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The Yorkshire Ripper

According to medical evidence presented to Britain’s High Court in April 2011, Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, now 63, was wrongly convicted of his crimes in 1981 as he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the murders; he will be safe to be released when his recommended time of 30 years in prison falls.

Kevin Murray, a consultant psychiatrist at Broadmoor secure hospital, where he has treated Sutcliffe since 2001, said it was the unanimous view of his colleagues that the Ripper suffered from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of his crimes. Dr Murray’s report from 2006 concluded that his treatment has had ‘very considerable success’ and if he continues with it the Ripper poses a low risk of offending.

Judge John Mitting told the High Court that a psychiatrist’s report might also form the basis for Sutcliffe to appeal against his murder convictions. The Ripper has been accused of ‘hoodwinking’ psychiatrists into believing that voices from God had ordered him to kill prostitutes. Judge Mitting said that the report should be disregarded.

Given the nature of Sutcliffe’s crimes, we can only conclude that it is the doctors recommending his release who need psychiatric help and that any judge who lets England’s second-worst serial killer back on the streets will be deemed to be crazier still. It simply won’t happen.

What became known as the Yorkshire Ripper killings began with the murder of Emily Jackson, 42, a prostitute and mother of three, who was found on a cold January morning in 1976 by workmen in a derelict site in Leeds. She had been stabbed, bitten, bludgeoned and strangled to death. Her death was then linked to the earlier murder of another streetwalker named Wilma McCann.

In May 1976, Marcella Claxton was attacked with a hammer in Leeds and survived. In February 1977, Irene Richardson’s body was found. Two months later, Patricia Atkinson was killed in her bedsit in Manningham, West Yorkshire. Then the Ripper no longer confined himself to murdering prostitutes. Jayne MacDonald, a 16-year-old shop assistant, was savagely stabbed, bitten and bashed to death in Leeds in June 1977.

As the body count rapidly rose, the women of the north of England were under siege and stayed home at nights. Female police officers worked undercover as prostitutes and put their lives in grave peril, should they go with a man in a car only to have to reveal their true identity and be stabbed to death if police did not back them up.

The biggest manhunt in England’s history saw as many as 250,000 names of questioned people on file. Thirty thousand statements were taken and hundreds of thousands of number plates in red light areas were registered. But checking all of them out in those times before modern technology was an impossibility and nothing led to so much as a suspect.

Had it been these times of cross-analysis by computer, then one name, Peter Sutcliffe, a local lorry driver, would have been a rash across their screens. Sutcliffe’s car was seen at red light districts 60 times. As a result, he was interviewed nine times. He always had an alibi – he was at home with his family. Despite being on a list of 300 names connected to a £5 note, traced to his employment, from the purse of one of the murder victims, Sutcliffe was never strongly suspected.

Then in 1979 a tape and a letter arrived at Task Force Headquarters, which was believed to be genuine. But the voice belonged to a hoaxer who convinced West Yorkshire Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield he was the killer. He said, ‘I’m Jack. I see you’ve no luck catching me.’ Delivered in a Sunderland lilt, the voice was played across the north-east of England, in pubs, clubs and football grounds. The public could hear it by calling a special number.

In a blunder of monumental proportions, Oldfield was so convinced that the tape was genuine that he switched their hunt to the north-east and anyone without a local accent was immediately eliminated. A month after the recording arrived, Peter Sutcliffe was being interviewed for a fifth time but walked free because his voice didn’t match that of the hoaxer. Although they may have been close to at least suspecting Sutcliffe at the time, the real Ripper was freed to kill again and again.

By the end of 1980, police had spent more than two and a quarter million hours hunting a killer who had killed 13 women, and savagely attacked seven more who were lucky to escape with their lives. Twenty-three children were without a mother. At the time, the Yorkshire Ripper was the most prolific serial killer in England’s history. And he was still at large. But not for long. And his capture had nothing to do with good detective work.

On the evening of 2 January 1981, two uniformed officers approached a Rover in a factory driveway frequented by prostitutes and their clients. In the car they saw a man and a prostitute who was known to them. The man said his name was Peter Williams and that he needed to go to the toilet. They watched as he walked along the driveway into the darkness and heard him relieve himself and walk back.

They rang the Rover’s registration through, to find that the plates were registered to a car in a local scrapping yard. At the Hammerton Road police station the man confessed that his name was really Peter Sutcliffe, and that he had stolen the plates so his wife wouldn’t find out. It was his first time with a prostitute. During the interview he asked to use the toilet, where he hid a knife in the cistern.

Given the fact that Sutcliffe answered the description of the man who had bashed the survivors and had a gap in his teeth that matched the bite marks on the victims, police returned to where he had relieved himself the night before to find a hammer and a knife. In Sutcliffe’s pocket they also found a length of rope.

All of a sudden it seemed blatantly apparent that the lorry-driving family man had been calmly murdering under their noses while they chased one red herring after the other.

After 48 hours of interrogation and with a mountain of circumstantial evidence piled up against him, Peter Sutcliffe sat calmly back in his chair and confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper. For the next two days he confessed every crime in minute detail. Hardened detectives were sickened at the obvious pleasure he got from it. The only emotion he showed was when discussing the murder of 16-year-old Jayne MacDonald. Sutcliffe’s excuse for his crimes was that he had been rejected by a prostitute when he was young.

When his wife Sonia was allowed to visit him for the first time, still unaware of the monster she had been living with, he confessed to her: ‘You know all those women who were killed by the Yorkshire Ripper. That was me. I killed all those women.’

To the police officer’s astonishment, after considerable debate, she replied, ‘Peter, what on earth did you do that for? Even a sparrow has the right to live.’

The Yorkshire Ripper was given 20 life sentences, with a recommendation he serve a minimum of 30 years in prison before consideration for parole.