by Ray Black
By the end of August 1979, the police were starting to doubt the Geordie connection and it was felt that they should dismiss the letters and tape altogether.
THE FINAL MURDERS
Peter Sutcliffe shocked his workmates in April 1979 when he told them that he was having an affair with a young woman who lived in a village near Glasgow. He was the last person they would have expected to have been messing around, as he had always talked most fondly of his wife Sonia. He had met Theresa Douglas in a bar near Glasgow when he had been making a delivery to a nearby General Motors plant. He made regular visits to her village and soon won over the hearts of her parents. The family knew him as Peter Logan, a divorced man, who lived in Yorkshire. He even jokingly told them that he was the Yorkshire Ripper when Theresa’s brother said he had evil-looking eyes. But the family laughed as they though he was one of the nicest men they had ever met.
Peter had a dilemma though, he was faced with the prospect of losing his licence due to the fact that he had been stopped for driving in an erratic manner when under the influence of drink. That meant that there would be no more visits to see his beloved Theresa, but more importantly, no more cruising the streets of Yorkshire looking for his next victim. As Peter waited for his case to come before the court, his attacks continued.
On the night of September 1, 1979, Sutcliffe spotted twenty-year-old Barbara Janine Leach walking down a quiet road in Bradford. Barbara was a student at the University and lived with a group of other students in Grove Terrace. Sutcliffe had spotted Barbara from across the room at The Mannville Arms, and had watched her continuously. When the pub closed he went outside and waited in his car until Barbara came out with her five friends. Peter watched as the party headed towards Grove Terrace. At this point Barbara decided she would like to go for a walk and asked her friend, Paul Smith, if he would like to go with her. He told her he was going home, and she asked him to wait up for her, as she didn’t have a key.
Peter watched Barbara walk down the road on her own and then started the car and drove it back to Ash Grove where he left it parked. Armed with the hammer and knife he walked quickly along an alleyway which he realised Barbara would soon be passing. He waited in the shadows and as she passed he sprang out and smashed the hammer into her skull. One blow and she was dead.
He then dragged her body into the shadows and dropped her body to the ground. He tore at her clothing exposing her breasts, abdomen and underpants and proceeded to stab her torso eight times. When his frenzied attack was complete, he covered her body with a piece of old carpet and left it beside some dustbins.
Paul waited up for Barbara for around an hour and, assuming she had been invited to a party, went to bed. However, when he realised she hadn’t been home all night he first rang her parents and then the police. They searched the area and her body was found that afternoon.
The police were no nearer to catching the Ripper and their £1m publicity campaign had turned up no new clues or evidence. Had they realised at the time that the letters and tape were just a cruel hoax, perhaps they would have been able to stop the deaths of four more women.
By this time in the investigations Peter Sutcliffe had been interviewed on a several occasions, and his workmates had taken to calling him the Ripper because of all the apparent police interest in him. Even as late as 1980 Peter was never really considered to be a serious suspect despite the fact that he had a gap in his front teeth, his blood type was B group, he had the correct boot size and finally his car had been spotted on several occasions in the red light districts. Added to all that incriminating evidence was the fact that he was now on the much shortened list of 300 possible recipients of the £5 note. In fact the overwhelming reason that Peter Sutcliffe was not considered a prime suspect, even after nine interviews, was because he was always able to provide an alibi which was verified by his wife, Sonia. Also he was dismissed because he did not have a Geordie accent. This is a frightening indication of how greatly assumptions prejudiced the investigations, limiting the outlook of the investigating officers to the point that they are able to miss vital clues.
What seems totally inexplicable, though, is that, of all the men the police interviewed, none were given blood tests, placed under surveillance or indeed even had their boot sizes checked. Of course the procedures in the 1980s were not as sophisticated as they are today, but even so the police did not seem to use the evidence they had to hand to help them apprehend the Ripper.
His next attack was on Marguerite Walls, a forty-seven-year-old civil servant. She had been working late on the night of August 20, 1980, as she was due to go on holiday the next day and she wanted to make sure she had cleared up all her work before she left. She left her office around 10.30 p.m. to begin her short route home. To be on the safe side she went the long way round, as it was on a bus route and the streets were well lit. Peter Sutcliffe jumped out from behind a fence and hit her around the head with his hammer. She did not fall to the ground immediately, as Peter had expected, but started screaming loudly. Even a second blow to the head did not stop Marguerite from screaming, and in a panic Peter grabbed her around the neck and strangled her. He dragged her body into a driveway and through some overgrown bushes and by the time he had reached the garage at the bottom of the garden his victim was dead. His frustration and anger rose to fever pitch when he realised that he had forgotten to bring his knife with him. He tore off her clothes in a frenzy and then proceeded to hit her numerous times with the hammer. When his anger was spent, he covered her body with leaves and left for home.
After this he attacked two more women, but luckily they both survived. The first was on September 24, when Dr. Upadhya Bandara was walking down an alleyway on her way home. The second was on November 5, 1980, in Huddesfield, his victim being sixteen-year-old Theresa Sykes. Theresa survived the brutal attack but was never to totally recover, so Peter had left his mark on yet another family.
The thirteenth and final murder took place on November 17, 1980, in Leeds. Sonia Sutcliffe had resigned herself to another night on her own watching television while her husband was supposedly out making a night delivery in Gloucester. What she didn’t know was that he wasn’t working at all, but was in fact in Headingley. Jacqueline Hill was a twenty-year-old student who Peter spotted walking past the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop where he was sitting alone having his meal. Jacqueline had just got off the bus when she entered the dimly-lit area of Alma Road. She was only about one hundred yards from her home when she was struck on the back of the head, rendering her unconscious. Peter dragged her body onto some vacant land just behind the Arndale car park. Protected from view by some trees and bushes, he removed her clothes and stabbed her repeatedly. This time he was careless and forgot about the handbag she had dropped in Alma Road when he had first attacked her.
Her bag was discovered, only a short time after the attack, by Amir Hussain, a student from Iran. He took the bag home with him and showed it to his flat mates, one of whom was an ex-chief inspector with the Hong Kong police, Tony Gosden. Tony immediately felt alarmed when he realised that nothing had been taken from the bag and that there were a couple of fresh blood spots on the outside. At 11.30 p.m. the students called the police, but it was quite some considerable time before an investigating officer arrived. He was reluctant to do anything about the bag until the next day, but on the insistence of Amir, the police started to search of the area. However, the brief search by torchlight did not uncover the body of Jacqueline and the police left.
The next morning around 10.00 a.m. a worker at the Arndale centre discovered the body, which was lying less than thirty yards from where the police had searched the previous night.
The attack was widely publicized and for once it appeared that the Yorkshire Ripper was not only a threat to prostitutes but also middle-class citizens and the public became enraged. Feminists now took to the streets in a violent protest against their loss of the right to walk their own streets in safety.
THE ARREST
The police were inundated with letters from the public who named people they believed could be suspects. One of these letters came from a man called Trevor Birdsall. In the letter he wrote about a man called Peter Sutcliffe, who was a lorry driver from Bradford. When the police had still not questioned Sutcliffe two weeks later, Trevor walked into the Bradford police station and once again repeated his allegations. The information was fed into their system but Peter Sutcliffe still continued to be a free man.
On January 2, 1981, two policemen, Sergeant Robert Ring and Constable Robert Hydes, were patrolling the streets of Sheffield. They were driving down an area which was renowned for its prostitutes, when they spotted a woman climbing into a car. They immediately went over to investigate so that they could possibly make an arrest for soliciting. When questioned, the man in the car said his name was Peter Williams. He asked the police if it would be all right for him to relieve himself, and when the police gave him permission he went over to an oil storage tank. When he returned to the car the police ran a check on the number plates and discovered that they were false. Both the man and the prostitute, Olivia Reivers, were arrested and taken to the police station on Hammerton Road. The man was questioned and told the police his full name was Peter William Sutcliffe, and that he had obtained his number plates from a scrapyard in West Yorkshire.
Peter was held overnight and questioned further the following morning. This time he told the police that he had already been interviewed regarding a five-pound note that the Yorkshire Ripper had left behind at the scene of a crime. This made the police suspicious, because not only had this man been found in a car with a prostitute, but he had already been questioned regarding the murders. Sutcliffe also told the police that he was a lorry driver who frequently travelled to the North-East. The police then contacted the Ripper Squad and found out that Peter Sutcliffe was in fact a possible suspect. When the police told the squad that they had Sutcliffe in custody, Detective Boyle decided to travel to Dewsbury to question the man.
When the arresting officer, Robert Ring, heard that the Ripper Squad were coming down to question the suspect, he remembered that Sutcliffe had relieved himself the night before right beside an oil storage tank. Sergeant Ring immediately went back to the site and discovered a knife and a ball-pein hammer. He rang the police station with the news of his discovery and they couldn’t believe the fact that at last they were making some real headway in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper.
That night they searched Sutcliffe’s house and also questioned his wife. In the house they found around thirty different weapons.
The following morning when Sutcliffe was being questioned once more by Detective Boyle, Boyle mentioned about the discovery of the knife and the hammer. Sutcliffe asked if the detective was leading to the Yorkshire Ripper and when Boyle admitted he was, Sutcliffe confessed to being the murderer. Over the next few days Sutcliffe gave a full confession and admitted to killing thirteen women, but denied any knowledge of the ‘Geordie Ripper’.
THE END OF THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER
The main reason Peter Sutcliffe gave for his vicious murders was his hatred of prostitutes. He said he wanted to get revenge because one had once cheated him out of ten pounds. But later when he was being further questioned he changed his motives. The psychiatric assessment on Peter Sutcliffe was that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. He told the doctors who interviewed him that, when he was working at Bingley Cemetery he had heard God’s voice coming out of a gravestone commanding him to kill prostitutes. They also carried out an analysis of his handwriting from an epitaph they found in Sutcliffe’s lorry, and this also revealed that he had some schizophrenic tendencies.
Peter Sutcliffe went to court sixteen weeks later. It was now up to the defence counsel to prove that he was legally insane, and in the hope of this Peter pleaded guilty to manslaughter. On the other hand the prosecutors tried to prove that Sutcliffe was sane by providing a witness. This witness was a prison officer who said he had overheard Sutcliffe telling his wife that if he could convince people he was mentally ill he would probably only get a ten year sentence in a mental institution. They also came up with the evidence that Sonia, Peter’s wife, had had a breakdown in which she heard God’s voice – an act which Sutcliffe thought he could copy to fake his own schizophrenia.
On May 22, the jury found him guilty of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment which he would serve at Parkhurst Prison.
HIS LIFE INSIDE
In 1983 Peter Sutcliffe was attacked by a fellow inmate with a broken coffee jar. The cut required 84 stitches to his face and in March 1984 he was transferred to Broadmoor mental hospital.
Sutcliffe was once again attacked on March 10, 1997. Another inmate at Broadmoor stabbed Peter in both eyes during a fight at the hospital. The attacker was a man named Ian Kay – also known as the ‘Woolworths Killer’ – who stabbed him with a fibre-tipped pen. These pens were used during the drawing classes at the hospital. When questioned, Kay, who was described as an extremely dangerous man, ‘In hindsight I should have straddled him and strangled him with my bare hands . . . He said God told him to kill thirteen women, and I say the devil told me to kill him because of that.’
In March, 1996, Sutcliffe was once again assaulted. This time a prisoner at the hospital tried to garrote Sutcliffe with the flex from a pair of headphones and, when asked why, the man said he ‘resented being locked up with sex offenders’.
It will never really be known whether Sutcliffe faked his mental analysis, but it is said that his mental state has deteriorated quite considerably since he has been at Broadmoor. But the main question, which still remains unanswered, is how did he avoid such a huge police operation for all those years?
One piece of information that did emerge some years later was that the hoaxer, who did such a good job of misleading the police investigations, was in fact a retired police officer himself. Apparently he bore a grudge against George Oldfield who had headed the Ripper investigation. He said he sent the the letters to settle the score against George Oldfield, whom he hated. Oldfield died from a heart attack in 1985. This was attributed to an unhealthy lifestyle, but also to the fact that he became too emotionally involved in the Ripper case which he was so desperate to solve.
Today, Sutcliffe is in a state of incoherent mental health at the Broadmoor high-security mental hospital in Berkshire, but no-one really knows what turned him into such a monster.
One theory is that his hatred of women initially started over a simple case of hurt pride. Peter had met a young woman by the name of Sonja Szurma who was to eventually be his wife. During their early courting days Peter became jealous of Sonja as he believed she was seeing another man. Peter decided to get his own back and picked up a prostitute who agreed to have sex with him for the sum of five pounds.
Peter paid the prostitute with a ten pound note and for some reason he was unable to achieve an erection. The prostitute ridiculed Peter and then had her pimp chase him off, without giving him his five pounds change.
About three weeks later Peter met the same prostitute in a pub and demanded that she give him his five pounds change. But instead of giving him the money she ridiculed him once more in front of everyone in the pub. Peter was seething and after leaving the pub waited for the prostitute outside. When she came out he pounced on her and hit her over the head with a rock contained inside a sock. The prostitute was unhurt, other than being stunned, but still reported the matter to the police. The incident was downplayed and Peter only ended up receiving a caution. But could this have been the start of his revenge killings?
The Brides In The Bath
George Joseph Smith first married the women he murdered, and then made sure they left him all their money in their will. His method was to kill them in the bath – that was until a simple bar of soap gave the game away.
It was a cold winter evening in the year 1914. A middle-aged man sat by his flickering gaslight playing a hymn on h
is harmonium – Nearer My God to Thee. On hearing the mournful sound one could have been excused for thinking George Joseph Smith was a religious man. However, what the neighbours didn’t realise was that, directly above George’s head in the bathroom, lay the body of his bride.
Margaret Lofty was a thirty-eight-year-old vicar’s daughter and had only been married to George Smith for one day. Smith had only drowned his wife minutes before and was now using his music as an alibi. This was done in an effort to convince his landlady that he was in fact downstairs at the time of his wife’s death.
This was typical of the cool facade that George portrayed. Underneath he was a serial bigamist, a ruthless seducer who married and murdered three wives, all purely for financial gain. Added to these murders he managed to swindle many others out of money, but they were lucky and managed to escape with their lives. George Joseph Smith was also known by the names Oliver George Love, Charles Oliver James, Henry Williams and John Lloyd and was certainly one of the most cold-hearted and notorious killers of the twentieth century.
HIS BACKGROUND
George Joseph Smith was born on January 11, 1872, in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. Smith was a typical cockney, full of charm and wit, with a wicked sense of humour. But this cockney had a darker side. As a youth he was a petty criminal, and at the age of nine was sent to a reformatory for stealing. At a very young age, Smith learned how to manipulate women in order to make money.
His first, and only legal marriage, was in 1898. But the marriage broke up when his wife was put in prison for stealing, I might add at the request of her husband. From then on he had a string of bigamous marriages to women whom he robbed and then left penniless. He could always spot the combination of wealth and vulnerability and frequented seafronts and pleasure gardens in his search for his next prey.
