Peter Sutcliffe killed 13 women and attacked at least seven others in West Yorkshire and Manchester between July 1975 and November 1980. He was a married truck driver from Bradford, and during the five years of attacks West Yorkshire Police interviewed him nine times. The inquiry was the largest the country had seen. It was also overwhelmed by its own paperwork, distracted by a hoax tape and letters sent from Sunderland, and built around a theory that the killer hated prostitutes, which led senior officers to sort his victims into those they called innocent and the rest.
He was caught on January 2, 1981, by two officers in Sheffield who noticed false number plates on his car. Two days later he confessed. At the Old Bailey in May 1981 he admitted the killings but said he was not guilty of murder because God had told him to kill. The prosecution was ready to accept that plea. The judge was not, and a jury convicted him of 13 murders. He spent most of the next 39 years at Broadmoor Hospital, was told in 2010 that he would never be released, and died of COVID-19 in November 2020. On the day he died, the chief constable of West Yorkshire apologized to the families for the language the original investigators had used about the women.
Peter William Sutcliffe was born on June 2, 1946, in Bingley, West Yorkshire, according to the Yorkshire Post. He was one of six children of John and Kathleen Sutcliffe, and the family lived in a four-bedroom house in the town. His mother's maiden name was Coonan, and he was said to be very attached to her; decades later he took her surname as his own.
He left school at 15. He worked in a factory, as a door-to-door salesman, as a gravedigger and as a driver of heavy goods vehicles. The Yorkshire Post reported that as a teenager he had an obsession with spying on prostitutes and their clients.
His first known contact with the police on the subject came in 1969, when he was arrested for carrying a hammer in a red-light district, the Press Association reported in 2020. The Byford Report, written for the Home Office after his conviction, later described an "unexplained lull" in his recorded activity between 1969, when he first came to police attention, and 1975, the year of the first attack officially linked to him. Its author thought it "highly improbable" that the crimes for which he was convicted were the only ones he had committed.
On August 10, 1974, Sutcliffe married Sonia Szurma, who was then 24. She worked as a schoolteacher. By the late 1970s he was driving trucks for T. and W.H. Clark, a haulage firm, and the couple lived at 6 Garden Lane, Heaton, in Bradford.
Sutcliffe's first attacks came less than a year after his wedding, in the summer of 1975, and all three women survived. None of these attacks was linked by the police at the time to what followed. The first charged attack was on July 5, 1975, in Keighley, when a woman was struck on the head with a hammer and wounded with a knife; she survived after extensive surgery. On August 15, 1975, a woman in Halifax was attacked in the same way and survived. These were two of the seven attempted murders to which he later pleaded guilty.
On August 27, 1975, a 14-year-old girl, Tracy Browne, was struck with a hammer in Silsden, near Keighley. She survived. Sutcliffe was never charged with the attack, but he later admitted it, and the High Court listed it in 2010 as an eighth attempted murder that he had admitted. Tracy Browne has said that her attacker had a Yorkshire accent. Her father, Tony, later argued that if the police had acted on her account, some of the women who died afterward might have lived.
Wilma McCann was 28 and the mother of four children. She lived in Chapeltown, Leeds. On October 30, 1975, after she had been out drinking, Sutcliffe picked her up in his car and took her to the Prince Philip Playing Fields, close to her home off Scott Hall Road. There he struck her with a hammer and stabbed her.
Police interviewed about 11,000 people in the months that followed, ITV reported, without an arrest. Wilma McCann's son Richard was five when she died. He spent much of his adult life speaking about her, and in 2020 he said she had been described by the police as a "good time girl" and a "woman of loose morals". Her family had always denied the rumors that she sold sex, the Yorkshire Post reported, but the press treated them as fact. After his arrest Sutcliffe told the police, "After that first time, I developed and played up a hatred for prostitutes."
Emily Jackson was 42, the mother of three children, from Churwell, near Morley. One of her sons, Derek, had died in an accident at 14 in 1969. When her husband Sydney's roofing business ran into serious debt, she began selling sex to help the family; the Express and Star reported that the couple had agreed this the month before she died. On January 20, 1976, Sutcliffe picked her up outside the Gaiety pub in Leeds and attacked her on derelict land near Roundhay Road. He left the print of a boot on her body. Her eldest son, Neil, was 17 when he identified her. He later wrote a book about what her death did to his family.
On May 9, 1976, Marcella Claxton was struck on the head with a hammer in Leeds. She survived and gave the police a description and a photofit that later proved accurate. She was ruled out as a victim of the series because she was not a prostitute, the Press Association reported. She was pregnant at the time and lost the baby. Speaking after Sutcliffe's death in November 2020, she said she still lived with her injuries and with the loss of her pregnancy. The attack on her was one of the seven attempted murders to which he pleaded guilty.
Irene Richardson was 28 and had two children. She was born in Glasgow and worked as a cleaner, and in early 1977 she was living in a bed and breakfast in Leeds. Sutcliffe picked her up near the Gaiety pub and drove her to Roundhay Park, where he killed her on Soldiers Field. The High Court gave the date as February 6, 1977.
Patricia Atkinson, known as Tina, was 32, divorced, and the mother of three children. She lived in Manningham, Bradford, and she was the first woman Sutcliffe killed in his home city. He met her in April 1977 when he was driving around the area looking for women, and he attacked her inside her flat on Oak Avenue; the court date is April 23, 1977. He left a boot print on her bedclothes that matched the print found at the scene of Emily Jackson's death. During the inquiry, NBC News reported, officers who interviewed him showed him a photograph of the boot print and did not notice that he was wearing the same kind of boots.
Jayne MacDonald was 16. She had recently left Allerton High School and worked as a shop assistant at a Grandways supermarket, and she was a fan of the Bay City Rollers. She had been out in Leeds city center, missed her last bus, and set off to walk home to Scott Hall Avenue. Sutcliffe followed her along Chapeltown Road and attacked her on Reginald Street on June 26, 1977. Children found her body in a playground the next morning. Her father, Wilfred, died two years later at 60 and was buried with her.
Her death brought the case to the national press. It also fixed in public a distinction the police were already drawing. Officers described Jayne as the first "innocent" victim, which Richard McCann later said implied that his mother and the other women had not been innocent. "My mum was completely innocent and deserved to live," he said in 2020. Jayne's own family were angered by the division of the dead into good and bad women, the Yorkshire Post reported.
Two weeks later, on July 10, 1977, a woman in Bradford was struck and survived; it was another of the charged attempted murders. Around this time the chief constable, Ronald Gregory, put his most senior detective, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, in charge of the investigation.
Jean Jordan was 20. She was born in Scotland and lived with her partner and their two children in a flat in Moss Side, Manchester. On October 1, 1977, Sutcliffe paid her with a new five-pound note and killed her on an old allotment near Princes Road, Chorlton. It was his first killing outside West Yorkshire. Sutcliffe returned to the site after realizing that the banknote could be traced, failed to find it, and further damaged her body before he left.
The note was found in her handbag. Its serial number traced it to a batch of wage packets paid out by one of six companies, among them T. and W.H. Clark, Sutcliffe's employer. Detectives interviewed him. His wife and his mother said he had been at a family party, and the alibi was accepted. In January 1978 police dropped their inquiries into the people who might have received the note.
On December 14, 1977, a woman was struck with a hammer in Leeds and survived. She gave a description that was later judged a "remarkable likeness" of Sutcliffe, but police dismissed her as unreliable, the Yorkshire Post reported in 2019. It was another of the charged attempted murders.
Yvonne Pearson was 21, from Bradford, and the mother of two small children. Sutcliffe picked her up in the Lumb Lane area on January 21, 1978, and killed her at Drummond's Mill. A passing car disturbed him, and he hid her. It was not found until March 26, 1978, partly because people assumed she had gone away to avoid a court case.
Helen Rytka was 18. She had an identical twin sister, Rita, and the two had grown up in care with two other siblings after their parents' marriage broke down. After leaving care Helen worked at a sweet-packing plant. By January 1978 both sisters were selling sex in the red-light area around Great Northern Street in Huddersfield. On January 31, 1978, Sutcliffe picked Helen up there and killed her in Garrard's timber yard nearby. Her death showed that he was now going beyond the main red-light districts of Leeds and Bradford.
Vera Millward was 40, the mother of seven children, and in poor health. She lived in Hulme, Manchester. On May 16, 1978, Sutcliffe drove her to the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary and killed her in a car park there. A witness heard a woman scream three times. Gardeners found her body by a fence the next morning.
In March 1978 the investigation began to receive letters from a man who claimed to be the killer. The first, signed "Jack the Ripper", was posted to the police on March 8, 1978. A second went to the Daily Mirror on March 13 and suggested that the killer might next strike in Manchester. A third letter followed. In June 1979, after a newspaper report in February that the police believed the letters genuine, the writer sent George Oldfield a cassette tape. "I'm Jack," it began. The voice taunted Oldfield, telling him he was no nearer catching the killer than when he had started.
Oldfield accepted the letters and tape as genuine. Dialect experts placed the voice in the Castletown area of Sunderland, and detectives were told they could eliminate suspects who did not have a Wearside accent. The tape was played to the media, the public could hear it by calling a "Dial-the-Ripper" telephone line, and it was featured on billboards and in newspaper advertisements, in a campaign that cost about one million pounds. Some 40,000 men in the North East were investigated.
Voice experts and some detectives warned that the material was a hoax, the Press Association reported. Twelve days after the killing of Barbara Leach in September 1979, the hoaxer himself telephoned the police to say that the letters and tape were not genuine. He gave nothing they could check, and the call was lost among many others. The survivors who had heard their attacker speak said he sounded like a local man. Sutcliffe was from Bradford. He later said of the Sunderland hunt: "While ever that was going on, I felt safe."
Josephine Whitaker was 19 and worked as a clerk for the Halifax Building Society. On the evening of April 4, 1979, she visited her grandparents, Tom and Mary Priestley, and waited for her grandmother to come home from a church event. They asked her to stay the night, but she had work the next day, and at about 11:40 p.m. she set off to walk home to Ivy Street across Savile Park. Sutcliffe followed her on foot and killed her in the park.
Barbara Leach was 20 and a student at the University of Bradford, about to start the third year of a degree in social psychology. On the night of September 1, 1979, she was out with friends at the Manville Arms, a pub near the city center, and stayed after closing time to help the landlord clear up. She then went for a walk along Ash Grove. Sutcliffe was parked there, let her pass, and attacked her from behind. He left her body in a back yard about 200 yards from where her friends were. The High Court gave the date as September 2, 1979. Her mother, Beryl, was still speaking publicly about her in 2015.
By 1980 the hunt for the killer had become the largest criminal investigation ever conducted in Britain, as the Home Secretary later told Parliament. A squad of about 200 officers carried out more than 130,000 interviews, visited more than 23,000 homes and checked 150,000 cars, and the inquiry consumed about 2.5 million police hours.
Its information was kept on a card index in the major incident room at Millgarth police station in Leeds. The index was overloaded and poorly cross-referenced, and the Byford Report found that the incident room had become ineffective, with a growing mass of unprocessed material. Officers sent to interview Sutcliffe were often not properly briefed, so evidence that pointed to him did not reach the people who needed it. He had a gap in his front teeth and size seven feet, features that matched what was known about the killer, and the matches were not made.
He was interviewed nine times. One interview concerned the five-pound note. In July 1979, on the fifth interview, two detectives, Andrew Laptew and Graham Greenwood, were suspicious of him and said so in a report. The report was filed away because his voice and handwriting did not match the letters and tape. Laptew, a junior detective from Bradford, felt that there were too many similarities for coincidence. He raised his concerns with Detective Superintendent Dick Holland, who made him feel, Laptew said later, so small that he "could have crawled under the crack in the door".
Other leads were set aside. Sutcliffe's 1969 arrest for carrying a hammer in a red-light district was overlooked. A friend, Trevor Birdsall, sent the police an anonymous letter naming him, and that too was not acted on in time. At one stage the inquiry was ranking suspects in a "league table": 26 men in its first division, about 200 in the second and about 1,000 in the third. Sutcliffe was in the third. At his trial he said: "It was just a miracle they did not apprehend me earlier. They had all the facts."
Oldfield suffered a heart attack and was moved off the case. In November 1980 Detective Chief Superintendent James Hobson took over the inquiry and reduced the weight it gave to the letters and the tape.
Marguerite Walls was 47, a civil servant who lived in Farsley, Leeds, and worked at the Department of Education and Science office in nearby Pudsey. On August 20, 1980, she worked late to make up her hours before going on holiday the next day, and set off on foot for her home about half a mile away. Sutcliffe attacked her and strangled her with a rope, and left her body in the garden of a house on New Street. Because she had been strangled, the police did not at first believe that her death was part of the series.
On September 24, 1980, a doctor was attacked in Leeds and survived; this was one of the charged attempted murders. In October 1980 Mo Lea, a 20-year-old arts student at Leeds University, was struck repeatedly with a hammer and stabbed near the university after an evening at a pub with friends. She survived. She later practiced and taught art at the University of Bedfordshire for more than 25 years, and in 2020 she published an account of her life after the attack, Facing the Yorkshire Ripper: The Art of Survival. The attack on her was never charged.
On November 5, 1980, Bonfire Night, a 16-year-old girl was attacked in Huddersfield and survived. It was the last of the seven charged attempted murders. Sonia Sutcliffe later told police that her husband had not come home until 10 p.m. that night.
Jacqueline Hill was 20, from Middlesbrough, and in the final year of an English degree at the University of Leeds. On the evening of November 17, 1980, she attended a seminar in Leeds city center connected with the probation service. She took a bus from Cookridge Street at about 9 p.m., got off on Otley Road about 23 minutes later, and walked up Alma Road in Headingley toward her student residence. Sutcliffe, who had been eating nearby, followed her, attacked her and dragged her off the road; her body was found on waste ground near the Arndale Centre. A passing motorist nearly saw him as he left. She was the last woman he killed.
Through these years the police told women in West Yorkshire not to go out at night. Women answered with protest. On November 12, 1977, about 60 women marched up North Street in Leeds under signs that read "No curfew on women, curfew on men." The march, organized through the Women's Liberation Movement, was the first Reclaim the Night march, and the movement spread across Britain from Leeds. At the time, Rape Crisis argued that the killer's hatred extended to all women, and that sex workers were simply more exposed to him; in their words, "any woman will do".
On the night of January 2, 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring and Constable Robert Hydes, a probationer, were on patrol in Broomhill, Sheffield, an area then known for street prostitution. In the driveway of a building called Light Trades House on Melbourne Avenue they found a brown Rover with two people inside: Sutcliffe and a 24-year-old woman who worked as a prostitute. A police check showed that the number plates were false; ITV later reported that the registration did not match the car's tax disc.
Before he was taken away, Sutcliffe told the officers he was "bursting for a pee" and was allowed to go to the side of the building. He was arrested over the plates and taken to Hammerton Road police station in Hillsborough. His name was on the Ripper inquiry's index, and because he fitted many of the physical details of the man they were looking for, he was transferred to Dewsbury police station to be questioned by West Yorkshire detectives. Screwdrivers were found in the car's glove compartment.
The next day, Sergeant Ring went back to Melbourne Avenue and searched where Sutcliffe had gone to relieve himself. He found a hammer, a knife and a length of rope that Sutcliffe had dropped there, about 50 feet from where the car had been. Sutcliffe had also hidden a second knife in a toilet cistern at a police station when he was allowed to use the toilet. When he was searched, officers found that he was wearing a V-neck sweater pulled on upside down under his trousers, with his legs through the sleeves and padding at the elbows. Police obtained a warrant to search the house on Garden Lane and questioned his wife.
Ring and Hydes were commended for the arrest.
Sutcliffe was questioned for nearly two days. On the afternoon of January 4, 1981, he told Detective Inspector John Boyle: "It's all right, I know what you're leading up to. The Yorkshire Ripper. It's me. I killed all those women." His statement, describing the attacks one by one, took about 24 hours. He asked for Sonia to be brought in so that he could tell her himself.
He was charged with the murders. When he was first charged, crowds outside the Yorkshire courthouse chanted for him to be hanged, United Press International reported, and his trial was moved to the Central Criminal Court in London, the Old Bailey.
Before the trial four psychiatrists examined Sutcliffe and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. He told them that he had heard voices telling him to kill and that it was God's will. On the first day of his trial, April 29, 1981, Sutcliffe, then 34, stood in the dock before Mr. Justice Boreham. As the clerk read the 13 murder charges, he answered each one with the same words: not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. To the seven charges of attempted murder he answered "guilty", seven times, in a voice that could barely be heard. His wife, his mother and his brother were in court.
The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, who led the prosecution, told the court that the Crown accepted the doctors' diagnosis and would accept the manslaughter pleas. Boreham refused. He said he had "grave anxieties" about the pleas. The medical opinions, he pointed out, rested on what Sutcliffe had told the doctors, which was not what he had told the police. Whether he was guilty of murder was for a jury. He set the trial for the following Tuesday. A manslaughter verdict would have sent Sutcliffe to a secure hospital; a murder conviction carried a mandatory life sentence.
With the pleas rejected, the prosecution had to prove that Sutcliffe knew what he was doing. Havers told the jury that he might be feigning madness to be sent to a hospital rather than prison. He said Sutcliffe had told his wife that he expected 30 years in jail if he were convicted of murder, but that if he could make people believe he was mad, he might serve only ten years in a mental hospital. Havers' remarks about the victims drew protests outside the court. "Some were prostitutes," he said, "but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not." He also said that "the last six attacks were on totally respectable women".
The defense rested on the psychiatric evidence that Sutcliffe believed he was carrying out God's will. The prosecution pointed to the difference between what he had told the doctors and what he had told the police. Among the survivors who came to the Old Bailey was the woman attacked in Halifax in 1975.
The trial lasted about two weeks. The jury deliberated for almost six hours, and on May 22, 1981, it found him guilty of all 13 murders by a majority of ten to two, the Yorkshire Post reported. Mr. Justice Boreham passed 20 concurrent life sentences, 13 for murder and seven for attempted murder. He called the killings murders "of a very cowardly quality", recommended that Sutcliffe serve at least 30 years, and said he hoped Sutcliffe would never be released.
Neither the Home Secretary nor any later minister ever set a formal minimum term. In a 1997 letter, Boreham wrote that it would have been better to make no recommendation at all, and that in this case life should mean life. In October 1997 the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham, recommended a minimum of 35 years.
After the conviction the Home Secretary asked Lawrence Byford, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Constabulary, to review the investigation. Byford was assisted by the external advisory team that had been set up in November 1980, and he heard from relatives of the victims.
The government gave Parliament its conclusions on January 19, 1982. The police had made "major errors of judgment", and there had been inefficiencies at several levels. "Excessive credence was given to the letters and tape from a man claiming responsibility," the statement said. The major incident room had been ineffective and overloaded with unprocessed information. Had those errors not been made, Sutcliffe would have been identified as a prime suspect sooner; on the facts that came out of his interviews, there was little doubt that he should have been arrested earlier. Officers who interviewed him had often been inadequately briefed, and too little attention had been paid to the common features of the photofits produced by surviving women. Byford also found that most officers had worked diligently. In the House of Lords, Lord Elwyn-Jones said that lives could have been saved.
The government announced better training for senior investigators and incident room staff, clearer command for crimes crossing force boundaries, the use of advisory teams of experienced detectives and forensic scientists, and greater use of computers in major inquiries; a Home Office circular on the subject had been issued earlier that month. A separate review by Colin Sampson also examined the investigation.
The full report remained confidential for almost 25 years. The Home Office released it on June 1, 2006, under the Freedom of Information Act, with parts blacked out, including a section headed "Description of suspects, photofits and other assaults". The released text said that Sutcliffe "was probably responsible for many attacks on unaccompanied women, which he has not yet admitted".
Sutcliffe began his sentence in the prison system and spent about three years at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. There, a fellow prisoner, James Costello, slashed his face with a broken coffee jar; Costello was tried at the Isle of Wight Crown Court in 1983 and found guilty.
In 1984, after prison doctors diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, he was transferred to Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire. He remained there for 32 years. The High Court noted in 2010 that he had taken antipsychotic medication since 1993. He was assaulted three times at Broadmoor, twice seriously. In the most serious attack, another patient, Ian Kay, who was serving a life sentence for murder, pinned him to the floor of his room on Henley ward and stabbed him in the eyes with a pen, blinding him in one eye and badly damaging the other. Kay admitted attempted murder at Reading Crown Court in January 1998. Sonia Sutcliffe visited him for many years. They divorced in 1994, and she later remarried.
Because no minimum term had ever been set, the Secretary of State for Justice referred the case to the High Court under the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Mr. Justice Mitting gave judgment on July 16, 2010. Doctors had diagnosed encapsulated paranoid schizophrenia in 1981, and Dr. Kevin Murray, the Broadmoor psychiatrist responsible for him since November 2001, reached the same diagnosis and said that his responsibility had been substantially diminished. A mental health tribunal had found on July 7, 2010, that his positive symptoms were in complete remission.
Mitting held that a sentencing judge could not go behind the jury's verdict on diminished responsibility. The number of victims, the planning, the sexual and sadistic elements and the mutilation made the starting point a whole life term, and he found it more likely than not that a Home Secretary would have set a whole life tariff under the practice before 2002. Relatives of six of the women were heard, and none suggested a lesser term. He ordered that the early release provisions would not apply, which meant that Sutcliffe would never be released.
Sutcliffe, by then known as Peter Coonan, appealed. The Court of Appeal, led by the Lord Chief Justice and sitting with Mr. Justice Calvert-Smith and Mr. Justice Griffith Williams, heard the case on November 30, 2010, and gave judgment on January 14, 2011. It accepted that a mental disorder falling short of diminished responsibility could in principle reduce a sentence. But the mitigation he relied on depended on his account of a mission from God, which the jury had rejected, and the court found it no more believable on appeal than at trial: his statements to the police were inconsistent, he had lied, the attacks had sexual elements, and his explanation had shifted once he stopped believing in the mission. A polygraph test had found that he was not completely truthful. The offending, the court said, was "at the extreme end of horror", and the interests of justice required "nothing less than a whole life order". The appeal was dismissed.
In August 2016 a mental health tribunal decided that Sutcliffe, then 70, no longer needed to be treated in hospital. On August 24, 2016, he was moved to HMP Frankland, a high-security prison in County Durham, where he was held as a Category A prisoner. The Ministry of Justice said that decisions to return prisoners from secure hospitals rested on clinical assessments by independent doctors, and that he "will remain locked up and will never be released".
In 2016 and 2017 detectives from West Yorkshire Police reviewed unsolved attacks from the 1970s and visited a small number of people named in the Byford Report. In 2017 it was reported that they had questioned Sutcliffe at Frankland. He had always denied responsibility for those attacks, and no charge followed.
Sutcliffe had type 2 diabetes and heart disease, and in his last years he was blind and used a wheelchair. In April 2020 healthcare staff at Frankland noted that he was at higher risk and offered him shielding on a different wing. He declined and asked to stay where he was.
On October 27, 2020, he told a nurse that he felt unwell and very dizzy. The next day an electrocardiogram showed a complete heart block, and he was taken to hospital, where a pacemaker was fitted on November 2. He tested negative for COVID-19 twice in hospital. He returned to Frankland in the early hours of November 4 and tested positive that day; the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman later concluded that he had most likely caught the virus in hospital.
He went back and forth between the prison's healthcare unit and hospital over the following days. On November 10, asked whether he would return to hospital if he got worse, he said there was no point; later that afternoon he agreed to go. He was admitted that evening for oxygen therapy and steroids. On November 12 a hospital consultant said that he was expected to die within a day or two, and the escort chain that had restrained him in hospital was removed that afternoon. He died at the University Hospital of North Durham, near Frankland, and was declared dead at 1:45 a.m. on November 13, 2020. He was 74. The postmortem gave the cause of death as COVID-19 pneumonia, with diabetes and ischaemic heart disease contributing. His funeral was held on November 27, 2020.
The ombudsman, Sue McAllister, reported in August 2021 that his clinical care had been equal to what he could have expected in the community. She criticized the decision of a senior manager in the high-security estate to order an escort chain against local advice, the failure to record his poor mobility in the escort risk assessments, and the time taken to remove the restraints once he was dying. She was also disappointed that he had not been able to speak directly to his family before he died.
At the inquest in Crook, County Durham, on September 22, 2021, the pathologist, Dr. Clive Bloxham, gave the cause of death as COVID-19 infection, with heart disease and diabetes contributing. A police officer told the coroner there was no evidence of anything other than natural causes. The coroner, Crispin Oliver, found no suspicious circumstances. "Peter Sutcliffe is now dead," he said. "He died a natural death having received good medical care."
The month before Sutcliffe died, Richard McCann asked West Yorkshire Police to apologize, "once and for all", for the way senior officers had described his mother and the other women in the 1970s. He objected most to the word "innocent", which he said suggested that some lives were worth more than others.
On November 13, 2020, the day Sutcliffe died, the chief constable, John Robins, issued a public apology. "On behalf of West Yorkshire Police, I apologise for the additional distress and anxiety caused to all relatives by the language, tone and terminology used by senior officers at the time in relation to Peter Sutcliffe's victims," he said. Such language "may have reflected wider societal attitudes of the day, but it was as wrong then as it is now." He said the Byford and Sampson reviews had not fully addressed how the victims were portrayed and described, and that the effect was still felt by surviving relatives. He called the inquiry the largest ever conducted by a British police force and said its failings were fully acknowledged and documented, and that the lessons learned from it had shaped how serious crimes are investigated.
The hoaxer was not identified for more than 25 years. In 2005 a cold case review obtained a DNA profile from saliva on the seal of one of the envelopes. It matched a sample on the national database from John Humble, a laborer from the Ford Estate in Sunderland, who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Humble was then about 50. He was arrested, said nothing at first, and then confessed.
He was charged with four counts of doing acts tending and intended to pervert the course of justice. On March 20, 2006, the day his trial was due to begin at Leeds Crown Court, he pleaded guilty. The next day the Recorder of Leeds sentenced him to eight years in prison. The Recorder placed his conduct "at the very top of offences of perverting the course of justice", noted that the turn of the hunt toward a Wearside man had given Sutcliffe confidence, and said that the women attacked afterward would have stood a better chance had police resources stayed in West Yorkshire.
The Court of Appeal dismissed Humble's appeal against the sentence on October 24, 2006. It said that it could not be said that his actions caused the later deaths, but that the sentence was not wrong in principle or excessive. Humble was released after serving half his term. He had tried to tell the police in 1979 that the tape was a hoax. "They took no notice and another two got killed," he said later. He died in 2019.
Jacqueline Hill's mother sued the chief constable of West Yorkshire, arguing that the police had been negligent in failing to catch the killer before he murdered her daughter. The House of Lords dismissed the claim in Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, reported in 1989. It held that the police owed no duty of care to her daughter: they had no dealings with her, and she had not been at greater risk than any other young woman in the area. Lord Keith also gave public policy reasons for refusing such claims. The case became a leading authority on police liability in negligence. In 2018 the Supreme Court, in Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, said that Hill did not give the police a general immunity from being sued for their work against crime, and treated it as a case about a failure to prevent harm by someone else.
Sutcliffe was convicted of 13 murders and seven attempted murders, and these are the only crimes proven against him in court. The record beyond them is as follows.
Admitted but never charged: the attack on Tracy Browne at Silsden on August 27, 1975, which the High Court in 2010 listed as an attempted murder he had admitted.
Not charged, attributed by the survivor and in the press: the October 1980 attack on Mo Lea in Leeds, which she has written about as an attack by Sutcliffe. No court has ruled on it.
Suspected: the Byford Report concluded that he was probably responsible for many attacks on unaccompanied women that he had not admitted, and it recorded the unexplained gap in his record between 1969 and 1975. In 2015 the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that police and Home Office officials were examining the censored part of the report. In 2017 newspapers reported that detectives had questioned Sutcliffe in prison about up to 17 unsolved attacks on women in Yorkshire from the 1970s, in which the women survived with injuries like those he inflicted; the cases named in those reports included attacks in Bradford, Ilkley and Leeds. West Yorkshire Police described the work as a review of non-recent undetected offences and said it kept "an open and objective mind". He denied responsibility, and he was never charged with any further offense.
The women who survived Sutcliffe's attacks lived with what he did for the rest of their lives. Marcella Claxton spoke in 2020 of injuries she still carried and the pregnancy she lost. Mo Lea wrote that she had no control over how often the story returned to the news, and turned to her art to deal with it; a short film made for her book showed her drawing Sutcliffe from the well-known photograph and then tearing the drawing up. Tracy Browne's family believed the police should have listened to her.
The families of the dead have spent decades insisting that the women be remembered for who they were. Richard McCann's appeal was answered by the 2020 apology. Neil Jackson wrote about his mother. In 2019 the writer Carol Ann Lee published Somebody's Mother, Somebody's Daughter, which profiled each of the women and found that most had no connection to prostitution, and the BBC Four series The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story, made by Liza Williams, gave survivors and relatives a voice and did not name Sutcliffe until its third episode, the Yorkshire Post reported.
Dates of the killings differ by a day in many accounts, because some give the night of the attack and others the date the court recorded or the date the woman was found. The 2010 High Court judgment recites, for example, October 30, 1975, for Wilma McCann, February 6, 1977, for Irene Richardson and April 23, 1977, for Tina Atkinson. For Barbara Leach, newspapers give September 1, 1979, the night she went out; the court gives September 2.
Ages differ in some reports: Yvonne Pearson is given as 21 or 22, Tina Atkinson as 31 or 32 and Jean Jordan as 20 or 21. Jayne MacDonald's surname appears as McDonald in the court judgment.
Reports differ on whether the second knife was hidden at Hammerton Road police station in Sheffield or at Dewsbury, and on whether the trial lasted 14 or 15 days. Some reports say that the jury found Sutcliffe guilty of the attempted murders; the court records show that he pleaded guilty to them. One 2020 report described his sentences as consecutive; they were concurrent. One 2020 report put his move to Frankland in 2017; the ombudsman's report gives August 24, 2016.
June 2, 1946: Peter William Sutcliffe is born in Bingley, West Yorkshire.
1969: arrested for carrying a hammer in a red-light district.
August 10, 1974: marries Sonia Szurma.
July 5, 1975: attack in Keighley (attempted murder).
August 15, 1975: attack in Halifax (attempted murder).
August 27, 1975: attack on Tracy Browne, 14, in Silsden (admitted later; never charged).
October 30, 1975: murder of Wilma McCann, Leeds.
January 20, 1976: murder of Emily Jackson, Leeds.
May 9, 1976: attack on Marcella Claxton, Leeds (attempted murder).
February 6, 1977: murder of Irene Richardson, Roundhay Park, Leeds.
April 23, 1977: murder of Patricia (Tina) Atkinson, Bradford.
June 26, 1977: murder of Jayne MacDonald, 16, Leeds.
July 10, 1977: attack in Bradford (attempted murder).
October 1, 1977: murder of Jean Jordan, Manchester; the five-pound note leads police to his employer, and he is interviewed.
November 12, 1977: first Reclaim the Night march in Leeds.
December 14, 1977: attack in Leeds (attempted murder).
January 21, 1978: murder of Yvonne Pearson, Bradford (found March 26).
January 31, 1978: murder of Helen Rytka, Huddersfield.
March 8 and 13, 1978: first hoax letters, to the police and the Daily Mirror.
May 16, 1978: murder of Vera Millward, Manchester.
April 4, 1979: murder of Josephine Whitaker, Halifax.
June 1979: the hoax tape is received and made public.
July 1979: fifth police interview; the Laptew and Greenwood report is filed.
September 2, 1979: murder of Barbara Leach, Bradford.
August 20, 1980: murder of Marguerite Walls, Farsley.
September 24, 1980: attack on a doctor in Leeds (attempted murder).
October 1980: attack on Mo Lea, Leeds (never charged).
November 5, 1980: attack on a 16-year-old in Huddersfield (attempted murder).
November 17, 1980: murder of Jacqueline Hill, Headingley, Leeds.
November 1980: James Hobson takes over the inquiry; the external advisory team is set up.
January 2, 1981: stopped and arrested in Sheffield.
January 4, 1981: confesses at Dewsbury.
April 29, 1981: pleads guilty to seven attempted murders and to manslaughter; the judge refuses the manslaughter pleas.
May 22, 1981: convicted of 13 murders; 20 concurrent life sentences, recommended minimum 30 years.
January 19, 1982: Byford's findings are given to Parliament.
1983: a fellow prisoner is tried at the Isle of Wight Crown Court for attacking him at Parkhurst.
1984: transferred to Broadmoor Hospital.
1989: House of Lords decision in Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire is reported.
1994: Sutcliffe and Sonia divorce.
January 1998: Ian Kay admits the attempted murder of Sutcliffe at Broadmoor.
2005: John Humble is identified by DNA as the hoaxer.
March 21, 2006: Humble is sentenced to eight years.
June 1, 2006: the Byford Report is released.
July 16, 2010: whole life order (Mr. Justice Mitting).
January 14, 2011: Court of Appeal dismisses his appeal.
August 24, 2016: moved from Broadmoor to HMP Frankland.
2017: questioned in prison about unsolved attacks; no charge.
November 13, 2020: dies at the University Hospital of North Durham; West Yorkshire Police apologize to the families.
August 2021: Prisons and Probation Ombudsman report on his death.
September 22, 2021: inquest in Crook finds a natural death.