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The Yorkshire Ripper

BRADFORD lorry-driver Peter Sutcliffe had a handwritten notice displayed in the cab of his vehicle. It read: ‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius if unleashed would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?'

This is an odd note from anyone, but this man turned out to be the infamous ‘Yorkshire Ripper'; a maniac who murdered and horribly mutilated thirteen women and grievously injured seven others in his five-year reign of terror in the county of Yorkshire in northern England. The seven survivors who had been left for dead were told how lucky they were, but with physical, emotional and psychological scars that will never completely heal, they surely do not feel very lucky. Some would even believe that they would have been better off if their attacker had succeeded in killing them.

Peter William Sutcliffe was the first-born son of John and Kathleen Sutcliffe. He first saw daylight in Bingley on 2 June 1946 weighing only 5 lbs. His father was a burly extrovert who loved sport and drinking with his mates in his local pub. But his son would not grow to be a ‘man's man' like his father. He was a quiet, shy boy who much preferred to stay indoors with his mother than join in the rough games of his younger brothers and sisters, choosing to read rather than play sport. Greatly intimidated by his father's aggressive masculinity, he found a safe haven with his mother, a gentle loving woman who adored all six of her children.

When he was at Secondary school Peter became the subject of severe bullying from other students, culminating in his truancy from school for two weeks before his parents were informed of his absence. He had spent the fortnight in the upstairs loft at home, reading comics and books by torchlight. Although the bullying stopped after the school authorities took action, young Peter Sutcliffe, who never fought with other boys or chased after girls, was seen as different, set apart from his classmates.

He left school at the age of fifteen without a clear focus on his life. Over the next two years, Sutcliffe changed jobs often. He started in a mill where his father worked, but within a few months left to begin an engineering apprenticeship, but quit there also after a short time. He then worked in a factory, but left that job to work as a gravedigger at the Bingley Cemetery for some time before becoming a lorry driver for Clark Transport in Bradford making regular deliveries in Leeds, Bradford, Bingley and Sheffield. In 1966, at the age of twenty, Peter met his future wife, Sonia Szurma, a daughter of Maria and Bodhan Szurma, immigrants from Czechoslovakia. They married eight years later on 10 August 1974, Sonia's 24th birthday. By June 1977 they had saved enough money together to put down a mortgage on their own home at Garden Lane, Heaton in Bradford.

As a seemingly happily married man, Sutcliffe created a public image that was exemplary: a caring and loving husband with no outward signs of violence or depravity hidden deep within. But though Sonia and Peter were well liked locally, they were also known to have many rows. It was Sonia, (who had a family history of mental illness), who did all the shouting, however. Peter would meekly implore her to keep her voice down so as not to disturb the neighbors. There were indeed tensions in the Sutcliffe household; tensions which do not explain the grisly and murderous acts of the Yorkshire Ripper, but may help to fill in some of his background.

There were a few who had seen the dark side of Peter Sutcliffe. Gary Jackson, who had worked with Peter at the Bingley Cemetery, was disturbed by his morbid pranks with the skeletons of the dead bodies in their care. And his brother-in-law Robin Holland would often go out drinking with Sutcliffe in Yorkshire red-light districts where Peter would brag about his exploits with local prostitutes. Sutcliffe seemed to have a fascination with female sex workers, mixed with a strange anger. Another friend, Trevor Birdsall, recalls vividly a night in 1969 at Bradford when Peter had left him in his car for a few minutes. When he returned, Peter told him that he had tried to bludgeon a local whore with a brick inside a sock, but the attack had failed when the sock fell apart and the brick dropped out. Years later, Birdsall reported to Bradford police his suspicions that his old drinking pal was in fact the infamous ‘Yorkshire Ripper'. The report was duly filed away and remained unread for years.

Back at home Sutcliffe played the part of the family saint, often making grand standing speeches about the immorality of men who two-timed their wives and those who paid for sex. This hypocrisy sickened Robin Holland so much that he refused to go out drinking and whoring with Sutcliffe any more.

The murders began in October 1975 with the killing of Wilma McCann, a 28-year-old night cruiser whose corpse, battered by hammer blows to the head and her eyes pierced by stab wounds made by a sharpened screwdriver, was discovered in a playing field in Leeds. The Ripper's next three victims all plied the same trade in the red light districts of Leeds and Bradford. As the bodies mounted up, the media seized on the name the ‘Yorkshire Ripper'; an echo of the unsolved murders of five (or six) prostitutes by a man dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper' in Whitechapel, East London between August and November 1888.

But the pattern of Sutcliffe's killings changed in June 1977 when a perfectly respectable 16-year-old girl (Jayne MacDonald) was brutally battered and stabbed to death and her body left on a rubbish dump. Other respectable women were killed later, and the case brought stark terror to the women of West Yorkshire. Indeed, females all over Britain feared for their lives, and went out in pairs at night, or escorted by fathers, brothers, boyfriends or husbands. The reign of motiveless killing unleashed by Sutcliffe struck fear into the nation; no doubt a situation that he enjoyed creating.

The Yorkshire Ripper case also prompted the biggest murder hunt of the century in England. In a family publication, it is best not to go into gruesome details of his savage work, so I will not list all the facts surrounding his killings as they took place. But on 2 January 1981, when the Ripper was finally arrested, it happened almost by chance. The bearded Sutcliffe was discovered by Sheffield police in his Rover V8 with a black prostitute named Ava Reivers. The car had false license plates and contained the grim tools of his nighttime ‘trade': there was a hammer, a garrote and a Philips screwdriver sharpened to a deadly point. Ms Reivers could count herself the luckiest woman in Britain that night, for she was surely scheduled to be the next victim.

The three week long trial took place at the Old Bailey in London in May 1981. Fascination with the case by now was international, and illegally taken photographs of Sutcliffe in the dock were published in magazines in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The trial also raised important questions about the way the investigation had been mishandled by Yorkshire police. Between 1975 and 1980, Sutcliffe had been pulled in no less than five times for questioning, and then let go by officers when he managed to convince them that he was an innocent party.

The massive police investigation, which cost British taxpayers over 4 million pounds sterling, had also been badly misled by hoax letters and an audio cassette tape sent to police by a man with a ‘Geordie' (north eastern) accent who had posed as the serial killer, and taunted all efforts to capture the Ripper. The accent had been traced by an expert in dialects to Castletown, an area of Sunderland in the north east of England, and this locality was duly flooded with police searching for any local men who had been in the Yorkshire area on the nights that the murders were committed.

The leader of the manhunt, Chief Inspector George Oldfield, became convinced that the man with the Castletown accent was the killer, because machine oil in one of the victim's wounds matched minute traces of oil on the tape and letters sent to police by the mysterious hoaxer. Oldfield was so consumed with the case that he suffered a nervous breakdown and three heart attacks brought on by work-related stress, and was hospitalized in July 1979. The case was then handled by DCI Jim Hobson.

But the over-riding issue, on which Sutcliffe's fate depended, was whether he was legally mad or not. This was not a trial to determine the Ripper's guilt or innocence, but his sanity. And that issue would take most of the legal debate during his trial.

Peter William Sutcliffe was charged with the murder of thirteen women, and attempts to kill another seven. He denied the murder charges, but his legal counsel admitted to manslaughter on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility'. Under the 1957 Homicide Act, the accused may plead for a reduced charge of manslaughter on the grounds that he or she suffered some ‘abnormality of mind', which impaired his or her mental responsibility.

In the Ripper case, the Attorney General Sir Michael Havers was prepared to accept such a plea. But Justice Boreham, the trial judge, was unhappy that the murder charges should be disposed of so easily. He insisted that the case should go before a jury. And so it was left to twelve ordinary citizens of England (six men and six women) to judge Sutcliffe's state of mind when he performed these horrific murders and mutilations.

From one point of view, anyone who did what Sutcliffe had done must be mad. But English law cannot accept such a proposition, as it would result in a legal absurdity. Every murder is an abnormal act, so anyone who has committed one might claim ‘abnormality of mind' in expectation of lenient treatment when brought to justice.

But Sutcliffe's defense was more specific: he alleged that he had heard voices ordering him to go out and kill female prostitutes. His had been a ‘divine mission', he said. In prison at Bradford, he had been examined by three psychiatrists who unanimously declared him to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Here was a meek, henpecked husband who set out at night to hunt down and murder women. Perhaps he was really seeking to kill his wife over and over again, as he was somehow unable to confront her directly? Was this a case of misdirected rage?

The accused stood impassively in the dock, giving no clues as to his mental condition. Against the expert testimony was the possibility that Sutcliffe had simply faked his symptoms. For example, he had not mentioned ‘hearing voices' until several interrogations after his capture and arrest in 1981. In custody he allegedly said that if he were found to be ‘loony' he would serve only ten years in jail instead of thirty. From his wife's bouts of mental disturbance he could have recalled convincing symptoms such as ‘tactile hallucinations'. He claimed that he had experienced a hand tightening around his throat each night before he set out to kill.

But his defense was weakened by one damning flaw: some of his victims had not been prostitutes. There was the teenager Jayne Macdonald, clerk Josephine Whitaker, Leeds University students Barbara Leach and Jacqueline Hill and also Margo Walls, a 47-year-old civil servant.

On 22 May 1981, the jury retired after hearing the judge's summing up. The twelve citizens deliberated for 5 hours and 55 minutes. On return to the court, the foreman declared that they had found Peter William Sutcliffe guilty of multiple murders. He was duly sentenced to life imprisonment, the judge recommending that a minimum of thirty years be served. In the streets outside the Old Bailey large crowds cheered the jury and their verdict. It was reported that even in the psychiatric community there was immense relief by the majority that the experts' testimony had been rejected.

Mystery still surrounds the mind of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. In prison at Parkhurst he continued to claim hearing voices commanding him to kill, and in March 1984 the Home Secretary ordered that he be removed to Broadmoor. He disclosed that Sutcliffe was in a condition of grave mental illness. Doctors at Parkhurst and Broadmoor had diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. Sutcliffe's state of mind had seriously deteriorated since admission to prison, and he could now be a threat to prison staff and other inmates.

After the verdict, cheque-book journalism reared its' ugly head. Sutcliffe's wife Sonia was soon hawking her life story to the tabloid press in what some saw as a cynical ploy to gain financially from her husband's conviction. Families of the Ripper's victims were deeply offended by her actions and attempted to bring out injunctions against publication of such newspaper disclosures as, ‘Sun Exclusive: My life with The Yorkshire Ripper by Sonia Sutcliffe'. After Mrs. Sutcliffe received a substantial sum of money for her revelations in newsprint, she was pilloried for that by the British satirical magazine ‘Private Eye'. This led to a blizzard of solicitors' letters between her lawyers and the journal's legal department. (When her libel action against ‘Private Eye' failed, a tabloid headline screamed, ‘SONIA BIKE!')

But even now, almost 25 years after his trial in 1981, there still remains the question of Peter Sutcliffe's sanity. Was he mad all along? Or did he become mad by faking madness?

(Research: Judgement on the Ripper' by Tim Healey, Hamlyn Publishing 1990, and crimelibary.com/Yorkshire Ripper).
(Update: In February 2006, a man from Sunderland named John Humble admitted to being the infamous hoaxer in the Yorkshire Ripper Case, and has been charged with this offence)

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