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....
