Peter Sutcliffe

Sutcliffe's first documented assault was of a female prostitute, whom he had met while searching for another woman who had tricked him out of money. He left his friend Trevor Birdsall's minivan and walked up St Paul's Road in Bradford until he was out of sight. When Sutcliffe returned, he was out of breath, as if he had been running. He told Birdsall to drive off quickly. Sutcliffe said he had followed a sex worker into a garage and hit her over the head with a stone in a sock. According to his statement, Sutcliffe said, "I got out of the car, went across the road and hit her. The force of the impact tore the toe off the sock and whatever was in it came out. I went back to the car and got in it".[23]

Police visited Sutcliffe's home the next day, as the woman he had attacked had noted Birdsall's vehicle registration plate. He admitted he had hit her, but claimed it was with his hand. The police told him he was "very lucky", as the woman did not want anything more to do with the incident – she was a known prostitute and her husband was serving a jail term for assault.[23]

Sutcliffe committed his second assault on the night of 5 July 1975 in Keighley. He attacked Anna Rogulskyj, who was walking alone, striking her unconscious with a ball-pein hammer and slashing her stomach with a knife. Disturbed by a neighbour, he left without killing her. Rogulskyj survived after neurological surgery at Leeds General Infirmary but was psychologically traumatised by the attack.[24] She said later: "I've been afraid to go out much because I feel people are staring and pointing at me. The whole thing is making my life a misery. I sometimes wish I had died in the attack."[25]

On the night of 15 August, Sutcliffe attacked Olive Smelt in Halifax. Employing the same modus operandi, he briefly engaged Smelt with a commonplace pleasantry about the weather before striking hammer blows to her skull from behind. He then disarranged her clothing and slashed her lower back with a knife. Again he was interrupted and left his victim badly injured but alive. Like Rogulskyj, Smelt subsequently suffered severe emotional and mental trauma. She had told interviewing officer Dept. Supt. Dick Holland (later the Ripper Squad's second in command) that her attacker had a Yorkshire accent, but this information was ignored, as was the fact that neither she nor Rogulskij were in towns with a red light area.[26] On 27 August, Sutcliffe attacked 14-year-old Tracy Browne in Silsden. He struck her from behind and hit her on the head five times while she was walking along a country lane. He ran off when he saw the lights of a passing car, leaving his victim requiring brain surgery. Sutcliffe was not convicted of the attack but confessed to it in 1992.[27]

The first victim to be killed by Sutcliffe was Wilma McCann on 30 October. McCann, from Scott Hall in Leeds, was a mother of four children age between 7 and 2. Sutcliffe struck the back of her skull twice with a hammer, then inflicted "a stab wound to the throat; two stab wounds below the right breast; three stab wounds below the right breast and a series of nine stab wounds around the umbilicus".[28] An extensive inquiry, involving 150 officers of the West Yorkshire Police and 11,000 interviews, failed to find the culprit. In December 2007, Wilma's eldest daughter Sonia Newlands died by suicide reportedly after suffering years of anguish and depression over the circumstances and consequences of her mother's death upon her and her siblings.[29]

Sutcliffe committed his next murder in Leeds in January 1976, when he stabbed 42-year-old Emily Jackson 52 times.[30] In dire financial straits, Jackson had been persuaded by her husband to engage in prostitution utilising the van of their family roofing business. Sutcliffe picked up Jackson, who was soliciting outside the Gaiety pub on Roundhay Road, then drove about half a mile to some derelict buildings on Enfield Terrace in the Manor Industrial Estate.[31] Sutcliffe hit her on the head with a hammer, dragged her body into a rubbish-strewn yard, then used a sharpened screwdriver to stab her in the neck, chest and abdomen. He stamped on her thigh, leaving behind an impression of his boot.[32]

Sutcliffe attacked 20-year-old Marcella Claxton in Roundhay Park, Leeds, on 9 May. Walking home from a party, she accepted an offer of a lift from Sutcliffe. When she got out of the car to urinate, he hit her from behind with a hammer. Claxton survived and testified against Sutcliffe at his trial. At the time of this attack, Claxton had been four months pregnant and subsequently miscarried her baby.[11] She required extensive, multiple brain operations and suffered from intermittent blackouts and chronic depression.[25]

On 5 February Sutcliffe attacked Irene Richardson, a Chapeltown prostitute, in Roundhay Park. Richardson was bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Once she was dead, Sutcliffe mutilated her corpse with a knife. Tyre tracks left near the murder scene resulted in a long list of possible suspect vehicles.[33]

Two months later, on 23 April, Sutcliffe killed Patricia "Tina" Atkinson, a sex worker from Bradford, in her flat, where police found a bootprint on the bedclothes. Another two months later, on 26 June, he murdered 16-year-old Jayne MacDonald in Chapeltown. She was not a sex worker and, in the public perception, her murder showed that all women were potential victims.[34] The police described her as the first "innocent" victim.[35][36] Sutcliffe seriously assaulted Maureen Long in Bradford in July. He was interrupted and fled, leaving her for dead. She was suffering from hypothermia when found and was in hospital for nine weeks.[25] A witness misidentified the make of his car, resulting in more than 300 police officers checking thousands of cars without success.

On 1 October 1977 Sutcliffe murdered Jean Jordan, a prostitute from Manchester.[37] In a confession, Sutcliffe said he had realised the new £5 note he had given her was traceable. After hosting a family party at his new home, he returned to the wasteland behind Manchester's Southern Cemetery, where he had left the body, to retrieve the note. Unable to find it, he mutilated Jordan's corpse and moved it.[38]

On 9 October, Jordan's body was discovered by local dairy worker and future actor Bruce Jones,[39] who had an allotment on land adjoining the site where the body was found and was searching for house bricks when he made the discovery. The £5 note, hidden in a secret compartment in Jordan's handbag, was traced to branches of the Midland Bank in Shipley and Bingley. Police analysis of bank operations allowed them to narrow their field of inquiry to 8,000 employees who could have received it in their wage packet. Over three months the police interviewed 5,000 men, including Sutcliffe. The police found that the alibi given for Sutcliffe's whereabouts was credible; he had indeed spent much of the evening of the killing at a family party. Weeks of intense investigations pertaining to the origins of the £5 note led to nothing, leaving police officers frustrated that they collected an important clue but had been unable to trace the actual firm (or employee within the firm) to which or whom the note had been issued.[40]

On 14 December, Sutcliffe attacked Marilyn Moore, another prostitute from Leeds. She survived and provided police with a description of her attacker. Tyre tracks found at the scene matched those from an earlier attack.[11] Her photofit bore a strong resemblance to Sutcliffe, like other survivors, and she provided a good description of his car, which had been seen in red-light districts. Sutcliffe had been interviewed on this issue.[41]

The police discontinued the search for the person who received the £5 note in January 1978. Although Sutcliffe was interviewed about it, he was not investigated further (he was contacted and disregarded by the Ripper Squad on several further occasions). That month, Sutcliffe killed again. His victim was Yvonne Pearson, a 21-year-old prostitute from Bradford. He repeatedly bludgeoned her about the head with a ball-peen hammer then jumped on her chest before stuffing horse-hair into her mouth from a discarded sofa under which he hid her body near Lumb Lane.[42]

Ten days later, he killed Helen Rytka, an 18-year-old prostitute from Huddersfield. He struck Rytka on the head five times as she exited his vehicle, before stripping most of the clothes from her body (although her bra and polo-neck jumper were positioned above her breasts) and repeatedly stabbing her in the chest. Her body was found three days later beneath railway arches in Garrards timber-yard to which he had driven her.[43] Sutcliffe said of Rytka while in police custody in 1981: "I had the urge to kill any woman. The urge inside me to kill girls was now practically uncontrollable."[41]

On 16 May, Sutcliffe killed Vera Millward in an attack in the car park of Manchester Royal Infirmary.[44]

On 4 April 1979, Sutcliffe killed Josephine Whitaker, a 19-year-old building society clerk whom he attacked on Savile Park Moor in Halifax as she was walking home. Despite forensic evidence, police efforts were diverted for several months following receipt of the taped message purporting to be from the murderer taunting Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield of the West Yorkshire Police, who was leading the investigation. The tape contained a man's voice saying, "I'm Jack. I see you're having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord, you're no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started."[45]

Based on the recorded message, police began searching for a man with a Wearside accent, which linguists narrowed down to the Castletown area of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. The hoaxer, dubbed "Wearside Jack", sent two letters to police and the Daily Mirror in March 1978 boasting of his crimes. The letters, signed "Jack the Ripper", claimed responsibility for the murder of 26-year-old Joan Harrison in Preston in November 1975. At the time, police mistakenly believed that the Preston murder was not public knowledge.

The hoaxer case was re-opened in 2005, and DNA taken from envelopes was entered into the national database, in which it matched that of John Samuel Humble, an unemployed alcoholic and long-time resident of the Ford Estate in Sunderland – a few miles from Castletown – whose DNA had been taken following a drunk and disorderly offence in 2001. On 20 October 2005, Humble was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice for sending the hoax letters and tape. Humble was remanded in custody and on 21 March 2006 was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison.[46] Humble died on 30 July 2019, aged 63.[47]

On 1 September, Sutcliffe murdered 20-year-old Barbara Leach, a Bradford University student. Her body was dumped at the rear of 13 Ashgrove under a pile of bricks, close to the university and her lodgings. It was his sixteenth attack. The murder of a woman who was not a sex worker again alarmed the public and prompted an expensive publicity campaign emphasising the Wearside connection. Despite the false lead, Sutcliffe was interviewed on at least two other occasions in 1979. Despite matching several forensic clues and being on the list of 300 names in connection with the £5 note, he was not strongly suspected. Sutcliffe was interviewed by police nine times in total.[48]

In April 1980, Sutcliffe was arrested for drunk driving. While awaiting trial, he killed two more women. Sutcliffe murdered 47-year-old Marguerite Walls on the night of 20 August 1980, and 20-year-old Jacqueline Hill, a student at Leeds University, on the night of 17 November 1980. Hill's body was found on wasteland near the Arndale Centre. He also attacked three other women, who survived: Uphadya Bandara in Leeds on 24 September 1980; Maureen Lea (known as Mo),[49] an art student attacked in the grounds of Leeds University on 25 October 1980; and 16-year-old Theresa Sykes, attacked in Huddersfield on the night of 5 November 1980. Needing to feel safe, Sykes placed a wardrobe and dressing table against her bedroom door and slept with a knife hidden under her pillow.[25] On 25 November 1980, Trevor Birdsall, an associate of Sutcliffe and the getaway driver as Sutcliffe fled his first documented assault in 1969, reported him to the police as a suspect, but the information vanished into the paperwork already accumulated.[11]

West Yorkshire Police were criticised for being inadequately prepared for an investigation on this scale. It was one of the largest investigations by a British police force[62] and predated the use of computers. Information on suspects was stored on handwritten index cards. Aside from difficulties in storing and accessing the paperwork (the floor of the incident room was reinforced to cope with the weight of the paper), it was difficult for officers to overcome the information overload of such a large manual system. Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times,[63] but all information the police had about the case was stored in paper form, making cross-referencing difficult, compounded by television appeals for information which generated thousands more documents. The 1982 Byford Report into the investigation concluded: "The ineffectiveness of the major incident room was a serious handicap to the Ripper investigation. While it should have been the effective nerve centre of the whole police operation, the backlog of unprocessed information resulted in the failure to connect vital pieces of related information. This serious fault in the central index system allowed Peter Sutcliffe to continually slip through the net".[64]

The choice of Oldfield to lead the inquiry was criticised by Byford: "The temptation to appoint a 'senior man' on age or service grounds should be resisted. What is needed is an officer of sound professional competence who will inspire confidence and loyalty".[65] He found wanting Oldfield's focus on the hoax confessional tape[66] that seemed to indicate a perpetrator with a Wearside background,[67] and his ignoring advice from survivors of Sutcliffe's attacks and several eminent specialists, including from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US, along with dialect analysts such as Stanley Ellis and Jack Windsor Lewis,[68] whom he had also consulted throughout the manhunt, that "Wearside Jack" was a hoaxer.[n 1] The investigation used it as a point of elimination rather than a line of enquiry and allowed Sutcliffe to avoid scrutiny, as he did not fit the profile of the sender of the tape or letters. The "Wearside Jack" hoaxer was given unusual credibility when analysis of saliva on the envelopes he sent showed he had the same blood group as Sutcliffe had left at crime scenes, a type shared by only 6% of the population.[46] The hoaxer appeared to know details of the murders which had not been released to the press, but which in fact he had acquired from his local newspaper and pub gossip.[70]

In response to the police reaction to the murders, the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group organised a number of 'Reclaim the Night' marches. The group and other feminists had criticised the police for victim-blaming, especially the suggestion that women should remain indoors at night. Eleven marches in various towns across the United Kingdom took place on the night of 12 November 1977. They made the point that women should be able to walk anywhere without restriction and that they should not be blamed for men's violence.[71]

In 1988, the mother of Sutcliffe's last victim, Jacqueline Hill, during the action for damages on behalf of her daughter's estate, argued in the High Court that the police had failed to use reasonable care in apprehending Sutcliffe in Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire. The House of Lords held that the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire did not owe a duty of care to the victim due to the lack of proximity and therefore failing on the second limb of the Caparo test.[72] After Sutcliffe's death in November 2020, West Yorkshire Police issued an apology for the "language, tone and terminology" used by the force at the time of the criminal investigation.[73]

West Yorkshire Police reflected Sutcliffe's own misogyny and sexist attitudes, according to multiple sources.[21][74][75] Jim Hobson, a senior West Yorkshire detective, told a press conference in October 1979 the perpetrator

"has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies".[74]

Joan Smith wrote in Misogynies (1989, 1993), that "even Sutcliffe, at his trial, did not go quite this far; he did at least claim he was demented at the time".[74]

The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers QC, at the trial in 1981 said of Sutcliffe's victims in his opening statement: "Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women".[6] This drew condemnation from the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), who protested outside the Old Bailey.[76] Nina Lopez, who was one of the ECP protestors in 1981, told The Independent forty years later, Sir Michael's comments were "an indictment of the whole way in which the police and the establishment were dealing with the Yorkshire Ripper case".[73]

Following his conviction and incarceration, Sutcliffe chose to use the name Coonan, his mother's maiden name.[82] He began his sentence at HM Prison Parkhurst on 22 May 1981. Despite being found sane at his trial, Sutcliffe was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Attempts to send him to a secure psychiatric unit were blocked. While at Parkhurst he was seriously assaulted by James Costello, a 35-year-old career criminal with several convictions for violence. On 10 January 1983, he followed Sutcliffe into the recess of F2, the hospital wing at Parkhurst, and plunged a broken coffee jar twice into the left side of Sutcliffe's face, creating four wounds requiring thirty stitches.[83] In March 1984, Sutcliffe was sent to Broadmoor Hospital, under Section 47 of the Mental Health Act 1983.[84]

Sutcliffe's wife obtained a separation from him around 1989 and a divorce in July 1994.[85] On 23 February 1996, he was attacked in his room in Broadmoor's Henley Ward. Paul Wilson, a convicted robber, asked to borrow a videotape before attempting to strangle Sutcliffe with the cable from a pair of stereo headphones. Two other convicted murderers, Kenneth Erskine and Jamie Devitt, intervened on hearing screams.[83]

After an attack with a pen by fellow inmate Ian Kay on 10 March 1997, Sutcliffe lost the vision in his left eye, and his right eye was severely damaged.[86] Kay admitted trying to kill Sutcliffe and was ordered to be detained in a secure mental hospital without limit of time.[87] In 2003, it was reported that Sutcliffe had developed diabetes.[88]

Sutcliffe's father died in 2004 and was cremated. On 17 January 2005, Sutcliffe was allowed to visit Grange-over-Sands where the ashes had been scattered. The decision to allow the temporary release was initiated by David Blunkett and ratified by Charles Clarke when he became Home Secretary. Sutcliffe was accompanied by four members of the hospital staff. The visit led to front-page tabloid headlines.[89]

On 22 December 2007, Sutcliffe was attacked by fellow inmate Patrick Sureda, who lunged at him with a metal cutlery knife while shouting, "You fucking raping, murdering bastard, I'll blind your fucking other one!" Sutcliffe flung himself backwards and the blade missed his right eye, stabbing him in the cheek.[90]

On 17 February 2009, it was reported[91] that Sutcliffe was "fit to leave Broadmoor". On 23 March 2010, the Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw, was questioned by Julie Kirkbride, Conservative MP for Bromsgrove, in the House of Commons seeking reassurance for a constituent, a victim of Sutcliffe, that he would remain in prison. Straw responded that whilst the matter of Sutcliffe's release was a parole board matter, "that all the evidence that I have seen on this case, and it's a great deal, suggests to me that there are no circumstances in which this man will be released".[92]

An application by Sutcliffe for a minimum term to be set, offering the possibility of parole after that date if it is thought safe to release him, was heard by the High Court of Justice on 16 July 2010.[93] The High Court decided that Sutcliffe would never be released.[94][95] Mr Justice Mitting stated:

This was a campaign of murder which terrorised the population of a large part of Yorkshire for several years. The only explanation for it, on the jury's verdict, was anger, hatred and obsession. Apart from a terrorist outrage, it is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which one man could account for so many victims.[96]

Psychological reports describing Sutcliffe's mental state were taken into consideration, as was the severity of his crimes.[97] Sutcliffe spent the rest of his life in custody. On 4 August 2010, a spokeswoman for the Judicial Communications Office confirmed that Sutcliffe had initiated an appeal against the decision.[98] The hearing for Sutcliffe's appeal against the ruling began on 30 November 2010 at the Court of Appeal.[99] The appeal was rejected on 14 January 2011.[100] On 9 March 2011, the Court of Appeal rejected Sutcliffe's application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.[101]

In December 2015, Sutcliffe was assessed as being "no longer mentally ill".[102] In August 2016, a medical tribunal ruled that he no longer required clinical treatment for his mental condition, and could be returned to prison. Sutcliffe was reported to have been transferred from Broadmoor to HM Prison Frankland in Durham, County Durham, in August 2016.[103][104]

In 2017, West Yorkshire Police launched Operation Painthall to determine if Sutcliffe was guilty of unsolved crimes dating back to 1964. This inquiry also looked at the killings of two sex workers in southern Sweden in 1980. As Sutcliffe was a lorry driver, it was theorised that he had been in Denmark and Sweden, making use of the ferry across the Oresund Strait. West Yorkshire Police later stated that they were "absolutely certain" that Sutcliffe had never been in Sweden.[105][106]