Peter William Sutcliffe (born June 2, 1946), infamous as the "Yorkshire Ripper", was convicted in 1981 of the murders of thirteen women and attacks on seven more from 1975 to 1980.
Early life
Sutcliffe was born in Bingley, West Yorkshire, the son of a mill-worker. Reportedly a loner at school, he left formal education at the age of fifteen and took a series of menial jobs, including a stint as a grave-digger, before settling into a job on the nightshift at a local factory.
He met Sonia Szurma in 1966, and they married in 1974. Shortly after his marriage, he was made redundant and used the pay-off to gain a Heavy Goods Vehicle licence in June 1975, and began working as a driver in September of that year. His wife suffered a number of miscarriages, and eventually the couple were informed that she would not be able to have children. Shortly after this, his wife returned to a teacher-training course. When she completed the course in 1977 and began teaching, the couple used the extra money to buy their first house, in Bradford.
Criminal career
Victims
Sutcliffe was convicted for murdering the following 13 victims:
| Date | Name of victim | Age at death | Body found |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 October 1975 | Wilma McCann | 28 | Prince Phillip Playing Fields, Leeds |
| 20 January 1976 | Emily Jackson | 42 | Manor Street, Leeds |
| 5 February 1977 | Irene Richardson | 28 | Roundhay Park, Leeds |
| 23 April 1977 | Patricia Atkinson | 32 | Flat 3, at 9 Oak Avenue, Bradford |
| 26 June 1977 | Jayne MacDonald | 16 | Adventure playground, Reginald Street, Leeds |
| 1 October 1977 | Jean Jordan | 20 | Allotments next to the Southern Cemetery, Manchester |
| 21 January 1978 | Yvonne Pearson | 21 | Under a disued sofa on waste ground off Artherington Street, Bradford |
| 31 January 1978 | Helen Rytka | 18 | Timber yard in Great Northern Street, Huddersfield |
| 16 May 1978 | Vera Millward | 40 | Grounds of the Manchester Royal Infirmary |
| 4 April 1979 | Josephine Whitaker | 19 | Savile Park, Halifax |
| 2 September 1979 | Barbara Leach | 20 | Back of 13 Ashgrove, Bradford |
| 20 August 1980 | Marguerite Walls | 47 | Garden of a house called Claremont, New Street, Farsley, Leeds |
| 17 November 1980 | Jacqueline Hill | 20 | Waste ground off Alma Road, Headingley, Leeds |
1975
The first known assault by Sutcliffe was in Keighley on the night of 5 July, 1975. He attacked Anna Rogulskyj (aged 36), who was walking alone, striking her unconscious with a ball-peen hammer and slashing her stomach with a knife. Disturbed by a neighbour, he left without killing her. Anna Rogulskyj survived after extensive medical attention. Later she would meet Sutcliffe's father, encouraging him to probe his fingers into the two indents that still remain in the back of her head. Sutcliffe attacked Olive Smelt (aged 46) in Halifax in August with the same modus operandi (MO) and again was disturbed and left his victim badly injured. Later in August he attacked Tracy Browne (aged 16) in Silsden. She was struck from behind and hit on the head five times while walking in a country lane. Sutcliffe was not convicted of this attack, but later confessed to it.
His next victim, Wilma McCann of Leeds (aged 28) and a mother of four, was killed on 30 October. He struck her twice with a hammer before stabbing her fifteen times. An extensive inquiry, involving 150 police officers and 11,000 interviews, did not uncover Sutcliffe.
1976
He did not kill again until January 1976, stabbing Emily Jackson (aged 42) 51 times in Leeds.
Due to repeated absenteeism, Sutcliffe lost his first driving job in March 1976 and did not find another until October. He attacked Marcella Claxton (aged 20), another prostitute, in Roundhay Park in Leeds on 9 May. He struck her with a hammer and left her with 25 stab wounds.
1977
The next murder took place in February 1977. He attacked Irene Richardson (aged 28), another Chapeltown prostitute, in Roundhay Park, this time killing her with a series of weighty hammer blows, followed by a post-mortem stabbing. Tyre tracks left near the murder scene resulted in an enormous list of possible suspect vehicles.
Two months later he killed Patricia "Tina" Atkinson (aged 32), a Bradford prostitute, at her flat, where police found a bootprint on the bedclothes. It was another two months later that Sutcliffe moved up a gear with a vicious murder in Chapeltown. Jayne MacDonald (aged 16) was not a prostitute, and in the public perception, her death suddenly made every woman a potential victim. He seriously assaulted Maureen Long (aged 42) in Bradford in July; interrupted, he left her for dead. He was seen by a witness, but the make of his car was misidentified. The police had over 300 officers working the case and amassed 12,500 statements and checked thousands of cars, without result.
Sutcliffe killed a Manchester prostitute, Jean Jordan (aged 20) in October. Her body was not found for ten days, but had obviously been moved several days after death. The recovery of her handbag offered a valuable piece of evidence. Sutcliffe had given the woman £5. The note was new and was traced to banks in Shipley and Bingley and from there into the wages of 8,000 local employees. Over three months the police interviewed 5,000 men, including Sutcliffe, but did not connect him. Sutcliffe had known the note could expose him: he had returned to the body a week after the killing to locate it and, unable to find the handbag, had tried to remove Jordan's head with a broken pane of glass and a hacksaw. Chillingly, he had undertaken this event after hosting a family party at his home. Jordan's body was discovered by Bruce Jones, who later went on to play the part of Les Battersby in the long-running TV soap opera Coronation Street.
Sutcliffe attacked another Leeds prostitute, Marilyn Moore (aged 25) in December. She survived and offered another reasonable description of her attacker, and tyre tracks found matched those of an earlier attack.
1978
Despite this, the police withdrew their intensive search for the person who received the £5 in January 1978. Sutcliffe was interviewed about the £5 note, but not investigated further; he would ultimately be contacted, and disregarded, by the Ripper Squad many more times. In that month Sutcliffe killed again, attacking a Bradford prostitute, Yvonne Pearson (aged 21), this time hiding the body under a discarded sofa so that it was not found until March. He killed a Huddersfield prostitute, Helen Rytka (aged 18), in late January; her body was uncovered three days later.
After a two-month hiatus Sutcliffe killed again, attacking Vera Millward (aged 40) in the car park of the Manchester Royal Infirmary on 16 May.
1979
Almost a year passed before he struck again; during this time his mother died. On 4 April, 1979, he killed Josephine Whitaker (aged 19), a bank clerk, in Halifax; he assaulted her on the town moor as she was walking home. Despite new forensic clues, the police efforts were diverted for several months into a fruitless search for a man with a Wearside accent, which was pinned down to the Castletown area of Sunderland, following a hoax tape message taunting Superintendent George Oldfield, who was leading the search. The same hoaxer had sent two letters to the police boasting of his crimes in 1978 signed "Jack The Ripper" and claimed a murder (that of 26-year-old Joan Harrison) in Preston in November 1975. On 20 October, 2005, John Humble, an unemployed alcoholic and long-time resident of the Ford Estate area of Sunderland (a mile away from Castletown), was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice in response to the sending of the hoax letters and tape, and remanded in custody. On March 21, 2006 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice. It is expected that he will also be questioned in connection with the Harrison murder.
Sutcliffe killed Barbara Leach (aged 20), a Bradford student, in September, his sixteenth attack. Yet again the murder of a woman who was not a prostitute aroused the public and prompted an expensive publicity campaign, which unfortunately pushed the Wearside connection. Even with this false lead, Sutcliffe was re-interviewed on at least two occasions in 1979, but despite matching several forensic clues and being on the list of just 300 names in connection with the £5 note, he was not strongly suspected. In total, Sutcliffe was interviewed by the police on nine occasions.
1980
In April 1980 he was arrested for drunken driving. While awaiting trial on this charge he killed two more women, Marguerite Walls (aged 47) in August and Jacqueline Hill (aged 20) in November 1980. He also attacked two other women who survived – Upadhya Bandara (aged 34) in Leeds and Theresa Sykes (aged 16) in Huddersfield. Following the November murder, one of Sutcliffe's friends reported him to the police as a suspect; this information vanished into the enormous volumes already created.
Arrest and trial
In January 1981 he was stopped by the police in the driveway of Light Trades House on Melbourne Avenue in Broomhill, Sheffield, South Yorkshire while in his car with prostitute Olivia Reivers (aged 24); he was arrested, on grounds of having fitted his car with false number plates. He was transferred to Dewsbury police station in connection with this offence. At Dewsbury he was questioned in relation to the Yorkshire Ripper case, as he matched so many of the physical characteristics known. The discovery the next day of a knife, hammer and rope he had disposed of at the time and place of his arrest along Melbourne Avenue (he used the pretext of needing to urinate to absent himself briefly from the arresting officers) increased police interest, and they obtained a search warrant for his home and brought his wife in for questioning.
After two days of intensive questioning, he suddenly declared he was the Ripper and, over the next day, calmly described his many attacks, only weeks later claiming to have been told by God to murder the women. He was charged on 6 January and went to trial in May.
The basis of his defence was his claim that he was the tool of God's will. However, there was a twist to the tale that, had it been made public at the time, could have shattered this defence, and exposed Sutcliffe as the sexual killer many believed he was. When Sutcliffe stripped out of his clothing at the police station, he was discovered to be wearing a V-neck pullover under his trousers. The arms had been pulled over his legs, so that the V-neck exposed his groin; the elbows were padded to protect his knees as, presumably, he knelt over his victims' corpses. The sexual implications of this outfit were held to be obvious. But this fact was not communicated to the public until disclosure in a book by Michael Bilton, published in 2003, called Wicked Beyond Belief:The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper.
At trial, Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty to thirteen counts of murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. He also pleaded guilty to seven counts of attempted murder. On the basis of four psychiatrists' reports diagnosing paranoid schizophrenia, the prosecution proposed accepting the plea. However, the trial judge, Mr. Justice Boreham, demanded an unusually detailed explanation of the prosecution reasoning, and after a two-hour representation by the Attorney-General Sir Michael Havers, a ninety-minute lunch break and a further forty minutes of legal discussion, he rejected the diminished responsibility plea, insisting that the case should be dealt with by a jury. The trial proper was set to commence on 5 May 1981. (A fuller account of the trial is available at The Yorkshire Ripper Web Site.)
His trial lasted just two weeks; he was found guilty of thirteen counts of murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of thirty years. His appeal was denied. Since his incarceration, he has been informed that he will die a prisoner.
After his trial, Sutcliffe admitted two further attacks to detectives. It was decided at the time however that prosecution for these offences was "not in the public interest". West Yorkshire Police have made it clear that the female victims wish to remain anonymous.
Prison
He began his sentence at HM Prison Parkhurst. Despite being found sane at his trial, he was soon diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. Attempts to send him to a secure psychiatric unit were initially blocked. During his time at Parkhurst he was seriously assaulted for the first time. The attack was carried out by James Costello, a 35-year-old career criminal from Glasgow with several convictions for violence. On January 10 1983 he followed Sutcliffe into the recess of F2, the hospital wing of at Parkhurst prision. He plunged a broken coffee jar twice into the left side of Sutcliffe's face, creating four seperate wounds requiring a total of 30 stitches.[1]
His wife Sonia obtained a separation from him in 1982 and a final divorce in 1994; she then went on to contest and win nine libel cases against various publications, most notably Private Eye [2]. In 1984 he was finally sent to Broadmoor hospital.
On February 23 1996 Sutcliffe was attacked in his private room in the Henley Ward of Broadmoor Hospital. Paul Wilson, a convicted robber, asked to borrow a video before attempting to strangle Sutcliffe with the flex from a pair of stereo headphones. Two other murderers, Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler, and Jamie Devitt, intervened upon hearing Sutcliffe's screams.[3]
In an attack (with a sharpened pencil) by fellow inmate Ian Kay in 1997, his eyesight was severely damaged. Kay admitted attempted murder and was ordered to be detained in a secure mental hospital without time limit.
Despite being given a whole life tariff by successive Home Secretaries, Sutcliffe could still be released from custody if the parole board decides that he is no longer a danger to the public. He was originally sentenced to a minimum of 30 years, so he could be released from prison in 2011 (at the age of 65) because the system under which his tariff was increased has since been declared illegal by the European Court of Human Rights and also the High Court. The main point of conflict is that the continued detention of Sutcliffe and other life prisoners is currently controlled by a politician – the Home Secretary – rather than by a member of the judiciary.
In 2003 reports surfaced that Sutcliffe had developed diabetes.[4]
On 17 January, 2005, Sutcliffe was allowed to visit the site of his father's ashes, his father having died from cancer the year before. The decision to allow the temporary release was initiated by David Blunkett and later ratified by Charles Clarke when he took over the role as Home Secretary. Sutcliffe was accompanied by four members of the hospital staff. Despite the passage of twenty-five years since the Ripper murders, Sutcliffe's visit was still the focus of front-page tabloid headlines, and also attracted the attention of the BBC, who published an articleon the matter on its website.
Controversy
West Yorkshire Police were criticised for being inadequately prepared for an investigation on this scale. The case was one of the largest ever investigations by a UK police force and pre-dated the use of computers in criminal cases. The information on suspects was stored on hand-written index cards. Aside from difficulties in storing and accessing such a bulk of paperwork (the floor of the incident room had to be reinforced to cope with the weight of paperwork), it was difficult for officers to overcome the information overload of such a large manual system. Sutcliffe was interviewed numerous times, but all information the police had about the case was stored in paper form, making cross referencing a difficult task. This fact was compounded by the television appeal for information, which generated thousands more documents to process. The police were also criticised for being too focused on the Wearside tape and letters, which allowed Sutcliffe to remain at large for longer, as he did not fit the profile of the sender of the tape or letters. The official response to these problems ultimately led to the implementation of the forerunner of the HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) Computer system.
Related works
- "Nineteen Seventy Four" by David Peace
- "Nineteen Seventy Seven" by David Peace
- "Nineteen Eighty" by David Peace
- "Nineteen Eighty Three" by David Peace
This celebrated "Red-Riding Quartet" was published to critical acclaim between 1999 and 2002. Set against the backdrop of the Ripper murders across Yorkshire, the novels depict the seedy underbelly of both the Police Force and journalism.
Sutcliffe was also depicted in parodic TV programme Brass Eye (episode regard entitled 'Decline') as being allowed out of prison to write and star in a musical about his life, in which he appologised for the murders.
References
- "Ripper visits father's ashes site" by BBC News, retrieved on 20 January, 2005
External links
- The Yorkshire Ripper Website
- BBC Crime Case Closed – The Yorkshire Ripper
- The Real Yorkshire Ripper (POV) Highly contentious site propounding an alternative theory of the murders.