Peter Sutcliffe — The Yorkshire Ripper — Dead at 74
By: L Hall
Tags: History, Justice, Serial Killers, Covid 19, True Crime

If one good thing has come out of COVID-19, it is that the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper, aka Peter Sutcliffe, can finally rest. On November 13, 2020, he died at the University Hospital of North Durham after refusing treatment for COVID-19.

Peter Sutcliffe brutally murdered 13 women and attacked many others in the late 60s to early 80s. Due to the extremely violent nature of his attacks, and a hoax sent to police, Peter’s murders were compared to Jack the Ripper.

The Yorkshire Ripper is born.

Early Life

Peter was a loner and didn’t quite fit in with anyone. He left school at 15 and worked at a series of manual labor type jobs including working as a gravedigger for a couple of times in the 60s. He would hop from job to job, and even after landing a decent job as a Heavy Goods Vehicle driver, he was fired shortly after for stealing used tires.

Peter developed an obsession with prostitutes at an early age. He enjoyed “watching them soliciting on the streets of Leeds and Bradford.” Although whether or not Peter ever hired any is up for debate.

He married a woman named Sonia Szurma in 1967 and she remained with Peter until the time of his arrest in 1981.

Known Victims

Peter murdered at least 13 women and attacked at least 9 others. He was ruthless, and he was brutal. His M.O. was to catch the woman by surprise, preferably from behind, and bludgeon them in the head with a hammer or other blunt object to incapacitate them. After that, he was free to stab the victims, often mutilating their corpses after death.

In 1969 he smashed a woman in the head with a rock in a sock hard enough to rip the sock. No charges were pressed in this incident.

Wilma McCann was murdered on October 30th, 1975. This mother of 4 was struck in the head with a hammer and then stabbed 15 times in the neck and upper body. One of Wilma’s daughters tragically took her own life in 2007 after suffering years of depression over her mother's murder.

Emily Jackson was 42 years old when in January 1976, Peter struck her in the head with a hammer and then stabbed her 52 times. The vicious attack left an impression of Peter’s boot print on Emily’s thigh.

Irene Richardson, a sex-worker from Chapeltown was murdered on February 5th, 1977. Peter beat her to death with a hammer and then mutilated her corpse with a knife. Peter’s vehicle left tire tracks at the scene of the murder that police were able to use as evidence.

Patricia “Tina” Atkinson was murdered on April 23, 1977. Tina was a sex-worker that lived in Bradford. She was murdered in her home, and Peter left a boot print on her bedsheets.

Jayne MacDonald was 16 years old when Peter brutally murdered her. Jayne was not a sex worker and the police described her as the first “innocent” victim. The misogynist attitude of the Police was criticized, and I wonder how much traction the investigation would have received if all of Peter’s victims remained sex-workers.

In July 1977, Peter attacks Maureen Long, but was interrupted and fled the scene. A witness misidentifies the car Peter was driving resulting in three hundred officers checking thousands of cars.

Jean Jordan was murdered on October 1, 1977. She was a sex-worker from Manchester. When Peter later confessed to her murder he admitted that he had given her a £5 note and realized that it was traceable after the murder. He returned to where her body was hidden to find the money but was unable to find it, so he mutilated and then moved her body.

On October 9th, Jean’s body was discovered, and when searched, the £5 note was found in a secret pocket of her handbag. Police traced it to a bank and narrowed it down from there that the £5 came from one of 8000 possible people's pay packages. Investigators interviewed 5000 men, including Peter. Peter’s alibi was credible though. He was at a party with family — he snuck away. Ultimately the £5 note turned out to be a frustrating dead-end to investigators.

Peter murdered Yvonne Pearson a 21-year-old sex worker by repeatedly striking her in the head with a ball-peen hammer and then jumping on her chest before stuffing her mouth with horsehair from a discarded sofa nearby.

Ten days later Peter killed Helen Rytka, an 18-year-old sex worker from Huddersfield. He attacked her from behind as she exited his vehicle then stabbed her repeatedly in the chest.

Vera Millward was a 40-year-old sex-worker that Peter killed on May 16th, 1978, with repeated hammer blows before stabbing her dead body multiple times with a knife.

Peter murdered Josephine Whitaker in 1979 and that is where the case takes a bit of a turn. Josephine was a 19-year-old building society clerk, that Peter attacked while she was walking home from work. The public really started paying attention to the case now that Peter had targeted another person not involved in the sex trade.

The investigation got diverted when a hoaxer sent in an audio recording to police and later a letter to the police and to the Daily Mirror. The taunting audio was addressed to Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield and signed Jack the Ripper.

The recording 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.”

People were able to tell that the man in the recording had a Wearside accent and so was nicknamed Wearside Jack. In the letters, he also claimed responsibility for the murder of Joan Harrison back in 1975. At the time the police mistakenly believed that Joan’s murder was not public knowledge.

It wouldn’t be till 2005 that investigators were able to get a match on the DNA samples taken from the letters. The match was for John Samuel Humble. His DNA was entered into the database after a drunk driving charge. He was sentenced to 8 years for the hoax. John passed in 2019 at the age of 63.

Barbara Leach was murdered in 1979. She was a 20-year-old Bradford University student, and once again the murder of a woman that was not a sex worker alarmed the public and prompted an extensive publicity campaign.

Peter was interviewed a total of 9 times by the police but wasn’t considered a suspect.

In April 1980, Peter was arrested for drunk driving. While awaiting trial, he murdered two more women.

Marguerite Wells and Jacqueline Hill were murdered on August 20 and November 17.

In 1980 an associate of Peter’s reported him as a suspect to the police, but that information ended up getting lost in the massive amount of information the police were trying to get through.

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

Arrest

On January 2, 1981, Peter was pulled over with 24-year-old sex worker Olivia Reivers. On checking police found that his vehicle had false plates so they arrested Peter.

While back at the station, the police noticed that he kind of resembled the description of the Yorkshire Ripper and started asking him more and more questions about the killings. At the same time, investigators go back to where they originally arrested Peter and discover that he had stashed a knife, hammer, and a length of rope. He also hid another knife in the washroom of the police station.

When the police finally strip-searched Peter, they noticed that he was wearing a v-neck sweater, upside down under his pants. It padded his knees but left his genitals exposed.

After two days of questioning, Peter calmly declared that he was the Yorkshire Ripper. For the next 2 days he described his many attacks saying:

“All women are filth. Bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets. I was just cleaning up the place a bit.”

At Peter’s trial, he pled not guilty to 13 counts of murder but did plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Basically, Peter was saying that he did do the crimes, but shouldn’t bear the consequence because he was a “tool of God’s will”, and that he heard voices in his head that told him to kill prostitutes.

The judge dismissed the grounds for diminished responsibility and Peter Sutcliffe ended up being sentenced to 20 concurrent life sentences. In 2010, the High Court changed his sentence to a whole life order, meaning he would never be released from prison.

Peter was sent to prison but later, after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. In 2016 Peter was found to be mentally fit to go back to prison, which is where he would stay until the day he died, November 13, 2020, due to refusing treatment after catching COVID-19.

At least one thing we can say about this pandemic is that it finally rid the world of the evil that was Peter Sutcliffe — The Yorkshire Ripper.