Yorkshire and Manchester 1975-1980
The Yorkshire Ripper case led to the largest manhunt ever seen in Britain, and yet was finally solved almost by accident. The case could have been solved much faster if the police hadn’t had to waste so much times on hoax letters and confessions.
Peter Sutcliffe was able to kill 13 women, and seriously assault 7 others, partly because of police following false leads. 250,000 people were interviewed, and 32,000 statements taken.
HIS EARLY LIFE
Peter Sutcliffe, like many serial killers, was a loner as a child, leaving school as soon as he could and working in many low-skill jobs. He did have two separate spells as a gravedigger, which left him with a macabre sense of humour.
Sutcliffe eventually became a lorry driver. He lost his first driving job after being caught stealing used tyres, but other than that, he did not get involved in crime until his murderous attacks started. However, he had been a voyeur since his teens, watching prostitutes and their clients. Later, he used prostitutes himself, and his fixation with sex workers turned to murder.
HIS VICTIMS
In 1969 Sutcliffe assaulted a prostitute. He had been tricked out of money by another sex worker, and while looking for her, he attacked another prostitute he saw on the streets. He admitted the assault to the police and was left off with a warning.
Then there were no incidents until 1975.
Anna Rogulsky 5 July 1975 Keighley
Rogulsky was walking alone at night when Sutcliffe hit her unconscious with a hammer and slashed her stomach with a knife. Disturbed, he fled without killing her.
Olive Smelt August 1975 Halifax
Sutcliffe knocked Smelt unconscious with a hammer and slashed her buttocks with a knife as she had fallen unconscious face down. He was interrupted and again fled without killing.
Tracy Browne 27 August 1975 Silsden
Browne was only 14 when Sutcliffe attacked her. He hit her 5 times with a hammer to try to knock her out, leaving her with head wounds, but ran off when a car passed nearby.
Wilma McCann 30 October 1975 Leeds
McCann was struck twice with a hammer and then stabbed 15 times in the neck, chest and abdomen, dying of her wounds.
Emily Jackson 20 January 1976 Leeds
Jackson worked as a prostitute because her family had bad financial problems. Sutcliffe picked Emily up outside a pub and drove her to a derelict building nearby. There he hit her on the head with a hammer, and stabbed her multiple times with a sharpened screwdriver.
Marcella Claxton 9 May 1976 Leeds
Claxton had accepted a lift from Sutcliffe. When she asked him to stop the car so she could urinate, he attacked her with a hammer, but did not stab her or try to kill her.
Irene Richardson 5 February 1977 Leeds
Richardson was a sex worker in the infamous Chapeltown area of Leeds. Sutcliffe took Richardson to Roundhay Park, where he beat her to death with a hammer, and then mutilated her body with a knife.
Patricia Atkinson 23 April 1977 Bradford
Sutcliffe attacked Atkinson, a prostitute in her flat.
Jayne MacDonald 26 June 1977 Leeds
Jayne MacDonald was 16 and not a sex worker, but Sutcliffe murdered her in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, thinking she was a prostitute. This murder was the one that alerted the public that the “Yorkshire Ripper”, as the press had dubbed the killer, could attack any woman.
Maureen Long July 1977 Bradford
Sutcliffe was interrupted when attacking Long, and fled, meaning she survived the attack. His car was spotted by a witness, but they mistook the make of the car, meaning the police interviewed over 10,000 people in error.
Jean Jordan 1 October 1977 Manchester
One of only two murders that Sutcliffe committed outside Yorkshire (both in Manchester), Jordan was a sex worker in Manchester. Sutcliffe murdered her and left her body by the Southern Cemetery.
He then went back to the scene when he realised he had paid Jordan with a new five pound note that could be traceable. He couldn’t find it (the police later found it in a secret compartment in Jordan’s bag), so he mutilated her body and then moved it.
The £5 note was one of a batch used in pay packets of a group of 8,000 men. Police interviewed over 5,000 of them, including Sutcliffe, but his alibi of being at a family party was accepted (he had been at the party most of the time).
Marilyn Moore December 14, 1977 Leeds
Prostitute Moore survived an attack by Sutcliffe, and was able to give police a description of her attacker.
Yvonne Pearson 21 January 1978 Bradford
Sutcliffe beat Pearson about the head with a hammer and then stuffed her mouth with horsehair from a sofa at the place he left her body. The site was not busy and so her body was not found for two months.
Helen Rytka 31 January 1978 Huddersfield
As Rytka got out of Sutcliffe’s car to give him sex, he hit her 5 times over the head and then stripped off most of her clothes before stabbing her to death.
Vera Millward 16 May 1978 Manchester
Sutcliffe attacked and killed Millward in the car park of the Manchester Royal Infirmary.
Josephine Whitaker 4 April 1979 Halifax
Whitaker was walking home alone at night when Sutcliffe killed her. It was after this murder that police were sent the notorious tape from a man with a Wearside accent, taunting the police officer leading the investigation.
This tape plus two letters to the Daily Mirror mean the police wasted huge amounts of time looking for a man from the north east.
[The letters claimed responsibility for a murder in 1975 in Preston, Lancashire. The investigation into the hoax was re-opened in 2005
DNA led to the arrest and conviction of John Humble, originally from Sunderland, for the hoax.]
Barbara Leach 2 September 1979 Bradford
Student Leach was killed near her university lodgings, and her body was partially hidden under a pile of bricks.
{In April 1980, Sutcliffe was arrested for drink driving. It was whilst he was on remand waiting trial for this that he committed his final two murders and three other attacks.]
Marguerite Walls 20 August 1980 Farsley
Walls was murdered on the night of August 20th.
Uphadya Bandara 24 September 1980 Leeds
Bandara survived the attack.
Margaret Lea 25 October 1980 Leeds
Sutcliffe attacked art student Lea in the grounds of Leeds University, but he did not kill her.
Theresa Sykes 5 November 1980 Huddersfield
16-year-old Sykes survived an attack on Bonfire Night.
Jacqueline Hill 17 November 1980 Leeds
20-year-old Hill was Sutcliffe’s final victim. She was a student at Leeds University and her body was left in the grounds of a University Hall of Residence.
THE ARREST AND TRIAL
On November 25th 1980, Sutcliffe’s friend Trevor Birdsall reported Sutcliffe to the police, saying he thought Sutcliffe was the murderer. But the information seemed to be lost in the mountain of paperwork.
The public and government had been astonished for years that the Yorkshire Ripper had been able to kill do often without being arrested, and the police investigation had been huge, but in the end, Sutcliffe was caught for something completely different.
Sutcliffe was in his car with a prostitute on the night of January 2nd when a police officer became suspicious. The car was found to have false plates and so Sutcliffe was arrested (giving a false name).
At the police station, he was questioned about the Ripper murders, as he seemed to fit the description of the killer. In the meantime, police officers went back to the scene of his arrest, and found a knife, hammer and rope in bushes (Sutcliffe had briefly gone into bushes to urinate while the police were talking to him). They also found a second knife in the cistern of a toilet he used at the police station.
After two days of interviews, Sutcliffe suddenly admitted he was the Ripper and confessed to the assaults and murders. He later claimed he was on a religious mission from God to clear the streets of prostitutes, but he had not shown any signs of religious mania before his arrest, and the general feeling was that he concocted the story in an attempt to support his defence of diminished responsibility.
[Sutcliffe was also questioned about the murder of another woman, Joan Harrison. He denied the murder, and in 2011, DNA evidence confirmed that another sex offender has committed the murder.]
At the trial, Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. After listening to expert testimony, the judge rejected the plea and Sutcliffe was committed to a jury trial.
Sutcliffe was found guilty and sentenced to 20 life sentences, with a minimum of 30 years. That was in 1981. In 2010, a year before Sutcliffe would have been able to apply for parole, the High Court changed the sentence to Whole Life, meaning he could never be released.
Sutcliffe started in normal prisons, but was then moved to the Broadmoor secure hospital. He has been attacked several times by other prisoners, including being blinded in one eye in 1997 when a prisoner stabbed him in the eye with a pen to try to kill him.