✝️ Elena (Helen) Rytka, age 18 – January 31 1978, Huddersfield, England, United Kingdom 💔
Helen and her twin sister Rita were the twin daughters of an Italian mother and Jamaican father. At the age of eighteen, when Helen was killed, they lived together in a miserable room next to a motorway flyover in Huddersfield. Although they were both in prostitution, they had dreams of a much better life in the future.
Helen and Rita were fairly new to the prostitution trade. They had only worked for a few weeks and had evolved a way of working designed to frustrate any efforts of men that might want to harm them. Though far from foolproof, the system involved that they would each accept clients at the roughly the same time, the client would have precisely twenty minutes, and they would rendezvous back at the same place, a block of public lavatories at the market end of Great Northern Street, Huddersfield. Some of the prostitutes of Bradford and Leeds had developed a better system, working in pairs, one would take down the license number of the car that the other was going off in, and then the piece of paper would be ripped up in front of the driver when they returned.
Helen was murdered by serial killer Peter Sutcliffe by hitting her with a hammer. He grabbed Helen by the hair and dragged her to the end of the timber yard. Sutcliffe climbed on top of Helen and told her she would be okay if she kept quiet. He then proceeded to use her sexually as she was bleeding to death. He then hit her several more times with the hammer. He followed up by repeatedly stabbing Helen through the heart and lungs with a kitchen knife.