The Halifax Slasher
Crib Lane
Tuesday 29 November 1938
Monday 28 saw an attack on Constance Wood at Long Lover Lane, Pellon, and reports of a 'parrot-nosed' man terrorising Wincobank, Sheffield, some 37 miles south of Halifax.
By Tuesday 29 November, the manhunt for the Slasher was compared to that for Jack the Ripper, 50 years earlier. But that evening saw the last of the Slasher attacks, thanks mainly to the arrival of Detective Chief Inspector William Salisbury and Sergeant Harry Studdard of Scotland Yard.
At 4.55pm, Mary Sutcliffe, the first victim, was attacked for a second time, just outside her Allerton Lane home. At 6.45pm, the police received another call from Winifred McCall, who claimed she had been slashed near Union Square Church as she left work.
The final attack came at 7.20pm, on the Crib Lane steps at Dean Clough, the mammoth carpet mill just to the north of the town centre.
Crib Lane
Mary Kenny, 40, of Back Crib Lane, descended the steep steps to look through the window of the mill building to the left, to view the clock there.
Returning back up the stairs, she was grabbed from behind. She felt a crushing grasp on her left arm, then a sharp pain in the right. A heavily-built woman, she turned and grappled with her assailant. After two or three minutes of silent struggle, she screamed. The man released her and ran off.
Kenny described her attacker as a well-built man with a broad face, wearing 'very lightweight shoes' and what felt like a dirty mackintosh.
The same evening saw reported attacks in the nearby cities of Manchester and Bradford, but Percy Waddington's confession shortly before midnight effectively marked the end of the panic in Halifax. An attack by a 'dark figure' the following night on one Nellie Widdop in Villiers Street, west Halifax, was immediately dismissed by the men from the Yard. The following evenings saw reports of Slasher attacks from as far afield from Glasgow and London, but on 2 December, the Halifax Courier sounded the all-clear:
'Carry on Halifax! - The Slasher scare is over... The theory that a half-crazed, wild-eyed man has been wandering around, attacking helpless women in dark streets, is exploded... there never was, nor is there likely to be, any real danger to the general public. There is no doubt that following certain happenings public feeling has grown, and that many small incidents have been magnified in the public mind until a real state of alarm was caused. This assurance that there is no real cause for alarm, in short, no properly authenticated wholesale attacks by such a person as the bogy man known as the 'Slasher', should allay the public fear.'