Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed by detectives nine times in five years and walked away from every one of them. The tenth time was not an interview. It was a routine check by two Sheffield officers on a Rover parked in a driveway with a woman in the passenger seat, on the night of January 2, 1981, and it ended a manhunt that had cost thirteen women their lives and had become the largest and most publicly ruined criminal investigation in British history. What the check found was that the car's plates had been stolen off a scrapyard vehicle. What the officers did not find until the following morning, when one of them went back to look, was the ball-pein hammer and the knife that Sutcliffe had asked leave to urinate behind an oil storage tank in order to hide.
The women he killed were not a category, whatever the police said about them at the time. Wilma McCann was twenty-eight, a mother of four from Scott Hall Avenue in Leeds, and on the night of October 29, 1975, she had been drinking in town and was trying to get home. Sutcliffe offered her a lift, struck her twice on the head with a hammer on the Prince Philip Playing Fields, a hundred yards from her house, and stabbed her fifteen times. A milkman found her the next morning. Her five-year-old son Richard had gone out with his sister in the small hours to look for her at the bus stop. Emily Jackson was forty-two, a roofer's wife from Churwell who had begun soliciting in Chapeltown to pay the family's debts; her husband waited for her in the Gaiety pub while she worked. She was found on January 21, 1976, on waste ground off Manor Street, beaten with a hammer and stabbed fifty-two times with a sharpened Phillips screwdriver, with the print of a size-seven Dunlop Warwick boot stamped on her thigh. Irene Richardson, twenty-eight, was killed in Roundhay Park on February 5, 1977. Patricia Atkinson, thirty-two, known as Tina, was killed in her own apartment on Oak Avenue in Bradford on April 23, 1977, the only one of the thirteen who died indoors; the same boot print was on her bedsheet.
Jayne MacDonald was sixteen and worked in the shoe department of a Leeds supermarket. She had been out dancing in the city center on the night of June 25, 1977, missed her last bus and was walking home through Chapeltown when Sutcliffe came up behind her. Children found her body in an adventure playground the next morning. Her father, Wilf, a railway worker, never recovered and died two years later. Her murder was the one that put the case on the front pages, and the phrase the police and the press used for her, the first innocent victim, told the other families what the investigation had thought of their daughters.
Jean Jordan was twenty and had a young son. She came from Motherwell, lived in Hulme in Manchester, and was killed on October 1, 1977, on allotments beside the Southern Cemetery. Sutcliffe had given her a new five-pound note from his wage packet before he killed her, realized afterward that it could be traced, and came back eight days later to find it. He could not, and he mutilated the body in what he later said was an attempt to make it look like something other than his own work. The note was in her handbag, found a day after she was. Its serial number put it in a batch issued by the Midland Bank at Shipley to a handful of local firms, one of them the haulage company T. and W.H. Clark, where Sutcliffe drove a truck. He was interviewed twice about the note and cleared.
Yvonne Pearson was twenty-one, from Bradford, and had two small daughters. She was killed on January 21, 1978, on waste ground off Arthington Street and hidden under a discarded sofa; she was not found until March 26, and Sutcliffe had returned in the meantime to leave a newspaper, dated a month after her death, under her arm. Helen Rytka was eighteen and had an identical twin, Rita, with whom she had been raised in children's homes; the two worked together in Huddersfield so that neither would be alone, and Helen was killed in a timber yard on Great Northern Street on January 31, 1978, in the few minutes her sister was out of sight. Vera Millward was forty and in poor health, a mother of seven, killed in the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary on May 16, 1978. Josephine Whitaker was nineteen, a clerk at the Halifax Building Society, killed on Savile Park in Halifax on April 4, 1979, walking home after visiting her grandparents. Barbara Leach was twenty, a social sciences student at Bradford University, killed on September 1, 1979, after leaving a pub with friends, her body left under a piece of carpet in a back yard on Ash Grove. Marguerite Walls was forty-seven, a civil servant at the Department of Education in Pudsey, strangled with a rope in the garden of a house in Farsley on August 20, 1980, on her way home from working late; because she had been strangled rather than struck, the police did not connect her death to the series until Sutcliffe confessed to it. Jacqueline Hill was twenty, an English student at Leeds University, killed on November 17, 1980, on Alma Road in Headingley, a few hundred feet from her student residence, walking back from a bus stop after a meeting about volunteering for the probation service.
Seven more women survived attacks that were charged as attempted murder: Anna Rogulskyj in Keighley in July 1975, Olive Smelt in Halifax the following month, Marcella Claxton in Leeds in May 1976, Maureen Long in Bradford in July 1977, Marilyn Moore in Leeds in December 1977, Upadhya Bandara in Headingley in September 1980, and Theresa Sykes, sixteen, in Huddersfield in November 1980. Several gave good descriptions. Marcella Claxton, attacked in Roundhay Park, needed fifty-four stitches to her head and lost the baby she was four months pregnant with; forty-four years later she was still living with headaches from the injuries. Marilyn Moore's photofit, made in 1977, looked like Sutcliffe. Tracy Browne, attacked at fourteen in Silsden in August 1975 and never charged on the indictment, described him well enough to have drawn him.
He was born in Shipley, West Yorkshire, on June 2, 1946, and grew up in nearby Bingley, the eldest of six children of John William Sutcliffe, a mill worker, and his wife, Kathleen, a shy, small boy who left school at fifteen and drifted through jobs until he became a gravedigger at Bingley cemetery in 1964. It was there, he told psychiatrists sixteen years later, that a voice from a Polish grave had spoken to him and given him a mission. He met Sonia Szurma, the daughter of Czech immigrants, in 1967 and married her on August 10, 1974. She trained as a teacher; he passed his heavy-goods license in 1976 and went to drive for Clark's at Shipley. They bought a detached house in Garden Lane, Heaton, in 1977, the year he killed four women. His workmates called him the Ripper as a joke. A hand-lettered sign in his cab read: In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation.
The investigation that failed to see him was run by West Yorkshire Police under Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, and it failed in ways that were later set out in detail by Sir Lawrence Byford, Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary, in a report completed in December 1981 and kept from the public until June 2006. The incident room at Millgarth in Leeds held its information on handwritten index cards, and by 1980 there were so many that the floor had to be reinforced and the backlog of unprocessed material ran to tens of thousands of documents. The first theory was that the killer was hunting prostitutes, and that theory dictated where officers looked, whom they interviewed, and what the public was told. When Sutcliffe's name came up, it was checked against a picture of the killer that did not fit him, and it came up often: for the five-pound note, twice; for his car being logged in red-light districts in Leeds, Bradford and Manchester more than fifty times; on a tip from a friend, Trevor Birdsall, who wrote to the police in November 1980 naming him and then walked into a station to say it again.
Then the inquiry was taken over by a hoax. Between March 1978 and June 1979, a man in Sunderland sent three letters and a cassette tape to Oldfield and to the Daily Mirror, claiming to be the killer and taunting the police. The voice on the tape had a Wearside accent. Oldfield staked the investigation on it, played the tape at a press conference in June 1979, and had it broadcast on billboards and telephone lines across the north. From that point, a suspect who did not speak with a Sunderland accent could be dismissed, and Sutcliffe, who spoke like a man from Bingley, was dismissed. Byford later wrote that the police had been "over-influenced" by the letters and tape, and that there was a curious and unexplained lull in Sutcliffe's record between 1969, when he had first come to police attention over a hammer attack on a prostitute and again for going equipped for burglary, and the McCann murder, in which he had probably attacked other women. The hoaxer was an unemployed laborer named John Humble. He was identified in 2005 from DNA left on an envelope flap, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice, and was sentenced in March 2006 to eight years.
On the night of January 2, 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring and Constable Robert Hydes of the South Yorkshire force found Sutcliffe in a Rover 3500 in the driveway of a house on Melbourne Avenue in Sheffield with a woman named Olivia Reivers. The plates had come off a Skoda in a Dewsbury scrapyard. He gave a false name, asked to relieve himself by an oil tank, and was taken in on the plates. Ring went back to the tank the next morning and found the hammer and knife. At Dewsbury police station, Sutcliffe hid a second knife in the tank of a toilet. On the afternoon of January 4, after nearly two days of questioning, he told Detective Inspector John Boyle, "I think you are leading up to the Yorkshire Ripper," and then, "Well, it's me." His statement took nearly sixteen hours to dictate.
At the Old Bailey on April 29, 1981, he pleaded not guilty to thirteen murders and guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility, and the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, told the court that the Crown was prepared to accept the pleas on the strength of four psychiatrists who had diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. The judge, Mr. Justice Boreham, refused. He said the question of Sutcliffe's state of mind was one for a jury, and a jury was sworn on May 5. Havers, now obliged to prove sanity, told the jury that some of the dead women had been prostitutes and that perhaps the saddest part of the case was that some were not, a sentence the families have never forgiven. The prosecution's case was that the voices from God had first been mentioned to a doctor after Sutcliffe's arrest, that he had told his wife he expected to serve ten years in a hospital rather than thirty in a prison, and that a prison officer had overheard him say as much. The defense, led by James Chadwin QC, called the psychiatrists; the Crown cross-examined them on whether they had been fed a story. On May 22, 1981, after a trial of fourteen days, the jury found him guilty by a majority of ten to two on all thirteen counts of murder and all seven of attempted murder. Boreham passed twenty concurrent life sentences and recommended a minimum of thirty years.
The sentence outlasted the tariff. In 1984, three years into it, Sutcliffe was diagnosed by prison doctors with the schizophrenia the jury had declined to find and moved to Broadmoor, the high-security hospital in Berkshire, where he spent thirty-two years and was attacked more than once, losing the sight of his left eye to a fellow patient in 1997. He later took the surname Coonan. In July 2010, when his thirty years were nearly up and no tariff had ever formally been set, Mr. Justice Mitting in the High Court imposed a whole-life order, and the Court of Appeal upheld it in January 2011. In August 2016, judged no longer to need hospital treatment, he was returned to prison at Frankland in County Durham. Sonia had divorced him in 1994 and remarried, and she never spoke publicly about him.
The staff at Frankland warned him in 2020 that his age and health made him vulnerable to the coronavirus, and he declined to shield. He fell ill on October 27, had a pacemaker fitted on November 2 for an episodic complete heart block, and tested positive for COVID-19 on November 5. Over the following days he was moved four times between the prison's health care unit and the University Hospital of North Durham. Reports at the time said he had refused treatment; the pathologist's account given later was that on November 12 he was judged to be dying and, after a full discussion with him, was moved to palliative care. He died in the hospital at 1:45 a.m. on November 13, 2020, aged seventy-four. At the inquest in Crook in September 2021, the coroner for County Durham, Crispin Oliver, found no suspicious circumstances and recorded a natural death from COVID-19, with diabetes and heart disease contributing; the postmortem also found early cirrhosis of the liver. He was cremated at a private funeral. A brother wrote in a eulogy that the family loved him as Peter Sutcliffe but that he had ruined all their lives when he became the Yorkshire Ripper. Richard McCann said on the morning of the death that it brought him "some degree of closure, not that I wished him dead, far from it."
What the case left behind was not only a name. It left the Reclaim the Night marches, which began in Leeds in 1977 when the police told women not to go out after dark, and which are still held. It left the computerization of major inquiries in Britain, because the Byford Report's account of the index cards at Millgarth made the paper system indefensible. It left the sons and daughters: Richard McCann, who was five when he went to the bus stop to look for his mother and who spent his adult life speaking about her, and Rita Rytka, who lost her twin in the minutes she was out of sight. And it left the Humble tape, which is the reason the police did not look harder at a Bradford truck driver with a Bingley accent whose name was already in their files.
West Yorkshire Police formally apologized in 2020, after Sutcliffe's death, for the language its officers had used about the women he killed.