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SERIAL KILLERS			Date Added
	Peter Sutcliffe		June 2003

	Bio
	Full Name	Peter Sutcliffe
	Date of Birth	2nd June 1946
	Known Also As	The Yorkshire Ripper
	Hit Count	13+
	Information & Pictures
	Jayne MacDonald had been dancing the night away at Hofbrauhaus, a German-style 'Bierkeller' near Leeds city centre. There she had fallen into conversation with 18 year old Mark Jones, and they had left, along with some others, at 10.30pm. Jayne suggested getting some chips, but by the time they had found somewhere selling them and had eaten, she had missed her last bus. The couple made their way towards the estate where Mark lived, so that his sister might run Jayne home. The car was not there, and they continued walking towards Chapeltown, the red-light district of Leeds, and lay down in a school field until some time after 1.00am. Then, having arranged to meet the following week, Jayne started walking towards home. As the Yorkshire Ripper cruised Chapeltown, his eyes alighted on a young girl in a blue gingham skirt walking alone. As Jayne emerged into the street lights of Chapeltown Road, she was unaware that she was being watched from a white Ford Corsair. She passed the Hayfield Pub, then turned left down Reginald Terrace, one of the many side streets running off the main road. Parking his car, the Ripper got out and began to follow the teenager on foot. The first blow struck the back of her head with such force that it sent her slumping to the ground. The Ripper dragged her away from the well-lit pavement into a nearby adventure playground and, shrouded in darkness, hit her twice more before savagely stabbing her once in the back and repeatedly in the chest. Her body was found seven hours later, when some children made their way into the playground between Reginald Street and Reginald Terrace, just a short distance away from her home. The police knew at once with whom they were dealing - the trademarks were unmistakable. The man who had become known as the Yorkshire Ripper had already claimed four victims, all prostitutes. But this one was different - Jayne MacDonald was just 16 years old, by far the youngest of his prey, and there was no way she could have been mistaken for a prostitute. Jayne was a sweet-natured girl who had recently found employment in the shoe department of a local supermarket. The MacDonalds were a happy, hardworking family. Despite Chapeltown's seedy reputation, the majority of its population consisted of ordinary, working-class people. The death of Jayne MacDonald caused a public outcry. Petitions were circulated calling for the re-introduction of capital punishment and graffiti urging 'Hang the Ripper' appeared in Chapeltown. Through the North of England, women began to live in fear.
	JAYNE MACDONALD : At 16, Jayne MacDonald was the Ripper's youngest victim, and the first woman to be killed who was not a prostitute - her only connection with the red-light district was that she lived there. The third of five children, she had just left school. A confident young woman, she was well liked in her neighbourhood and quickly became popular with the staff at the shop where she worked. She was murdered early in the morning of 26th June 1977 in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, not far from her home.
	Two weeks after killing Jayne, the Ripper struck again in Lumb Lane in Bradford. It was a Saturday evening and Maureen Long intended to drink and dance the night away. Wearing her best black dress, she travelled from Leeds to Bradford where she met her estranged husband in a pub and arranged to stay at his house at the end of the evening. She then left the pub to go dancing and, after trying a number of different venues, ended up at the Bali Hai discotheque. She was a familiar face at the discotheque and a number of people later recalled that she was very drunk when she left in the early hours of Sunday morning. As she was heading for a taxi rank, a stranger in a white car offered her a lift home, which she readily accepted. He pulled into some waste ground near her husband's home where he attacked her, striking the back of her head and stabbing her in the back, stomach and chest - a slashing wound found on her breasts to her navel. He left her for dead, but by some miracle she survived and was able to give a description of her attacker to the police. Unfortunately, this did little to help the police inquiry. Maureen Long described her attacker as over 1.8 metres (six feet) tall, aged 36 or 37, with collar-length fair hair - when, in fact, he was considerably shorter, younger and darker. The only part of her description that caused the Ripper any concern was the detail that he had been driving a white Ford Corsair with a black roof. By October 1977, he had switched his white Corsair for a red one.
	JEAN JORDAN : Jean Bernadette Jordan was 21, a prostitute and the mother of two young daughters. She lived in Manchester with her common-law husband. She was known to other prostitutes who frequented the Nile and Reno Clubs and the local pubs of Moss Side as 'Scottish Jean'. The Ripper's first victim outside Yorkshire, her body was discovered in Moss Side on 10th October, a new Ł5 note which the Ripper had given her was found in a compartment of her handbag five days later. It was the first real clue to the identity of the Ripper.
	On Saturday, 1st October 1977, Jean Jordan, a 21 year old prostitute, climbed into the red Ford Corsair near her home in Moss Side, Manchester. She accepted Ł5 in advance, put it in her purse and directed the driver to some land between the Southern Cemetery and some allotments much favoured by prostitutes. A couple of paces from the car, a hammer was smashed down with massive force on the woman's skull. The hammer struck her again and again, the driver in an uncontrollable rage, bludgeoning her 11 times in all. He then dragged her lifeless body into the nearby bushes where he intended to continue the assault. But a car startled him, so he cut short the attack and made a quick getaway. Ten days later, an allotment owner found the mother of two's naked body and rang Chorlton-cum-Hardy police station. Her head and face were so mutilated that it would be impossible for anyone to recognise her and there was no identifying evidence among her scattered belongings. Jean's common law husband reported her missing and she was eventually identified from her fingerprints, which matched those on a lemonade bottle she had held shortly before leaving home for the last time. Forensic evidence later established that the vicious knife wounds were inflicted at a later date than the hammer blows - at some point within a few hours after the murder, the Yorkshire Ripper had returned. On 14th December 1977, the Yorkshire Ripper headed for the red-light district of Leeds once more. There he picked up the 25 year old prostitute Marilyn Moore. Marilyn Moore had been visiting a friend and had decided to do some business on her way home. Well aware of the danger, she felt uneasy when she got into the car, but the driver's friendly and relaxed manner reassured her. He mentioned two other prostitutes he knew by by name and was obviously familiar with the area, as he suggested a quiet place a short distance away. After stopping at Scott Hall Street, the man lured her out of the car on the pretext of using the back seat. Once out of the car, he hit her several times with a hammer. But she began to scream at the same time as a dog began to bark. The Ripper fled.
	YVONNE PEARSON : Yvonne Pearson, 22, was a prostitute and mother of two who lived in Heaton, where she shared a flat with her boyfriend. However, at the time of her murder their relationship was foundering. She was killed on 21st January 1978, but her body was not discovered until two months later in Lumb Lane, Bradford. The killer had returned to the scene of the crime to place a Daily Mirror, dated a month after her death, under the corpse's arm.
	Like most prostitutes in the Lumb Lane area of Bradford, 22 year old Yvonne Pearson knew only too well the dangers of her business and discussed her fear of the Ripper with a neighbour, but she had a long list of clients all over the country and could not afford to stop working. On the night of 21st January 1978, Yvonne left her two young daughters, Colette and Lorraine, with a neighbour and set off for the nearby Flying Dutchman pub. She left there at 9.30pm and within minutes had picked up a client - a bearded man with black, piercing eyes. They drove to some waste land in nearby Arthington Street, but she had barely stepped out of the car when the stranger hit her with a heavy hammer. As she screamed, he dragged her by the collar to an abandoned settee and stuffed her mouth with horsehair to keep her quiet. He then jumped on her until her ribs cracked before hiding her dead body under the upturned settee. While Yvonne Pearson's body went undetected, the Ripper wasted no time in seeking out his eighth victim.
	HELEN RYTKA : Helen Rytka was an attractive 18 year old prostitute who had ambitions to become a soul singer. She was murdered on 31st January 1978 in a lumber yard at Great Northern Street, Huddersfield, despite the precautions she and her twin sister had worked out. The twins had an Italian mother and Jamaican father, but they had spent most of their lives in care. They turned to prostitution to pay for a run down room they shared next to a motorway flyover in Huddersfield.
	Helen Rytka was a striking 18 year old who shared a miserable room next to a motorway flyover in Huddersfield with her twin sister, Rita. The girls tended to work as a pair, concentrating on the limited red-light district in and around the depressed and derelict Great Northern Street area where they worked the car trade. The Yorkshire Ripper had not struck in Huddersfield, but the town wasn't far from his territory, so the two girls had devised a system which, they thought, would keep them out of harm's way. They solicited for trade outside a public lavatory and gave their client precisely 20 minutes, returning to the toilet at a set time to meet each other after every appointment. But everything went horribly wrong on 31st January 1978. It was a snowy night and, when Helen arrived back at their rendezvous at 9.25pm, she was five minutes early. A bearded man in a red Ford Corsair pulled up and offered her the chance of earning a quick Ł5 before Rita returned. Helen could not resist. The twins never saw each other again. Helen took the stranger to nearby Garrad's timber yard, a night time haunt close to the railway arches used by down and outs as well as prostitutes. As she got out of the front seat, the stranger lunged at her with a hammer. His first blow missed, striking the door of the car, but his second attempt struck her cleanly on the head. He continued to hit her until she was motionless, then dragged her body towards a woodpile, where he had sex with her. This was the first time he had had sexually assaulted any of his victims and, as it turned out, the only time he had intercourse with a victim. Then he renewed his attack, stabbing her three times in the chest and repeatedly attacking the same wounds.
	GEORGE OLDFIELD : George Oldfield, West Yorkshire's Assistant Chief Constable (Crime), in the timber yard where the body of Helen Rytka was discovered. He had been brought in to spearhead the search for the Ripper.
	When Helen did not reappear, Rita was desperately worried, but she was afraid of the police. It was three days before she contacted them. A police Alsatian found Helen's body hidden in the woodpile. Her clothes were scattered over a wide area. The attack had taken place near the foreman's shed and the walls were spattered with blood. Her bra and sweater were pulled up over her breasts. Her socks were left on but her black lace panties had been found earlier by a lorry driver, who had pinned them to the shed door. This time, the police had high hopes. This victim had vanished in the early evening from a busy street and there were sure to have been witnesses. But more than 100 passersby were traced and all but three cars and one stocky, fair haired man were eliminated from inquiries. The police got no further. George Oldfield, head of the murder investigation, went on the radio to say that, at this point, someone's wife, mother or girlfriend must surely suspect that they were living with the killer. There was no response at all. A few weeks later, on 26th March 1978, a passerby happened to spot an arm sticking out from under an overturned settee on the waste land in Lumb Lane. The putrid small from the body sent him rushing to a telephone. Yvonne Pearson had finally been found. It seemed that the killer had returned to the scene to make her body more visible. A copy of the Daily Mirror, dated four weeks after the day she went missing, had been placed under one of her arms. Like Helen Rytka, her bra and jumper were pulled up, while her black, flared trousers had been tugged down.
	VERA MILLWARD : Spanish-born Vera Millward was a 41 year old prostitute and a mother of seven. She was murdered on the night of 16th May 1978 in the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary. Arriving in Britain shortly after the war, she worked as a domestic help. Later she lived with a Jamaican man and resorted to prostitution to support her large family. On the night she died, she had popped out from their flat in Greenham Avenue to buy a packet of cigarettes and to obtain some pain killing drugs from the hospital to ease her chronic stomach problem.
	Two months after Yvonne Pearson's body was found, Vera Millward - a frail, prostitute who, because of her poor health, looked at least 15 years older than her 41 years - died in a well lit part of the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary on the night of 16th May 1978. The Ripper had hit the mother of seven three times on the head with a hammer, then slashed her across her stomach. When a gardener discovered her body at 8.10am on a rubbish pile in the corner of the car park the following morning, he thought at first that she was some sort of doll. Her body was slumped against a fence, her shoes placed neatly on top of the body. She was partly covered by a grey coloured coat and a piece of paper was placed over her badly mutilated head. Between the months of June 1977 and May 1978, seven women had been attacked, leaving five dead and two horrifically injured. But just as quickly as the killing spree had accelerated, it abruptly stopped. For the next 11 months the Yorkshire Ripper inexplicably went out of circulation. For Sutcliffe, those months were some of the most significant in his life. His mother's health had been failing for some time and a move to a new home at the beginning of 1978 failed to revive her. On 8th November 1978, the woman who had been the centre-piece of Sutcliffe's life died. Devastated, he slumped into a deep depression. Consequently, it was not until the following April that he regained his desire to kill. On the night of Wednesday 4th April 1979, however, the Ripper struck again, this time in Halifax. There was no red-light district for him to cruise. Instead he circled several times around a park in the town before he caught sight of a woman walking on her own.
	JOSEPHINE WHITAKER : Josephine Whitaker was 19 years old and a clerk at the headquarters of the Halifax Building Society. She lived with her mother and stepfather and two brothers in Halifax. She was murdered on 4th April 1979 in Savile Park playing fields.
	Just before midnight, he got out of his car and casually fell in step with 19 year old Josephine Whitaker. He spoke to her briefly, asking the time and then, when she took a short cut across the Savile Park playing fields to her home in Ivy Street, he smashed the back of her skull with a hammer and dragged her into the shadows, away from the street lights. When he heard voices and saw two people approaching, he left without slashing the body - his usual trademark. Her body was found early the next morning. As the police studied it, a 13 year old boy on his way to do his paper round wondered what all the fuss was about. As he approached the policeman, he spotted a tan shoe which he recognised as belonging to his sister. He raced home, panic-stricken, to tell his parents. His mother saw that Josephine's bed had not been slept in and rang the police to tell them her daughter was missing. Like Jayne MacDonald, Josephine had been a respectable girl who lived at home with her family and worked as a building society clerk. On the night of her death she had been on her way back home from her weekly visit to her grandparents. Some size seven Wellington bootprints were found near Josephine's body and traces of milling grease and tiny metal particles were discovered in her wounds. George Oldfield called a press conference to say he now had a good impression of the killer; he was looking for 'an artisan or manual worker... with engineering or mechanical connections'. With the murder of Josephine Whitaker, the Ripper was letting women known that he had not mistaken Jayne MacDonald for a prostitute - he would attack any woman who dared to walk the streets after dark. Overnight, all women in the North of England lost their liberty. The local prostitutes continued to work but were now carrying knives, hatpins and sharpened scissors for their protection.
	THE RIPPER'S WEAPONS : The Yorkshire Ripper used a daunting array of household tools as murder weapons - the police eventually retrieved 30 in all. His favoured instrument of attack, however, was a ball-pein hammer, which has one flat and one round end, although he also used a claw hammer. The mutilations were carried out with an assortment of carving knives, chisels, hacksaws and screwdrivers - at least two of which had been sharpened at the tip - as well as a wooden-handled cobbler's knife.
	The problem the police faced was that nobody could get inside the Ripper's mind. Why was he killing - and why could he not be caught? The truth was that the man they were seeking did not seem - at first, anyway - to fit the typical picture of a murderer. He was a polite and mild-mannered man, a hard-working employee, a good son and a loyal husband who loved nothing better than to tinker with his car at weekends. There was little about him that would raise eyebrows - certainly not enough to make anyone suspect that he was a serial killer.
	YVONNE PEARSON'S CRIME SCENE : Horsehair from this settee was stuffed in Yvonne Pearson's mouth, while the settee itself hid her body for two months.
	The eldest of John and Kathleen Sutcliffe's six children, Peter - even as a child - often wondered jokingly if John Sutcliffe was his real father. After all, John was a self-proclaimed man's man, a local boy-about-town, as well as a famed local footballer, cricketer and actor - a man for all seasons. Peter, by contrast, was small and weedy from the start, weighing just 2.3 kilos (5 pounds) when he was born on 2nd June 1946. The sickly baby grew into a puny and introverted boy who clung to his mother's skirts, following her everywhere. Indeed, it was quiet and solid Kathleen who provided round-the-clock stability, seven days a week. Unlike the other Sutcliffe children, Peter never quite managed the art of surviving daily life comfortably in the council estate world of Bingley, a somewhat dour town just 10km (6 miles) north of Bradford along the Aire Valley. Peter refused to play with the little boy who lived just a few houses away, preferring to read or play at home near his mother. At St Joseph's RC Infants and Junior School, his frail physique and shy manner marked him out as an easy target for bullying. He made few friends and, by the time he moved on to Cottingly Manor Secondary School in 1957, the bullying had become so bad that he once played truant for two full weeks, hiding in the loft of the family's home. Peter was considered the most intelligent child of the family, but he nevertheless failed his 11-plus exams. When he left school at the age of 15, traditionally the cross-over point into manhood, Peter still confounded his family.
	PETER SUTCLIFFE'S CHILDHOOD : Peter, aged four (left in photo), on his way to church with his family. Peter was sent to nursery school in 1948, then moved up to the junior section when he was five. He was so introverted that few of his teachers could recall who he was when they were interviewed after his arrest.
	Methodical, meticulous and fastidious, he spent hours preening himself in the bathroom - but showed no interest in girls at the end of it all. Indeed, his ability to spend three or four hours at a time alone in the bathroom became something of a family joke. As he grew older, Sutcliffe took up body-building and went on a course of high-protein foods to build up his physique. But despite his efforts, it was still apparent to Peter, and to friends of his brothers and sisters, that he was different. He was bright and generally regarded as good looking, yet none of his sisters' girlfriends were attracted to him - perhaps because he showed little, if any, interest in them, and perhaps because of his awkward and off-hand manner had an alarming tendency to express itself suddenly in wild fits of uncontrollable laughter. After leaving school, Sutcliffe got his first job as an apprentice fitter to a Bingley engineering works. But he soon found work as a Ł9-a-week grave-digger at a local cemetery, a job that he stuck to for almost three years.
	THE SUTCLIFFE FAMILY : John Sutcliffe was 24 and his wife 26 when Peter was born. Both Bingley locals, good-looking Kathleen was considered quite a catch for the impulsive John. Kathleen had five more children after Peter, three girls (Anne, Maureen and Jane); and two boys (Mick and Carl). The girls, however, are missing from this family gathering. Standing, from left to right: Mick, his wife, Peter; seated: John, Kathleen, unidentified woman, Peter's wife, Sonia and Carl.
	As a rule, Sutcliffe didn't allow himself to joke. But during the course of his new employment, he began to develop a somewhat macabre sense of humour, and would sometimes quip about having 'thousands of people below me where I work now'. On one occasion, he pretended to be a corpse, lying down on a slab with a shroud over him and making moaning noises when his workmates arrived. At other times, Sutcliffe used to boast to friends that he had removed gold and jewellery from bodies. But it was only his notoriously bad time-keeping that eventually lost him his job in 1967. 'Peter was a good, hard worker,' his boss Douglas McTavish recalled. 'But I had to sack him because he could never get to work on time.' As a child, Peter had spent an inordinate amount of time asleep, and tardiness was to be the one criticism levelled at him by employers throughout his working life. Sutcliffe's colleagues regarded him as inscrutable. His trim, dark beard earned him the nickname Jesus. Whether at home, at work or in the pub, he would sit bolt upright, his knees neatly together. As if unable to turn his head, he would move only his eyes when someone spoke to him. While his friends and family thought there was something odd about Peter, his first proper girlfriend, Sonia - the first girl he took home to meet his mother - seemed to understand him. Peter was 20 when he met the dark, quiet 16 year old school girl with the mid-European accent in the Royal Standard pub, one of his favourite haunts in Bradford.
	THE SUTCLIFFE BROTHERS : Mick Sutcliffe (left in photo) had a reputation as a local thug. Three years Peter's junior, Mick seemed to have inherited their father's appetite for life and for the opposite sex. On the other hand, Carl the baby of the Sutcliffe family (right in photo), was more like Peter - slim, timid and self-conscious.
	In 1947, Sonia's parents had left Czechoslovakia and moved to Bradford, where her father found work as a yarn tester. Sonia, their second daughter was born on 10th August 1950. She had a strict upbringing and her father was determined that his children should not neglect their studies by indulging in more frivolous activities, such as going out with boyfriends. Sonia had the same introversion and haughtiness that others saw in Peter. She quickly succeeding in moving him away from his pals in 'grave-diggers' corner' in the pub. Also, on Sundays at the Sutcliffe house, Sonia and Peter would sit on dining chairs at the back of the sitting room, lost in their own private conversation. Sonia would speak to others only when it was absolutely unavoidable. Consequently, the Sutcliffe family believed she held them in contempt. Sonia was particularly scornful of Peter's father and brother Mick, the serious drinkers for whom the Saturday night and Sunday lunch time sessions were sacred. Mick and Sonia certainly made no secret of their dislike for each other. Sutcliffe had always stuck up for his mother, sympathising with her for the hard time his domineering father gave her. But early in 1969 his faith in her innocence was shattered. His father had discovered that Kathleen was having an affair with a neighbour, a local policeman. John Sutcliffe arranged for the children, including Peter and his bride to be Sonia, to be present at a Bingley hotel for a grand confrontation.
	THE ROYAL STANDARD : Peter first met Sonia in the disco of the Royal Standard in Bradford. Later, they were often seen to be kissing and cuddling in a corner of the bar.
	Kathleen arrived in the bar believing she had a assignation with her boyfriend, only to be forced by her husband to show the whole family the new nightdress she had bought for the occasion. Peter was devastated by the revelation. Yet, having discovered earlier that Sonia had had a secret boyfriend, Peter indicated to his father that he understood how he must have felt. For his part, John Sutcliffe came to believe that the traumatic discovery of his mother's affair may well have triggered off the Ripper inside his son. 'It shook him rigid. He worshipped his mother and I think now that what I did turned his mind,' he remarked some time later. One psychiatrist involved in the case agreed, explaining that Sutcliffe's mother's affair could have propelled him into an acute psychotic state.
	PETER & SONIA : Peter Sutcliffe and his wife Sonia. After they were married they went to live with Sonia's parents in Tanton Crescent, Bradford. When he was just 23 years old, Peter Sutcliffe had his first encounter with a prostitute - an incident that led him to become one of Britain's most infamous and vicious, serial killers.
	In 1969, Peter Sutcliffe's long-term relationship with his future wife, Sonia, was suddenly threatened when he discovered that she was seeing another man. Overwhelmed with jealousy and desperate to even out the score, he decided to seek out a prostitute in Bradford's red-light district. But this first encounter was to repel him and give birth to an inner rage that would eventually lead to multiple murder. Having agreed to pay her Ł5 for sex, Sutcliffe handed the girl a Ł10 note. But when she never returned the change, he felt 'cheated and duped'. That same year, Sutcliffe carried out his first attack, hitting a prostitute over the head with a heavy stone in a sock. When she reported it to the police, he was let off with a warning. But his next encounter with the police led to a fine, after he was found lurking in a garden in possession of a hammer. He was charged with being equipped to steal and later fined Ł25 - but Sutcliffe had a quiet different purpose for the hammer in mind.
	PETER SUTCLIFFE'S IN LAWS : Peter and Sonia joined her parents on a holiday in Czechoslovakia in late 1975 after visiting Rome on the way. Peter and Sonia's marriage certificate was drawn up on 10th August 1974. The couple had finally decided to marry after an eight year long courtship. Neither was a churchgoer, but Sonia had once been impressed by a Baptist wedding service, so the couple decided to have one too.
	Over the next six years, Sutcliffe's obsession with wreaking revenge on prostitutes was outweighed by his relationship with Sonia. Although she had ended her affair, their relationship was tested in a new way, when in 1972 she began having a nervous breakdown that she did not truly recover from until 1976. It was largely due to Sutcliffe's loyalty and attentiveness that she managed to pull through the worst of her illness, and his support won him the respect of her family. The couple were finally married in 1974 but, a month before their first anniversary, Sutcliffe made his first serious attack. On Friday 4th July 1975, Anna Rogulskyj left her home in Highfield Lane, Keighley, after an argument with her boyfriend and went to a pub in Bradford. She returned home later, still angry, and at about 1am decided to look for him at his flat nearby. But despite her banging on his door - and putting her shoe through a window in frustration - he did not answer. As Anna headed back home, Sutcliffe struck her on the back of the head three times with a ball-pein hammer. He then raised her blouse and slashed her stomach. But, just as he was about to stab her, he was frightened off. She was found an hour later and taken to Leeds General Hospital. Her injuries were so bad that she was read the last rites. But, after a 12 hour emergency operation on her brain, Anna Rogulskyj survived. Fortunately for Sutcliffe, however, the operation, which had involved removing minute bone splinters from her brain, had also effectively erased any recollections of her attacker.
	TREVOR BIRDSALL : Peter Sutcliffe's close friend and drinking partner, Trevor Birdsall, was with Peter just prior to the attack on Olive Smelt. He later confided in his wife, Melissa, that he suspected Peter of being the Ripper.
	Six weeks later, Peter Sutcliffe and his long-time drinking companion, Trevor Birdsall, made one of their frequent drinking trips from Bradford to the Royal Oak in Halifax. After several drinks, they were on their way home when Sutcliffe spotted Olive Smelt, a 46 year old office cleaner, who had been in the same pub. Sutcliffe left Birdsall in the car and followed the woman down an alleyway. He overtook her and, after turning round to make some off-hand remark to her about the weather, he struck her twice on the back of the head. As she lay on the pavement, he slashed her across the back, but was again disturbed by a passerby and returned to the car. When Birdsall read about the attack in the paper the next day, he guessed that Sutcliffe had been the assailant but, as his loyal friend, said nothing. Like Anna Rogulskyj, Olive Smelt survived. But the attacks were not linked initially, and it was to take more than three years for the police to acknowledge that they were the work of the Yorkshire Ripper. By then, Sutcliffe had become a multiple murderer. After returning from a summer holiday with Sonia and his in-laws in Czechoslovakia and Italy, Sutcliffe attacked a 28 year old prostitute from behind on 30th October 1975. He lifted his hammer and brought it down sharply onto the back of her head. He then struck for the second time, shattering her skull and killing her. Instead of running from the dead body, he took out a knife and stabbed it 14 times in the stomach and chest. This was Sutcliffe's first murder.
	WILMA MCCANN : A 28 year old Scot and mother of four, born in Inverness, she had moved in 1970 to Leeds to be close to her brothers. Wilma McCann was often drunk, and had faced convictions for theft and disorderly conduct.
	The next morning Wilma McCann's body was found on the bleak playing fields just off Harrogate Road, Leeds, by a milkman on his rounds in Chapeltown. As he peered through the early morning mist, he saw a shapeless bundle lying on the frosted grass. Wilma McCann was sprawled face upwards on the ground, her hair matted with blood, her body exposed. Her jacket and blouse were open, her bra was pushed up and her trousers pulled down below her knees. The previous night, Wilma McCann had put on her favourite outfit - a pink blouse, white flares and dark blue bolero jacket. At 7.30pm she left the house, telling her oldest daughter, Sonje, to keep the three younger children in bed and the front door locked. She had always liked a good time and a drink and set off on a tour of a few of her favourite pubs. She was seen coming out of a nightclub at about 1am, carrying a carton of chips and curry sauce. She took a lift from a stranger and was never seen alive again. She died just steps from her home. There seemed to be no sexual motive for her murder but her purse, the clasp bearing the word 'Mumiy' which had been inscribed by her daughter, was missing. In the absence of any other motive, the police treated her killing as a callous by-product of robbery. In fact, it was the first in a long line of vicious killings that was to strike fear into the hearts of women in the North, particularly those who lived and worked in the Chapeltown area. While the death of Wilma McCann was being dismissed as an isolated incident, 42 year old Emily Jackson carried on life with her husband and three children in the respectable Leeds suburb of Churwell, 9km (5 miles) to the west of Chapeltown.
	EMILY JACKSON : Emily Jackson was a 42 year old part time prostitute. Outwardly she maintained a respectable appearance, living with her husband, Sydney and three children in Churwell, west of Leeds. In 1971, one of their sons had died from a fall at the age of 14.
	It was early in the evening of 20th January 1976 when Emily and her husband arrived at the Gaiety public house on the Roundhay Road, a well known watering hole for Chapeltown prostitutes and their would-be clients. Within minutes of their arrival at the pub, Emily, a part time prostitute, left her husband in the main lounge and went looking for business. At closing time, Mr Jackson, still alone, drank up and took a taxi home, assuming that his wife had found a man for the night. It was still dark the next morning when a worker on early shift noticed a coat on the ground, not far from the Gaiety pub. Underneath lay Emily Jackson's body. She was lying face down with her breasts exposed but her knickers still in place. Like Wilma McCann, she had been dealt two massive blows to the head with a heavy hammer. Her neck, breasts and stomach had been lacerated with stab wounds, but this time the killer had stabbed at her body over 50 times with a Philips screwdriver. In the autumn of 1976, Peter Sutcliffe had secured a new job which was to afford him good opportunities to extend his travels and to carry on killing without suspicion from his wife. As a lorry-driver witch Bradford engineering firm T & W H Clark, it was expected that he would work long, irregular hours and travel across the country. His bosses were more than delighted with his manner and work, finding him meticulous and courteous. The job suited Sutcliffe too. It gave him more scope and a new freedom to kill.
	IRENE RICHARDSON : A 28 year old Scot who had separated from her husband and taken up part time prostitution to make ends meet, she was the mother of two daughters who had been fostered a month before her death.
	Like Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson was a part time prostitute living a precarious existence in a squalid rooming house in Chapeltown. On the evening of Saturday 5th February 1977, she left her room half an hour before midnight to go dancing. The next morning, a jogger was making his way across Soldier's Field, a public playing field, when he saw a body on the ground behind the sports pavilion. When the police arrived, they found a sickeningly familiar scene. Irene Richardson had received three massive blows to her head, shattering her skull like an egg-shell. Her skirt was pulled up, but her coat had been draped in pointless propriety over her buttocks. Her calf-length boots had been removed from her feet and now lay neatly on her thighs. In awful contrast to this decorum, her neck and torso had been peppered with savage knife wounds and her stomach had been stabbed so viciously that her intestines spilled out. A postmortem indicated no sign of sexual intercourse and that she had died only half an hour after she had left her lodgings.
	PETER SUTCLIFFE : When Sutcliffe took a job as a long-distance driver in 1976, he found himself in a position where he could murder with ease. This publicity shot, with Sutcliffe behind the wheel, was used on a works calendar.
	After the murder of Irene Richardson, there could be no denying that serial killer was on the loose. As details of her death came to light, the Yorkshire media were not slow to draw parallels with that other woman-killer who still stalks police files and the public imagination - Jack the Ripper. The unknown murderer of Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson and Irene Richardson had now been given a name - the Yorkshire Ripper. Patricia 'Tina' Atkinson was a Bradford girl who lived just around the corner from Oak Lane. She counted herself lucky that she did not have to ply the increasingly dangerous car trade. Instead she could work out of her own flat where she lived, alone, after her divorce. She was attractive, slim and dark haired, and there was no shortage of clients visiting her. The Leeds murders had sent a shiver of fear through the working girls in Bradford. But two months had passed since Irene Richardson's body had been found. Besides, the Ripper had only struck in Leeds. Tina Atkinson felt she had little to worry about.
	PATRICIA 'TINA' ATKINSON : 'Tina' Atkinson was a 32 year old prostitute who had married an Asian immigrant, Ray Mitra, in the early 1970's. But he later filed for divorce, taking custody of her three daughters. She was the only victim to be killed at her home, where she openly plied her trade.
	On 23rd April 1977, Tina was planning a night out at her local bar, the Perseverance. It was a pleasant spring evening. Dressed in her favourite black leather jacket, blue jeans and a blue shirt, she had a good drinking session with her friends, reeling out at about 10pm to make her way to another local haunt, the Carlisle pub on nearby Lumb Lane. It was on her way back from the Carlisle that her path crossed that of the Yorkshire Ripper. She had barely set foot in her flat when Sutcliffe lunged at the back of her head, hitting her four times with the full weight of his hammer. He then flung her on to the bed and plunged a knife into her stomach seven times. She was not seen all the next day, and people assumed she was sleeping off the previous nights excesses. But, the following evening, friends dropped round and found the door to her flat unlocked. When they entered, they found her mutilated body on the bed, shrouded in blankets. But what most interested police this time was a clue in the shape of a size seven boot print on the bottom bed sheet - identical to the print that had been found on Emily Jackson's thigh.
	PETER SUTCLIFFE : To those who met him, Peter Sutcliffe came across as an obliging, courteous man who never lost his temper. But festering inside was a sadistic serial killer.
	In his youth, Peter Sutcliffe was a quiet, shy boy. He wasn't aggressive, resentful or irresponsible - in fact, he showed characteristics that are the very opposite of the type of personality that psychiatrists would normally associate with sexual aggression and murder: he was invariably meticulous, courteous and thoughtful, as well as being a hard worker. Due to his gentle disposition, it was practically impossible to provoke him into anger or to make him assert himself. As if to underpin his shaky self-confidence, he became preoccupied with riles and procedures. He was, in short, a conformist who would always toe the company line. So how did he develop into the maniac who smashed women's skulls and then repeatedly stabbed them? The Sutcliffe home was no place for a sensitive boy like Peter. His father was a dominant extrovert and his brothers shared many of their father's 'manly' characteristics. The atmosphere was heavy with sexuality - even Peter's mother, a reserved, down-trodden woman, had an extramarital affair. A certain degree of criminality was also condoned; Peter's father, John Sutcliffe was arrested for breaking and entering, one of his brothers was always in and out of jail, and some of his friends were burglars. As a matter of survival, the acutely shy boy began to develop qualities that would make him less of a misfit. He did body-building, drove at high speed through built-up areas and started to frequent pubs on a regular basis. He also boasted of sleeping with prostitutes, which was almost certainly a fantasy. He was, however, morbidly fascinated by the whole idea of women selling their bodies for money, and found it hard to believe they charged so little for an act that held him in awe. The truth is that he was too shy to approach them. It was probably Sonia's affair in 1969 that breached this shyness and started the chain of events that led him towards serial killing.
	INVESTIGATION BLUES : Northern England was in the grip of Ripper fever as he left a trail of blood and not much else. He was running rings around the police and the events of the summer of 1979 did nothing to help - on the contrary, they led the police on a wild goose chase.
	In an agony of jealousy, he tried to avenge himself by having sex with a prostitute. It was a disaster. He failed to get an erection and the prostitute not only swindled him out of Ł5, but humiliated him later when he met her in a pub by telling the rest of the customers what had happened. For an oversensitive person who set so much store by his hard-earned masculine image, such a loss of face was deeply bruising; it also stirred all his childhood insecurities about being inadequate. He became fixated on the idea of revenge. One day, while eating fish and chips in a friend's van, he thought he saw the prostitute who had swindled him and attacked her by hitting her on the head with a stone that he kept in a sock - apparently just in case he should meet her again. After this incident he kept out of trouble for five years, although his obsessive hatred of prostitutes did not subside. He sometimes approached women he thought looked like prostitutes and asked them crudely if they were 'on the game'. If they were, he would ask how much they charged and then, driving off, would jeer 'Is that all you're worth?' It was totally uncharacteristic behaviour, but seeping hatred was turning him into a dual personality. This aggressive self-assertion was like a balm to Sutcliffe's fragile ego. But it was only a matter of time before the verbal attacks were to become physical - and Sutcliffe turned to killing. Despite the fact that the majority of his attacks were not overtly sexual, it is highly likely that Sutcliffe found the act of assaulting and mutilating his victims provided some sort of intense sexual release. By the time Sutcliffe turned his attention from prostitutes to 'respectable' women, he had become addicted to sadistic assault. He had tapped into the part of his psyche where, even though it was for the briefest of moments he could rise above the blandness of his everyday personality. Attached to the back of the can of his truck was a notice in Sutcliffe's handwriting: 'In this truck is a man whose latent genius if unleashed would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?' This is a clear description of the power he felt when he killed.
	IN THE FRAME : By the end of 1977, five of the eleven women Sutcliffe had attacked had survived. Each tried to provide a description of her attacker. Olive Smelt, attacked in August 1975, described him as aged about 30, 5 foot, 10 inches tall (1.78cm), with a beard. But detectives failed to confirm a link with the Ripper until three years later. In May 1976, Marcella Claxton described her attacker as having a black, crinkly beard. But her statement was treated with scepticism, not least because the police considered her to be unintelligent. Then a year later, Maureen Long described him as a man of about 36, over 6 foot tall (1.83cm), with big hands and collar length hair. The photofit that Marilyn Moore produced in December 1977 was uncannily close, but not close enough, as the police insisted that no reliance should be placed upon this kind of evidence. There were also identifications offered by the public. The result was that
	Another explanation for Sutcliffe's urge to kill was that he was insane. His claim that he had been following instructions from God to clear the streets of prostitutes led three psychiatrists who examined him before the trial to diagnose him as a paranoid schizophrenic. The problem with diagnosing this illness is that the symptoms are relatively easy to feign. In Sutcliffe's case, it was not until he had several interviews with psychiatrists, after two months of custody, that he made his claim about the voices. He never once mentioned his divine mission to friends or family, and he also killed women who were clearly not prostitutes. Furthermore, Sutcliffe had experience the symptoms of schizophrenia through Sonia when she suffered her nervous breakdown. She talked of being the second Christ and of feeling pain in her hands as a result of being nailed to the cross. Maybe, as the prosecution would maintain, Sutcliffe deliberately tried to mislead the doctors about his mental condition. But after he was sent to prison he suffered rapid mental deterioration, and it soon transpired that he really was experiencing hallucinations and delusions. Those who believed that Sutcliffe was not mad at the time of the killings argue that he lost his sanity after the trial because of the stress of prison. But paranoid schizophrenia is not believed to be caused by stress, whereas relapses of the illness are. So it may have been possible that Sutcliffe was slipping in and out of madness during his five year killing spree. On one occasion, many years previously, while drinking in a pub, Sutcliffe suddenly appeared to go off in a trance. Oblivious to all around him, he grabbed his glass, stuck it up in the air, then brought it violently down on the table in front of him, soaking a man standing nearby with bear. In retaliation, the man poured his beer over Sutcliffe, who did not so much as flinch and never mentioned the incident again. The parallel between the action of raising the glass and smashing it down and the hammer blows to his victims' heads seems to reinforce the possibility that Peter Sutcliffe suffered from temporary hallucinations. Perhaps they occurred in the form of a seizure or trance, leaving him relatively normal between episodes, but making him highly dangerous while they lasted.
	DO YOU RECOGNISE THIS HANDWRITING : Clues to identify the killer were few and far between, when the police received letters claiming to be from the Ripper. Would they provide a breakthrough or were they a hoax? The first two letters weren't taken seriously but when a third letter arrived it contained details that indicated it could, perhaps, be genuine.
	It had become clear to police and public alike that the Yorkshire Ripper could no longer be perceived as a selective killer. His victims were apparently chosen at random and now included an 'innocent' teenage girl from a respectable family. Understandably, the public hue and cry was deafening, demanding immediate action. The effect on the investigation was galvanizing. With the death of Jayne MacDonald in June 1977, the investigation took a dramatic twist. Up until now, each murder had been investigated on an ad hoc basis, with a different investigating officer allocated to each case, according to where the murder took place. It was then up to the Ripper Room in Millgarth to establish any common links that came to light. At this point, Ronald Gregory, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, appointed his most experienced detective to lead the biggest murder inquiry the country had ever known. The man brought in to head the operation was George Oldfield. A detective for most of his 31 years in the force, Oldfield removed from his desk-bound job as West Yorkshire's Assistant Chief Constable. From day one, Oldfield made it clear that he was willing to stake his considerable reputation on the case and immediately set about recognising the inquiry's resources. With a renewed sense of purpose, the police interviewed almost 700 residents in 21 streets in the immediate vicinity of Reginald Terrace, where Jayne MacDonald's body had been found, and took 3500 statements, many of them from prostitutes. After a fortnight, however, the leads began to dry up. Nevertheless, Oldfield remained outwardly buoyant, and two days after Maureen Long, miraculously survived an onslaught at the hands of the Ripper in the early hours of 11th July 1977, he informed a press conference that 'the investigation is beginning to bubble', and implied that the police were close to a breakthrough. Oldfield's claim was beginning to sound hollow when, three months later, the police stumbled on the first major lead since the boot print clues. Five days after the mutilated body of Jean Jordan was discovered in Manchester on 10th October 1977, the local police found her handbag with a bran new Ł5 note neatly folded in an inside pocket. They were convinced it must have been given to her by the killer.
	HELP US CATCH THE RIPPER : The campaign included a special 'Ripper' newspaper with information about the murders. The paper also contained a number of key questions that, if answered, might have identified the killer. An appeal was also made to employers to come forward if any of their staff had been in Sunderland on specific dates.
	The discovery of the note breathed new life into the flagging investigation. Within hours, Chief Superintendent Jack Ridgeway - in charge of the Manchester CID - had contacted the Ripper Room across the Pennines and established that they were hunting for the same man. With George Oldfield's blessing, Ridgeway set up his own team of investigators and launched a campaign to trace the batch of Ł5 notes from which the one in police possession originated. The Bank of England traced the note to one of a batch issued by the Shipley branch of the Midland Bank four days before Jean Jordan's death. The batch had been used as payroll for 30 local businesses, who between them employed about 8000 people. Undeterred, the Manchester Police set about interviewing them all. Working steadily through the list of names, the police arrived at the Sutcliffe's home in Heaton a month after Jean Jordan's death. Peter Sutcliffe had received a wage packet from T and W H Clark just days before the killing. Helpful and courteous, Sutcliffe told the policemen that he had stayed in on the night of the murder and had gone to bed around 11.30pm. When asked about his whereabouts on the night the Ripper revisted the murder scene, eight days later, Sutcliffe was able to claim that he was hosting his own housewarming party. Sonia supported both these stories and, later, Sutcliffe's mother confirmed that he had driven her and John (Sutcliffe's father) back to their home in Bingley. The detectives left, satisfied that Sutcliffe had water-tight alibis, and filed a five paragraph report clearing his name. Six days later, on 8th November, he was interviewed again, this time by two different policemen. Sutcliffe and Sonia replied as before and even consented to the house being searched. Nothing was found. With the discovery of Yvonne Pearson's body on 26th March, public disquiet about the lack of progress was putting increasing pressure on the police 'to do something'. Partly in response to this, a special Ripper Squad, consisting of 12 crack detectives was set up at Millgarth in Leeds to centralise the hunt. The man in charge, who was appointed special assistant to George Oldfield, was Detective Chief Superintendent John Domaille. At the same time, a surveillance operation mounted in the red-light districts of West Yorkshire towns to interviews owners of cars spotted regularly in these areas. By August 1978, Sutcliffe's red Corsair car had been seen in Lamb Lane in the Manningham area of Bradford on seven occasions. On 13th August, three months after Vera Millward had become the Ripper's ninth victim, the police paid Sutcliffe a third visit.
	HELP US STOP THE RIPPER FROM KILLING AGAIN : Advertising hoardings appealing for help from the public appeared on walls throughout the Ripper territory, in a further attempt by the police to catch the killer.
	The interviewing officer, unaware that Sutcliffe had already been questioned ten months earlier about the Ł5 note, accepted Sutcliffe's explanation that he regularly travelled through the area on his way to work - again, confirmed by Sonia - and, with no other grounds for suspicion, the officer left satisfied. On the fourth occasion - 23rd August - Sutcliffe was question about the tyres on his car. The police were checking treads that might match tracks first identified at the scene of Irene Richardson's murder, back in February 1977. As usual, Sutcliffe was accommodating and unruffled, betraying absolutely nothing. By the end of April 1979, the Ripper's rampage had been going on three and a half years. Ten women were dead, Josephine Whitaker, his last victim, having perished in Halifax at the beginning of the month, and the police were still no nearer to finding him. In fact, they were sinking further and further into a morass of conflicting information, media-perpetrated myth and conjecture. As the killings became more indiscriminate, so the investigation was being suffocated by the sheer volume of mounting paperwork. Cruelly, just when it seemed that the luck of the investigation team could get no worse, it duly did. On the morning of 18th June 1979, a buff-coloured envelope, containing a black cassette tape, landed on George Oldfield's desk. When Oldfield placed the tape in a recorder and switched it on, a flat Geordie (Tyneside) voice filled the room. The message, purporting to be from the Ripper himself, taunted Oldfield for his lack of progress. The tape had not arrived unheralded. In March 1978, two anonymous letters were sent from Northeast England to destinations in Yorkshire. They were posted in Sunderland five days apart. One was addressed to George Oldfield, the other to the northern office of the Daily Mirror. Signed 'Yours respectfully, Jack the Ripper', the letters were initially discounted as the work of a hoaxer because they had been written after Yvonne Pearson's disappearance, but before her body was discovered, and the writer had given the wrong number of victims. The letters were allowed to disappear into the obscurity of the filing system. Almost exactly a year later, a third letter arrived. It had been posted to catch the 1.45pm collection in Sunderland on 23rd March 1979. Handwriting experts confirmed that the same person had written all three letters. The third letter made it clear that the next victim might possibly be in Bradford's Manningham area, but definitely not Chapeltown as it was 'too bloody hot there' because of the efforts of the 'curserred coppers'. The bizarre language, and the general cast of the letters - so close to the gleeful sadism of the original Ripper's taunting notes in the last century - rang warning bells in the minds of some of the police. Unfortunately, these were muffled by the clamour to find the lead that would break the case open. For George Oldfield, the third letter was significant as it mentioned the fact that Vera Millward had recently received medical treatment at the hospital in the grounds of which her body was found. He believed, wrongly and fatally that this information could only have come from Vera herself. It had, in fact, been published in the Daily Mail at the time of her death. A re-reading of the second letter, sent two months before Vera was killed, made reference to targeting an 'older one'. On this basis, the West Yorkshire Police made a breathtaking leap and concluded that the writer was the Ripper. George Oldfield called a press conference, and the Sunderland theory was aired for the first time. He also revealed that traces of engineering oil had been found on one of the letters, similar to traces found on Josephine Whitaker's body. The public was asked to come forward with any information they had about anybody who might have been in Sunderland on the days the letters were posted. For the first time, the response was overwhelming. Although the envelope in which the tape was sent was in the same hand writing as the 'Geordie' letters, George Oldfield wanted to keep the tape from the public scrutiny for a while. In probably his last concession to objectivity, he was concerned that it could still be a hoax. But his superior, Chief Constable Ronald Gregory, thought that such a distinctive voice would be easily identified if the public were allowed to hear it. Two days later, news of the tape and its contents had somehow seeped through to the press. The international media machine was about to swamp George Oldfield.
	BARBARA LEACH'S CRIME SCENE : Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson and Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield examine the ground at the scene of Barbara Leach's death.
	At a hastily called press conference the world's press crammed into the modest lecture hall at the police detective training school in Wakefield. Oldfield's career and the reputation of his force was on the line. He seemed to regard the Ripper's outrages as a personal challenge to him and was grimly determined to defeat his opponent. The press conference announced the start of a huge publicity campaign. The public could dial in and listen to the Geordie Ripper tape in the hope that someone, somewhere, might recognise his voice. Within a few days of the press conference and publication of the tape, more than 50,000 calls had flooded in. Meanwhile, Oldfield decided to bring in two language experts from Leeds University - Stanley Ellis and Jack Windsor Lewis. After six painstaking weeks they were able to verify the accent as genuine Wearside, pin-pointing it to Castletown, a small suburb of Sunderland. The West Yorkshire police moved in - 11 detectives were installed in a Sunderland hotel and 100 officers in the town prepared to get their man. Media coverage reached saturation point. In theory, it should have been only a matter of time before the Geordie Ripper was found. The police were moving through a very small town - only 4000 people lived in Castletown - and with a very fine toothed comb. But as the investigation failed to uncover the Ripper, men less emotionally involved in the case than Oldfield began to acknowledge that the Geordie Ripper was a cruel hoaxer who knew he would not be discovered because he had a cast-iron alibi for all the relevant times. Northumbria police, never entirely convinced, made their doubts public. Despite the mounting reservations, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire issued a Special Notice instructing his men that 'a suspect could be eliminated from their enquiries if, among other things, he did not have a Geordie accent'. The timing of this directive was most unfortunate. One month later, on 29th July 1979, Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed by DCs Laptew and Greenwood after his car - now a red Sunbeam Rapier - had been spotted in the red-light area of Lumb Lane 36 times in the previous three weeks. As before, Sutcliffe claimed that he travelled that way to and from work. However, many of these sightings had been late at night and, dissatisfied with Sutcliffe's explanation, Laptew decided to take the research further. Laptew discovered that Sutcliffe had a criminal recording dating back to 1969, and he filled out a report suggesting Sutcliffe be interviewed by one of the senior detectives. Laptew's report was eventually passed on to his superiors, but because Sutcliffe spoke with an unmistakably Yorkshire accent and his handwriting did not match the Geordie letters, his suspicions were ignored. By the middle of August the investigation's policy of carrying out blanket interviews in the Northeast had failed to produce a single useful clue. At the same time George Oldfield, overworked and overweight, suffered a near fatal heart attack and was taken off the inquiry. After two years on the case, and no closer to catching the Yorkshire Ripper, this was the final blow to his pride.
	BARBARA LEACH : A vivacious, smiling girl who had gained A levels in English and Religious Knowledge, Barbara Leach, 20, was a social sciences student about to embark on her third year at Bradford University. Her father was a bank clerk in Kettering. She shared a flat with other students in Grove Terrace just across from the campus, and enjoyed cooking and horse riding. She and her flat mates often went to the Mannville Arms pub, where they enjoyed listening to the live music.
	In the early hours of the morning of 2nd September 1979, the Ripper claimed his 11th victim. Aware that the red-light districts were now under heavy surveillance, he chose instead to head for a quiet residential part of Bradford. He cruised the streets around Little Horton, an area where many University students live, until he spotted Barbara Leach saying goodbye to a group of friends outside the Mannville Arms pub and walking off on her own. He accelerated past her, turned left into Ash Grove, stopped the car, opened the door and waited for her to walk past him. He then struck her from behind with a hammer. Dragging her into a nearby side-alley, he stabbed her repeatedly before discarding the body in a dustbin recess and slinging an old carpet over it. Barbara's body was not found until the following Monday afternoon. Like Josephine Whitaker she had been stabbed with a specially sharpened screwdriver. Barbara's death caused the biggest out-cry yet. The initial shock at the death of a university student was rapidly overtaken by indignation, as the realisation of the fact that all women were at risk hit home. Alarm bells were also ringing in the heads of the two voice specialists, Stanley Ellis and Jack Lewis. Their suspicions that the 'Geordie connection' might not be the real Ripper had already been stirred by the lack of results in the investigation's trawl of the Northwest and the fact that none of the survivors of the Ripper's assaults had noticed a trace of a Geordie accent in their assailant. Barbara Leach's murder finally convinced them. Three weeks after her death, they wrote to the officers in charge of the investigation outlining their concerns. Their opinions were ignored. In early October, Chief Constable Ronald Gregory announced the launch of another big-budget, high-profile advertising campaign, nicknamed 'Flush Out the Ripper'. The main focus of the campaign was the Geordie Ripper tape. The immediate effect on the investigation was to plunge it even further into darkness. The Ripper Room, already creaking under the weight of information gathered from the previous murders, was promptly inundated with tip-offs; by the middle of November the list of possible suspects had spiralled to 17,000. To help ease the pressure, a former head of Scotland Yard's Terrorist Squad, Commander Jim Neville, was sent to Yorkshire as an advisor. He returned to London a month later, having contributed nothing to the inquiry. In January 1980, DCS Ridgeway and his team from the Manchester force returned to Bradford to review the Ł5 note inquiry. They succeeded in narrowing the field down to about 300 suspects - including Peter Sutcliffe - and they were now in possession of another piece of evidence: a photocopy of the boot print found by Josephine Whitaker's body in Saville Park. Over the following three weeks, Sutcliffe was interviewed three times, on the first occasion wearing the very boots the police were looking for. They failed to notice them. One week later, Sutcliffe was questioned by the same officers - his eighth interview to date - and on 2nd February, much to his terror, he was asked to provide a sample of his handwriting. He had no cause for anxiety, however, as the police were as committed as ever to the Geordie connection and Sutcliffe's handwriting did not match the script of the Sunderland letters. Ridgeway returned to Manchester non the wiser.
	MARGUERITE WALLS : Marguerite Walls, 47, was known to her friends as Margot. A civil servant in the Department of Education and Science in Pudsey, she was going on holiday to the Lake District the following day and had been working late to tie up some loose ends before Sutcliffe killed her on her way home. She was unmarried and a member of the local walking club, she normally walked to and her office in order to stay fit.
	As the summer of 1980 faded, the Ripper receded from the foreground of public consciousness. He had not struck for nearly a year. There was even talk that he might have 'burned out' or committed suicide. Nor did it seem that such speculation was premature when the body of Marguerite Walls, a 47 year old civil servant, was found, on 21st August, buried under a mound of grass clippings in the wooded grounds of a magistrate's house, the day after she had been bludgeoned and strangled with a piece of hemp. Her body had not been mutilated. The police were certain of only one thing about the murder - it was not the work of the Yorkshire Ripper. The Ripper's past 11 murders had established a distinctive pattern of killing and mutilation, which this one did not appear to fit. When news of the murder made the newspapers, the Ripper was not mentioned. It would not be until Sutcliffe revealed that he had changed his method of assault deliberately to confuse them that the police learned that this was the Ripper's 12th murder victim. Sutcliffe waited only a month before seeking out his next victim. On 24th September he made his way to Headingley in Leeds. At around 10.30pm, he attacked Dr Upadhya Bandara, a 34 year old mature student from Singapore, knocking her unconscious with two hammer blows to the head after he had put a noose around her neck. He was disturbed before he could kill her and fled. Dr Bandara later made a full recovery in hospital, but, once again, because of the attempted strangulation, the police did not attribute this attack to the Ripper. In fact, Sutcliffe would attack once more - a botched attempt on Theresa Sykes in Huddersfield on 5th November - before the Ripper would make headline news again.
	JACQUELINE HILL : The second student to be killed, Jacqueline Hill, 20, had been on her way home when she was attacked. She had recently moved from the outskirts of the city to an all-girls hall of residence at Leeds University where she thought she would be safer. She was a quiet girl, studying languages and hoping to join the probation service. She had a boyfriend serving in the RAF.
	On Monday, 17th November, Jacqueline Hill, a student at the University of Leeds, stepped off the bus opposite the Arndale shopping centre in Headingley, Leeds, at about 9.25pm. On the short walk from the bus stop to her hall of residence, Sutcliffe struck her down. He dragged her body to some wasteland behind the shopping parade and stabbed her repeatedly in the chest and once in the eye. Half an hour later, a passing student stumbled across Jacqueline's handbag, which was on the pavement some distance away from her hidden body. Back at his flat, one of the student's flat mates noticed the fresh splashes of blood on the side of the bag and rummaged through its contents for clues of its owner. He found Jacqueline's cheque card. The police were called and two officers duly arrived and made a half-hearted search. The students suggested checking on Jackie's whereabouts but, to their surprise, the officers decided that no further action was necessary other than to report the handbag as lost property. Jacqueline Hill's body was found the following morning by a passer-by. There was no mistaking whose work it was. Overnight, the Ripper tyranny reasserted itself in full force. But this time the warnings to stay indoors after dark brought women throughout the North onto the streets in 'Reclaim the Night' demonstrations. The West Yorkshire police were demoralised, and it was now abundantly clear to everyone concerned that the publicity campaign based on the Geordie Ripper tape had lost all credibility. It had achieved nothing, apart from congesting an already overloaded filing system with a surfeit of useless information. In the eyes of many commentators, however, it was a reflection of the lack of will to catch the Ripper that ran through the force. George Oldfield, who had returned to the case earlier, was devastated that the Ripper had struck again: 'This man is obviously very mentally ill and has got this sadistic killer streak in him. He can flip at any time. We hope fervently we can catch him before any more lives are lost.' A week after Jacqueline Hill's murder, the Home Office agreed to the formation of a committed of senior officers and forensic experts drawn from outside the West Yorkshire police force, to be headed by Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson, Oldfield's second in command. Oldfield himself was quietly removed from the case. This 'Super Squad', as the press dubbed them, was to fare no better. Six weeks later, its members reached the same conclusion as the West Yorkshire force - they had no idea how to crack the case.
	'RECLAIM THE NIGHT' : Women in Bradford vent their anger after yet another murder, while in Leeds the windows of a sex shop are smashed. It was by now five years since the first killing and the police had made little progress.
	It was about 10.50pm on the second day of the New Year, 1981, when Sergeant Robert Ring and Probationary Constable Robert Hydes started their night shift. Cruising along Melbourne Avenue in Sheffield - a well known haunt for local prostitutes - they saw Olivia Reivers climbing into a Rover V8 3500. It was a toss of a coin whether they would bother to investigate alleged soliciting. They decided to go ahead. The driver identified himself as Peter Williams and said, when questioned, that the car was his own. Sergeant Ring, thinking that he recognised the women passenger as a known prostitute, asked the man who she was. 'My girlfriend,' answered the driver. 'What's her name?' asked Ring. 'I don't know, I haven't known her all that long.' Sergeant Ring smiled: 'Who are you trying to kid? I haven't fallen off the Christmas tree.' The officers followed the usual procedure and radioed in the car registration number for an operator to run a check on the police computers. Now the driver told the officers that he desperately needed to relieve himself. Bob Ring nodded and the man sidled over to the bushes lining the lane. Under cover of darkness he removed a ball-pein hammer and sharpened knife from a special pocket in his coat and hid them under the bushes. Olivia Reivers, remonstrating with the policemen, had no idea that she was abusing the men who had just saved her life. By the time the man strolled back to his car, the police had established that the number plates on it were false and were registered as belonging to a Skoda. Both prostitute and client were taken to Hammerton Road police station for further questioning. It was there that the man's real name was found to be Peter William Sutcliffe. At the station, Sutcliffe's main worry seemed to be that the police would tell his wife that he had been picked up with a prostitute. Otherwise, he was calm and obligingly forthcoming - after he had been to the lavatory and hidden a second knife in the cistern. He readily admitted that he had stolen the number plates from a scrap yard in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Every force in the land had been issued with instructions to inform the West Yorkshire Police if they picked up a man in company with a prostitute. So Sutcliffe was locked up for the night and the next morning was taken, still unprotesting, to Dewsbury police station for further questioning. He was a chatty interviewee, explaining that he was a long-distance lorry-driver who travelled regularly to the Northeast. Almost in passing he mentioned his regular visits to the Bradford red-light district and that he had been interviewed by Manchester CID about the Ł5 note.
	ROVER V8 3500 : Sutcliffe loved cars; they were one of his main topics of conversation. But it was this Rover that led to his arrest, when police checked the number plates and found they were secured to the car with tape.
	Within an hour of Sutcliffe's arrival, Dewsbury Police had called the Ripper Squad at Millgrath in Leeds. Detective Sergeant Des O'Boyle soon discovered that Sutcliffe's name had come up several times during the investigation. But there had been so many false hopes in the past six years that he controlled his excitement as he drove the short distance to Dewsbury. By 6pm, though, O'Boyle was sufficiently intrigued by Sutcliffe to contact his immediate superior in Leeds, Detective John Boyle. Sutcliffe had been asked to give a blood sample, and the results now showed that he had blood type B - the blood group of Joan Harrison's murderer. At this point, the police were still convinced that she was one of the Ripper's victims. When Boyle was informed about the result of the blood test, he too travelled to Dewsbury and Sutcliffe was locked in his cell for a second night. In the meantime, Bob Ring heard one of his colleagues at Hammerton Road casually mention that the Rover driver was still in the cells at Dewsbury, being interviewed by detectives from the Ripper Squad. Ring suddenly remembered that, before taking Sutcliffe into custody, he had gone to the bushes, supposedly to relieve himself. He rushed back as fast as he could to Melbourne Avenue. After a few frantic minutes, he found what he was looking for. His telephone call to Dewsbury was music to the ears of Ripper Squad detectives. Ring had recovered a ball-pein hammer and a knife. Boyle and his sergeant stared speechlessly at each other, scarcely daring to believe it.
	SONIA SUTCLIFFE : A policeman guards the Sutcliffe's house at 6 Garden Lane, during the trial, while Sonia tries to keep a low profile.
	Sutcliffe slept soundly through a night that saw frantic police activity. Detective Sergeant Peter Smith, a young detective with an encyclopedic knowledge of the case, was called in. While Smith and Boyle questioned Sutcliffe, Sonia was being questioned in a room down the corridor and their neat suburban house was being searched for evidence. Detective Inspector Boyle led the questioning, slowly and cautiously. The Yorkshire Ripper and his victims were not mentioned directly. As he gradually led up to the subject, Sutcliffe was asked about the evening of 5th November, when Theresa Sykes had been attacked. His continued assertion that he had returned home that night at 8pm was, unknown to Sutcliffe, being contradicted by his wife who remembered it nearer 10pm. Slowly but surely, the police were moving nearer to questioning Sutcliffe about being the Ripper. Early the next afternoon, Boyle mentioned the hammer and knife found in Sheffield. Sutcliffe, the garrulous witness, fell silent. Boyle probed gently, 'I think you are in trouble, serious trouble.' Sutcliffe finally spoke. 'I think you are leading up to the Yorkshire Ripper,' he said. Boyle stayed calm, barely containing his mounting excitement. 'Well, what about the Yorkshire Ripper?' 'Well,' said Sutcliffe, 'that's me.' He admitted to killing 11 women, denying that he had anything to do with Joan Harrison's death or the Geordie tape.
	WEST YORKSHIRE POLICE TEAM : Assistant Chief Constable Oldfield, Chief Constable Gregory and Detective Chief Superintendent Hobson of the West Yorkshire police looking jubilant after Sutcliffe's arrest. But it was actually the South Yorkshire police who actually caught him in Sheffield.
	Boyle could hardly believe his ears. After six years of fruitless searching, the hunt was over, thanks to two ordinary policemen. It seemed to be as much a relief to Sutcliffe as it was for his captors. 'Just thinking about them all reminds me of what a monster I am,' he confided. He did not want a solicitor present as he recalled - unprompted - the long list of dead. Over the following day and a half, Boyle and Smith took down Sutcliffe's confession in a marathon dictation session that took almost 17 hours. Asked why he had done what he did, Sutcliffe said that he began killing several years after he was cheated by a prostitute in 1969. At the time, he was feeling overcome with jealousy about Sonia, and had sought the companionship of a prostitute. The encounter was a catastrophe. Sutcliffe did not have sex with the woman and was deliberately short-changed. It was this, he said, that drove him to kill any woman he judged to be a good-time girl. At the end of the session, Sutcliffe signed the statement and identified the knife and hammer found in Sheffield as his. The news broke and the atmosphere of celebration filled the streets and pubs where the Yorkshire Ripper had stalked. Senior detectives could scarcely conceal their delight during the packed press conference given after Sutcliffe's confession.
	SUTCLIFFE ARRESTED : Sutcliffe is escorted from Dewsbury Magistrates Court under a blanket, thus depriving the waiting crowds packing the streets from seeing his face.
	By 4pm on 4th January, Dewsbury Town Hall had attracted a crowd of more than 2000 people, all waiting to see the Ripper being brought to the court. As the police van pulled up, an angry mob cried 'Hang the bastard!' and 'Killer!'. But they were deprived of seeing him, as he was ushered into court under a blanket. At about 5pm he was charged with murdering Jacqueline Hill between 16th and 19th November and stealing two car registration plates worth just 50p. He was remanded in custody at Armley Jail in Leeds. Sixteen weeks later, Sutcliffe stood trial at the Old Bailey's Number 1 Court. That he came to trial at all was due to the forthright convictions of the judge, Mr Justice Boreham. In the eight weeks he had been in custody, the only reason Sutcliffe had given for carrying out the killings was to exact revenge. But now he offered a different explanation. He suddenly claimed that the murders had been part of a divine mission brought about after hearing the voice of God while working at Bingley cemetery. Even before he had been formally charged, the Crown prosecution, defence counsel and the Attorney General had all agreed that the Bradford lorry driver was mentally ill, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. A group of eminent psychologists had been unanimous in their judgment. A short hearing would be held, where Sutcliffe's plea of guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility would be accepted. After five years of terrorising women in the North of England, it looked as if the Yorkshire Ripper would be quietly put away.
	THE RIPPER TRIAL : The Ripper trial developed into a major event. Members of the public queued overnight for seats in the gallery, while seats were found for MPs and coucillors. Sutcliffe remained impassive throughout the two days he was in the witness box, looking straight ahead with a calm, unwavering stare.
	Mr Justice Boreham, however, was having none of this. Barely concealing his irritation with both counsels, he threw out their suggestion, ordered the court to reconvene in five days' time and made it clear that the jury would listen to the evidence and decide, on behalf of the British public, whether Peter Sutcliffe was a madman or a callous murderer. Among those who gave evidence during the two-week-long trial were Sutcliffe's drinking pals Ronnie and David Barker, who told how they often visited the red-light districts with him; Trevor Birdsall, who revealed how he had suspected his friend of being the Ripper; and Olivia Reivers, who had been Sutcliffe's intended victim on the night he was arrested. The prosecution, led by Sir Michael Havers, also showed that, contrary to previous beliefs, there had been a sexual aspect to many of Sutcliffe's attacks. He had stuck a sharpened screwdriver into Jacqueline Hill's vagina, had scratched Olivia Smelt's buttocks with a hacksaw and had sex with Helen Rytka as she lay dying. The prosecution used this evidence to prove that Sutcliffe's claim that he was on a mission from God was a lie. Much of the trial was taken up with the examination and cross-examination of forensic psychiatrists Dr Hugo Milne of Bradford, Dr Malcolm McCulloch of Liverpool and Dr Terence Kay of Leeds. Each had interviewed Sutcliffe and provided the basis for the defence, led by James Chadwin QC, that Sutcliffe was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. But, under cross-examination, it became clear that their diagnoses might not be altogether sound.
	CHEQUEBOOK JOURNALISM : After the arrest, journalists fought to buy the stories of anyone connected with the Ripper case. At one stage there were almost 100 reporters outside the Sutcliffe house and offers of several hundred thousand pounds were put through the letter box. Jacqueline Hill's mother Doreen started a campaign to prevent newspapers from making further payments to Sutcliffe's relatives. In 1983 the Press Council published a report on conduct in the case which stated that complaints about chequebook journalism were specifically laid against four newspapers. During the trial, witnesses admitted receiving payments or promises of payment from newspapers. All defended their actions, although the Council concluded that Sutcliffe's relations were subject to unacceptable pressures by some journalists.
	Sutcliffe's defence team had tried to dissuade Sutcliffe from giving evidence under oath, but he refused to follow their advice. On Monday 11th May, he stepped into the witness box and began to give evidence which would last nearly two days. His high-pitched Bradford voice hardly faltered as his defence counsel accompanied him through his recital of death. He even laughed when he recalled that, when questioned about the boot prints found on Emily Jackson's thigh and Tina Atkinson's bed sheet, the policeman had not noticed he was wearing the very boots at the time. Sutcliffe calmly explained his divine mission and the voices he had heard. He claimed that God had told him to clean up the streets and had protected him from the police for so long. 'They had all the facts for a long time. But then I knew why they didn't catch me - because everything was in God's hands.' Even under cross-examination, he remained unshaken. He also conceded that he had been planning to do 'God's work' on Olivia Reivers when police finally caught him. Mr Justice Boreham summed up the case and the jury was led out to make its decision. They had heard the evidence of the psychiatrists and seen their convictions waiver under cross-examination. And they had seen and heard the words of Peter Sutcliffe himself. Was this a man who was mad pretending to be sane or a sane man pretending to be mad?
	SUTCLIFFE ARRESTED : In a blaze of publicity, Peter Sutcliffe leaves the Old Bailey to begin his 30 year prison sentence.
	After five hours of deliberation, the jury of six men and six women returned to the court to notify the judge that they could not come to a unanimous decision. They were told a majority decision would suffice and, 55 minutes later, returned. Late in the afternoon of 22nd May 1981, Peter Sutcliffe rose to his feet to hear the verdict. The jury found him guilty of 13 murders and seven attempted murders by a majority of ten to two. Mr Justice Boreham sentenced Peter William Sutcliffe to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 30 years for the 'cowardly' and brutal nature of the killings.
	PETER SUTCLIFFE : The scars on Sutcliffe's face were still visible ten months after the attack at Parkhurst, when he gave evidence against the assault.
	The Yorkshire Ripper investigation was the most expensive and labour-intensive hunt ever known in Britain. It cost about Ł4 million and took five million police hours. Over 21,000 people were interviewed, five million car registrations were taken and, at the height of the investigation, between 500 and 1000 letters were received from the public each day. Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, so long in charge of the case, died in 1985. He had broken the oldest rule in the book - he became emotionally involved. Ronald Gregory, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire retired from the force in 1983. Peter Sutcliffe was incarcerated in the special top-security wing at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. In January 1983 he was attacked by a fellow inmate, who slashed his face with a broken jar. He needed 84 stitches. In March 1984 he was moved to Broadmoor high-security mental hospital in Berkshire. His faking of mental illness - if faking it was - has rebounded on him. Sutcliffe's mental state was so deteriorated that he is often totally incoherent. Sonia Sutcliffe was awarded a record Ł600,000 damages against Private Eye magazine in May 1989 for libel claiming that she was aware that her husband was the Ripper. However, this was later lowered to Ł160,000. A further bid to sue the News of the World failed, as she lied about her financial resources, and she was ordered to pay huge costs, which bankrupted her. Sonia Sutcliffe finally divorced Peter in 1994, although she continued to visit him at Broadmoor afterwards. Despite his crimes, she remembers the time he helped her out and has stayed loyal to him, explaining to his father: 'Peter pulled me through my troubles, so I'm going to pull him through his.' Jane Sutcliffe, Peter's sister, has recurring nightmares. For months she dreamed of visiting her brother Peter in prison to get him out. 'He's handcuffed to me and I take him to a cafe. I cufflink him to the metal arm of the settee when I go to bed and take him shopping with me when I wake up,' she explains. Anna Rogulskyj, attacked in 1975, was not at first regarded as a victim. It took two years before the attack was recognised for what it was. Having contemplated suicide several times, she was finally awarded Ł15,000 from the Criminal Injuries Board. Doreen Hill, Jacqueline Hill's mother, believes that her daughter's death accelerated the death of her husband, who was seriously ill at the time. Mrs Hill avoids reading newspapers or watching TV news broadcasts. Her reaction to Sutcliffe's sentence was: 'Simple imprisonment was too good for someone who destroyed her [Jacqueline's] life.' In November 1996, it was revealed that, after he had been sentenced, Sutcliffe admitted attacking women as early as 1969, six years before the first murder for which he was convicted.
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