by Gordon Burn
He wanted to know what the words of the message were, and Sutcliffe said he hadn’t heard them. But Sir Michael was intent on an answer: ‘The first time the line was clear,’ he asked critically, ‘what was said?’
– ‘That I should have faith and that I should believe and that there was no need to be so depressed.’
‘Should that not have encouraged you to go back to the Catholic faith?’ Sir Michael now wanted to know.
– ‘No, because I had been chosen when I was out of the faith.’
‘But you have gone back now?’
– ‘Yes.’
‘So for all these years this miracle – and to you it must have been a miracle – was kept entirely to yourself?’
– ‘Yes.’
Sir Michael asked when it first occurred to Sutcliffe that the God he was in touch with was a very evil God, quite contrary to the sort of miracles he had surely been told about as a boy in the Roman Catholic Church. Sutcliffe’s reply was that, to him, it seemed similar to the contradiction between the Old Testament and the New.
There was what the newspapers next day would call ‘a terse exchange’ when Sir Michael suggested that ‘God had jumped on the bandwagon’ only after Sutcliffe had already developed a hatred for prostitutes. He had told the court, had he not, how he hated prostitutes after he was taunted by the first one he had dealings with, following his row with Sonia?
‘You came out frustrated and tormented … Humiliated, outraged and embarrassed? … You felt a hatred for her and her kind. That is a fact.’
– ‘Yes.’
‘So, God jumped on the bandwagon after that, and says, “You have a divine mission, young Peter, to stalk prostitutes and avenge me by killing them”?’
– ‘It is a very colourful speech, sir,’ – Sutcliffe tried, but ultimately failed, to dampen a smile – ‘but it does not apply.’
After lunch on what was Sutcliffe’s second full day of testimony, Mr Justice Boreham reiterated for the benefit of the jury, and at the jury’s own request, the definition of the particular defence in the case. ‘What has to be established,’ the judge told them, ‘is, first, that at the material times – that is, at the times he killed – the defendant was suffering from abnormality of the mind. Secondly, that that abnormality was caused or induced by inherent causes or disease, mental disorder or illness; and, thirdly, that that abnormality was of such proportions as substantially diminished his mental responsibility for what he did – for the killings.’
In other words, looked at another way, if it could be shown that Peter Sutcliffe killed any woman knowing that she was not a prostitute, or that he derived sexual pleasure from any of the thirteen killings with which he was charged, then ‘the divine mission’ and, with it, the defence of diminished responsibility due to an ‘abnormality of the mind’ – in this case, paranoid schizophrenia – effectively crumbled.
These were to be the twin prongs of the prosecution’s all-out assault on the doctors. But it became plain that the Attorney-General planned to rehearse the arguments in his cross-examination of their patient in the course of the afternoon. Sir Michael put it bluntly to Sutcliffe that, having decided to ‘pull the wool over the doctors’ eyes’ by persuading them that he was mentally ill and that his whole thing was a mission, the mission collapsed if he had to admit to the doctors that five or six of the murdered women were not prostitutes.
‘Is that why you had to maintain through thick and thin, in the face of the clearest evidence, that these six women were prostitutes?’
‘No,’ Sutcliffe retorted, ‘I knew when I did it that each one was.’
‘Your story would have gone straight down the drain if you had to say to the doctors that six of them were not prostitutes?’
– ‘It is not a story.’
‘But the mission requires them to be prostitutes?’
– ‘It didn’t require them to be, they were.’
Sir Michael referred Sutcliffe to the killing of Josephine Whitaker and read from his statement to the police the phrase: ‘I realised she was not a prostitute.’ He asked Sutcliffe why he had told the police that.
He said it was because he ‘couldn’t divulge anything else’. He had believed that she was not a prostitute until he received a message. The message was that she was a prostitute and not to believe her (when she said she was on her way home from visiting her grandparents). She was very clever.
Sir Michael recalled what Sutcliffe had said to Miss Whitaker shortly before killing her: ‘You can’t trust anyone these days.’ ‘Can you think,’ he asked, addressing his question to the jury as much as to the man in the box, ‘of a more horrible and cynical thing to say to someone you were just about to murder?’ He asked Sutcliffe why he had said it, and then supplied the answer himself. ‘You were trying to convince her she was safe with you?’
– ‘Yes, in a sense.’
Sutcliffe agreed that what he told the police about the attack on Miss Whitaker was a confession of ‘a cold-blooded, calculated, sadistic murderer’. He also agreed that he had feigned poor sight and asked her to look at the time on a clock to get her to stop.
‘Was this a sort of macabre play-acting while you got her jockeyed into the right position?’ Sutcliffe conceded it was.
‘Did God tell you to tell that poor girl to look at the church clock?’ Sutcliffe said He did.
He admitted removing his victims’ clothes after they were unconscious, but only so that they ‘would not hinder’ him when he stabbed them, and ‘to show them for what they were’. There was nothing at all sexual in his actions.
When it was put to him that he had stabbed his victims ‘in areas of sexual attraction in order to get sexual gratification’, he denied it. Asked why he had placed a piece of wood against Emily Jackson’s vagina, he said that he was ‘just pushing her out of sight with it. I pushed her with it because I could not bear to touch her again.’
But he had had sex with Helen Rytka. ‘Surprise, surprise,’ Sir Michael taunted him. ‘Pretty little Helen Rytka. You went and had sex with her. Why?’
‘I didn’t have sex,’ Sutcliffe replied. ‘I entered her, but there was no action. It was to persuade her that everything would be all right.’
He was asked if he had any regrets about putting a screwdriver through Jacqueline Hill’s ‘accusing’ right eye, and hesitated before giving his answer for an unusually long time. ‘It’s difficult for you, isn’t it?’ Sir Michael asked him, and Sutcliffe agreed that it was. ‘Because you’re not sure what is the right answer to give to the jury and the doctors.’
It was Sutcliffe’s turn to be sardonic this time: ‘You’re much quicker than I am, sir,’ he said.
Returned to the dock, he returned, upon contact with his firmly bolted seat, to his former, entirely impassive self, and sat out the rest of the trial like a seaside cabinet doll that has known better days.
*
‘The poor psychiatrists,’ Ferdinand Mount was to write two weeks later in the Spectator. ‘The whole court is well aware that it is they who are on trial. The policemen sitting in the dock around the defendant exchange smiles every time a shrink is made a fool of; after lunch, two of the policemen nod off.’
In the final words of his cross-examination – ‘The mission was the floater and the bait on the end of the hook was God’s message, and [the doctors] fell for it hook, line and sinker’ – Sir Michael Havers had prepared the stage for what, in retrospect, would be regarded as the most ruthless – and, in the opinion of many, the most damaging – examination psychiatry had been given in any British court.
Three of the four forensic psychiatrists who had interviewed Sutcliffe in prison would be called in his defence. And Sonia was in court for the first time in six days to hear Dr Hugo Milne of Bradford immediately speak for all of them when he declared that he did not believe the accused was simulating mental illness but was suffering from ‘schizophrenia of the paranoid type’.
Answering questions from Mr Ch
adwin, Dr Milne said he had interviewed Sutcliffe on eleven occasions at Armley jail and had ‘always been very much on my guard’ about attempts by the defendant to persuade him that he was mentally ill: ‘There was no evidence whatever to say he was simulating. I had been looking for this all the time, and I cannot accept that, in the sequence his symptoms were made known to me, that he could have been simulating.’
(Later, answering questions put to him by the prosecution, Dr Milne would say that, from twenty-nine years’ experience, he would have expected anyone trying to simulate schizophrenia to show outward symptoms, such as jumbled speech, irrational behaviour, excessive moving and running about, and frequent dressing and undressing. During her illness in 1972, Sutcliffe’s wife, Sonia, had been at times violent, aggressive, restless and would often dress and undress at inappropriate times. Sutcliffe had shown none of these signs, despite the fact that he had probably seen them in his wife.)
Dr Milne told Mr Chadwin that he believed Sutcliffe had been a paranoid schizophrenic since the age of nineteen or twenty – from the time of what he referred to as ‘the primary experience’ in Bingley cemetery. Hearing voices was the ‘classic’ symptom of the many symptoms of schizophrenia that Dr Milne enumerated for the court.
The cross-examination of the expert witness was conducted by Mr Harry Ognall, the small but pugnacious Yorkshire-based QC on the Attorney-General’s team. Cross-examining Sutcliffe two days earlier, Sir Michael had touched on Sonia’s ‘breakdown’ in the early 1970s. Mr Ognall now pressed Dr Milne for the symptoms of Sonia’s illness.
After consulting the judge on the ethics of the matter, Dr Milne said that Sonia had suffered from schizophrenia and had complained of ‘hearing voices talking to her’.
MR OGNALL: ‘Sonia is described as having grandiose ideas. That is what this man has set out to display to you. This man has spoken of being in communication with the Almighty and Jesus, hasn’t he? … Sonia had the delusion that she was the second Christ, didn’t she?’
Dr Milne agreed that she had and that it was just possible that he could have been ‘duped’ by Sutcliffe into thinking he was a paranoid schizophrenic.
MR OGNALL: ‘Prison officers have told us that six days before you first saw Sutcliffe, he had said: “I’m going to do a long time in prison, thirty years or more, unless I can convince people here that I’m mad. Then I’ll do ten years in the loony bin.” What are we to make of that, Dr Milne, in the context of your evidence?’
– ‘I think it is a very straightforward decision to make. Is this man pretending to be mad and has duped me and my colleagues? Or am I, from my clinical experience and clinical examination, right in saying that he is a paranoid schizophrenic? As far as I can see in this particular case, either he is a competent actor or I’m an inefficient psychiatrist.’
– ‘It is possible that he was very much on the alert as to what you and other doctors wanted to hear?’
– ‘If he knew the symptoms and signs of schizophrenia and he was as cool and calculated as he might have been, then it is possible.’
‘“Morbid depression”,’ Mr Ognall said. ‘That’s a very learned phrase for a lorry-driver? And “pathological hatred”. That’s a rum phrase for a lorry-driver to use?’
– ‘He is an intelligent lorry-driver.’
– ‘Yes he is.’
– ‘And articulate.’
– ‘Yes.’
– ‘And astute.’
– ‘He is!’
Mr Ognall then turned to the timing of the twenty attacks. Exactly half of them had taken place on Friday or Saturday nights when Sutcliffe’s wife was working at a nursing home. ‘This is a man,’ he told Dr Milne, ‘who is prompted by God, the hapless and hopeless victim of God’s will. This is a man who believed he was God’s instrument. Why did God only direct him on Friday and Saturday nights?’
Dr Milne said he didn’t think God had; that paranoid schizophrenics are ‘extraordinarily cunning, extremely involved in premeditation and determined not to be found’. Mr Ognall put it to him that that wasn’t the hallmark of the schizophrenic so much as of the normal criminal – ‘the badge of a premeditated killer’. The doctor said he didn’t agree.
Dr Milne did accept, however, that the fact that Sutcliffe had neglected to tell him about his arrest in a red-light district in 1969, when he had been equipped with a hammer, showed that he did tell lies.
Mr Ognall went further. Sutcliffe was a selective liar to suit his own purpose. He had told deliberate lies to police and doctors and had said that his first attack was on Wilma McCann when, in fact, he had attacked four times before then. The central weakness of Dr Milne’s diagnosis was that it was based almost exclusively on what the defendant himself had told him, and the doctor now admitted that he could have told him lies.
Dr Milne could only stress once again that he didn’t feel that he had been ‘wilfully misled’.
‘You take the view,’ Mr Ognall now put it to him, ‘that, so far as this man is concerned, there is no underlying sexual component in his attacks?’ (In a detailed report, read to the court by Mr Ognall at the beginning of the trial, Dr Milne had said Sutcliffe consistently denied that the killings and attempted killings had given him sexual excitement at the time or that afterwards he had used the incidents to ‘help in the sexual situation’ at home. Dr Milne had also stated that there was no suggestion that Sutcliffe’s habit of stabbing his victims through the same hole on repeated occasions ‘had a specific sexual symbolism’.) Mr Ognall now asked him what he meant when he talked about there being no sexual component?
Turning to the judge, Dr Milne replied: ‘In simple terms, although his victims were female and it might be thought to provide the suggestion that he must be a sexual killer, I am of the opinion that he is not primarily a sexual killer.’
Mr Ognall suggested that, if Sutcliffe was disposed to mutilate his victims or show any unhealthy interest in their sexual parts, that would be a minus against Dr Milne’s diagnosis. If there was a sexual component, that tended to go against the ‘divine mission’ argument? Dr Milne agreed.
Mr Ognall held up a seven-inch sharpened screwdriver which had been used to attack Josephine Whitaker. ‘There is absolutely no doubt that this wicked agent was introduced deep into the vagina with almost no injury to the external parts. That indicates the most fiendish cruelty deliberately done for sexual satisfaction. Do you agree?’
DR MILNE: ‘It may be a most vicious and foul thing to do, but not necessarily for sexual satisfaction. Mutilation of the genitalia for sadistic satisfaction would have to be repetitive, and there is no evidence, as far as I know, that this man has attacked any of the other victims in this way. There is no other evidence that he has in any way despoiled them or carried out any unnatural acts with them during the killings.’
Dr Milne, in his report, had said he believed that the injury to the lower part of Josephine Whitaker’s body was accidental, but the judge asked him whether, if Mr Ognall was right, the observations made in the report would still stand. Dr Milne said that it would seem not to be as accurate as it should be and he would withdraw the observation that it was accidental.
Mr Ognall asked what else the screwdriver attack could be but sexual.
DR MILNE: ‘It may well have been sexual.’
MR OGNALL: ‘What else could it have been? I will have an answer.’
DR MILNE: ‘I don’t think it could have been anything else other than sexual.’
Mr Ognall commented that it was not the only example, although by far the most horrendous, of a sexual component. He asked Dr Milne whether Sutcliffe had told him that this injury had been an accident. Dr Milne said he had not.
‘Did Peter Sutcliffe tell you there was no sexual element in the attacks?’
– ‘Yes.’
– ‘Well, that doesn’t seem to be right, does it?’
– ‘No.’
– ‘He deceived you. Why did he do that?’
– ‘Perhaps he migh
t have been very reluctant to talk about this because of what people might think of him.’
– ‘He had admitted thirteen killings and seven attempted killings. But he thought he might be worse thought of because he stabbed one of them in the vagina? Is that a considered reply?’
– ‘It is a considered reply. He has said he never ever wanted to be seen as a sexual killer.’
– ‘I expect he has never wanted to be seen as a sexual killer because, if he puts himself forward as a sexual killer, the divine mission goes out of the window. That’s why, isn’t it?’
– ‘It could be.’
– ‘Could be!’
Dr Milne, a small, neat man with heavy lips and the vestige of an Edinburgh accent, looked momentarily as if he thought he was going to be allowed to stand down. But that was to underestimate the stamina of Mr Ognall, whose finely orchestrated attack was just moving towards its crescendo.
‘If you were to find a number of instances of sexual molestation,’ he said, ‘the more instances you find, the more it would erode the validity of the diagnosis?’ And Dr Milne agreed with a heavy heart that, yes, it would lead to an erosion.
Mr Ognall reminded the jury of how Sutcliffe had stabbed Jacqueline Hill through the breast and told police that he did it because ‘It’s just something that comes over me.’ ‘Unless I’m very naive,’ Mr Ognall said, ‘that betrays a specific, clear sexual element in his killing.’
DR MILNE: ‘If you interpret it in that way, it does suggest that there may be a possible sexual component.’
Mr Ognall again asked him if he thought there was no suggestion that Sutcliffe had specific sexual reasons for the killings. Dr Milne again repeated that he still did not think that Sutcliffe was a sexual sadist.
Mr Ognall asked the jury to recall how Sutcliffe had attacked Olive Smelt and then scratched her buttocks with a hacksaw blade. He asked Dr Milne what he made of that, and Dr Milne replied: ‘I don’t make very much of it, apart from the fact he thought she was a prostitute and I don’t see any particular sexual significance, certainly not as a sexual sadist.’
