True Story Of A Stolen Childhood (400,000 copies in hardback and paperback sold), Richard has gone round the country giving motivational talks.

He knows that most people swing between negative and positive polarities.

“When Sonia died – there’s me spouting off about turning things around – I was devastated. I was tested. I started having that conversation with myself. Fleetingly, I considered joining her. I thought, I cannot deal with this pain, this reality.

“I wouldn’t say I was depressed; but at the end I thought, she’s no longer in any pain, she’s with my mum: that’s the positive side, the end of stress and pain,” he said.

Another positive aspect is that Richard now gets on better with his other two sisters, Angela and especially Donna, and with his father although, as he admits, the struggle never stops. But at least, in addition to his birth family, he has three other reasons for getting out of bed in the morning: his wife Helen and their children, aged one and two.

Part of the battle to change your mindset is to stop projecting, stop piling up anxieties about tomorrow, and to accept that from time to time bad things will happen.

“Humans have an innate survival instinct. When my mum died, I tried to find things to make life easier. I told myself that she had been sacrificed to give me a better life.

“What a thing to say; but that’s how I dealt with it. I was six at the time. I used to lay in bed telling myself that I would be able to help people around the world as I got older.

“If I hadn’t had that journey I would be able to touch other people’s lives as I do. I did a talk in the North-East, at a school, and afterwards one boy stood up and gave me an ovation. I was told that he was the most dysfunctional boy in the school.

“When I talk about the book I say I am nobody special, just a guy off a council estate; but we are all the authors of our future. I talk about being in prison for drugs and I ask them to tell me who was responsible for that. They say, ‘You were’.

“There are a lot of people out there out of control; there are people who go out there stabbing and killing; but on the whole the majority of young people are not like that.

“There are some young people you are not going to be able to help. It may take them a lifetime to realise; but I would hope they will come to that point; but it isn’t going to happen by me giving a talk. As a society we have a responsibility to them by giving them the values they should have.

“But I say to them, if I can then you can too.”

Richard McCann’s talk at Bradford Cathedral takes place tonight at 7.30pm. Admission is free.