Peter William Sutcliffe was born in Bingley, West Yorkshire, on June 2, 1946. He worked as a gravedigger and then as a long-distance lorry driver, married Sonia Szurma in 1974, and lived in a detached house in Heaton, Bradford.
He killed Wilma McCann in Leeds in October 1975 and went on killing for five years: Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Helen Rytka, Vera Millward, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls and Jacqueline Hill. Seven other women survived attacks. He used a ball-pein hammer and then a knife or a sharpened screwdriver. The British press called him the Yorkshire Ripper.
The investigation became the largest in British criminal history and one of the worst run. Detectives fixed early on the theory that the killer was targeting prostitutes, which was not true of many of the victims and which shaped how their deaths were treated and reported. The records were kept on paper index cards in a system that had physically outgrown the room. And from 1978 the inquiry was captured by a hoaxer, a man who sent letters and a cassette recording in a Wearside accent claiming to be the killer. Senior officers publicly staked the investigation on the tape. Sutcliffe, a Bradford man, was thereby excluded, and he was interviewed nine times and released each time. The hoaxer, John Humble, was identified by DNA and convicted in 2006.
He was arrested on January 2, 1981, in Sheffield, sitting in a car with a woman, on a routine check that showed false number plates. He had hidden a hammer and a knife beside a nearby oil tank while relieving himself; an officer went back for them the next day. He was tried at the Old Bailey in May 1981. Both prosecution and defence were prepared to accept diminished responsibility on psychiatric evidence that he heard the voice of God in a Bingley graveyard; the judge refused to let it go through on the papers, and the jury rejected it. He was convicted on May 22, 1981, of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders and given twenty concurrent life sentences, with a whole-life tariff confirmed in 2010. He was moved to Broadmoor in 1984 and back to prison in 2016, and died of COVID-19 on November 13, 2020. The Byford Report on the failures of the inquiry was written in 1981 and not published in full until 2006.