by Stephen Wade
In 1974, it seems highly likely that there was a Ripper attack in Bradford, this one on Gloria Wood, who survived. Gloria was a student at the time and on 11 November, as she was walking across a school field, she met a man who seemed kind, she was laden down with heavy bags and he said he would help. But she says that he began to strike her with a claw-hammer. She only survived because there were people nearby who disturbed the ritual that the Ripper needed. Gloria’s description of the assailant was that he was medium height, with a short curly beard and dark hair, wearing a dark suit. Her skull was fractured, and she was clearly very close to being on the list of murder victims.
There are other possible victims beginning to be recorded and discussed, mainly due to a television programme, broadcast in 1996, Silent Victims: The Untold Story of the Yorkshire Ripper. The documentary dealt with six attacks and most of these seem highly likely to be put down as Sutcliffe cases. Gloria Wood’s attack was perhaps the most plain one to link to him, but there are other brief accounts, maybe all part of the sequence in that early phase, when he was gaining a twisted kind of confidence in his sick and brutal regime.
In August 1996, for instance, a housewife in Lister Hills was attacked in the early hours of the morning: she was stabbed in the stomach. Earlier, in 1992, according to Keith Hellawell in his book of memoirs, an Irish student was attacked in Bradford, as reported at the time. Yet the documentary attaches the crime to Leeds. The tendency is for crime historians to want to link any brutal murder committed around the Leeds-Bradford conurbation in these years to the Ripper. Even some murders which have no features of a Ripper attack have been suggested, such as the unsolved murder of Mary Judge near Leeds Parish Church in 1968, which is clearly not the work of Sutcliffe.
But in the facts around the murder of Tina Atkinson on 23 April 1977 there is no doubt about the identity of the killer. She was a divorced mother who worked as a prostitute, based in a flat, and she returned home one day to find the Ripper there, making all circumstances easy for him to strike. Tina had had a great deal to drink, and had enjoyed a pub crawl looking for business. When she left the Carlisle pub just after ten on a warm Saturday evening she was noticed. She carried on working for a while, then went to her flat.
The next day, early evening, one of her close friends went to check on her and to have a chat; he was to find her mutilated body on the bed. The pathologist on the scene, Dr Gee, was the first medical man to have to write up a report of what was to become a sickeningly familiar tale across Yorkshire: a chisel had been used, and she had been stabbed in the body and neck. She had not been raped. It is staggering to note just how much alcohol was in her body – twenty spirit measures – and we have to wonder how much she knew about anything that went on that night, particularly as she was struck as soon as she entered the room.
In January 1978, Yvonne Pearson’s body was found under a dumped sofa in a waste site. This was perhaps the most disgustingly brutal attack, as she had been struck so violently and relentlessly on her skull that it had fragmented into twenty-one pieces. To do this nasty work of destruction, a heavy ball-hammer had been used. As a final humiliation, some old stuffing material from the sofa had been rammed into her gullet. This time, there was nothing to denote the usual stabbing, but the hammer and the sexual elements to the killing pointed to the Ripper. Ironically, Yvonne had been heard to say on one occasion, ‘It would be just my luck to meet the Ripper.’
At this stage, the operation to catch the killer was being increased and more men deployed. In April 1979, the event happened that was to divert the investigations and arguably made the last killings more manageable for the Ripper: this was the arrival of the Wearside Jack tapes, sent to George Oldfield who led the investigation. Valuable time was spent in gathering experts and scholars to study the tape and to trace the location of the speaker, as he had a distinct Wearside accent. The focus shifted from West Yorkshire to Castletown near Sunderland. Though the general paranoia about the identity of the Ripper went on, there was less intense concentration on the Bradford conurbation. Forensic linguistic expert, Stanley Ellis of Leeds University did an amazing job of analyzing the voice on the tape, isolating the local accent of ‘Jack’. How was he to know that the police would be convinced that the voice was Sutcliffe – and be wrong?
Now of course we know the identity of Wearside Jack and his venture into fantasy and a reign of terror that ensued can be blamed for the continued Ripper killings around Leeds when attention was diverted to Wearside. Before that, as oral history testimony makes clear, the Ripper tapes had been broadcast in every possible location. Thousands of people have recalled their feelings of terror on hearing that voice, clearly based on the infamous hoax letters written to the Metropolitan Police back in the days of the original Ripper in Whitechapel, in 1888.
During this period, the eleventh victim was found: student Barbara Leach had enjoyed a night out at the Manville Arms in Bradford, and after this she decided to walk home alone: just the thing that the police had been advising women not to do. She only managed to walk around twenty yards before he struck. Student flatmates assumed she was sleeping somewhere else, but they were worried the next day. Her body was found under an old carpet, in an alley. Bricks had been piled on this. The scene provided the usual degrading and seedy atmosphere, as he chose to haunt the back alleys and yards of the northern towns.
Barbara had even asked a flatmate to wait up for her. She had said that she just wanted a walk, after stepping out of the pub into Great Horton Road; it was a quarter to one. The search for her took a few days, and there was still a faint hope that she might turn up for an appointment that had been made for 12.30 on the next Monday. She never arrived and not long after, a constable found the body. It was a shocking experience for PC Simon Greaves.
It is instructive to look back at those years with the knowledge of hindsight, and to be aware of David Canter’s concept of mapping in profile work. It all looks so simple now: thirteen murders and at least eleven attacks, all within a twenty mile radius of Bradford’s centre (with the exception of the Manchester killing). It all points to a person living close to Bradford, taking the excursions to places he could reach within a set period of time, and from where he could return to his lair smoothly and quickly.
The file on other potential victims of the Sutcliffe campaign will inevitably go on. The documents linked to the Byford Report on the way the police dealt with the case had some spin-offs in this ongoing investigation, and the author of Wicked Beyond Belief, a full story of the Yorkshire Ripper, by Michael Bilton, makes use of these documents. This suggests that anything else likely to emerge now that might be related to these murders will be marginal and perhaps difficult to substantiate.
A summary of his known victims helps to define exactly what a relentless killer the man was. First came Wilma McCann on 30 October 1975 in Leeds; the police at the time thought she was a part-time prostitute and that her death had happened because she had unluckily come across one of those clients who turned nasty and perhaps did not want to pay for her services. She was killed only a short distance from her home, her body being dragged into some nearby playing fields.
The second victim was Emily Jackson from Churwell, near Morley. The Jacksons had the habit of going to the Gaiety pub on the fringe of Chapeltown, a Leeds red-light district, and Emily was allegedly out in search of sex on the night of 20 January 1976 when she did not return to her waiting husband in the pub. The next day her mutilated body was found in some derelict buildings. There was then a lull until the third victim, Irene Richardson, a prostitute, was found dead in a park on 6 February 1977. This was at Roundhay, where there had previously been an attack, on Marcella Claxton, and she had survived.
The fourth was Tina Atkinson in Bradford, and she met her clients in her flat, where her body was found. She had taken Sutcliffe back there one night, 23 April 1977. DCS Domaille went to the crime scene. What he found was described by Michael Bilton in one of the most comprehensive Ripper
books: ‘The woman had probably bled to death on the bed. Her dark hair was soaked in blood, as were the sheets and pillow … Her arms were spread out down her side … Her white cotton pants had been pulled down to expose her buttocks …’ But what Domaille noticed most acutely was a large bloodstain on a wooden chair; then he saw a bloodstained leather jacket in the wardrobe. A narrative of events was built up. One might have thought at the time that the police were getting closer to their man.
Then murder five happened: Jayne Macdonald (25 June 1977) was walking home late one night. Her body was found by children the next day. She was only sixteen and was not on the game. The public outrage was savage. Not only had the victim pattern changed: there was now apparently an indiscriminate and opportunist approach by the killer, and his victims could be of any type, age or status.
The sixth known victim was Jean Jordan, killed on 1 October 1977. She had not returned from a night out; this murder was in Manchester, the first killing outside the Leeds-Bradford conurbation. But a vital clue was left: Jean had a £5 note tucked away in a pocket. This was a new note, and the recipients could be traced; the note had gone to one of three firms in Bradford. Sutcliffe knew the note had been left, and we know that he returned to the body to find it, but it was in a secret pocket. He even stuck glass into her body in frustration.
The seventh killing was of Yvonne Pearson. The mystery attached to this is that when her body was eventually found, two months after the murder, there was a copy of the Daily Mirror under one arm. The paper’s date was a month after the time of death, so had Sutcliffe returned to the body? It looks that way, though he denied it.
In the wood yards next to the railway station in Huddersfield, the eighth victim was found: Helen Rytka, murdered by blows of a hammer. She was one of twins and they worked the streets in town, taking it in turns to work while one waited and looked out. But Helen took a risk and the man she had was the Ripper.
Number nine was Vera Millward, in Manchester. Her body was horribly mutilated. She had been waiting for a man she knew but he did not come so in wandering around for custom, she was fated to meet the Ripper. Her body was one of the worst ever found, with the head crushed and terrible slashing across her stomach. She was found in a car park. That seems to have been a turning point, though, because the next victims were not prostitutes – they were two students and a teenager. A woman is a woman, whatever her trade or occupation, but the media and the public moral panic accelerated their responses when number ten in Sutcliffe’s list of victims turned out to be a teenager on her way home in a quiet suburb of Halifax.
Savile Park, a wide recreation ground between King Cross and the stylish area of large houses and leafy roads by the infirmary (now gone) was, with hindsight, a perfect place for Sutcliffe to strike. Young Josephine Whitaker had been visiting relatives and chose to walk home across the park. She was only a short distance from her home when he struck. This was his second teenage victim. No-one was safe now. The eleventh was Barbara Leach, a student who had merely walked home on her own after a night out with friends, just before term started. Her body was found in an alley, covered with some old carpet. The twelfth victim, Margeurite Walls, was similarly just walking home. She had been working late and decided to walk home – this was about a mile away, so she was taking a risk. It was not her lucky night at all: she was beaten to death and her body was thrown into a garden.
Finally, there was another student, Jacqueline Hill, in Leeds. Again, she was not far from safety, close to her student flat, when he struck. She had got off a bus in Headingley, and Sutcliffe, who had been buying some fried chicken at a café nearby, saw her, followed her and pounced. Her fateful night was one on which she had chosen to go to a meeting of volunteer probation workers: destiny made it her last night on earth.
What about Sutcliffe the notorious prisoner? In 2010 the papers were eager to tell the public that Sutcliffe was now cured of his schizophrenia. The subject of release and rehabilitation of lifers will always be contentious, and that announcement brought the kind of dissension that Sutcliffe’s life inside has always done. Andrew Willis, a former lecturer in criminology, wrote to The Times to point out that ‘There are about 5,600 prisoners in England and Wales who are serving indeterminate sentences for public protection, and have no idea when they might be released. Many of these cases … are not as serious as the Sutcliffe case … this case throws some light on a confused area of sentencing.’ That is the most current issue. Another correspondent in the same week expressed probably the common feeling, that if the man was able to reflect rationally on his crimes, then he should be ‘given the rest of his life to do this’.
Conversations began across the land in February 2010 when The Sun had a headline which said: ‘Ripper’s Free to be Freed from Broadmoor’ and explained that ‘According to a source close to Sutcliffe, the medics will support his bid to get out of Broadmoor.’ The paper knew how to increase sales; the story was that no less than top security hospital doctors had told Sutcliffe’s lawyers that he was now classified as a low risk prisoner. Other papers reported more soberly that there would be a medical report on him produced by the end of 2010.
The main experience Sutcliffe has had in prison, though, is that of being a victim of physical attacks. There have been six serious assaults on him, the most recent being in December 2007, when he was stabbed near his right eye while he was eating. He had lost his sight in the left eye in 1997. In this latest attack in Broadmoor, Patrick Sureda screamed at Sutcliffe and then grabbed him, saying, ‘I’ll teach you, you bastard, for killing all those women.’ Sureda is a paranoid schizophrenic and he saw where he needed to focus the attack – on the right eye. He had a blunt seven inch blade with which he stabbed several times at his victim as he sat in a small cafeteria on the Dorchester Ward. Sureda was jailed for the murder of his mother; he was determined to use his violent skills to harm Sutcliffe, and it seems as though Sutcliffe rocked backwards automatically, probably saving his good eye from damage. Nurses then restrained Sureda and put him in isolation.
It was later reported by staff that Sureda had been ‘Looking around a lot, messing with his food, but not actually eating any of it.’ Then he suddenly got to his feet, and he was hold of a metal dinner knife. That is an odd detail: metal cutlery is banned in prisons, so it has to be asked why the Broadmoor prisoners have metal cutlery. In court in Reading, Sureda was found guilty of wounding with intent and assault in an attack. But he was unfit to plead.
The Ripper has naturally been a target wherever he has been housed. Back in 1983 he was in Parkhurst and with him there was James Costello, a man convicted of possessing a firearm, and who had had nine court appearances related to violence. He was waiting for a transfer to Broadmoor when he attacked Sutcliffe with a broken coffee jar.
It is well known in jails that eating times and transit times are the points in the prison regime at which attacks are most likely to be made, and this was typical of that. Costello gave Sutcliffe four wounds, including a deep slash from mouth to neck and another from the left eye to the ear. Sutcliffe had gone to a recess for water and there Costello struck. The day after the attack, his solicitor made this announcement: ‘The prison doctor and the visiting professor have sectionalized Sutcliffe under the Mental Health Act. Moves will continue to get him transferred to a secure psychiatric unit.’
In court when Costello was tried, Sutcliffe was asked if he still ‘heard voices’ and he answered yes to that, but Costello had tried to argue that Sutcliffe’s voices were telling him to kill him (Costello) and Sutcliffe denied that. In the end, after slanging matches in court between the two prisoners, the judge, Lewis McCreery, gave Costello a five-year sentence and added, ‘You are one of the most dangerous and evil men it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.’
In 1996 Sutcliffe, now in Broadmoor, answered a knock on his private room door. A man called Paul Wilson was there, ostensibly to ask a favour. But he had in his hands a flex from headphones. He attacked Sutcl
iffe and tried to strangle him. The Ripper shouted for help and two men came to help (one being Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler) and the Ripper was saved. Wilson said his motive was that he detested sex offenders. There was no investigation. The manager of the special hospital made no comment to the media.
The final serious attack came in 1997 from Ian Kay, jailed for attempted murder and labeled as suffering from a serious personality disorder. He attacked at a time when there were criticisms of security and care of prisoners being carried out in a review by the Health Secretary. Sutcliffe was sitting in his room when Kay attacked; a pen was used to stab the Ripper in both eyes, after objecting that he was kept so close to the notorious killer. The press were told: ‘Kay has made a couple of attacks on patients in the last few months and Sutcliffe seems to have been his ultimate aim.’ Earlier, Kay had planned to use one of the standard improvised weapons of prison life – a toothbrush with a razor blade inserted. But the missing razor had been traced by staff. The real reason for the attack was surely to attain the status, the ‘cred’ of being the man who ‘did the Ripper’.
There is another side to the Ripper’s prison life though: his fan mail. In his life inside he has been inundated with letters; in 2006, one report on his fan mail claimed that his brother had said, ‘He has told me there are hundreds of letters stacked up. A lot of them are from women. He has had women writing to him for years. They seem to have a fascination for him because of who he is. It’s amazing they would want to court a killer like Peter.’ The fans continue to send letters, and in fact he is now engaged to one women, Pam Mills, who visits him, as does his wife, Sonia. This is a classic example of the irresistible allure of killers inside, as the number of women who write to US men waiting to die on Death Row testifies.
It was reported by BBC News in 2001 that Sutcliffe receives an average of thirty letters a week. A television documentary was produced, with the title, Dear Peter – Letters to the Yorkshire Ripper – and the programme featured people with a range of reasons for writing, including Sandra Lester who started writing to him in 1990 and gives as her reason the aim to ‘extend a Christian hand of support’. He did not want her to visit, however. More interesting is Olive Curry. She has always been convinced that Sutcliffe, who visited her canteen in Sunderland when he was working as a lorry driver, was with ‘Wearside Jack’ – not the one who has been caught and imprisoned, but another character.
