July 1979. Constable Andy Laptew turns up at the house of Peter Sutcliffe, a possible
murder suspect. He’s met at the door by Sutcliffe’s wife and is invited in for a
cup of tea and a chat. Sutcliffe appears in the living room, a man that doesn’t look
dissimilar from a Hollywood portrayal of the antichrist. He has menacing eyes, almost like
black dots; black hair and a finely coiffed jet-black beard.
The police officer asks him, “Peter, do you frequent prostitutes?”
The response is quick, “No, not at all, I’ve no need – I’m only recently married.”
After the interview the cop leaves that house thinking this could be the guy. This could
be the animal that has made women fear for their lives for years now in the towns and
cities of West Yorkshire and beyond. Laptew goes back to the station and tells
his boss that the guy he just spoke to is a “dead ringer” for the photofit they
have. That boss, one of many cops who would be later accused of doing dreadful police
work, screams at the young constable. “Anybody mentions photofits to me again will be doing
traffic for the rest of their service!” he shouts. The higher ups have a tape recording,
one they’re sure was made by the real ripper. They are wrong of course, and their shoddy
work will mean flagons of blood spilled on the streets that needn’t have been spilled.
The case, still today, is arguably the most well-known serial case the UK has ever had
bar London’s Jack the Ripper, who, it must be said, wasn’t anywhere near as prolific
as the Yorkshireman. There’s a saying in England that goes, “It’s
grim up north.” If in the late 70s and early 80s you would have walked down certain streets
in the industrial cities and towns of West Yorkshire you wouldn’t have disagreed. These
streets, with their dilapidated houses and rubbish piling up in gardens, were the hunting
grounds for the man that would become known as the Yorkshire Ripper.
Like many kids back in those days, Sutcliffe was born into the kind of family where higher
education was simply out of the question. For most working class teenagers, they left
school aged 15 or 16 and they either got a trade or worked in one of the industries in
what was known as the industrial north. One of Sutcliffe’s first jobs was as a gravedigger,
a job perhaps quite apt for a man that would later ditch bodies. It’s said that due to
the morbid nature of this occupation, as a teenager Sutcliffe sometimes surprised people
with his very dark sense of humor. Possibly something that happened during those days
shaped what he would become. We’ll get around to that later. All we will say is that Sutcliffe
apparently enjoyed washing the corpses, something that shocked his few friends when he told
them about it in the pub. We don’t know too much about his childhood,
but it didn’t sound very pleasant. One of six children, Sutcliffe was a mother’s boy.
As the saying goes, he was tied to her apron strings. His father never really gave much
attention to who he considered the quiet, oddball son. This is what one of Sutcliffe’s
brothers later said about their father: “He used to belt the hell out of us when
we were kids. I remember when I was about four or five, there was a bit of an argument
and he smashed a beer glass into Peter’s head.” It’s also said most of the children
at times had to watch on helplessly as their father beat their mother.
Ok, so this once quiet child with a history of violence undoubtedly didn’t have the
best of upbringings, but after a series of factory jobs and a stint unemployed, he landed
himself work as a heavy goods vehicle operator at a place called T. & W.H. Clark Holdings.
That’s a name you’re going to hear again. By this time, he’d already married Sonia
Szurma, a young woman he’d been dating for around seven years. They tried to have children,
but after a series of miscarriages, they gave up. She also had an affair at one point, but
still, they stayed together and bought a house in Bradford with her savings from school teaching.
The relationship doesn’t exactly sound like one made in heaven, but nonetheless, a teacher
and driver living in a semi-detached property looked normal enough to family, friends and
neighbors. Together the couple had nights out with people. They attended weddings together.
They were just another couple like any other. What his wife didn’t know, though, is that
her husband was a voyeur. Sometimes he’d go out at night and just watch women, especially
women working in the atrociously rundown red lights districts of Leeds and Bradford.
In 1969, when Sutcliffe was 23-years old and had been with Szurma for almost two years,
he began his life of vicious crimes. This all happened after a prostitute had tricked
him out of some money. Later the same night, after having a few drinks with a friend, they
drove off in the friend’s car. This friend is another matter of great importance that
we’ll come back to later. Sutcliffe told his buddy he wanted to get
out of the car for a minute. He wanted to find the prostitute. He couldn't find her,
but he saw another woman working on the streets, so he followed her. In his hand was a sock
filled with a stone. This is what he later admitted about that night: “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.”
His friend might not have seen all this take place, but that didn’t matter.
The cops had gotten the registration plate of Sutcliffe’s friend’s car and so they
ended up at Sutcliffe’s home the next day. As you already know, this wouldn’t be the
first time they knocked on his door. In fact, prior to his arrest, they’d interview him
nine times. Yep, this is one messed up case. What you’ll discover is that it seemed the
police looked everywhere but the place they should have been looking.
Anyway, when Sutcliffe talked to the cops, he admitted he’d hit the woman, but he said
he had done so with his fist. The cops bought into that story, and also told Sutcliffe he
was fortunate because the woman didn’t want to press charges. Had she been middle class,
not a prostitute, you can be sure the police would have urged her to take things further.
This was the late 60s, a time of widespread class prejudice and misogyny in England.
July, 1975. This time the place of the crime is a textile town on the outskirts of the
city of Bradford. Sutcliffe spots a woman walking down a quiet street at night. He walks
behind her, says something to her, and subsequently strikes her hard on the head with a ball-pein
hammer. He then slashes her stomach with a knife. Like many of his victims, she would
survive, but the attack was so traumatic she later said she sometimes wished she’d have
died. A month later, he stalked a woman in the town
of Halifax, a mill town not too far from Bradford. He asked her something about the weather before
hitting her over the head with a hammer. Again, he slashed the victim, this time on the back.
She also survived the attack. It should be said, neither of these attacks
happened in red light areas and the victims weren’t prostitutes. The last woman had
been out at the Royal Oak pub in Halifax and had stopped off on her way home to buy fish
and chips for her and her husband. Sutcliffe had also been in that pub with the same guy
he’d been with in the 1969 attack. At one point Suttcliffe turned to his friend and
said, “I bet she's on the game.” The next day the friend read the newspaper and saw
a woman had been attacked after leaving the Royal Oak. It did cross his mind that the
perpetrator might have been Sutcliffe. Both times he could have killed the women,
but he was interrupted during the commission of the crimes. Many years later, Sutcliffe
told the police about the second attack, “I was going to kill her. I had the knife with
me at that time. I was going to kill her, but I did not get the chance.”
Just after the crime, this woman told the police something of great importance. She
said her attacker had a Yorkshire accent. This fact, and the fact both women hadn’t
been attacked in red light areas, police just chose to forget.
This is very, very important for you guys to know. You see, maybe you don’t know that
accents in England can change even when you don’t travel too far. You can travel from
Bradford to Manchester, or to Liverpool, or to Newcastle in the North East, and the change
in accent is unmistakable. These places are all pretty close by, in USA terms anyway.
You can drive as little as 20 miles from one city and people can sound different.
Ok, not long after that last attack, Sutcliffe followed a 14-year old girl down a quiet country
lane. He approached her and they walked for a while and chatted. After about 20 minutes
he hit her five times over the head with a hammer. He then saw car lights, so ran, leaving
the girl for dead. She needed brain surgery, but when she came around, she could accurately
describe her assailant and say what kind of accent he had.
What we now have are three crimes that all look very similar that happened not too far
away from each other. Then, just a couple of months later he attacked another woman
with a hammer. This time he stabbed the woman many times and she died.
Even though these crimes were so similar, police hadn’t linked them together. They
had some details about the attacker given from the surviving victims. They’d been
told he was about five feet eight (173 cm). They knew he had a Yorkshire accent. They
knew he had black hair and a black beard. Still, they believed one man was attacking
prostitutes and he wasn’t the one attacking what they deemed “good girls”.
In fact, the photofit police put in the newspaper was his double. Little did police know that
when that photofit appeared in the newspapers Sutcliffe joked with his mother-in-law about
how much it looked like him. Just a few months later he picked up a prostitute
in Leeds. He drove her to some abandoned buildings where he hit her over the head with a hammer.
This time he used a sharpened screwdriver to stab her 52 times. He then dumped her body
in what looked something like a junkyard, but this was just another downtrodden area.
This time he stamped on her, leaving an impression of his boots. This is important, too. It was
a size 7 Dunlop Warwick Wellington boot. This bootprint would be seen again at a crime scene.
Over the next year, he attacked more women in a similar style. Usually using a hammer
to knock them out or subdue them, and then stabbing them. Some of his victims would survive,
but not without life-changing injuries. One woman he killed with a hammer, and then
he mutilated her dead body. This time he left tire tracks behind. That was another clue,
since police could investigate what kind of car or at least tires they were looking for.
Still, there were 100,000 possible matches for those tires.
When he killed a 16-year old girl, the police and the press all started talking about him
now killing normal people, as if the other victims were inhuman or something. Such were
the days, the cops ashamed themselves at one point by calling the last girl the first “innocent”
victim. They hadn’t linked the 14-year old who survived, which was a pity, since she
had given an almost perfect description of him.
The cops had been sure they had a prostitute killer, but they were wrong. At one point
they’d even invited prostitutes from West Yorkshire to attend a meeting with them so
they could give advice and ask them questions. One cop smiled just before the women entered
the room and said to another cop, “I hope we’re not going to catch anything sitting
on these chairs.” The other cop laughed and replied, “Well, I kept well out of their
way just in case.” It was only after this murder that police
really stepped up the investigation and the female public started thinking, “Oh, it
could be me next.” Time and again, the police said now a “respectable” woman had been
killed. One of the biggest manhunts in English history
was shaping up. Cops already had a lot of paperwork, so much, the station had to reinforce
the floor. On 1 October 1977, Sutcliffe had chosen the
city of Manchester as his next hunting ground. He made another mistake after paying a prostitute
some money and killing her. He realized the five pound note he’d handed her could be
traced. He returned to the part of Manchester where he’d dumped the body. This was described
as a wasteland. When he couldn’t find the note, Sutcliffe
was enraged. He took a knife and mutilated the body as much as was possible, almost taking
off her head. The victim had worked on the mean streets, so she’d known to always hide
money in a secret compartment in her purse. The police found it, of course.
It was after this that cops narrowed down their search to some 8,000 men. That note
was issued by a bank for employee paychecks at certain companies. One of those companies
was T. & W.H. Clark Holdings. Sutcliffe was interviewed during his workday
there, but the police didn’t find anything suspicious about his story. As we described
at the beginning, one cop ended up going to his house. There his wife said he’d been
with her at a party on the night of the murder. She was lying. She had no idea he was a killer,
but she was still giving false alibis for him.
Then there was another survivor and yet another woman who described a man who was a dead ringer
for Peter Sutcliffe. On top of that, the same tire tracks were found at the scene of the
crime. Maybe if they hadn’t had so much paperwork
they would have known he was a prime suspect. So much information in the days when technology
was so backwards might have hampered the case. That, or the cops just sucked at their jobs.
They even questioned him yet again about why his car was seen so many times in red light
areas. It’s said the “Ripper Squad” had talked to him several times at this point.
In ’78, he killed again, twice, each time stabbing and slicing the corpses. He later
told the cops about 1978, saying, “I had the urge to kill any woman. The urge inside
me to kill girls was now practically uncontrollable.” In ’79 he killed a 19-year old girl as she
walked home from her clerk job in the town of Halifax. The British tabloid press made
it a much bigger story when a young worker like this could be one of the Ripper’s victims.
The pressure now on the West Yorkshire police was intense. To say the least, they looked
bad. That’s one reason they sent the file to the FBI, an agency very experienced with
serial killers. It’s then that someone posted a tape recording
packed into an envelope. It was addressed to the lead investigator. When they played
it, they heard, “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.” Obviously, if you know anything about the
Jack the Ripper letters, you’ll know this person was imitating those. Linguists listened
to the recording and said this man was from Sunderland in Tyne and Wear in the North East
of England. That is about 78 miles (126 kilometers) away from Bradford, and if you know your English
accents, people from Sunderland sound nothing like people from West Yorkshire. Cops had
already heard how the attacker was short, had a Yorkshire accent, and how many people
now described him as having black hair and a black beard. It didn’t matter.
They started investigating the man dubbed, “Wearside Jack.” This would become one
of the biggest embarrassments in UK policing history. Why? Because it was a hoax.
Wearside Jack even sent letters to the Daily Mirror newspaper. One went in part like this:
“I am the Ripper. I've been dubbed a maniac by the Press but not by you, you call me clever
and I am. You and your mates haven't a clue that photo in the paper gave me fits.”
Experts even told the investigators that the letter and the recording were very likely
the work of a hoaxer, but the cops stubbornly pressed forward with this line of investigation.
The FBI’s Behavioral Unit, the people tasked with catching serial killers in the US, told
the Yorkshire cops that the tape was a hoax. They’d studied serial killers. They’d
invented profiling. They were leagues ahead of sexist, misogynistic Yorkshire cops.
One night Robert Ressler sat down for some pints in a quiet pub with the Yorkshire investigators.
This was the man depicted in the series Mindhunter and in real life the guy that helped bring
down the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. He said to the cops, “You realize, of course,
that the man on the tape is not the killer, don’t you?”
He told them the man on the tape was an extrovert, when they should be looking for an introvert.
They also said the guy they were looking for likely worked as a driver for a living. It
was being able to move around for a job that gave him cover, he said, adding that the man
was likely aged late 20s early 30s and had some serious mental health problems.
Even the surviving victims came forward and said this was not the man that had attacked
them. The actual killer, Peter Sutcliffe as you know, was even put at the back of the
suspect list because he didn’t have a North East accent.
As the cops were looking for Wearside Jack the real Yorkshire Ripper killed three more
women and grievously injured two others. In 2005, thanks to DNA evidence that wasn’t
available back then, John Humble was arrested on the Ford Estate in Sunderland. The man,
now a poor alcoholic, admitted he had been fascinated with Jack the Ripper and that’s
one reason he pretended to be the Yorkshire Ripper.
It was also revealed that out of guilt, Humble had called the police during the investigation
and told them he was behind the hoax, but for some reason, the cops hadn’t believed
him. Humble was released from prison in 2009. He was given a new identity in view of how
much the public despised him. His alcoholism killed him in 2019.
Ok, back to Mr. Sutcliffe. The game is almost up.
That guy who’d been out with Sutcliffe the night he used the loaded sock to hit a woman
over the head sent an anonymous letter to the cops marked “Priority No1”. It fell
on deaf ears. This is what it said, “I have good reason to know the man you are looking
for in the Ripper case. This man has dealings with prostitutes and always had a thing about
them... His name and address is Peter Sutcliffe, 5 Garden Lane, Heaton, Bradford, Shipley.”
To think, the police had already visited this house and talked to the man nine times.
The former friend, having seemingly been ignored, even went to the police station and told the
cops again, he knew who the killer was. He told them he’d been with him when he attacked
someone. After Sutcliffe’s arrest, the record of his meeting just went missing.
Sutcliffe was eventually arrested about a month later, but for a DUI. While waiting
for his trial he killed a middle aged woman. He also attacked a student at Leeds University
and a 16-year old girl who’d felt so scared she’d slept with a knife under her pillow.
At this point, cops had been warning women not to go out at night. This caused an outcry.
Women marched in the streets, saying why should they have to stay home at night. It was as
if the cops were blaming them for going out. This was later called “institutional sexism”.
Believe it or not, Sutcliffe even told his own sisters to stay home at night, just to
be on the safe side. At the same time, cops on the case were so
stressed it led to ill health. The main guy in charge of the investigation, George Oldfield,
had a heart attack in 1979. It’s thought the stress of the case led to his early death
at 61 in 1985. Another cop said this, “You know, you’d go for a drink somewhere to
your local and they’d ridicule you.” On January 2, 1981, Sutcliffe was stopped
in his car by police in the city of Sheffield, around 31 miles (49km) from Bradford. The
constable who stopped him soon found out there was a false license plate on the car. The
man in front of him also looked exactly the same as the guy whose face has been printed
in newspapers from time to time. They took Sutcliffe to the small textile town
of Dewsbury. There he was questioned about the Ripper case. The next day, cops returned
to where they’d pulled him over. They also remembered he’d asked them if he could go
for a pee since he said he was “bursting.” Lo and behold, where he’d taken that pee,
or pretended to, police found a hammer, a knife and some rope. At the station, police
also found that Sutcliffe was wearing clothes that exposed his genitals - a V-neck sweater
he wore inverted, so his legs went through the arms.
They knew this had to be the killer. He denied it at first, but then with all the
evidence being put in front of his face he broke. He told the police, “The women I
killed were filth. I was just cleaning up the place a bit.” His actions, he claimed,
were the orders of God. He said he’d first talked to God when he worked as a gravedigger.
God came to him through a dead Polish man’s grave, a Mr. Bronisław Zapolski.
This was heard during the court trial: “While some of the victims were prostitutes perhaps
the saddest part of this case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally
respectable women.” You heard that right.
The Yorkshire Ripper was sentenced to 30 years before he could meet with a parole board,
although his sentence was later extended to life without the possibility of parole, a
“whole tariff” as it’s called in the UK. He was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia
and sent to Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital.
During his years in prison and at the mental hospital, he was attacked a number of times.
One time a broken coffee jar was shoved into his face. Another time he was almost strangled
to death with some headphone cables. He was stabbed in both eyes with a pen in another
attack, losing the sight in one eye and almost the sight in the other. He was stabbed in
the neck during another attack. Sutcliffe died in prison on 13 November 2020.
He’d been sick for some time with diabetes and he had a heart condition. A couple of
weeks after a suspected heart attack he was diagnosed with COVID-19, for which he asked
not to be treated. According to the press, he was secretly buried, with the family being
“frozen out.” This is what his brother had prepared as a eulogy:
“Peter, all of your family love you as Peter Sutcliffe, although you ruined all our lives
when you became the Yorkshire Ripper.” In what seems absurd given the horror of this
story, the family were allowed to attend the funeral via Zoom.
Now you need to watch, “Japanese Horrific Serial Killer - Tsutomu Miyazak (The Human
Dracula).” Or, have a look at....