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

by Gordon Burn

  Having devoted several hours to the factual evidence and what Sutcliffe did, the judge turned to the evidence as to why he did it, still counselling the jury that ‘If you keep your feet firmly on the ground it will stop you from getting your heads into the clouds.’ The point at issue, Mr Justice Boreham said, was reasonably simple: did Sutcliffe lie to the police in order to divert them from his ‘mission’? Or did he lie to the doctors in order to persuade them he was mad?

  It was Sutcliffe’s own testimony here that was ‘crucial’. It was Sutcliffe himself who had decided to give evidence; nobody had been in a position to make him. He was capable of it because, according to the doctors, his schizophrenia was of the rare type known as ‘encapsulated’, which means that the rest of his personality is intact. The jury were advised to ‘weigh him up as you would any other witness – not just what he said but how he said it’.

  ‘If the doctors have been told the true story – that he was deluded into thinking he had a divine mission to kill prostitutes – then nobody challenges the diagnosis they have built on it,’ Mr Justice Boreham said, and the defence was made out: they must find him not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. ‘But if the factual basis is not reliable, then their opinions fall to the ground.’ He is guilty of murder on all thirteen counts.

  The judge gave the jury a clear indication of which way his own mind was working on at least two occasions during his summing-up. Reminding them of the several times Sutcliffe had talked about ‘an inner compulsion to kill any woman’ in his statement to the police, and of how the defence and the medical experts agreed that too much notice should not be taken of such comments because Sutcliffe was wanting to hide his divine mission, Mr Justice Boreham remarked: ‘I don’t know, you must judge, but do you necessarily have to say things like: “I realise she wasn’t a prostitute but at the time I wasn’t bothered and I just wanted to kill a woman”? Why say that if it isn’t right, and why go to that length if all you are trying to do is simply hide the mission?’

  Reviewing Dr Milne’s evidence, in which he had said that there was nothing the defendant had told him which in the end he didn’t accept, including the experience in Bingley cemetery which was central to his diagnosis, Mr Justice Boreham told the jury: ‘[Sutcliffe] says he worked in the cemetery. I do not know how far that takes you, but you must judge. I don’t wish to be flippant in a case such as this, but it is very much like claiming to have swum the Channel and when your friends doubt you, you take them to see the Channel. It doesn’t prove very much, does it?’

  Not a great deal hung on the verdict of the jury in the case of Regina versus Sutcliffe. Whether he was found guilty of manslaughter or murder, nobody doubted that Peter Sutcliffe was going to be locked away for the rest of his natural life. But proof that the last act of a famous murder trial still exercised a profound fascination for the public was to be found in the number of people who arrived with their sleeping bags for what was expected to be the trial’s final day, even before the afternoon sitting on Thursday, 21 May was over. Even the rain which lashed them for most of the night didn’t seem to lower their spirits.

  Mr Justice Boreham concluded his summing-up within half an hour of the court reconvening on Friday morning, and at 10.21 a.m. sent the jury to their room to seek a unanimous verdict. Five hours later, at 3.28 p.m., they returned to the court to tell the judge that unanimity was proving impossible, and the judge said that in that case he would accept a majority verdict.

  By now it was after closing time, and so the journalists and other spectators milled impatiently around the grand muralled hall outside Number One Court, discussing deadlines. If the atmosphere stopped just short of the circle-bar at No Sex Please, We’re British, this was out of deference for the relatives of some of the dead women who were present. Below in the cells, the defendant was said to be happily whiling away the hours with his favourite author, James Herriot.

  At about 4.15 there was a buzz of excitement when an usher appeared and unlocked the doors of what from the outside gave every appearance of being a superior department-store of the old school. And at 4.19 p.m. the foreman of the jury, a young red-haired man with a beard, rose at the invitation of the clerk of the court and took seven minutes to deliver thirteen verdicts of murder by a majority of ten to two.

  As the foreman sat, Sutcliffe himself went to sit down but was prevented from doing so by the two prison officers pressed on either side of him. They urged him closer to the rail of the dock, where he stood without registering a blip of emotion as Mr Justice Boreham pronounced sentence on him.

  ‘Peter William Sutcliffe, the jury have found you guilty of thirteen charges of murder, and, if I may say so, murder of a very cowardly quality. It is difficult to find words that are adequate in my judgement to describe the brutality and the gravity of these offences and I say at once I am not going to pause to seek those words. I am prepared to let the catalogue of your crimes speak for itself.’

  The judge said that in deciding on his sentence he had considered the depth in human terms of the terror which Sutcliffe had brought to a wide area of Yorkshire. ‘It is a population which to my knowledge does not lack fortitude. But I am left in no doubt that women from a wide area were in the deepest fear, and I have no doubts too that that fear spilled over to their menfolk on their account.’

  He said he had also considered the danger which Sutcliffe would represent in the future if he were at large. ‘The sentence for murder is laid down by the law and is immutable. It is a sentence that you be imprisoned for life.’

  He told Sutcliffe that he would recommend to the Home Secretary that he should serve at least thirty years. ‘That is a long period,’ he said, ‘an unusually long period, but I believe you are an unusually dangerous man. I express the hope when I have said life imprisonment it will mean precisely that.’

  The final remark addressed by Mr Justice Boreham to the man who had sat virtually motionless under his gaze for fourteen days was that the seven charges of attempted murder to which he pleaded guilty at the start of the trial also incurred life sentences. ‘You may go,’ he said, and a bolt was drawn loudly in the door at the bottom of the dark flight of stairs leading from the dock.

  *

  When news of the verdicts reached the crowds in the street outside the Old Bailey, The Times reported next day, there were three cheers for the jury.

  ‘I would like him to be hung. I could kill him myself,’ Mrs Doreen Hill told awaiting newsmen. ‘I want him in a normal prison so other prisoners can get him.’

  ‘I wish he was going to the gallows,’ Mrs Irene MacDonald, Jayne MacDonald’s mother, said. ‘I hope other prisoners have the decency to make every minute he is inside a living hell for him.’

  ‘I hate and loathe him,’ were Mrs Beryl Leach, Barbara Leach’s mother’s, parting words.

  *

  That night, both the BBC and the ITV network ran hour-long documentaries about the case. John Sutcliffe was in both but watched neither (although a friend videoed the Yorkshire Television programme for him). He started watching YTV’s film at home but ‘got bored’ after about ten minutes and went down to the pub. He had made no bones about the fact that he thought the ‘voices from God’ story was ‘bunkum’. He thought the best thing all round would have been if Peter had been hanged.

  Along with the rest of his family, John had followed the general development of the case, which had anyway been virtually inescapable in the press and on radio and television. But, whenever possible, he had spared himself the details.

  Neither his father nor his brothers and sisters were aware, for instance, that when Peter stood up in court and said he had been on his way home from work on the night that he killed Yvonne Pearson in Manningham, he had in fact just been helping Mick and his father move the heavier items of furniture into Rutland House. They wouldn’t realise for more than a year – and only then when it was pointed out to them – that, within an hour or two of the end of his house-warming party at
Heaton, Peter was attempting to saw the head off Jean Jordan’s eight-day-old corpse in Manchester.

  What Carl knew was mainly what his brother had told him on his first visit to see him in Armley. ‘He said he hadn’t done them all. He said to me, “They aren’t really as bad as they say.” He hadn’t really ripped them to bits, he said.’

  Asked why he had done it, Peter had looked at Carl and smiled, and said, ‘I were just cleaning up streets, our kid. Just cleaning up the streets.’

  33

  Among the regular attenders at the Old Bailey during the first week of the trial was a tall, rather striking woman who every morning took her place in the back row of seats banked up steeply behind the dock and reserved for those with the right to stare most searchingly at the back of the Ripper’s head.

  By the time the verdict was announced, Anna Rogulskyj was back in Keighley, in the terraced house only a few hundred yards from where Peter Sutcliffe had stepped out behind her armed with a hammer on a warm summer night in July 1975, and which she had been able to buy out of the £15,000 that she had eventually received from the Criminal Injuries Board.

  Sitting in an aluminium-framed garden chair in a room decorated with only a plaque dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes and a few pictures torn out of magazines – John Travolta, the Pope, David Soul – she watched the news on a television wired to a meter which demanded more fifty-pence pieces than she was normally able to afford.

  Dark-haired at the time of the attack, ‘Joanna’, as she now preferred to call herself, had become an ash-blonde and had particular reasons to be grateful for a thick growth of hair: it concealed the two ladle-sized craters in her skull, one below the crown and the other just behind the right ear, which, even after six years, she seemed compelled to ask people to thrust their hands into, as if this in some way alleviated the pain.

  That John Sutcliffe should meet the woman acknowledged to be the first of the twenty victims claimed by his son, let alone explore her wounds with his fingers and invite her home to Sunday lunch, was something that seemed bizarre to everybody but John and Anna Rogulskyj herself. ‘The depressions in her skull are horrific. You can get your fist into them. I mean, she was beaten and beaten and beaten. Her right hand is still deformed from trying to protect herself. He beat the hell out of her hand as well.’

  It was only two years after she was attacked and left for dead that Anna Rogulskyj’s name was added to the list of the Ripper’s crimes, and the minute it was, the life she had been painstakingly rebuilding – after months in hospital, she had had to be taught how to walk and talk again – crashed about her ears. ‘I don’t go round the pubs. I never have done in my life. I’m not a gallivanting woman: I choose my men carefully, and they’re few and far between,’ she protested to anyone who would listen, but it wasn’t enough: the phone never stopped ringing with heavy-breathers and people asking ‘How much?’ She was scared to get up in the morning in case another filthy letter had been pushed through the door, afraid to go out because of the pointing fingers and wagging tongues.

  She became convinced that it wasn’t the Yorkshire Ripper who had attacked her at all, but another man, whose identity she knew. And after the trial, she started to believe that the Ripper himself was the only person who could ‘clear her name’. If his father could get him to put it in writing that he wasn’t the man who beat her over the head, then perhaps at last she might be able to start getting back to being herself …

  In the meantime she would go on taking her doses of Wyeth Ativan, without which her mouth dried and her nerve went and she was unable to face the world. ‘If he takes me off them,’ she said one cold night at the beginning of 1983, ‘then I don’t want to live.’ While in London for the trial she had taken an overdose of her brother’s blood-pressure pills and had had to be rushed into Edgware General to have her stomach pumped. It was only the latest in a series of attempts on her own life, and only one example of the illimitable misery which would continue to seep through the lives of countless others, like an unshakeable damp.

  Through their common experience, Anna Rogulskyj and Olive Smelt had become friends, but it didn’t make Mrs Smelt’s day-to-day existence any more tolerable: she, too, was the victim of gossip and innuendo and, while never driven to attempt suicide, was vulnerable to sudden black depressions and amnesia. Linda, her oldest daughter, suffered a nervous breakdown whose roots, the doctors said, almost certainly lay in the assault on her mother.

  Two years after Jayne MacDonald’s death, in June 1977, her father died, so his wife believed, ‘from a broken heart’: ‘He couldn’t forget seeing her in the mortuary when he had to identify her,’ Mrs MacDonald told the Yorkshire Post. ‘All he could say was there was blood all over her beautiful hair.’

  Doreen Hill firmly believes that if Jacqueline had still been alive her husband would still be alive as well. Jacqueline Hill was due to announce her engagement to Ian Tanfield, a Royal Air Force officer, on her twenty-first birthday, Friday, 22 May 1981, which happened to be the final day of Peter Sutcliffe’s trial. Jack Hill had been seriously ill for some time with a tumour on the lung. ‘But,’ Mrs Hill said at her home in Ormesby, on Teesside, one Sunday afternoon near the end of Sutcliffe’s second full year in jail, ‘my husband lived to give Jacqueline away.’

  A painting by Jacqueline, of the window in front of which Doreen Hill was sitting, hung on the fireplace wall. Below it, framed pictures of Jacqueline herself and of her fiancé stood at either end of the fire surround. Mrs Hill stared blankly at the piece of wall between these three objects for long periods, saying nothing. She no longer reads newspapers and tries to avoid the news on television and, asked whether she is bitter, says stonily: ‘Of course. I’ve had my doubts about it for a number of years, but they’re all settled now,’ she says of the Bible. ‘It’s just one big fairytale.’

  Simple imprisonment, she repeated, was too good for the man who had casually destroyed her life: ‘Somebody has suggested putting him in a room and throwing away the key. Another person, who I was very surprised at, a doctor, suggested removing both his eyes, and giving them to somebody who needs them, taking away his kidneys for somebody who needs them, cutting his vocal chords and putting electrodes on his head. Perhaps the best thing would be locking him in a room with thirty prostitutes and letting them loose.’

  *

  On 10 January 1983, Peter Sutcliffe was attacked with a broken coffee jar by another prisoner in F2, the hospital wing of Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight. He sustained a deep laceration five inches long across his face, a two and a half inch-deep laceration at the upper part of his left eye and a laceration to his upper left eyelid, and lost more than a pint of blood. It took eighty-four stitches to repair the wounds and, when Sutcliffe gave evidence against the man who had attacked him – ‘Glaswegian hardman Jimmy Costelloe’ – at Newport Magistrates Court in November, the scars were clearly visible where his face wasn’t covered in beard.

  The incident was said to have occurred because of Sutcliffe’s repeated defacing of the prison’s copy of the Sun, which he described in court as ‘trash’. Wearing a large gold crucifix on a thin chain fastened tightly round his neck, he railed against ‘greed, immorality and depravity’ and ‘the declining moral values in society today’.

  Peter only wrote infrequently to his family, but when he did this was also the tenor of his letters to them. ‘These greedy moral-less scum’ he wrote of his former ‘so-called friends who have talked to the “gutter” press’.

  ‘I may be classed as the number one criminal, but their behaviour disgusts me. They are real criminals, I’m not! (only by name and lack of understanding of why I had to do what I did) … I have a true and strong belief in God and the personal understanding I’ve had for years of his overall purpose for everything. Poverty, disease, famine etc – none of these are optional vices like immorality, corruption, greed … Look at the absolute moral decline of society. Every aspect of it is one of decay and corruption …’


  *

  To his father, this all seemed as divorced from the Peter he had known as the ‘deranged’ side of him that was now a matter of public record. ‘You can’t put them together,’ John said. ‘They’re so poles apart. They’re two completely different people, no doubt about it. When he was Peter he was Peter. He was one of the most natural-looking blokes in the world. There was nothing about him to make anybody suspect that he was in any way possessed by anything evil. He was merriment from the word go. But when he was this other guy he was somebody else altogether.

  ‘You see, all this thing, it’s so foreign to his nature. It’s so unlike him. It’s just incomprehensible that he could’ve done the things he’s done, when you know him as we’ve known him. I’ll tell you one thing: I wish that I had him back. They could put the other two in there, for me, and let me have him back. Because I got ten times more consideration from him in the space of one month than I got from either of the other two.

  ‘Peter was everybody’s favourite. He curried favouritism without trying. He would have made sure that his mother and I were looked after for the rest of our lives if it had been up to him. He is the one out of the whole family who, had his mother lived and had I lived on to any great age, I know would have looked after us. I can guarantee that.

  ‘It’s Peter who would have seen that we were all right. He’d have fetched and carried for us. He’d have taken us for days out and weekends out, run us over to Morecambe to see Anne and the kids … We’d never have been short of anything that he could have provided within his means. I know that. I couldn’t say that about either Carl or Mick. They look after Number One. They look after themselves.’