Between 1975 and 1984, police in Northern England conducted a massive investigation for a serial killer of prostitutes. Dubbed the "Yorkshire Ripper" in reference to London's infamous nineteenth-century slayer, the suspect proved elusive. Bludgeoned and mutilated corpses kept being found. As the body count climbed to thirteen, false leads--including taunting letters sent to newspapers and police--diverted investigators from their real prey: a mild-mannered, 34-year old former grave digger, Peter Sutcliffe. By sheer chance, police arrested Sutcliffe as he was in the act of soliciting a prostitute to be his fourteenth victim. He said that God had ordered the killings.
Born on June 2, 1946, Sutcliffe was the first of six children to John and Kathleen Sutcliffe. They lived in Bingley, a small town just north of Bradford. Shy and bullied at school, the boy feared his burly, extroverted father and preferred the company of his mother. His inability to hold a job troubled his family, as he bounced from mill to factory work before settling into a job as gravedigger in the Bingley Cemetery.
Yet there was a secret life. Outwardly a moralizer who condemned improper behavior, Sutcliffe became a frequent customer of prostitutes. A sign of worse to come, he told his friend Trevor Birdsall about attempting to hit a prostitute with a brick hidden in a sock. At the cemetery, he unnerved a co-worker by playing with the corpses.
In his late twenties, Sutcliffe's violence came unleashed. Marrying his longtime girlfriend in 1974 and becoming a truck driver, he appeared to settle into a life of married responsibility but then the attacks began. He assaulted two women in the summer of 1975. They escaped, but the third, a 28-year old prostitute, was smashed to death with a hammer and then mutilated with a knife. Thus emerged his pattern for the next nine years: killing and disfiguring with tools like hammers and screwdrivers. Like many serial killers, he took care to arrange his victims so that they would be noticed.
As the press made comparisons to Jack the Ripper, police worked for years to follow numerous leads. Sutcliffe's friend Birdsall reported him as a suspect. But police overlooked him, partly due to a hoax: letters and even a tape recording by someone claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper had thrown them off the scent. On January 2, 1981, Sutcliffe was apprehended in Sheffield with a prostitute, and, a short time later, police found his knife and hammer near the scene. In custody, he confessed, claiming to have heard the voice of God speaking from a tombstone in the cemetery, instructing him to murder.
Failing to convince a court of insanity, Sutcliffe was convicted of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. A judge sentenced him to life in prison, and so began Sutcliffe's transformation from victimizer to victim. A series of well-publicized attacks culminated in his being stabbed by another inmate in both eyes in 1997. He survived.
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