by Gordon Burn
Cross-examined by Mr James Chadwin, QC, for the defence, Barker said that he had never seen anything in Peter Sutcliffe which might suggest he had an aggressive attitude towards women.
‘In fact, he was a rather quiet, even shy, man?’
‘I would say so, yes.’
The Barkers were followed into the box by Olivia Reivers and, after three days of almost total immobility, Sutcliffe turned and stared at Reivers intently for a few moments as if trying to recollect where he might have seen her before, while she recounted what had taken place on the night of the arrest.
Det. Inspector John Boyle, the police officer to whom Sutcliffe had finally admitted being the Yorkshire Ripper, told the jury that, in the course of giving his sixteen-hour statement, Sutcliffe had commented: ‘I would have killed that girl in Sheffield if I hadn’t been caught,’ and agreed with Mr Chadwin that Sutcliffe had said a number of other things which did not ‘show him in a very good light’.
Of the Helen Rytka killing, Sutcliffe had said: ‘I had the urge to kill any woman. The urge inside me to kill girls was now practically uncontrollable.’ And of the Vera Millward killing in Manchester: ‘The urge inside me still dominates my actions. Following Millward the urge inside me remained dormant, but then the feeling came welling up. I had the urge to kill any woman. It sounds a bit evil now. There I was walking along with a big hammer and a big Phillips screwdriver in my pocket ready for the inevitable.’ He added: ‘I have been taken over completely by this urge to kill and I cannot fight it.’
He had forced Jacqueline Hill’s bra over her head to expose her breasts after she was dead so he could stab her more easily, he had said. He had used a screwdriver to stab her through the eye: ‘I just put it to her lid and with the handle in my palm I just jerked it in.’
Mr Chadwin asked Boyle whether Sutcliffe had dealt with all the offences he committed in a way which did not ‘tone down or soften the enormity of them’, but the judge interrupted, saying that that was a matter for the jury to decide, not Mr Boyle.
The final witnesses for the prosecution were a number of prison officers from the hospital wing at Armley, where Sutcliffe had been held on remand. The first of them, a Mr Leach, was handed the hospital logbook and asked to look at a particular reference dated 8 January 1981. Sir Michael asked him: ‘Do you remember anything of significance that Sutcliffe said to his wife (while she was visiting him) that day?’
To which Leach replied: ‘What I have written down here, yes, sir … They were left for a short while together. Mr Macgill wasn’t there. Mrs Sutcliffe used to run the visits, in as much as she used to take the lead very much. She brought pieces of paper with itemised things on them … I think personal matters between Sutcliffe and his wife. Sutcliffe said at one stage. “I wouldn’t feel any animosity towards you if you started a life of your own. I’m going to do a long time in prison, thirty years or more, unless I can convince people in here I’m mad and maybe then ten years in the loony bin.”’
A second prison officer from Armley, a Mr Fitzpatrick, told the court that on the evening of 5 April 1981 he had noted in the log that Sutcliffe seemed ‘unusually cocky’. He later discovered that this was because Sutcliffe claimed an agreement had been reached between the defence and the prosecution for a plea of diminished responsibility to be accepted, and a bed had been reserved for him, he said, at Park Lane Special Hospital in Liverpool. He also said a psychiatrist had told him he would have to do no more than ten years ‘to satisfy the public’.
Mr Fitzpatrick refuted the defence’s suggestion that, when Sutcliffe talked about ‘an agreement’, what he had actually meant was that the doctors all agreed on their diagnosis. (Sir Michael Havers, at a later stage of the trial, would deny absolutely that any agreement had been reached regarding Sutcliffe’s plea.)
A third, and final, prison officer from West Yorkshire described how, on 14 April 1981, just after Leeds Crown Court had moved the trial to the Old Bailey, he had found Sutcliffe ‘cheerful and bright’.
‘He told me that he was going to the Old Bailey for trial and he was very pleased with that news. He was saying to me that the doctors considered him disturbed and he was quite amazed by this and was smiling broadly and leaning back in his chair. He said to me: “I’m as normal as anyone.”’
The Attorney-General said that that completed the case for the prosecution, and the judge announced an adjournment until after the weekend.
At the weekend, ‘a firebug’ caused an estimated £1,000-worth of damage at the house the Sutcliffes had shared at Garden Lane and extra police were drafted in to keep ‘sightseers and ghouls’ away. Neighbours were quoted in the popular Sunday papers saying that ‘Sick people have turned the Sutcliffe home into a terrible shrine.’
On Monday, and every day for the remainder of the trial, a group of women representing the English Collective of Prostitutes joined the general pandemonium in Newgate Street outside the Old Bailey: they carried placards which, among other things, accused the Attorney-General of ‘condoning the murder of prostitutes’ by drawing a distinction between prostitutes and ‘respectable women’ when cataloguing the Yorkshire Ripper’s crimes.
Meanwhile, inside the court that morning, speculation was rife following Mr James Chadwin’s request for an adjournment ‘to take more detailed instructions’, just seventeen minutes into Day Five. On the press benches this was taken as a signal that Sonia was about to give evidence. But when the hearing resumed fifty minutes later, it was Sutcliffe himself who was called in his own defence.
The sense of apprehension which had characterised the first couple of days had gradually given way to an atmosphere in which the media contingent at least felt free to swap wisecracks under their breath and move around at will. All movement ceased, however, on the morning of 11 May, the second it became clear what was about to take place. Accompanied by two men in petrol-coloured uniforms, the Ripper left the dock with its enclosing, antique, sanitising glass screen, and passed between the jury and the exhibits table to the canopied witness box in the far left-hand corner to be sworn in.
Although in reality this took only seconds to complete, it seemed to be in progress for a long time; and, although it was the most pedestrian of events – a man taking two dozen paces across a room – it seemed far and away the most dramatic thing that had occurred. Even those who felt that they had long ago reconciled themselves to the fact that the Ripper was manifestly a man like other men felt hairs rising involuntarily on their necks.
His voice, as he took the oath, came out as a piping treble which could easily be imagined abstracting itself into the familiar high-pitched giggle that would be one of the things by which his family would choose to remember him. And his face, even when discussing the most sordid details of his crimes, seemed to constantly flirt with the idea of a smile.
In profile, which is how most of those in the lay areas of the court had been seeing him, he had looked stooped and stale and bovine. Now, head-on and liberated from the dock, he could have been merely a near relative of that other self. His eyes, unfastened from the spot where they had rested for the whole of the first week, flashed inquisitively around the room, returning repeatedly to the space occupied by his own empty chair. The small deceit by which his hair seemed to retain its youthful height and body was not apparent from in front, and below it was a face transformed by its own liveliness into something pleasant, unalarming, almost personable.
Led by Mr Chadwin, Sutcliffe spent the rest of that day and much of the next telling the court about his ‘divine mission’ and how the failure of the police to catch him, even after interviewing him many times, seemed to him confirmation that he had been chosen as the instrument of God’s will. ‘It was a miracle that they didn’t apprehend me earlier. They had all the facts. They knew it was me. They had all the facts for a long time, but then I knew why they didn’t catch me. Everything was in God’s hands. The way I escaped, the way they went away satisfied. There was no chance of them getting me.�
�� He said he thought the episode of the hoax letters and tape recording was ‘an indirect line to God’. He thought it had been a diversion ‘so that I could be left to carry on’.
‘What was it,’ Mr Chadwin began by gently prompting him, ‘that happened at Bingley cemetery that you particularly remember?’
To which Sutcliffe enthusiastically replied: ‘Something that I felt was very wonderful at the time. I heard what I believed then and believe now to have been God’s voice.’ He said that he had been digging a grave in the Catholic section at the top of the cemetery. ‘I was digging and I just paused for a minute. I just heard something – it sounded like a voice similar to a human voice – like an echo. I looked round to see if there was anyone there, but there was no one in sight …
‘Then I got out of the grave and walked – the ground rose up. It was quite a steep slope. I walked to the top but there was no one there at all. I heard again the same sound. It was like a voice saying something, but the words were all imposed on top of each other. I could not make them out; it was like echoes … coming directly in front of me from the top of the gravestone, which was Polish. I remember the name on the grave to this day. It was a man called Zapolski.’
Shown a photograph of Bingley cemetery, Sutcliffe indicated the crucifix-shaped headstone from which he claimed the voices emanated, then continued: ‘It had a terrific impact on me. It was starting to rain. I remember going to the top of a slope overlooking the valley and I felt as though I had just experienced something fantastic. I looked across the valley and all around and thought of heaven and earth and how insignificant we all were. But I felt so important at that moment … I felt I had been selected.’
He said this had happened in 1967, when he was about twenty, and that, although he heard the voice ‘hundreds’ of times over the coming years, he mentioned it to nobody.
Sutcliffe explained how, in 1969, his brother Mick had told him that Sonia, who at that time he had been courting steadily for more than two years, had been seen in the company of an Italian. This information, which Sonia didn’t deny when he confronted her with it, had stunned him: ‘I was so depressed, in fact, that this led to my first encounter with a prostitute.’
He recounted his experiences with the ‘coarse and vulgar person’ who, first, tricked him out of the change she owed him and then made a laughing-stock of him when he approached her in a pub two or three weeks later and asked for his money back. The voice, which had previously been benign and ‘reassuring’, now started instructing him on his mission: ‘This is what I believed was the voice of God saying it was prostitutes who were responsible for all these problems … It kept saying I had got to go on with a mission and it had a purpose. It was to remove the prostitutes. To get rid of them.’
Soon afterwards, he attacked a prostitute with a piece of brick in a sock in the Manningham area of Bradford, and was cautioned by the police about it. About a month later (in October 1969) he was arrested and later found guilty of ‘going equipped for theft’ but admitted that the real reason for carrying a hammer that night was because he intended to kill a prostitute with it.
Asked by his counsel what he felt about the fact that the woman whom he hit with the sock had not pressed charges, Sutcliffe said he felt it meant he ‘was not meant to be caught or punished’.
There had been no further attacks on women for six years, until 1975, when, in the space of a few weeks in the summer, he had tried to murder both Olive Smelt and Anna Rogulskyj. Of the Smelt attack, Sutcliffe said that, earlier that night, he had felt very strongly that he must kill a prostitute. He had hoped that the feelings would subside, but they didn’t. ‘Consequently I did it with Trevor still in the car. I knew that was my mission. I heard voices – echoes. Sometimes it was the voice, sometimes an echo, sometimes it was very clear, sometimes not.’
Two and a half months later he killed the first of the thirteen women. ‘Before doing it,’ Sutcliffe said, ‘I had to go through a terrible stage each time. I was in absolute turmoil. I was doing everything I could to fight it off, and asked why it should be me, until I eventually reached the stage where it was as if I was primed to do it.’
Mr Chadwin asked if he ever tried to resist what he had been told to do and Sutcliffe said yes, he had, once: ‘I was on my way to the Leeds red-light area. I got halfway there and I was still in a turmoil. I do not think I was quite in that state where I could possibly do it. I was arguing all the time. I was not always getting answers, and there was a lot I did not understand. I finally stopped the car and turned it round. I was shouting in the car. I set off back, and was changing up and down the gearbox. Eventually I got back home, locked the car in the garage, and went to bed. I felt a great sense of achievement at that stage.’
Mr Chadwin reminded Sutcliffe that, at first, he had only admitted twelve killings and two attempted killings to the police. Was this because he thought he would be making things worse for himself by admitting all twenty attacks?
– ‘No, not at all.’
‘One thing you don’t mention is the incident in Bingley cemetery. Why not?’
– ‘I didn’t want [the police] to find out about the mission. I was by no means convinced it was finished … God was in control of the situation and anything was possible. I didn’t want them to have the faintest idea about the mission … I just thought it was wiser to steer clear of the place altogether.’
Mr Chadwin then asked Sutcliffe whether he had had it in mind at any time to pretend that he was mad, and Sutcliffe said he had not.
‘Do you think you are mad?’ – ‘No.’
‘Do you think there is anything wrong with you mentally?’ – ‘Nothing serious at all, no.’
‘Do you think you will spend less time in custody if people think there is something wrong with you mentally?’ – ‘No. There would be something wrong with me mentally if I thought that.’
*
This last was the sort of exchange that, as Mr Chadwin, a school-masterly, bespectacled figure, sat and Sir Michael rose, was – astonishingly – to be characteristic of the Attorney-General’s cross-examination. Being matched against one of the pillars of the British legal establishment might have been expected to faze Sutcliffe; on the contrary, it put him on his not inconsiderable mettle – which, attempting as he was to demonstrate that the accused was no stranger to creative extemporisation and ‘devious cunning’, may have been part of the Attorney-General’s purpose. ‘I do not claim to be stupid,’ Sutcliffe was stung by him to declare at one point; and later in the week one of the doctors would confirm that, although ‘not a genius’, he was, with an IQ of between 108 and 110, 20 to 25 intelligence points above the average.
In order to demonstrate Sutcliffe’s impressive ability for thinking on his feet, Sir Michael’s first questions concentrated on the night of the arrest. Sutcliffe agreed that he had picked up Olivia Reivers in Sheffield on 2 January intending to kill her, and that he had suggested to Miss Reivers that she run away from his car when the police suddenly turned up. He also agreed that it was his instinct to protect himself that led him to say that he had gone behind an oil tank to urinate, when in fact he was hiding his weapons, and to conceal a knife in the cistern at the police station upon arrival.
SIR MICHAEL: ‘Then, for a considerable time you lied, and lied, and lied again?’ – ‘Yes.’
‘All to protect yourself?’ – ‘The mission …’
‘All to protect Peter Sutcliffe?’ – ‘Yes.’
‘Then, when found out, you decided to tell the truth, like any other criminal?’
– ‘Like any criminal – not any other.’
Sir Michael next turned to the events in Bingley cemetery and made no attempt to disguise the tone of heavy irony which cloaked his every statement. He expressed curiosity as to why Sutcliffe had kept the ‘mission’ a secret until his eighth interview with one of the psychiatrists in Armley at the beginning of March. Why was it, for example, that, during the otherwise exhaustive police ‘co
nfessions’, he had never mentioned a word?
‘Because I was waiting for a direct message saying that it was over, to fully convince me that the mission was terminated,’ Sutcliffe said.
– ‘What you are saying is that you had to have a “mission finished” or “mission terminated” signal? Did you ever get that?’ Sutcliffe said he hadn’t.
‘Do you mean never? You still haven’t had it?’ Mr Justice Boreham enquired over the rims of his spectacles, and Sutcliffe shook his head, no.
SIR MICHAEL: ‘To this day, you believe you are an agent for God in a mission only partially fulfilled?’
SUTCLIFFE: ‘That’s right.’
The Attorney-General then reminded him about the first time he had heard ‘the voices’ and how he had described being ‘transfixed’ and had felt he had been chosen to hear the words of God.
Answering questions from Sir Michael, Sutcliffe acknowledged that Sonia was his girlfriend at the time of the graveyard ‘revelation’ and that he ‘loved and trusted’ her; that his mother was then still alive and that he was ‘devoted to’ her; that, as a lapsed Catholic, he had no priest to turn to but that he did have a best friend, Eric Robinson.
‘This is the most stunning thing in your life and you did not tell Sonia?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t tell your devoted mother?’ – ‘No.’
‘You didn’t tell anyone until years and years had gone by and then you told them on the eighth interview in Armley jail? … What was so secret about this marvellous message?’
SUTCLIFFE: ‘The first two years were the best. There were no signs of the purpose or why I had been chosen to be here. None whatsoever.’
SIR MICHAEL: ‘Then there was nothing to be ashamed of in telling Sonia, your mother, your priest or anyone?’
