Peter Sutcliffe Analysis (Yorkshire Ripper)

hello this is dr grande today's question is can i analyze the case of peter sutcliffe who is also known as the yorkshire ripper sutcliffe was the topic of a netflix four-part documentary titled the ripper just a reminder i'm not diagnosing anybody in this video only speculating about what could be happening in a situation like this if you enjoy this video please like it subscribe to my channel and consider supporting me on patreon i'll put the link to patreon in the description for this video so first i'll go through the background of peter sutcliffe i'll move to the timeline of the crimes and then i'll offer my analysis peter sutcliffe was born in west riding of yorkshire england on june 2 1946 his family was working class sutcliffe dropped out of school when he was 15 years old and had a number of lower level jobs including digging graves he married in august 1974. his wife had a number of miscarriages and could not have children after working in a factory for a while succliffe became a truck driver he was fired in march of 1976 for stealing used tires but would find another truck driving job in october of that same year succliffe and his wife bought a house in west yorkshire in 1977. now moving to the timeline of the crimes all of suckless victims were female and it is believed that he committed more crimes than were eventually attributed to him the first attack that we know of occurred in 1969 he followed a female prostitute into a garage and hit her with a sock that contained a stone when questioned by the police later he admitted to striking her but said he just used his hand nothing happened to him because he had no criminal record and the woman did not want to pursue charges it's been reported that he attacked this victim because of an unusual series of events suclive's wife had an affair with an ice cream truck driver and sucklift found a prostitute in order to get even he paid her 10 pounds but then her manager chased him away sucliff attacked this victim thinking that she was that prostitute who took the 10 pounds in 1975 sutcliffe carried out four attacks in west yorkshire the first one was in july he attacked a woman who was walking alone by striking her in the head with a hammer he then cut her with a knife he was interrupted by a neighbor and left the second and third attacks were both in august they were quite similar to the first attack he used a hammer and a knife he was interrupted and left the scene before killing the victims the fourth attack would be his first homicide this occurred on october 30 1975 his victim was 28 year old wilma mccann in january 1976 he killed a woman named emily jackson a 42 year old prostitute in may he would attack a 20 year old woman who survived after this attack we see that the papers named him the yorkshire ripper which was selected because of the similarities to jack the ripper the famous serial killer in 1977 we see four more homicides in february he killed a 28 year old woman he left tire tracks at that scene in april he murdered a 32 year old woman in her apartment he left a boot print behind in june he killed a 16 year old woman named jane mcdonald she was not a prostitute the police referred to her as the first innocent victim public concern grew as it became clear that any woman could be the target of this killer in july sucklift attacked a woman but was interrupted and she survived in october he paid a 20 year old prostitute with a five pound note that was new and could be traced to some degree he murdered the woman in manchester and would later return to her body to try to find the note but she had put it in a secret compartment in her purse it's not clear why he simply didn't take the entire purse with him and search it later when the police found the five pound note they interviewed every man that could have been connected to it sutcliffe was one of those people as his employer had paid him with that note the police believed the alibi that sutcliffe gave them he said he was at a party that evening but of course in reality he did have time to commit the murder in december succift attacked another prostitute but she would survive she was able to help the police develop a sketch of her attacker and supply them with the description of his vehicle in january 1978 sutcliffe murdered three more victims two in january and one in may they were 21 18 and 40 years old respectively the body of the 18 year old was found in a lumberyard in the netflix documentary a woman talking about this said that it was a bad place to die i think from a victim's point of view any place they die is a bad place if the victim died in an upscale restaurant would people say at least they died in a good place the next homicide would be in april 1979 a 19 year old woman around this time the police focused their efforts on two letters in a tape recording that were sent to them ostensibly by the yorkshire ripper in an effort to increase the damage caused by their already compromised reasoning skills they launched a massive campaign to make sure that as many people as possible saw the handwriting in the letters and heard the voice on the recording they wasted time and resources even though the letters in the recording contained information that was publicly available i guess they forgot about the whole idea that someone could actually be lying to them as it turns out of course the letters and the recording were hoax the man who wrote the letters and made the recording was named john samuel humble he was arrested in 2005 based on a dna match to the envelopes in 2006 he was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison he would die in 2019. in september 1979 sukcliff would strike again this time he murdered a 20 year old college student named barbara leach sutcliffe was arrested in april 1980 for driving while intoxicated between the time of his arrest and his trial he murdered two more victims 47 and 20 years old he also attacked three others suclift was pulled over by the police on january 2 1981 a 24 year old prostitute was in the car with him sutcliffe asked if he could walk away from a moment to relieve himself which the police permitted during this excursion he managed to hide a hammer knife and a rope that was on his person the officer soon realized that the license plate on his car were false and they placed him under arrest they either did not search him or search him adequately because later in the police station he hid another knife in the toilet the police eventually found the items left at the scene after becoming suspicious because there were screwdrivers in his glove box and they realized that sutcliffe looked like a sketch of the yorkshire ripper when they questioned sutcliffe about the murders he confessed to all of them providing a high level of detail about each one sucliff was charged with multiple counts of murder in january of 1981. he pleaded not guilty to those charges but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished capacity he was found guilty of all the counts of murder and sentenced to 20 concurrent sentences of life imprisonment i noticed that some people wanted more concurrent sentences i'm not sure this really makes a lot of sense they could have given him a million but if the sentences were concurrent the amount of time served would be the same sutcliffe's wife would divorce him in 1994 and remarry a few years later sutcliffe had a rough time in prison he was attacked several times by other inmates and severely wounded during one attack in 1997 he lost vision in his left eye some time later a medical mistake cost him his vision in his right eye sutcliffe would die on november 13 2020 from complications of covid19 he had significant medical comorbidity at the time of his death now moving to my analysis during the trial of the yorkshire ripper we see a familiar pattern as it relates to mental health the prosecution argued that suck lifted the difference between right and wrong and was not psychotic the defense argued that he had schizophrenia and was psychotic sutcliffe claimed that he was hearing voices for years and that god told him to kill prostitutes what i find so interesting here is that four different mental health professionals were quite certain that sutcliffe did have schizophrenia and after he was already found guilty he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and transferred to a secure mental hospital later the staff at that hospital claimed that sutcliffe was no longer mentally ill and they sent them back to prison when someone has schizophrenia it's unlikely the disorder would simply go away someday the symptoms might become more manageable or go into remission but the disorder usually just doesn't disappear altogether the jury did not believe that sutcliffe had schizophrenia despite the expert testimony one thing that really hurt him was the fact that a prison guard overheard him telling his wife that if he could convince people that he was mad he may only have to serve 10 years in what he referred to as a loony bin another thing that hurt him was the fact that his wife had schizophrenia people thought that he simply learned about the disorder from her symptoms it's difficult to know if sutcliffe has schizophrenia or not there was always an incentive for him to pretend that he did even after his trial he believed that a mental hospital would be a better place to be incarcerated than a prison compared to other people who would eventually become serial killers sucliff did not appear to have particularly unusual experiences or behaviors as a child other than being considered somewhat of a loner and being overly attached to his mother we would expect to see a long history of increasingly dangerous criminal behavior which was absent in this case although he later did develop a tendency to spy on prostitutes sutcliffe would say that his urge to kill was practically uncontrollable after killing his first victim wilma mccann he said that he developed a hatred of prostitutes to rationalize that homicide sutcliffe did not take as many precautions to avoid being captured as some other serial killers who mainly targeted prostitutes like gary ridgeway arthur shawcross or robert hansen what helped sucklift to get away was the fact the police were completely overwhelmed and ineffective the police investigation contained a number of mistakes they interviewed sutcliffe nine separate times and never noticed that the boots he was wearing matched the boot prints left at the scene they didn't properly investigate his alibi when they were talking to him about the five pound note they acted as if the hoax items were real and focused on the accent that humble featured in the recording now the saliva on the envelopes matched the blood type at the crime scenes only six percent of the population had that blood type this coincidence did contribute to the problem a friend of succliffe sent a letter to the police saying that sutcliffe was the yorkshire ripper that seems like a less than subtle clue when victims who were not prostitutes were attacked the police didn't believe that they were really attacked by the yorkshire ripper and therefore discounted their descriptions of the assailant the police developed a way to shame both prostitutes and non-prostitutes it was like no victim was good enough for them i think what happened here with the police is they were simply overwhelmed by the amount of data they needed to process without the aid of computers they had difficulty cross-referencing they spent a lot of time collecting data and were not efficient at analyzing data we see that they used 2.5 million police hours of work when it was actually a poorly conducted traffic stop that broke the case the last part i want to mention here is how the police fixated on the idea that the yorkshire ripper only killed prostitutes i think mainly two items led to this the first item they had a poor understanding of serial killers to be fair there was a lot known about serial killers in the time range when the yorkshire ripper was active 1975 through 1980 not having access to our current understanding of domination-based offenses it does make sense to believe that if a person kills only prostitutes they may not like prostitutes the difficulty i have with what the police did was they took this theory and proclaimed it as definitive they said they knew this killer hated prostitutes the second item when faced with something horrible like these murders one way that people cope is to try to make the crimes seem closer to fair the police could say yes this was a terrible crime but the victim was not innocent in all this this protects people from the idea that anyone could be the victim and that sometimes these crimes happen randomly when serial killers target prostitutes it's almost always because of the fact that they are easy targets it's easy to get them alone it's easy to put them in a vulnerable position and as we see in this case the police do not try as hard when they perceive that the victim is not respectable those are my thoughts on peter sutcliffe the yorkshire ripper please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always i hope you found my analysis on this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 81,197

Keywords:

Id: gaZWEKGS0oE

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020