Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper

by Gordon Burn

  Mr Ognall said that when Sutcliffe killed Emily Jackson he had pushed a two-foot to three-foot piece of wood against her vagina.

  DR MILNE: ‘If in fact you believe what he said, then it obviously could imply a sexual component.’

  Mr Ognall described the killing of Helen Rytka, whom Sutcliffe had hit with a hammer. When she was near to death he had had sex with her, but complained that she ‘just lay there limp and didn’t put much into it’. ‘Could you think of anything more obscenely abnormal than his behaviour with that unfortunate girl?’

  – ‘I entirely agree with you, but I still think that this was a use of sexual behaviour for entirely the wrong reason – to avoid detection, quieten her and get away.’

  MR OGNALL: ‘I don’t suppose he could have just put his hand over her mouth?’

  Dr Milne said he thought Sutcliffe had had intercourse with Helen Rytka because it was ‘what the girl expected’. At which point a politely incredulous Mr Justice Boreham interrupted to enquire: ‘At that stage did she really expect it, doctor?’

  Dr Milne conceded that he didn’t know whether she did or not.

  Mr Ognall said the killing of Marguerite Walls also had a sexual component because Sutcliffe had left fingernail scratches at the entrance to her vagina. He asked Dr Milne if he agreed there was an underlying sexual component in that case, to which, with resignation creeping in, he replied: ‘You may possibly be right.’

  MR OGNALL: ‘I put it to you that the injuries to these women betray quite clear sexual components in the attacks. Do you agree?’

  DR MILNE: ‘Yes.’

  Mr Ognall told the jury: ‘This isn’t a missionary of God, it is a man who gets a sexual pleasure out of killing these women.’

  DR MILNE: ‘I don’t accept that.’

  MR OGNALL: ‘It is not God telling the tortured soul, “You must kill.” It is a man who craves for it like an addict for the next shot of heroin. What he is saying is: “I am hooked on it.”’

  Mr Ognall suggested that the ‘mission to kill’ was central to the diagnosis, and the doctor agreed. Dr Milne also conceded that, if the divine mission did not stand up in the eyes of the jury, then his diagnosis lay ‘very simply, nowhere’.

  MR OGNALL: ‘If the jury were to decide that Sutcliffe knew full well that the last six women he attacked were not prostitutes, then the divine mission to kill prostitutes as a theory lies in smithereens?’

  DR MILNE: ‘I agree. If he knew they weren’t prostitutes, and killed them knowing they were not, then the diagnosis fails.’

  MR OGNALL: ‘He then becomes a murderer.’

  DR MILNE: ‘Yes.’

  Mr Ognall then reminded the jury of three comments Sutcliffe made to the police about the attacks. After the Millward killing he had said that ‘there was a compulsion inside me. Sometimes it would lie dormant but eventually it would come welling up, and each time they were more random and indiscriminate. I now realise I had the urge to kill any woman.’

  He had also said that before he killed Josephine Whitaker he had driven round aimlessly: ‘The mood was in me and no woman was safe.’ He later said: ‘I realised she wasn’t a prostitute but at that time I wasn’t bothered, I just wanted to kill a woman.’

  Mr Ognall pointed out that Sutcliffe had completely changed his method of operation, and, on the last six occasions, instead of going into red-light areas and luring prostitutes into his car, had driven to an isolated spot, parked and attacked innocent women. ‘I suggest that the circumstances of these last six killings show this man, with compelling clarity, to be a liar and a fake.’

  Dr Milne, nearing the end of his fourth day on the stand, said he did not agree.

  *

  A few hours before the trial was adjourned for the second weekend, the second medical witness, Dr Malcolm MacCulloch, medical director of Park Lane Special Hospital in Liverpool, was sworn in.

  A quietly spoken, moonfaced man, Dr MacCulloch sent many correspondents hurrying to the telephone when he told the court that he had interviewed Sutcliffe in Armley on three occasions and had concluded after only half an hour that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. (An example of ‘overcompetence’ the judge would call it in his summing-up.) Dr MacCulloch then added – a touch defiantly – that nothing he had heard in court had caused him to change his mind. On the contrary, in the past week he had seen certain signs which were consistent with schizophrenia.

  One was Sutcliffe’s persistent and repeated looking up, on about thirty-eight occasions, to the same spot – a light cluster about ten feet above the judge’s head. He had also seen how Sutcliffe showed an abnormal lack of emotion, especially during heated exchanges about the weapons he used and the wounds inflicted by them.

  Prompted by Mr Chadwin, Dr MacCulloch said there were eight ‘first rank signs’ which aided diagnosis. If a patient had just one of these, it would be fair to say he would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Sutcliffe had four. These included:

  (i) Bodily hallucinations, which involved a sensation of being touched, or an electrical sensation, or feelings deep in the chest or abdomen. (Sutcliffe had talked of a hand gripping his heart.)

  (ii) Influence of thought. Sutcliffe believed his thoughts were being influenced or tampered with, or that he could read the thoughts of others. (Exemplified best in the case of Josephine Whitaker.)

  (iii) Delusional perception. He had read in a newspaper that a priest had said Manchester was a wicked place and had interpreted this as a message from God to go to Manchester and kill a prostitute. ‘Prostitutes should be exterminated,’ Sutcliffe had said. ‘They corrupt men. It affects their lives. The mission is from God. I have read something in the Bible which confirms these women should be shown up.’

  (iv) The final symptom was passivity, where a patient believes his actions are being controlled by others.

  Dr MacCulloch said that he regarded Sutcliffe as ‘an extremely dangerous man’, and the best that a hospital could hope to do was turn him into simply a ‘dangerous’ one.

  Cross-examining him for the prosecution, Mr Ognall drew from Dr MacCulloch the admission that the first time he had considered the Crown’s case against Peter Sutcliffe had been the day before Sutcliffe was due to stand trial. Mr Ognall affected outrage that the doctor had offered a diagnosis without availing himself of the details of what the defendant was alleged to have done. Dr MacCulloch said that he had examined the defendant’s mental state and ‘taken a history’, but the judge interrupted to enquire whether there are not ‘truly occasions when that homely old phrase applies, that a man’s acts speak louder than his words?’

  Dr MacCulloch said that he was sure there were, and the judge said well, he thought that was what Mr Ognall was getting at.

  When the court reconvened after the weekend, at the beginning of its tenth working day, Dr MacCulloch was again in the box, and Mr Ognall was again performing like a terrier.

  ‘Your diagnosis stands or falls by what this man has told you,’ he barked. ‘That is the beginning and the end of it.’

  The doctor replied: ‘I don’t think it’s the beginning and the end, but it is substantial.’

  The final witness for the defence, and the final witness before both sides began their summings-up, was Dr Terence Kay, a tall, kindly-looking man who had originally been engaged to examine Sutcliffe by the Crown.

  Like his colleagues, Dr Kay maintained, while being questioned by Mr Chadwin, that his faith in his original diagnosis of Peter Sutcliffe was unshaken. He believed that Sutcliffe thought he had heard the voice of God in Bingley cemetery and that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

  Dr Kay said that at times Sutcliffe’s manner did not match the seriousness of what he was talking about. ‘At times he smiled, almost giggled, when we were discussing very serious things. Sometimes he treated it almost as a joke and laughed.’

  He said that he had asked Sutcliffe what brought on his depressions and was told: ‘Quarrels with wife, worries,
problems losing licence. Two or three occasions packed my cases. Wife has had a nervous breakdown. Hell to pay if I enter house with boots on.’ (In his report, Dr Milne said he had interviewed Sonia three times at the beginning of the year and found her temperamental and difficult: ‘She admitted that she teased and provoked her husband … He told me that she was over-excited, highly-strung, unstable and obsessed by cleanliness.’)

  Dr Kay said he asked Sutcliffe if his wife was worried about excessive cleanliness regarding sex. It would have told him a lot about his wife if she had insisted on him taking baths before sex, Dr Kay explained, but Sutcliffe had told him that she didn’t, though she did use towels on the bed when she had just put clean sheets on.

  Mr Chadwin asked if, given what the doctors knew of Mrs Sutcliffe’s own illness, there was anything Dr Kay might have expected Sutcliffe to do if he was attempting, as the prosecution had suggested he was, a copycat version. ‘Yes,’ Dr Kay replied. ‘She had shown terror, aggression, dismay, a fatuous smile, things that could be seen on her face.’

  If Sutcliffe wasn’t schizophrenic, Mr Chadwin wanted to know, what was he? ‘If he is not schizophrenic, only a psychopath would kill this many people,’ Dr Kay said, ‘and the origins of that must be sexual.’ He said he had asked Sutcliffe about ‘his lifestyle and daydreams’ and he did not believe that he came into the category of a sadist-killer. There were a number of reasons. Firstly, a sadist-killer can very rarely relate to adult women and therefore is very rarely married; secondly, he has a rich sexual fantasy life, dreams about sex and is usually very anxious, given the opportunity, to discuss his fantasies; thirdly, such people would stimulate their fantasy with pornography and would be interested in torture, whips and female underwear. Dr Kay said he was not aware of any evidence of that nature in Sutcliffe’s case.

  Asked by Mr Chadwin whether there was anything that struck him about the killings in that context, he replied: ‘I would have expected the sexual aspect to be present in all except the first one or two cases, and I would have expected it to spread so that in the last killing there would have been greater mutilation than in the earlier ones.’

  He added that the use of the hammer also did not suggest a sadist-killer, because of its speed: the usual emphasis was on slowness of death and the agony of the victim. The sadist-killer needed to see the suffering and he needed to control the terror of the victim. Referring to the hammer blows, Dr Kay said the speed and need to see the face of the victim would appear to contradict the sexual pleasure in doing it.

  Mr Chadwin turned to the injuries suffered by Josephine Whitaker. ‘I suppose it is obvious to all of us why a sadistic killer would inflict that injury – why would a schizophrenic inflict it?’

  Dr Kay explained that as a schizophrenic went on, his sensitivity would be eroded.

  After several days of silence, Sir Michael Havers decided to unburden his junior colleague of the cross-examination of this final representative of the medical profession. Immediately homing in yet again on the ways in which the Crown maintained Sutcliffe had ‘duped’ the doctors, the Attorney-General referred the court to a controlled experiment in America in which psychiatrists were fooled by a team of researchers pretending to be schizophrenics. Before he could get into his stride, however, Sir Michael was diverted by the unaccustomed gust of laughter which blew through the court following Mr Justice Boreham’s observation that he must not blame Dr Kay for what happened in America.

  Sir Michael then set about convincing Dr Kay of the likelihood that Sutcliffe was, despite all the doctor had already said, a sadist-killer. Dr Kay conceded that Sutcliffe’s sexual involvement with Helen Rytka as she lay dying was ‘a very unusual act’, but he added that he would have expected that sort of thing in not just one, but in every case from a sadist-murderer.

  Next, Sir Michael turned to the case of Josephine Whitaker, who had been stabbed with a screwdriver in the vagina. Wasn’t it much more like the work of a sadist-killer than somebody on a mission?

  Dr Kay replied: ‘I have to balance whether this was done for sexual excitement or pleasure, or whether it is the act of a man whose feelings for human beings are blunted by schizophrenia.’

  The doctor was then handed the screwdriver with which Sutcliffe had attacked Miss Whitaker and told by Sir Michael, lacking the brio of Mr Ognall, that ‘there must be a sexual component there. That was introduced inside the vagina three times through the same entry hole.’

  Dr Kay agreed, and said that when he asked Sutcliffe about it Sutcliffe had said he ‘waggled it about two or three times’. It didn’t, however, significantly affect his diagnosis.

  SIR MICHAEL: ‘Why would any man want to do that to a girl?’

  Dr Kay acknowledged that a sexual motive was the most likely but insisted that he could not know what went through a schizophrenic’s mind all the time. ‘I do not know what particular thoughts they have in regard to sex or anything else under every condition.’

  He agreed with the Attorney-General that if Sutcliffe was ‘a cold-blooded killer who had an enormous desire to kill prostitutes or just to kill women, he could be bad rather than mad.’

  This was the point, to nobody’s surprise, to which Sir Michael returned shortly before the adjournment for lunch on Tuesday 11 May, when he began his closing address to the jury. In a ninety-minute speech, he told them it was up to them to decide whether Peter Sutcliffe was mad, as the doctors believed, or ‘a sadistic, calculated, cold-blooded murderer who loved his job’, as the Crown maintained. Somebody who was ‘just plain evil’.

  ‘It is the doctors’ belief in what he said about Bingley, the voice of God and the mission which leads them to their diagnosis. If you do not believe that he is telling the truth, then the doctors’ diagnosis collapses. If you are not satisfied that he did hear voices of God or he did have a mission, that is an end to it,’ Sir Michael said.

  It might be the most notorious or infamous multiple murder of the decade, he told them, but it was in essence no different from any other case. They must not flinch or feel afraid to allow the presence of the world’s press in court to affect them.

  In a characteristically unflamboyant but well-argued closing speech, Mr Chadwin explained to the jury that he was in the unusual position as defence counsel of having to prove the defence case, while the prosecution didn’t have to prove anything. ‘Because Peter Sutcliffe has admitted these killings, and has said they were done with the intention of killing, it follows that they are murders unless I can persuade you that, because of the evidence, it is probable that Peter William Sutcliffe at the time of these killings had a sick mind, a diseased mind which had the effect that it substantially impaired his responsibility for what he did.’

  Mr Chadwin challenged the theory put forward by the prosecution that Sutcliffe attacked women because he had a grudge after he was belittled by a prostitute in 1969. He asked what happened to Sutcliffe’s seething hatred of prostitutes between 1969 and 1975. ‘If this man had been activated merely by resentment, then by 1970, 1971 or 1972 the matter would have been over.’

  Mr Chadwin said a man with a healthy mind as opposed to one which was diseased would have been most unlikely to start killing and attacking prostitutes in 1975 because of an incident that had taken place six years earlier. ‘But a man who had become convinced through sickness of mind that it was God’s will that he should attack prostitutes might well have taken time to become so convinced to start his attacks.

  ‘This man was obsessed by prostitutes,’ he continued, ‘paranoid about prostitutes, and would see special significance about a part of a prostitute’s body. But is there anything to suggest he enjoyed anything sexually?’ Mr Chadwin suggested there was not. He drew the jury’s attention to Sutcliffe’s own explanation of why he placed one victim in a humiliating position, ‘to show them for what they are. To show them as a disgrace.’

  ‘He loathed their bodies and he attacked in many cases with excessive violence – one woman having something like fifty
-two stab wounds,’ Mr Chadwin went on. ‘But bear in mind that, whether stabbing or strangling, the pattern was always blows to the back of the head. Is it even probable,’ he asked, ‘that this is a pattern of someone who enjoys to see the suffering of his victim, or enjoys killing? Or is consistent with the feeling that he was destroying what he, in his own way, regarded as the scum of the earth who were responsible for all the ills of the world?’

  In conclusion, Mr Chadwin told the jury that the responsibility shouldered by the defence counsel in the case was a heavy one, but that he asked for no sympathy ‘because your responsibility is heavier than mine’.

  This, of course, was mere rhetoric. As Piers Paul Read pointed out soon afterwards in the Observer: ‘Barristers may pretend that it is the jury which decides a case such as this, but the facts at the jurors’ disposal are filtered through the rules of evidence, and because of this they were denied quite crucial information – notably about [Sutcliffe’s] childhood and married life.

  ‘The contentions of both prosecution and defence in this case,’ Read went on, ‘both seemed inadequate explanations for what had happened, and the issue became less and less a question of fact, and more a philosophical riddle: Was he a sane man pretending to be mad? Or a mad man who thought he was sane? Or a mad man who thought he was sane and was pretending to be mad?’

  It was the judge’s purpose, of course, to convince the jury that their verdict turned on less arcane distinctions than these. And often during a summing up which took him from Wednesday afternoon to the morning of Friday 22 May to deliver, Mr Justice Boreham seemed like the head of a family lately returned from a long holiday in a strange land, trying to remind the younger members of all that they had seen. ‘This was the one killed in her flat, d’you remember?’; ‘This was the one where he waved at the window to reassure her’; ‘you know, the little twin’; ‘that ligature, the cord, do you remember it?’ he gently prompted the jury, turning the pages of the ledger that he had been assiduously, and rather hypnotically, blotting with the heel of his right hand, day by day.