Was murdered Preston mum-of-two another victim of the cruel Yorkshire Ripper?
On a cold, damp morning in 1975, the body of Joan Harrison was found beaten to death in a disused garage in Avenham, Preston.
When a new relationship with a much older man also failed, Joan could not keep up with the mortgage payments. The house was repossessed and social services took Joan's children from her. Her family feared the worst. Joan’s elder sister Margaret Upton told the Lancashire Evening Post that in the last six weeks before her death Joan had become a “fleeting memory” to the family. Her frequent visits to her sister's home in Havelock Street grew few and far between and she turned to the bottle, swigging morphine based cough medicine to ease her failing health.
By the time she returned, she was too drunk to work and was allowed to lie down in one of the beds at the shelter. It was 10pm before she was sober enough to walk home. But when she arrived back at the house in East View, Deepdale, a row broke out when Mr Keighley refused to give her money for more alcohol.
Mildred hurried to a nearby phone box to call the police, who launched a murder investigation. They discovered Joan's handbag and purse were missing, and a bite mark on her left breast implied her attacker had a gap in his front teeth. There were certainly similarities - Joan's clothing had been placed on her body in a similar pattern found at the scenes of Sutcliffe's victims. But what would he be doing in Preston?
A match linked him to Joan's murder and it later emerged he was in Preston at the time of her killing, after being released from a sentence at HMP Preston. At the time of his arrest, Smith was in the final days of his life, and died six days later from lung cancer.
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