The Killer

Jim Rayner, the 62-year-old blacksmith of Carlton-in-Coverdale, was tired. All day he had tracked the killer who prowled the crags and moors of the North Riding; in ten days the victims numbered 118.

Jim and a thousand other villagers of Wharfedale, Waldendale and the emerald green valley of Wensley were joined in their hunt by a posse of army lads equipped with walkie-talkies; at one point they thought they had him surrounded, but the murderer fled to a stretch of wild country where no man could follow.

Next day he was back, and 16 more victims lay dead in Coverdale and the adjoining hamlet of Horsehouses. Jim was shoeing a pony when the word came, but with 400 of his countrymen he set out again. Down the line of the River Ure, from Aysgarth to Leyburn, the Dalesmen tracked their quarry. Then, on a lonely stretch of track near Bolton Castle, Constable Charles Jackson laid him low.

In farmhouses from the Pennine Hills to the seven streams that flow eastward to the Humber, the herders celebrated the end of a ten-day nightmare. But at Leyburn Police Headquarters none liked to look too closely at the body of the huge, tawny Alsatian sheepdog that had wrought the havoc; for in that section of Yorkshire sheep are a livelihood, and no Dalesman cares to admit that his dog has gotten the taste for sheep's blood.

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