Peter Sutcliffe
Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter Coonan, was an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. Press reports dubbed him the Yorkshire Ripper, an allusion to the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper. Sutcliffe was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. Two of his murders took place in Manchester; all the others took place in West Yorkshire. Criminal psychologist David Holmes characterised Sutcliffe as being an "extremely callous, sexually sadistic serial killer."
Sutcliffe initially attacked women and girls in residential areas, but appears to have shifted his focus to red-light districts because he was attracted by the vulnerability of prostitutes and the ambivalent attitude of police to prostitutes' safety. After his arrest in Sheffield by South Yorkshire Police for driving with false number plates in January 1981, he was transferred to the custody of West Yorkshire Police, who questioned him about the killings. Sutcliffe confessed to being the perpetrator, saying that the voice of God had sent him on a mission to kill prostitutes. At his trial he pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility but was convicted of murder on a majority verdict. Following his conviction, Sutcliffe began using his mother's maiden name of Coonan.
The search for Sutcliffe was one of the largest and most expensive manhunts in British history. West Yorkshire Police faced severe criticism for their failure to catch Sutcliffe despite having interviewed him nine times in the course of their five-year investigation. Owing to the sensational nature of the case, investigators handled an exceptional amount of information, some of it misleading, including hoax correspondence purporting to be from the "Ripper". Following Sutcliffe's conviction, the government ordered a review of the Ripper investigation, conducted by Inspector of Constabulary Lawrence Byford, known as the "Byford Report." The findings were made fully public in 2006 and confirmed the validity of the criticism of the force. The report led to changes to investigative procedures that were adopted by all British police forces. Since his conviction, Sutcliffe has been linked to a number of other unsolved crimes.
Sutcliffe was transferred from prison to Broadmoor Hospital in March 1984 after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The High Court dismissed an appeal by Sutcliffe in 2010, confirming that he would serve a whole life order and never be released from custody. In August 2016, it was ruled that Sutcliffe was mentally fit to be returned to prison, and he was transferred that month to HM Prison Frankland. In 2020, Sutcliffe died in hospital from natural causes as a result of diabetes-related complications.
Early life
Peter William Sutcliffe was born in Shipley, West Riding of Yorkshire, on 2 June 1946, to a working-class family who lived in Bingley. His parents were John William Sutcliffe and his wife, Kathleen. Sutcliffe's mother was Catholic while his father was a member of the choir at the local Anglican church of St Wilfred's; their children were raised in their mother's Catholic faith, and Sutcliffe briefly served as an altar boy.Sutcliffe's mother was the victim of domestic abuse by his alcoholic father, making it likely that she struggled through her pregnancy under great emotional stress. Sutcliffe was born prematurely, having to spend two weeks in hospital. One of Sutcliffe's brothers recounted an incident in which their father smashed a beer glass over Sutcliffe's head during a Christmas argument when the brother was four or five years old. Additionally, Sutcliffe's father would whip his children with a belt. In 1970, Sutcliffe's father posed as his wife's lover in order to lure her to a local hotel, taking along Sutcliffe and two of his siblings to witness him expose her infidelity. When Sutcliffe's mother arrived, his father pulled out a negligee from her purse as her children watched.
In his late adolescence Sutcliffe developed a growing obsession with voyeurism, and spent much time spying on prostitutes and their male clients. Reportedly a loner, he left school at the age of 15 and had a series of menial jobs, including two stints as a gravedigger at Bingley Cemetery in the 1960s. Because of this occupation, Sutcliffe developed a macabre sense of co-workers reported that Sutcliffe enjoyed his work too much and would even volunteer to do overtime washing corpses. Between November 1971 and April 1973, Sutcliffe worked at the Baird Television factory on a packaging line. He left this position when he was asked to go on the road as a salesman.
After leaving Baird Television, Sutcliffe worked night shifts at the Britannia Works of Anderton International from April 1973. In February 1975, he took redundancy and used half of the £400 pay-off to train as a heavy goods vehicle driver. On 5 March 1976, Sutcliffe was dismissed from this employment for the theft of used tyres. He was unemployed until October 1976, when he found a job as an HGV driver for T. & W.H. Clark Holdings Ltd. on the Canal Road Industrial Estate in Bradford.
Sutcliffe reportedly hired prostitutes as a young man, and it has been speculated that he had a bad experience during which he was conned out of money by a prostitute and her pimp. Other analyses of Sutcliffe's actions have not found evidence that he actually sought the services of prostitutes but note that he nonetheless developed an obsession with them, including "watching them soliciting on the streets of Leeds and Bradford."
On 14 February 1967, Sutcliffe met sixteen-year-old Sonia Szurma, the daughter of Ukrainian and Polish refugees from Czechoslovakia, at the Royal Standard pub on Manningham Lane in Bradford's red-light district; they married on 10 August 1974. Sonia was studying to become a teacher when she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Her relationship with Sutcliffe was later characterised by the writer Gordon Burn as domineering, with Sonia willing to slap down her husband "like a naughty schoolboy," while Sutcliffe even had to occasionally "contain her physically by pinning her arms to her side" during her common "unprovoked outbursts of rage." Barbara Jones, a journalist who had numerous conversations with Sonia, described her as the strangest, coldest and most irritating person she had ever encountered, noting that she was incredibly prickly and demanding.
Sonia suffered several miscarriages after marrying Sutcliffe, and the couple were informed that she would not be able to have children. Sonia eventually resumed her teacher training course, during which time she had an affair with an ice-cream van driver. When she completed the course in 1977 and began teaching, she and Sutcliffe used her salary to buy a house at 6 Garden Lane in Heaton, into which they moved on 26 September 1977, and where they were living at the time of Sutcliffe's arrest in 1981.
Attacks and murders
1969
Sutcliffe's first documented assault was against a prostitute he encountered while searching for another woman who had deceived him out of money. He left his friend Trevor Birdsall's minivan and walked along St Paul's Road in Bradford until he was out of sight. When he returned, Sutcliffe appeared out of breath, as if he had been running, and instructed Birdsall to drive away quickly. He claimed to have followed a prostitute into a garage and struck her on the head with a stone wrapped in a sock. The following day, police visited Sutcliffe's home because the woman he attacked had noted Birdsall's vehicle registration plate. Sutcliffe admitted to hitting her but insisted it was with his hand. The officers informed him that he was "very lucky" because the woman did not wish to press charges.1975
Sutcliffe committed his second known assault in Keighley on the night of 5 July 1975. He attacked 36-year-old Anna Rogulskyj, who was walking alone, striking her unconscious with a hammer and slashing her stomach with a knife. Disturbed by a neighbour, Sutcliffe left the scene without killing her. Rogulskyj survived after brain surgery but was psychologically traumatised by the attack. She later expressed that she had been fearful of going out frequently due to the feeling that people were staring and pointing at her, and that the encounter with Sutcliffe had turned her life into a misery where at times she wished she had died in the attack.On the night of 15 August, Sutcliffe attacked 46-year-old Olive Smelt in Halifax. Employing the same modus operandi, he briefly engaged Smelt with a commonplace pleasantry about the weather before striking hammer blows to her skull from behind. He then disarranged Smelt's clothing and slashed her lower back with a knife. Again, Sutcliffe was interrupted and left his victim badly injured but alive. Like Rogulskyj, Smelt subsequently suffered severe emotional and mental trauma. She later told Detective Superintendent Dick Holland that her attacker had a Yorkshire accent, but this information was ignored, as was the fact that neither she nor Rogulskyj were in towns with a red-light district.
On 27 August, Sutcliffe targeted 14-year-old Tracy Browne in Silsden, attacking her from behind and hitting her on the head five times while she was walking along a country lane. He ran off when he saw the lights of a passing car, leaving his victim requiring brain surgery. Sutcliffe was not convicted of the attack but confessed in 1992. Browne later recalled that she had initially felt charmed by Sutcliffe, noting that they had walked together for almost a mile—about thirty minutes—without ever feeling intimidated or in danger.
Sutcliffe's first confirmed murder victim was 28-year-old Wilma Mary McCann, a mother of four from Scott Hall, on 30 October. McCann was last seen alive at 7:30 p.m. when she left her council house on Scott Hall Avenue, in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, walking past the nearby Prince Philip Playing Fields. As with the earlier attacks, Sutcliffe approached McCann from behind and struck the back of her skull twice with a hammer. An extensive inquiry, involving 150 officers of the West Yorkshire Police and 11,000 interviews, failed to identify Sutcliffe.