A warning before this article. The Yorkshire Ripper case involves sustained physical violence against women, including women who survived attacks that left them with lifelong injuries. The investigation itself was, by the eventual official assessment, profoundly compromised by attitudes that treated some of the victims as less worthy of urgent protection than others. Both elements of the case are unavoidably distressing. This piece does not dwell on graphic detail beyond what is required for an honest account.
Part One: The City That Stopped Going Out
For the better part of six years, between the autumn of 1975 and the winter of 1980, an unidentified man attacked women across the cities and towns of West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. He killed at least thirteen of them. He attacked, by the eventual count, at least seven more who survived. He used a hammer to disable his victims, a knife or screwdriver to mutilate them, and a method of approach so simple that for years it defeated one of the largest manhunts in British history. He was eventually arrested in Sheffield in January 1981 by two officers conducting a routine check on false number plates. By that point he had become the most wanted criminal in the country, and the investigation to catch him had become, in the assessment of the inquiry that followed his conviction, a study in institutional failure.
The case left, in the cities where the killings happened, a generation of women whose experience of public space was permanently altered. The 1977 to 1980 period in Leeds and Bradford produced an atmosphere that the historian Joan Smith, who lived through it as a young journalist in Manchester, described as “a curfew in everything but name.” Women stopped going out alone after dark. Women stopped using taxis driven by male drivers they did not know. Women carried whistles, keys held between fingers, makeshift weapons. The Reclaim the Night marches that began in Leeds in November 1977 — the first such marches in Britain — were a direct response to the Ripper killings and to the policing response that told women to stay home rather than telling men to stop attacking them. The marches eventually spread internationally. They are one of the lasting legacies of a case whose other legacies are mostly grief.
The man who caused all of this was a thirty-four-year-old lorry driver from Bradford named Peter William Sutcliffe.
Part Two: The Bradford Boy
Peter William Sutcliffe was born on 2 June 1946 in Bingley, West Yorkshire, the eldest of six children of John and Kathleen Sutcliffe. The family was working class and Catholic. His father worked as a textile worker and was, by every account, a forceful and domineering personality. His mother Kathleen was the gentler parent, deeply religious, and the source of Peter’s early emotional attachment. Peter was a small, shy child who clung to his mother through his early years. He was bullied at school. He left at fifteen with no qualifications and drifted through a string of jobs — a gravedigger at Bingley Cemetery (a posting that produced anecdotes which his later defenders would dismiss and his prosecutors would not), a factory worker, eventually a long-distance lorry driver.
Three things, in the biographical accounts that have accumulated since his conviction, are usually identified as significant in his pre-criminal life. The first was the gravedigger period. Sutcliffe worked at Bingley Cemetery from 1964 to 1967, and several of his later remarks to fellow workers — about hearing voices coming from the headstones, about wanting to dig up corpses — would in retrospect be read as the early surfacing of the psychotic symptoms his defence would later argue had driven the killings. Whether these remarks represented genuine early-stage schizophrenia or merely the dark sense of humour of a young man in an unpleasant job is something the available record does not finally settle.
The second was an apparent humiliation by a sex worker in Bradford in 1969. Sutcliffe, by his own much-later account, had been driven by a friend to the Manningham area of Bradford — then the city’s red-light district — and had been short-changed by a woman from whom he had attempted to buy sex. He spent the following months stewing on the humiliation. The story has been treated with appropriate scepticism by some historians of the case, who have noted that Sutcliffe’s later attempts to construct a narrative of provocation by his victims served his defence strategy and his own self-image. Whether it happened in the form he described, or at all, the period in question produced his first documented assault on a woman — a hammer attack on a Bradford woman in September 1969 that left her with a head injury but did not result in his arrest.
The third was his marriage. In 1967 Sutcliffe met Sonia Szurma, a Czech-Ukrainian teacher’s daughter from Bradford. They were married in August 1974. By every account from those who knew the couple, Sonia was a domineering and increasingly unstable partner whose behaviour worsened through the 1970s and who would, in 1972, suffer a serious psychiatric episode that resulted in her being hospitalised with what was diagnosed at the time as schizophrenia. Sutcliffe’s relationship with his wife has been the subject of substantial subsequent analysis. Some accounts have presented her as a controlling figure whose pressure helped trigger the killings. Others have noted that Sonia herself was a vulnerable woman whose mental illness has been used, retrospectively, to construct a narrative that lets her husband off too easily. The reasonable reading is that the marriage was unhappy, that Sutcliffe was conducting affairs and visiting sex workers throughout it, and that whatever the dynamics between him and Sonia may have been, they do not amount to a meaningful exculpation of what he eventually did.
He began his confirmed murder campaign in October 1975. He was twenty-nine years old.
Part Three: The Killings, Phase One
The first known fatal attack took place in Leeds on the night of 29 October 1975. Wilma McCann, twenty-eight, was a mother of four whose marriage had recently broken down and who was working occasionally as a sex worker on Chapeltown Road in Leeds to supplement her income. She was last seen alive in the early hours of 30 October. Her body was found later that morning on the Prince Philip Playing Fields by a milkman walking to work. She had been struck twice on the head with a ball-peen hammer, then stabbed fifteen times in the neck, chest, and abdomen. Her four children were sleeping in the family home approximately 150 yards from the field where she died.
The McCann investigation, run by West Yorkshire Police, was conducted with the considerable care that a murder investigation in 1975 conventionally received but produced no immediate leads. There was no known suspect. There were no witnesses. The pattern of the injuries was distinctive enough to be flagged but not yet to be linked to anything else.
Eleven weeks later, on 20 January 1976, the second killing occurred. Emily Jackson, forty-two, was a married Leeds woman who had also begun working as a sex worker — in her case driven by her husband Sydney, who waited for her in pubs while she worked the streets to bring in additional household income. On the night of her death she had argued with Sydney in a Leeds pub and had gone out alone. She was found the following morning on Manor Street, in the city’s Sheepscar district, near a derelict building. She had been hit twice with a hammer, then stabbed fifty-one times — three times more wounds than McCann had received — with what appeared to be a Phillips screwdriver. The killer had also stamped on her thigh, leaving a clear impression of a size-seven Dunlop Warwick wellington boot that would, eventually, be matched to Sutcliffe.
The McCann and Jackson killings were, in the immediate aftermath of Jackson, recognised by West Yorkshire detectives as the work of the same man. The hammer-then-stabbing signature was distinctive. Both women had been sex workers. Both had been killed at night in similar Leeds districts. The investigation was now formally a serial inquiry. The senior officer assigned to it was Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Hoban, a charismatic Leeds detective who had risen rapidly through the ranks and who initially believed the case would be solved within months.
A year passed without a further killing. Then, in February 1977, the pattern resumed and intensified. Irene Richardson, twenty-eight, a mother of three from Leeds who had recently begun sex work after her marriage broke down, was found dead on the morning of 6 February on the grass of Roundhay Park in Leeds. She had been hammer-struck and stabbed in the same pattern. Two months later, on 23 April 1977, Patricia Atkinson, thirty-two, a Bradford woman who had worked as a sex worker for several years, was found dead in her own flat on Oak Avenue in Bradford. The killer had, for the first time, attacked a victim indoors. She had been hammered four times and stabbed seven times in the abdomen.
And then, on 26 June 1977, the killing that broke the case open to public consciousness in a way the previous four had not. Jayne MacDonald, sixteen, was a shop assistant from the Scott Hall area of Leeds who had been out with friends in the city centre that Saturday evening. She was walking home alone at approximately 2 a.m. on Sunday morning when she was attacked in Reginald Terrace, a few hundred yards from her home. Her body was found by a group of children the following morning. She had been hammered three times and stabbed in the chest and back twenty times.
Jayne MacDonald had no involvement in sex work. She was, by the language her family and the press would use afterwards, an “innocent” victim. The distinction would dominate the investigation and the public discussion of the case for the next three and a half years. It was a distinction that would, in retrospect, prove catastrophic.
Part Four: The Two-Tier Investigation
The Jayne MacDonald killing transformed the case. Detective Chief Superintendent Hoban was, within days, telling the press that the killer had now begun to attack “innocent” women — by direct implication, that the previous four killings had been of women whose deaths were tragic but who had, by their occupations, exposed themselves to risk in ways that MacDonald had not. The framing was repeated through the rest of 1977 and into 1978 and 1979 by officer after officer at the press conferences that the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry was generating in increasing volume.
The 2019 BBC Four documentary series The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story, presented by the filmmaker Liza Williams, devoted a substantial portion of its three episodes to documenting what this framing did to the investigation. The senior officers running the inquiry, almost all of them men of a particular generation and class background, treated the sex worker victims as a different category of casualty from the “respectable” women — slower to investigate, less central to press appeals, less prioritised in resource allocation. The families of the sex worker victims, when they came forward with information, were treated with what former Detective Constable Megan Winterburn described in the documentary as “a kind of contempt that nobody bothered to hide.” The mothers of the early victims, watching the press conferences in which their daughters were being categorised as the less important kind of victim, did what they could to protest. Most of them had been ignored.
The consequence of the two-tier framing was operational as well as moral. It meant that crucial early evidence — including information from sex worker witnesses who had seen suspicious men in cars, including descriptions that subsequent reviews would establish were consistent with Peter Sutcliffe — was either not pursued, not believed, or treated as too tainted by its source to be acted on. The killer, by his own subsequent admission, understood this. He continued to target sex workers in the early years of the campaign precisely because he had recognised that the institutional response to their deaths was different.
By the time the MacDonald killing forced a recalibration, the killer had already established his methods, his geographic range, and his confidence. Three months later, on 1 October 1977, he killed Jean Jordan, twenty-one, a Manchester sex worker who had been visiting clients in the Chorlton-on-Medlock area. Her body was not found for eight days. When it was, investigators recovered something that, in a less compromised investigation, would have closed the case. Sutcliffe had paid Jordan with a £5 note that he had drawn from his wages packet at the haulage firm where he worked. The number on the note was traceable. West Yorkshire Police, in cooperation with Greater Manchester Police, conducted a vast inquiry into the eight thousand workers who could plausibly have received that particular note in their pay. They interviewed approximately 5,000 men, including Peter Sutcliffe, who was visited at his Bradford home on 2 November 1977. He gave a satisfactory account of his movements. The officers did not pursue him further. The note inquiry was eventually exhausted without identifying the killer.
This was the first of nine separate occasions on which Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed by Yorkshire Ripper detectives during the course of the investigation and was, each time, eliminated from the inquiry.
Part Five: The Killings, Phase Two
The killings continued through 1978. Yvonne Pearson, twenty-one, a Bradford sex worker, was killed on 21 January 1978. Her body was not found until two months later, on 26 March, when a passer-by noticed a hand protruding from beneath an abandoned sofa on waste ground at Arthington Street. She had been hammered repeatedly and the killer had stuffed horsehair from the sofa into her mouth.
Ten days after the Pearson killing, on 31 January 1978, Helen Rytka, eighteen, a Huddersfield sex worker, was killed in a timber yard in the Great Northern Street area of the town. She and her twin sister Rita had been working together that evening, taking it in turns to go off with clients while the other waited. They had agreed to meet back at a specific spot at a specific time. Helen did not come back. Rita, who had been with another client, eventually had to walk home alone, not knowing what had happened. Helen’s body was found three days later, hammered and stabbed in the same pattern.
On 16 May 1978, Vera Millward, forty, the mother of seven children and a Manchester woman who had been working as a sex worker to support her family, was killed in the car park of Manchester Royal Infirmary. The location — a hospital car park, in central Manchester, on a relatively busy evening — represented a new audacity in the killer’s choice of attack site. Her body was found the following morning by a gardener.
Then a period of nearly a year passed with no confirmed Ripper killings. The investigation, by spring 1979, had grown to enormous size. The incident room at Millgarth Police Station in Leeds had become physically overloaded with paper records — every interview, every car sighting, every tip-off recorded on index cards — and the floor of the room had to be structurally reinforced to bear the weight. There was no computer system. Cross-referencing was done manually. Detectives were drowning in their own information.
And then, in March 1978, the first of three letters arrived.
Part Six: Wearside Jack
The first letter arrived at George Oldfield, the assistant chief constable who had taken over as the senior officer on the investigation after Dennis Hoban’s transfer in late 1977. It was postmarked Sunderland. It was handwritten. It claimed to be from the Yorkshire Ripper. It contained details — particularly about the Vera Millward killing — that the writer claimed only the killer could know.
A second letter arrived later in 1978, also from Sunderland. A third arrived in 1979. And in June 1979, a small audio cassette tape arrived in the post at George Oldfield’s office. Recorded on the tape was a man’s voice, speaking in what was unmistakably a Wearside accent — the distinctive working-class speech of the Sunderland area of north-east England, very different from the Yorkshire accents of West Yorkshire and the Manchester accents of Lancashire. The voice taunted Oldfield personally. It claimed responsibility for the murders. It threatened more killings. It opened with a line that would, over the following eighteen months, become one of the most replayed audio recordings in British media history: I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me.
George Oldfield made what would prove to be the single most catastrophic decision of the entire Yorkshire Ripper investigation. He accepted the tape as genuine. He directed the inquiry’s resources accordingly. From mid-1979 onwards, the search for the Ripper was effectively a search for a man with a Wearside accent. The hoax tape was played at public meetings across Sunderland. It was broadcast on national television. It was played repeatedly on local radio. Six hundred thousand pounds — an enormous sum in 1979 — was spent on publicity for the recording. Members of the public were asked to come forward if they recognised the voice.
The decision had two devastating consequences. First, it consumed an enormous proportion of the investigation’s remaining resources on a false trail. Second, and more critically, it provided the screening test by which detectives eliminated suspects from further consideration. Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed for the seventh and eighth times during this period. On both occasions, the fact that he had a Yorkshire accent and not a Wearside one was treated as effectively conclusive proof that he was not the killer.
One West Yorkshire detective, Detective Constable Andrew Laptew, had become convinced by November 1979 that Sutcliffe was a serious suspect. Laptew had interviewed Sutcliffe on a separate matter, had been struck by his appearance and demeanour, had checked his record, and had submitted a report up the chain of command recommending further investigation. The report was, according to Laptew’s later testimony, dismissed by senior officers on the grounds that Sutcliffe’s accent did not match the tape. Laptew was reportedly told, by an officer he later named, that he had “Jack the Ripper on the brain.” The report was filed and not acted upon. Sutcliffe killed three more women in the fourteen months that followed.
The hoaxer was eventually identified in 2005 — twenty-six years after he had sent the original tape — when a DNA sample taken from the envelope of one of the original letters was matched to John Samuel Humble, a fifty-year-old unemployed labourer from the Castletown area of Sunderland, who had been arrested on a separate drunk-and-disorderly charge that produced a routine DNA swab. Humble, who had spent the intervening decades drifting between casual work, alcoholism, and family estrangement, confessed to the hoax. He was convicted of four counts of perverting the course of justice in March 2006 and sentenced to eight years in prison. He served four. He died in South Shields on 30 July 2019, aged sixty-three, of heart disease and chronic alcohol misuse. By that point he had changed his name to John Samuel Anderson and was living anonymously. Four people attended his funeral.
The detective who finally caught Humble, former Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, said publicly in 2019 that Humble had been “a coward” who had “had to live with” the knowledge that three women had been murdered by Peter Sutcliffe during the period when the investigation was looking in the wrong county for the wrong man. Whether Humble had ever fully reckoned with that knowledge before his death is impossible to know. The available evidence suggests that he drank.
Part Seven: The Killings, Phase Three
While the investigation pursued the Wearside Jack false trail, Sutcliffe continued to kill. On 4 April 1979, Josephine Whitaker, nineteen, a building society clerk from Halifax, was killed in Savile Park in the town as she walked home from her grandparents’ house. She had no involvement in sex work. She was, in the language the investigation had now reluctantly absorbed, an “innocent” victim. The killing was the first to take place in Halifax. It indicated, in retrospect, that Sutcliffe was expanding his geographic range as a deliberate counter-investigative measure.
Five months later, on 2 September 1979, Barbara Leach, twenty, a Bradford University student, was killed near the city’s Mannville Arms pub after leaving a friend’s house at approximately 1 a.m. She was found two days later, hammered and stabbed in the now-familiar pattern, in a yard behind Ash Grove. She had been within five minutes’ walk of her own student lodgings. The Leach killing produced extensive coverage in the national press and a major escalation of the Reclaim the Night movement in West Yorkshire. The University of Bradford organised marches. The University of Leeds organised marches. The Greater Manchester universities organised marches.
An eleven-month gap followed, the longest of the active campaign. Then, on 20 August 1980, Marguerite Walls, forty-seven, a civil servant from Leeds, was killed near her home in the Pudsey area of the city. She had stayed late at the office and had been walking home after dark. The Walls killing was, in some respects, methodologically different from the others — Sutcliffe used a length of rope rather than a knife to mutilate the body — and it was not initially attributed to the Ripper. The error would be corrected only after Sutcliffe’s confession the following year.
On 17 November 1980, Jacqueline Hill, twenty, a Leeds University student studying English, was killed near the Arndale Centre in the Headingley area of Leeds as she walked home from a Probation Service training session. She was found early the following morning, after passersby had reported a glove and a small package of mints on the pavement of Alma Road. Her body was discovered on waste ground behind the road. Jacqueline Hill was the last of the thirteen confirmed Ripper murders. Her death produced, in the closing weeks of 1980, a level of public pressure on the West Yorkshire Police that had no precedent in modern British policing. Editorials in the national press were calling for the senior investigating officers to be replaced. Members of the public were heckling police at press conferences. The Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, was being asked daily in the House of Commons what the government was doing to bring the killings to an end.
The government’s response, in late November 1980, was to assemble what was effectively a parallel investigation. Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson of West Yorkshire was made operational head of a new “super squad” that combined the West Yorkshire inquiry with input from Greater Manchester Police, Northumbria Police, and senior officers from elsewhere in the country. The structure was a tacit acknowledgement that the original investigation had failed. The arrest, when it came six weeks later, owed nothing to the super squad’s work.
Part Eight: The Arrest
On the evening of Friday 2 January 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring and Probationary Constable Robert Hydes of South Yorkshire Police were on routine patrol in the Broomhill district of Sheffield. They were not Yorkshire Ripper investigators. They were not looking for the killer. They were, in the standard way of patrol officers in red-light districts, looking for instances of soliciting and curb-crawling.
At approximately 10:50 p.m., they spotted a brown Rover 3500 parked in the driveway of a builder’s yard with a man and a woman in it. They approached the vehicle. The man identified himself as Peter Williams. The woman, Olivia Reivers, was a local sex worker known to Sergeant Ring. Ring checked the car’s number plates by radio. They came back as belonging to a different vehicle entirely — a Skoda. The plates were false. The man in the car was driving on stolen plates.
This is, in the standard account of the case, the moment of accidental rescue. South Yorkshire Police officers, not looking for a serial killer, stopped a man for a minor vehicle offence. The man — Peter Sutcliffe, who had been driving with the false plates because his Rover was unregistered and uninsured under his own name — would, in any standard procedural arrest, have been taken to the local police station for questioning on the plates and likely released within hours. What changed the outcome was a small additional decision by Sergeant Ring.
Before Ring escorted Sutcliffe to the patrol car, Sutcliffe asked permission to relieve himself. Ring gave him permission and watched, as best he could in the dark, the area into which Sutcliffe disappeared. Sutcliffe returned. He was placed in the patrol car and taken to Hammerton Road police station.
At the station, Sutcliffe gave the false name Peter Williams and was placed in a holding cell. By the early hours of the morning, the booking sergeant had run the false plates through the system and had begun to suspect that the man in his cell was more than an ordinary car thief. He noted Sutcliffe’s appearance — the height, the build, the dark beard — and compared it mentally with the various physical descriptions that had been circulated of the Yorkshire Ripper over the previous six years. He flagged it up the chain.
The decisive moment came the following morning, on 3 January 1981, when Sergeant Ring returned to the builder’s yard in Broomhill to check the spot where Sutcliffe had urinated the previous night. Behind a small oil tank, partially hidden in some shrubbery, Ring found a ball-peen hammer and a knife. The instruments matched the descriptions of the Yorkshire Ripper’s weapons. Within hours, West Yorkshire detectives had been called to Sheffield. Within twenty-four hours, Peter Sutcliffe had confessed.
The confessions, given over a sustained sixteen-hour interrogation conducted by Detective Inspector John Boyle and Detective Sergeant Peter Smith, covered all thirteen of the eventually charged murders and seven of the attempted murders. Sutcliffe gave the locations, the dates, the methods, the weapons. He gave details of the surviving victims’ injuries that only the attacker could have known. He gave a degree of cooperation that surprised his interrogators. The single thing he resisted, throughout the confessions and at trial and for the rest of his life, was the suggestion that his motives had been ordinary sexual sadism. He insisted, repeatedly and with detail that he had clearly been developing for some time, that he had been instructed to kill the women by the voice of God, which had spoken to him through a headstone at Bingley Cemetery in the 1960s and had told him to clean the streets of prostitutes.
The defence strategy at his trial would be built on this claim. So would the rest of his life.
Part Nine: The Trial
Peter Sutcliffe’s trial at the Old Bailey began on 5 May 1981 before Mr Justice Boreham. The prosecution was led by the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers. The defence was led by James Chadwin QC. The case turned almost entirely on a single legal question: was Sutcliffe guilty of murder, or of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility?
The defence position was that Sutcliffe was a paranoid schizophrenic who had been suffering from a profound mental illness throughout the period of the killings, and who had been driven by genuine auditory hallucinations of divine instruction. Four consultant psychiatrists gave evidence in support of this diagnosis: Hugo Milne, Malcolm MacCulloch, Terence Kay, and Duncan MacKay. All four had examined Sutcliffe at length while he was on remand at Armley Prison in Leeds, and all four had concluded that he met the diagnostic criteria for paranoid schizophrenia.
The prosecution position, which had originally been to accept the diminished responsibility plea on the basis of the psychiatric evidence, was forced to change at the last minute when Mr Justice Boreham — to the considerable surprise of both legal teams — refused to accept the joint position and insisted that the question of Sutcliffe’s mental state be put to a jury. The prosecution accordingly reorganised its case to argue that the diagnosis of schizophrenia was wrong, that Sutcliffe had constructed the divine-voices story strategically while on remand, and that the killings had been the work of a man with full criminal responsibility for what he had done.
The trial lasted fourteen working days. Sutcliffe gave evidence himself, sustaining his account of the voices through extensive cross-examination by Sir Michael Havers. The four defence psychiatrists were cross-examined in detail about the methodology of their diagnoses and about specific inconsistencies in Sutcliffe’s account. The prosecution’s most effective argument was perhaps the simplest: that Sutcliffe had selected his victims with care, planned his attacks with care, concealed evidence with care, evaded police questioning with care, and continued to do all of these things consistently across more than five years — none of which was consistent with the kind of psychotic compulsion the defence was describing.
On 22 May 1981, the jury rejected the diminished responsibility defence by a majority verdict of ten to two. Peter Sutcliffe was convicted of thirteen counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder. Mr Justice Boreham sentenced him to twenty concurrent life sentences with a recommended minimum tariff of thirty years. The High Court would later, in July 2010, impose a whole-life order, confirming that Sutcliffe would never be released.
The verdict was widely regarded at the time as a vindication of the prosecution’s late-stage reorganisation. The medical question, however, did not stay settled. In 1984, three years into his sentence at HMP Parkhurst, Sutcliffe was formally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by prison psychiatrists and was transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, the high-security psychiatric facility in Berkshire. He remained at Broadmoor for thirty-two years. He was eventually transferred back to ordinary prison conditions at HMP Frankland in County Durham in August 2016, after assessments that he no longer required psychiatric care.
The implication of this sequence — convicted as a murderer rather than as a manslaughter case in May 1981, then formally diagnosed schizophrenic and transferred to a psychiatric hospital three years later — is one of the unresolved oddities of the case. Either the jury had been wrong in 1981 and the original diagnosis had been correct, or the prison psychiatric service was diagnosing in 1984 a condition that had developed after the conviction, or the schizophrenia diagnosis itself had always been more contested than the headlines suggested. The most plausible reading is that Sutcliffe had a genuine but lesser psychiatric impairment, that the auditory hallucinations were probably real but were not the primary driver of the killings, and that the jury was substantially correct to find that whatever was wrong with him did not relieve him of responsibility for what he had done.
Part Ten: The Failures, Officially Reckoned With
In the immediate aftermath of Sutcliffe’s conviction, the Home Office commissioned a formal review of the investigation. The review was conducted by Sir Lawrence Byford, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, and was completed in December 1981. The Byford Report was, in the standard practice of the era, not released to the public. A sanitised summary was published. The full report remained classified until June 2006, when it was released in redacted form under freedom of information laws.
The full Byford Report, when it eventually emerged, was an unsparing document. It catalogued the operational failures of the West Yorkshire investigation in considerable detail. The two-tier framing of the victims was identified as a fundamental error that had distorted resource allocation from the early stages. The handling of the £5 note inquiry — the one investigative line that had brought Sutcliffe within sight of arrest in late 1977 — was described as inadequate. The handling of Andrew Laptew’s 1979 report on Sutcliffe was described as a serious lapse. The decision to accept the Wearside Jack tape as genuine was described as understandable in the immediate context but catastrophic in its consequences. The overall management of the inquiry under George Oldfield was described as having become, by 1979, “increasingly disordered.” Oldfield himself, by that point, had collapsed under the strain of the investigation and had been temporarily relieved of his duties. He died of cardiovascular disease in 1985, aged sixty.
The Byford Report also confirmed what victims’ families had suspected for years: that Sutcliffe had probably committed additional attacks before his confirmed murder campaign began in October 1975, and that some of the unsolved attacks on women that had been carried out across northern England in the late 1960s and early 1970s were likely to have been his work. The report identified at least nineteen further potential attacks. Sutcliffe himself, in interviews given after his conviction, hinted at additional crimes but never produced specific enough accounts to allow identification of victims.
The Byford Report’s most lasting effect, however, was not on the specific operational practices it identified — many of those had already been changed by 1981 — but on the wider question of how British policing approached crimes against women. The report’s analysis of the two-tier framing of victims, combined with the sustained campaigning of the Reclaim the Night movement and the work of feminist writers including Joan Smith (whose 1989 book Misogynies contains one of the most influential extended treatments of the Ripper case), entered the long process by which British police forces began, slowly and imperfectly, to revise their handling of violence against women and girls. The process is not complete. The Yorkshire Ripper case remains a benchmark against which subsequent failures are measured.
The formal apology came in 2020. On 13 November of that year, after Peter Sutcliffe’s death in hospital earlier the same day, Chief Constable John Robins of West Yorkshire Police issued a public statement acknowledging the historic failings of the investigation. The statement referenced specifically the “language and terminology” that had been used by senior officers about the victims, and offered what Robins called a “heartfelt apology” to the families. The apology had been requested for months by Richard McCann, the son of the first victim Wilma McCann, who had spent decades campaigning on the case. McCann had been five years old when his mother was killed in 1975. He was fifty in November 2020. He accepted the apology with what observers described as quiet dignity. He has continued, in the years since, to campaign for the case’s lessons to be properly absorbed by the institutions that need to absorb them.
Part Eleven: Sutcliffe in Custody
The forty years of Peter Sutcliffe’s incarceration were, by the standards of high-profile British prisoners, relatively uneventful. He spent most of them at Broadmoor Hospital, where he was held in conditions appropriate to his diagnosis. He was attacked by other patients on several occasions, most seriously in 1997 when a fellow patient stabbed him in both eyes with a Biro pen, leaving him blind in his left eye and with reduced sight in his right. He was reported to have engaged with various therapeutic programmes within Broadmoor with varying degrees of cooperation.
His marriage to Sonia Szurma was dissolved in 1994. Sonia, who had remained married to him through the trial and the early years of his imprisonment, eventually remarried and lived a quiet life in Bradford until her death in 2024. She had given no significant public interviews after the late 1980s and had consistently refused to engage with media coverage of the case.
In August 2016, after a series of psychiatric assessments, Sutcliffe was returned to ordinary prison conditions and transferred to HMP Frankland, a maximum-security men’s prison in County Durham. The transfer was opposed by victims’ families and by some commentators who argued that it represented a softening of the conditions of his confinement. The Home Office position was that the transfer was a clinical decision and that Sutcliffe remained subject to a whole-life order with no possibility of release.
He died at the University Hospital of North Durham on 13 November 2020, aged seventy-four. The cause of death was complications related to COVID-19 combined with pre-existing diabetes and heart problems. He had been receiving end-of-life care for several weeks. His remains were cremated at a private ceremony. His ashes were scattered at a location that has not been publicly disclosed.
There was, in the immediate response to his death, no national outpouring of relief or vindication. The reactions of victims’ families, as carried in the national press over the following days, were almost uniformly that his death was an irrelevance. He had been removed from the community in 1981. The damage he had done had been done. What he was or wasn’t doing in a hospital cell forty years later mattered very little to the people whose mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends he had killed.
Part Twelve: The Names That Matter
The murdered were thirteen women. The investigation, the press, and the popular memory of the case have, for more than four decades, sorted them into the two categories that the original investigation imposed: the “prostitutes” and the “innocents.” The categorisation was wrong then and it is wrong now. The thirteen women who died at Peter Sutcliffe’s hands were thirteen women. They had families. They had lives. Some of them were doing sex work, often in response to circumstances — broken marriages, financial pressure, the absence of any social safety net for women trying to raise children alone — that no reasonable society would have left them to navigate without help. None of them deserved what was done to them. The two-tier framing should never have been applied to them in life, and should not be applied to them now in memory.
Wilma McCann, twenty-eight, killed in Leeds on 30 October 1975. A mother of four young children. Her son Richard has spent his adult life campaigning for the recognition of his mother and the other early victims.
Emily Jackson, forty-two, killed in Leeds on 20 January 1976. A married woman from the Morley area.
Irene Richardson, twenty-eight, killed in Leeds on 6 February 1977. A mother of three.
Patricia “Tina” Atkinson, thirty-two, killed in Bradford on 23 April 1977. A Bradford woman who had been known affectionately in her local community as Tina.
Jayne MacDonald, sixteen, killed in Leeds on 26 June 1977. A shop assistant who had been walking home from a Saturday night in the city centre.
Jean Jordan, twenty-one, killed in Manchester on 1 October 1977. Originally from Inverness, Scotland.
Yvonne Pearson, twenty-one, killed in Bradford on 21 January 1978. A mother of two.
Helen Rytka, eighteen, killed in Huddersfield on 31 January 1978. The twin sister of Rita Rytka.
Vera Millward, forty, killed in Manchester on 16 May 1978. A mother of seven.
Josephine Whitaker, nineteen, killed in Halifax on 4 April 1979. A building society clerk.
Barbara Leach, twenty, killed in Bradford on 2 September 1979. A Bradford University student.
Marguerite Walls, forty-seven, killed in Leeds on 20 August 1980. A civil servant.
Jacqueline Hill, twenty, killed in Leeds on 17 November 1980. A Leeds University English student.
The survivors were at least seven women whose attacks Sutcliffe was convicted of — Anna Rogulskyj, Olive Smelt, Tracy Browne (whose attack in 1975 he confessed to but was never formally charged for), Marcella Claxton, Maureen Long, Marilyn Moore, Theresa Sykes, and others. Some of these women have spoken publicly about their experiences in the years since. Others have not. The injuries that Sutcliffe inflicted on them, including those who survived, were severe enough to require sustained medical treatment and in some cases to produce lifelong disability. Several of the survivors have campaigned for the police failures of the investigation to be properly acknowledged and for the women who were not believed at the time — particularly the sex workers whose evidence was discounted — to be retrospectively credited for the help they tried to give.
The Byford Report and subsequent reviews identified at least nineteen further potential attacks by Sutcliffe in addition to the twenty he was formally charged with. The total number of women who suffered direct physical violence at his hands across the 1969 to 1980 period is, in the most thorough estimates, somewhere between thirty and forty. The full extent of the harm he did is, in this respect, not fully knowable. What is knowable is the thirteen names above.
A Final Note
The Yorkshire Ripper case is, by some distance, the British criminal case of the second half of the twentieth century in which the failures of the investigating police were most directly responsible for the continuation of the killings. Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times by Yorkshire Ripper detectives during the active campaign. The £5 note inquiry brought him within sight of arrest in November 1977. Andrew Laptew’s 1979 report identified him as a serious suspect. The Wearside Jack tape, when accepted as authentic, gave the killer eighteen further months of operation during which he killed Whitaker, Leach, Walls, and Hill. The Byford Report’s conclusion that the case might have been solved as early as 1978 if the investigation had been conducted differently is not a counterfactual that the women who died after 1978 had any opportunity to take comfort from. They are dead because the investigation failed them.
The 2019 BBC Four documentary The Yorkshire Ripper Files, the 2023 ITV drama The Long Shadow (which dramatised the investigation from the perspective of the victims and their families rather than from the perspective of the killer or the detectives), and the sustained scholarly work on the case by Joan Smith, Liza Williams, and others have, over the past decade, begun the slow process of reframing the case in something closer to its appropriate terms. The story is not, as the popular memory of the 1980s tended to present it, the story of a brilliant evasive killer outwitting an overwhelmed police force. It is the story of an unexceptional man who killed thirteen women over six years while a police force that should have caught him much earlier failed to do so because of attitudes about which women’s deaths warranted urgent investigation and which did not.
Peter Sutcliffe died in 2020. John Humble, the hoaxer who helped him stay free for an additional eighteen months, died in 2019. George Oldfield, the senior detective whose acceptance of the hoax tape derailed the investigation, died in 1985. Sonia Sutcliffe died in 2024. Richard McCann, who was five years old when his mother became the first confirmed victim, is now in his fifties and continues to campaign. The case has, in the slow way of these things, begun to pass from active grief into history.
What it leaves behind is the thirteen names. Wilma McCann. Emily Jackson. Irene Richardson. Patricia Atkinson. Jayne MacDonald. Jean Jordan. Yvonne Pearson. Helen Rytka. Vera Millward. Josephine Whitaker. Barbara Leach. Marguerite Walls. Jacqueline Hill. And the survivors who carry, in many cases still, the physical and psychological injuries of having met Peter Sutcliffe and lived. They are who the case should always have been about. The categorisation of them as the “prostitutes” and the “innocents,” which dominated the 1970s coverage and which the original investigation built itself around, was an offence against all of them then. It would compound the offence to repeat it now. They were women. They were killed. The man who killed them was caught, eventually, by accident, by officers who were not looking for him, in a Sheffield builder’s yard, on the evening of 2 January 1981. That is, in any honest accounting, far too late.
