Peter Sutcliffe

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter William Sutcliffe was questioned by police nine times during a five-year hunt for the killer the press called the Yorkshire Ripper, and each time he was let go. He was a heavy goods vehicle driver from Bradford, in the north of England. Between 1975 and 1980 he murdered thirteen women and attempted to murder seven others. Newspapers borrowed the name of Jack the Ripper, the Victorian killer, to describe him. The search that followed became one of the largest and most expensive manhunts in British history.

  This documentary asks how so many warnings failed to reach the right desk. It asks why a taunting voice on a tape pulled detectives away from the man they needed. It also asks what changed in British policing once the full account of the failure was made public.

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• 2. Boyhood and Marriage

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  Peter Sutcliffe was born prematurely in Shipley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on the 2nd of June 1946, and spent his first two weeks in hospital. His family was working class and lived in nearby Bingley. His father, John William Sutcliffe, sang in the choir at the Anglican church of St Wilfred's. His mother, Kathleen, was Catholic, and the children were raised in her faith. Peter briefly served as an altar boy.

  Home was not peaceful. John Sutcliffe was an alcoholic who abused his wife, so Kathleen probably carried Peter through her pregnancy under great emotional strain. One of Peter's brothers remembered a Christmas argument in which their father smashed a beer glass over Peter's head. The father also whipped the children with a belt. In 1970 he staged a humiliating scene. He posed as his wife's lover to lure her to a local hotel, and he brought Peter and two siblings along to watch. When Kathleen arrived, he pulled a negligee from her purse as her children looked on.

  Sutcliffe left school at fifteen and drifted through menial jobs. He was reportedly a loner, and in his late teens he developed an obsession with spying on prostitutes and their male clients. In the 1960s he worked twice as a gravedigger at Bingley Cemetery. Co-workers said he enjoyed the job too much, and he even volunteered for overtime washing corpses. From November 1971 to April 1973 he worked on a packaging line at the Baird Television factory. He left when he was asked to travel as a salesman. From April 1973 he worked night shifts at the Britannia Works of Anderton International.

  In February 1975 he took redundancy and spent half of a £400 pay-off on training as a heavy goods vehicle driver. He was dismissed on the 5th of March 1976 for stealing used tyres, and he stayed unemployed until October 1976. Then T. & W.H. Clark Holdings Ltd., on the Canal Road Industrial Estate in Bradford, hired him as a driver. It has been speculated that a prostitute and her pimp once conned him out of money. Other analysts found no evidence that he paid for sex at all, but agreed that he was fixated on women soliciting on the streets of Leeds and Bradford.

  On the 14th of February 1967, Sutcliffe met sixteen-year-old Sonia Szurma at the Royal Standard, a pub on Manningham Lane in Bradford's red-light district. Her parents were Ukrainian and Polish refugees from Czechoslovakia. They married on the 10th of August 1974. Sonia was studying to become a teacher when she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The writer Gordon Burn described a domineering wife who would put her husband down "like a naughty schoolboy". Sutcliffe sometimes had to restrain her physically during sudden fits of rage. The journalist Barbara Jones, who spoke with Sonia many times, called her the strangest, coldest and most irritating person she had ever met.

  Sonia suffered several miscarriages, and the couple were told she could not have children. She later resumed her teacher training and had an affair with an ice-cream van driver. When she finished the course in 1977 and began teaching, her salary helped buy a house at 6 Garden Lane in Heaton. They moved in on the 26th of September 1977. Years earlier, in 1969, a night out with a friend had already put Sutcliffe's name in a police notebook.

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• 3. The Survivors

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  Trevor Birdsall was sitting in his minivan on St Paul's Road in Bradford in 1969 when his friend Sutcliffe got out and walked off until he was out of sight. Sutcliffe came back out of breath and told Birdsall to drive away fast. He said he had followed a prostitute into a garage and struck her with a stone wrapped in a sock. The next day police called at Sutcliffe's home, because the woman had noted the registration plate of Birdsall's vehicle. Sutcliffe admitted hitting her but insisted he had used his hand. The officers told him he was very lucky, since she did not want to press charges.

  The hammer attacks began six years later. On the night of the 5th of July 1975, Sutcliffe came upon Anna Rogulskyj, aged 36, walking alone in Keighley. He knocked her unconscious with a hammer and slashed her stomach with a knife. A neighbour disturbed him and he fled. Rogulskyj survived brain surgery, but she was left afraid to go out, feeling that people stared and pointed at her. She later said that at times she wished she had died in the attack.

  On the 15th of August, Sutcliffe attacked Olive Smelt, aged 46, in Halifax. He opened with a commonplace remark about the weather, then struck her skull from behind. Interrupted again, he left her badly injured but alive. Smelt told Detective Superintendent Dick Holland that her attacker had a Yorkshire accent. Nobody acted on that, nor on the fact that neither she nor Rogulskyj had been attacked in a town with a red-light district.

  Twelve days after the Halifax attack, in Silsden, Sutcliffe hit fourteen-year-old Tracy Browne five times on the head as she walked along a country lane. He ran when a passing car's lights appeared, and she needed brain surgery. Browne remembered feeling charmed by him at first. They had walked together for almost a mile, about thirty minutes, without her sensing any danger. Sutcliffe was never convicted of this attack, but he confessed to it in 1992.

  Marcella Claxton, aged 20, accepted a lift from Sutcliffe after a party on the 9th of May 1976. She was hit from behind in Roundhay Park when she got out of the car. She was four months pregnant and lost the baby. She needed several extensive brain operations and suffered intermittent blackouts and chronic depression. Claxton later testified against Sutcliffe at his trial.

  Maureen Long, aged 43, accepted a lift home from a Bradford nightclub and was knocked out on the 10th of July 1977. She was found with hypothermia and spent nine weeks in hospital. A witness got the make of Sutcliffe's car wrong, and more than 300 officers checked thousands of cars without result.

  Marilyn Moore, a 25-year-old prostitute, survived on the 14th of December 1977 only because Sutcliffe lost his balance as he swung his hammer. She escaped with severe head injuries and gave police a good description of a black Sunbeam Rapier. Tyre tracks at the scene matched those from an earlier attack. The photofit looked strongly like Sutcliffe, as other survivors' photofits had. Police interviewed him.

  Ann Rooney, a 22-year-old Irish student, was struck three times on the head at Horsforth College on the 2nd of March 1979. Her description of the attacker and his car closely matched Sutcliffe and the Sunbeam Rapier, which police had flagged many times in the red-light districts of Leeds and Bradford. Sutcliffe confessed to her attack in 1992. Barbara Mills QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, decided it was not in the public interest to add charges for the Rooney and Browne attacks.

  Upadhya Bandara, a 34-year-old visiting doctor from Singapore, was walking home through Headingley on the 24th of September 1980 after an evening out with friends. She noticed a man inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken staring at her. In the dim Chapel Lane alley she was struck twice on the head, and a rope was looped around her neck. Her shoes scraped loudly on the cobbles as she was dragged, and a woman whose house backed onto the alley called the police. Sutcliffe fled, and Bandara gave a description of him.

  Maureen Lea, a 21-year-old art student at Leeds University, was attacked on the 25th of October after visiting a pub in Chapeltown with friends. She suffered a fractured skull, cheekbone and jaw. On the 5th of November, Theresa Sykes, aged 16, was hit from behind in Huddersfield on her way to a shop in Oakes. Her boyfriend heard her screams and ran out, scaring Sutcliffe away. She was still recovering from brain surgery when Sutcliffe was arrested.

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• 4. The Victims

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  Wilma McCann, a 28-year-old mother of four, left her council house on Scott Hall Avenue in the Chapeltown area of Leeds at 7:30 p.m. on the 30th of October 1975. She was Sutcliffe's first confirmed murder victim. He approached her from behind, as in the earlier attacks, and struck the back of her skull twice with a hammer. A police inquiry involving 150 officers and 11,000 interviews failed to identify him.

  Sutcliffe had begun by attacking women and girls in residential areas. He appears to have moved toward red-light districts because he was drawn to the vulnerability of prostitutes and to the ambivalent attitude of police toward their safety. Emily Jackson, aged 42, died on the 20th of January 1976 after he picked her up outside the Gaiety pub on Roundhay Road in Leeds. She was in dire financial straits, and her husband had persuaded her to work as a prostitute, using the van of the family roofing business. She was stabbed fifty-six times.

  Irene Richardson, aged 28, was a Chapeltown prostitute. She was last seen at 11:15 p.m. on the 5th of February 1977, leaving a rooming house on Cowper Street and saying she was going to Tiffany's, a pub and disco in central Leeds. Her body was found in Roundhay Park, where Sutcliffe had placed her knee-length boots neatly over the back of her thighs. Tyre tracks near the scene produced a long list of suspect vehicles. Patricia Atkinson, known as Tina, aged 32, was killed on the 23rd of April 1977 in her Bradford flat, where police found a boot print on the bedclothes.

  Jayne MacDonald was sixteen. On the 25th of June 1977 she went to meet friends at the Hofbrauhaus, a German-style bierkeller in Leeds, and missed the last bus home. After about forty-five minutes at a friend's house she decided to walk. Sutcliffe attacked her at around 2:00 a.m. in Reginald Street, Chapeltown. Children found her body in a playground at 9:45 the next morning. The Home Office pathologist Professor David Gee carried out the post mortem. MacDonald was Sutcliffe's youngest murder victim, and when he was questioned later she was the only victim he expressed regret about.

  Two of the murders took place in Manchester. One victim there was Jean Jordan, a 20-year-old mother of two known to friends as "Scottish Jean", who died on the 1st of October 1977. The other was Vera Millward, aged 40, a mother of seven from a council flat in Hulme. She left home at 10:00 p.m. on the 16th of May 1978, telling her boyfriend she was going out to buy cigarettes. Sutcliffe drove her to the car park of the Manchester Royal Infirmary in Chorlton-on-Medlock, where he killed her. Every other murder took place in West Yorkshire.

  Yvonne Pearson, a 21-year-old prostitute from Bradford, was killed on the 21st of January 1978. Ten days later, on the 31st of January, Elena Rytka, known as Helen, became his next victim. She was an 18-year-old prostitute from Huddersfield, and she was the only victim Sutcliffe also raped. Her body was found three days later at Garrards timber yard, behind a stack of timber under a sheet of asbestos.

  Josephine Whitaker, a 19-year-old clerk, was killed at 11:55 p.m. on the 4th of April 1979 as she walked home across Savile Park Moor in Halifax. Barbara Leach, a 20-year-old social psychology student at Bradford University, was attacked at about 1:00 a.m. on the 1st of September 1979, after leaving a pub. Marguerite Walls, aged 47, was a civil servant at the Department of Education and Science in Pudsey. On the night of the 20th of August 1980 she left her office to walk home to Farsley. Earlier that summer Sutcliffe had been arrested after testing positive for alcohol while driving, and he was awaiting a hearing due in mid-January 1981.

  Jacqueline Hill, a 20-year-old student at the University of Leeds, stepped off a bus on the 17th of November 1980 and began walking back to her hall of residence on Alma Road in Headingley. Sutcliffe followed her in his car, then on foot. Hill was his last known murder victim. By then the hunt for him had run for five years.

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• 5. Clues That Misled

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  A new £5 note should have been Sutcliffe's undoing. After he killed Jean Jordan, he realised that the note he had given her was traceable. On the 9th of October 1977, after hosting a family party at his home, he returned to the wasteland behind Southern Cemetery where he had left her body, hoping to find it. He could not. He mutilated the body with a knife and a broken pane of glass. The next morning Bruce Jones, a dairy worker and future actor, found Jordan while searching for house bricks near his allotment.

  The note was in a secret compartment of Jordan's handbag. Police traced it to branches of the Midland Bank in Bingley and Shipley, which narrowed the inquiry to 8,000 employees who might have received it in a wage packet. Over three months, officers interviewed 5,000 men, Sutcliffe among them. His alibi, the family party, seemed credible. Weeks of work on the note's origin led nowhere, and investigators were frustrated to hold an important clue they could not follow to a firm or a person. Police discontinued that line in January 1978. Sutcliffe stayed on a list of 300 names tied to the note, yet he was contacted and set aside several more times.

  Then a voice on a tape swallowed months of effort. It mocked Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who led the Ripper investigation. The voice said: "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." Linguists narrowed the accent to the Castletown area of Sunderland, and police began hunting a man from Wearside. The same hoaxer had sent two letters to police and the Daily Mirror in March 1978, signed "Jack the Ripper". They claimed the murder of 26-year-old Joan Harrison in Preston in November 1975.

  The hoaxer, soon dubbed Wearside Jack, gained unusual credibility. Saliva on his envelopes showed the same blood group as that left at the crime scenes, a type shared by only 6% of the population. He also seemed to know details of the murders that were supposedly unreleased. In fact he had picked them up from his local newspaper and pub gossip. Lawrence Byford later found that Oldfield ignored advice from survivors, eminent specialists, the FBI in the United States, and the dialect analysts Stanley Ellis and Jack Windsor Lewis, who all judged the voice a hoax. The inquiry used the tape to eliminate suspects instead of treating it as one line of enquiry. Sutcliffe did not fit the profile of the sender, so he slipped past.

  After Barbara Leach's death, the killing of another woman who was not a prostitute alarmed the public. Police responded with an expensive publicity campaign that stressed the tape. Even so, Sutcliffe was interviewed at least twice more in 1979. He matched several forensic clues, but he was not strongly suspected.

  The hoax case reopened in 2005, and DNA from the envelopes was entered into the national database. It matched John Samuel Humble, an unemployed alcoholic from the Ford Estate in Sunderland, a few miles from Castletown. His DNA had been taken after a drunk and disorderly offence in 2001. Humble was charged on the 20th of October 2005 with attempting to pervert the course of justice. He was convicted on the 21st of March 2006 and sentenced to eight years. He died on the 30th of July 2019, aged 63.

  Sutcliffe himself showed emotion only when questioned about Joan Harrison, and he vehemently denied killing her. DNA evidence revealed in 2011 proved him right. The crime had been committed by Christopher Smith, a convicted sex offender who died in 2008.

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• 6. Arrest and Trial

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  Probationary Constable Robert Hydes was running a routine check on a car in the driveway of Light Trades House, on Melbourne Avenue in Broomhill, Sheffield, on the 2nd of January 1981. The driver was Sutcliffe, and with him was Olivia Reivers, a 24-year-old prostitute. The car carried false number plates. Sutcliffe was arrested and taken to Dewsbury police station in West Yorkshire. There officers questioned him about the Ripper case, because he matched many of the known physical characteristics.

  The evidence arrived in pieces. At the scene in Sheffield, Sutcliffe had told police he was "bursting for a pee" and briefly slipped away. The next day Sergeant Robert Ring went back on a hunch and found a knife, a hammer and a rope behind an oil storage tank. Sutcliffe had also hidden a second knife in the toilet cistern at Dewsbury police station. When he was stripped, officers found a V-necked jumper worn inverted beneath his trousers, with the sleeves pulled over his legs. The elbows were padded, presumably to protect his knees as he knelt over his victims. The public did not learn of this until 2003.

  When shown the discovery of the weapons, Sutcliffe suddenly admitted he was the Yorkshire Ripper. Over the next day he described his attacks calmly. He said he felt an overwhelming urge to kill any woman. Several weeks later he claimed that God had told him to kill, and he called the women filth who cluttered the streets. Police obtained a search warrant for his house in Heaton and brought his wife in for questioning.

  Sutcliffe was charged on Sunday the 4th of January 1981. West Yorkshire Police announced it at a late-night news conference where grinning police chiefs said they were "absolutely delighted". Critics later said this gave newspapers an effective green light to publish background about Sutcliffe, against the traditional norms of contempt of court. It contributed directly to the strictness of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. He first appeared in court at Dewsbury on Monday the 5th of January, while a large, hostile crowd gathered outside.

  At his trial that May, Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty to thirteen charges of murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He also pleaded guilty to seven charges of attempted murder. His defence was that he was the tool of God's will. He said he first heard voices while working as a gravedigger, coming from the headstone of a Polish man, Bronisław Zapolski, and he took them to be the voice of God.

  Four psychiatrists diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, and the prosecution meant to accept his plea. The trial judge, Sir Leslie Boreham, would not. He demanded an unusually detailed explanation. Attorney-General Sir Michael Havers spoke for two hours, there was a ninety-minute lunch break, and then forty minutes of legal discussion. Boreham still rejected the plea and the psychiatrists' evidence, and insisted that a jury decide.

  The trial proper began on the 5th of May 1981 and lasted two weeks. Despite the efforts of his counsel, James Chadwin QC, the jury found Sutcliffe guilty of murder on all counts by a majority verdict. He received twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment. The jury rejected the four psychiatrists, possibly swayed by a prison officer who heard Sutcliffe tell his wife that if he convinced people he was mad, he might get ten years in a "loony bin".

  Boreham called Sutcliffe beyond redemption and hoped he would never be released. He recommended a minimum of thirty years before parole, which meant Sutcliffe would not be free until at least 2011. A court would later go further than that recommendation.

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• 7. What Byford Found

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  Handwritten index cards held much of what West Yorkshire Police knew about their suspects. The Ripper inquiry was one of the biggest ever run by a British police force, and it came before modern computers. With everything on paper, cross-referencing was difficult, and television appeals for information produced thousands more documents. After the conviction, the government asked Inspector of Constabulary Lawrence Byford to review the investigation. He concluded that the major incident room, which should have been the central nerve centre, was a serious handicap. A backlog of unprocessed information meant that crucial pieces were never connected. That flaw in the central index let Sutcliffe repeatedly evade capture.

  Byford also questioned the choice of leader. Chief Constable Ronald Gregory had picked Oldfield for the job. Byford argued that a senior officer should not be chosen on age or years of service. He wanted someone with strong professional competence who could inspire confidence and loyalty.

  The clearest missed chance came from Trevor Birdsall, the friend from the 1969 minivan. On the 25th of November 1980 he sent police an anonymous letter saying he had good reason to know the identity of the man sought. He described someone who had dealings with prostitutes and a particular interest in them, and he supplied Sutcliffe's name, address and employer. The next day Birdsall went to Bradford police station and repeated his suspicions. He said he had been with Sutcliffe when Sutcliffe left a car to chase a woman after an argument in a Halifax bar on the 15th of August 1975, the night of the Olive Smelt attack.

  A report written during that visit was lost, and a comprehensive search after Sutcliffe's arrest never found it. Byford saw the inaction as an example of the incident room's declining efficiency. It left Sutcliffe at liberty for over a month when he could have been in custody. There is no evidence that he killed again in that time.

  Byford's 1982 report was not released by the Home Office until the 1st of June 2006, and parts were withheld, including sections on photofits and on Sutcliffe's immediate associates. A summary published by Home Secretary William Whitelaw had disclosed the major findings. The full report confirmed that the criticism of the force was valid. It led to changes in investigative procedures that were adopted by all British police forces.

  Public anger was not limited to the incident room. Police suggested a curfew for women at night, and the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group and other feminists accused them of victim-blaming. They said men should be given the curfew instead. On the 12th of November 1977, eleven Reclaim the Night marches took place in towns across the United Kingdom. They made the point that women should be able to walk anywhere without restriction, and should not be blamed for men's violence.

  Sources describe misogynistic and sexist attitudes within the force at the time. At a press conference in October 1979, the senior detective Jim Hobson said Sutcliffe had clearly expressed hatred toward prostitutes, a sentiment shared by many. He added that police would keep arresting prostitutes, but that Sutcliffe was now targeting innocent women. At the trial, Michael Havers said in his opening statement that the saddest aspect was that some victims were not prostitutes, and that the last six attacks were on completely respectable women. The English Collective of Prostitutes protested outside the Old Bailey. One protester, Nina Lopez, told The Independent forty years later that the remarks reflected criticism of how police and the establishment handled the case.

  In 1988, the mother of Jacqueline Hill took a case to the High Court, arguing that West Yorkshire Police had failed to use reasonable care in catching Sutcliffe. The House of Lords held in Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire that the Chief Constable owed Hill no duty of care. It ruled there was a lack of proximity, so the case failed on the second limb of the Caparo test.

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• 8. Beyond the Verdict

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  Within days of the 1981 conviction, the crime writer David Yallop suggested that Sutcliffe had also murdered 20-year-old Carol Wilkinson. She was bludgeoned with a stone in Bradford on the 10th of October 1977, nine days after Jean Jordan died. Police had ruled her out as a Ripper victim because she was not a prostitute. A local man, Anthony Steel, was already convicted of her murder. Steel had confessed under intense questioning after being told he could see a solicitor if he did. The confession lacked any detail of the killing, and Jim Hobson testified that he did not find it credible. Steel was still narrowly convicted. In 2003 his conviction was quashed, because his low IQ had made him a vulnerable interviewee.

  Yallop noted that Sutcliffe knew Wilkinson, had argued violently with her stepfather over his advances toward her, and worked close to where she died. In prison, Sutcliffe was noted to show particular anxiety whenever her name came up.

  In 1982, West Yorkshire Police secretly appointed detective Keith Hellawell to look for further victims. His list ran to around sixty murders and attempted murders across the country. Sutcliffe's driver's logs, which showed where in the country he was working, eliminated forty of them. Twenty-two unsolved crimes remained, twelve of them in West Yorkshire. One was the killing of Debra Schlesinger, aged 18, who was stabbed on the 21st of April 1977 on the garden path of her home in Hawksworth. Sutcliffe's work record placed him delivering to an engineering plant 100 yards from her home that day. By 2002 West Yorkshire Police said they were ready to charge him, but no further action followed.

  Two authors went further. In 2015 the former detective Chris Clark and the journalist Tim Tate published Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders. They alleged that between 1966 and 1980 Sutcliffe was responsible for at least twenty-two more murders than the ones he was convicted of. ITV adapted the book as a two-part documentary. Some links were disputed. Derbyshire Constabulary, for example, said there was no evidence tying Sutcliffe to the 1973 attack in Bakewell Cemetery. In 2016 investigators examined two unsolved murders of Swedish prostitutes from 1980, but West Yorkshire Police said they were "absolutely certain" Sutcliffe had never been in Sweden.

  After his conviction, Sutcliffe began using his mother's maiden name, Coonan. Custody was not safe for him. On the 10th of January 1983, in the hospital wing at Parkhurst, a career criminal named James Costello stabbed him in the face with a broken coffee jar. The wounds needed thirty stitches. In March 1984 Sutcliffe was moved to Broadmoor Hospital after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Sonia obtained a separation around 1989 and a divorce in July 1994.

  The attacks continued. In 1996 a fellow patient tried to strangle him with the cable from a pair of headphones. On the 10th of March 1997, another inmate, Ian Kay, attacked him with a pen, and Sutcliffe lost the sight in his left eye. In December 2007 Patrick Sureda lunged at him with a metal cutlery knife, shouting that he would blind the remaining eye. Sutcliffe threw himself backward, and the blade stabbed his cheek instead. In between, on the 17th of January 2005, he was allowed to visit Arnside with four members of hospital staff. His father's ashes had been scattered there, and the visit made front-page tabloid headlines.

  On the 16th of July 2010, the High Court imposed a whole life tariff. Mr Justice Mitting described a campaign of murder that terrorised a large part of Yorkshire for several years. Sutcliffe's appeal was rejected on the 14th of January 2011. In December 2015 he was assessed as no longer mentally ill, and in August 2016 a medical tribunal ruled that he no longer needed clinical treatment. He moved from Broadmoor to HM Prison Frankland.

  Sutcliffe died at University Hospital of North Durham on the 13th of November 2020, aged 74, from Covid-19. Two weeks earlier he had been treated at the same hospital for a suspected heart attack. He had underlying problems including diabetes and obesity. The Prison Service called the formal cause of death a matter for the coroner. After a private funeral he was cremated. West Yorkshire Police later apologised for the "language, tone, and terminology" the force had used during the original investigation. The apology came nine months after a victim's son wrote on behalf of several victims' families.

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