the times | Saturday November 14 2020 2GM 11News
but wasn’t bothered. I just wanted to kill a woman’
Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson told
reporters: “He has made it clear that he
hates prostitutes. Many people do. We
as a police force will continue to arrest
prostitutes. But the Ripper is now
killing innocent girls.”
At Sutcliffe’s trial, Sir Michael
Havers, the attorney-general, said of
the victims: “Some were prostitutes, but
perhaps the saddest part of the case is
that some were not. The last six attacks
were on totally respectable women.”
West Yorkshire police apologised for
those attitudes yesterday after Richard
McCann, whose mother, Wilma, 28,
was killed in October 1975, called on
them to “do the right thing”.
Mr McCann told Times Radio that
he had requested an apology from the
force on behalf of his and five other
families: “I’d like them to set the record
straight and say they were all innocent,
it’s long overdue.”
Talking to the BBC he added that he
wanted his mother “to be remembered
as the mother of four children, the
daughter of her parents,” he said.
“She was a family woman who,
through no fault of her own, was going
through adversity and made some bad
decisions, some risky decisions. She
paid for those decisions with her life.”
Wilma’s death was the first case
attributed to the Ripper but he had
attacked at least three other women
that year who had survived.
He would go on to kill Emily Jackson,he told the interviewing officer.
“Leading up to what?”
“The Yorkshire Ripper.”
“What about the Yorkshire Ripper?”
“Well, it’s me,” Sutcliffe admitted.
Despite confessing, Sutcliffe denied
murder at the Old Bailey in 1981.
It emerged that a deal was struck
between Sutcliffe’s defence and the
attorney-general, who accepted the
view of psychiatrists that Sutcliffe was a
paranoid schizophrenic.
The judge, Mr Justice Boreham,
rejected the argument because it was
based on what Sutcliffe had told
doctors and had not taken account of
his graphic confessions to police.
He insisted on a full jury trial at the
end of which Sutcliffe was convicted of
13 murders and seven attemptedsidetracked by an obsession with a man
dubbed Wearside Jack who sent letters
and, in June 1979, a tape recording to
Oldfield claiming to be the killer.
Mr Bridgestock, 68, recalled that for
Oldfield “nothing else mattered” but
finding Wearside Jack, who was
thought to be from the Castletown area
of Sunderland. One officer tried to say
Sutcliffe needed closer examination
but was “put in his place and warned he
could find himself back on the beat”.
In 2006 Jack was revealed to be John
Humble, who was jailed for eight years
for perverting the course of justice and
died last year aged 63. He was caught
when a cold case review recovered a
fragment of his DNA from one of the
three letters he sent to Oldfield.
Using DNA or automatic number
plate recognition were not available at
the time. Detectives did not even have
computers, although a consequence of
the case was the development of the
Holmes computer system for logging,
cross-referencing and interrogating
evidence in major investigations.
Mr Bridgestock said: “Oldfield broke
the golden rule that you never assume
anything, you let the evidence speak for
itself. Yet you can only work with what
you’ve got and in the 1970s we didn’t
have DNA or computers.
“Some people say Sutcliffe was a
clever killer to outwit the police. He
wasn’t clever, he was evil and brutal. He
just looked for lone females to attack.”murders. He was given 20 life sentences
with a recommendation that he serve a
minimum of 30 years.
The relief that Sutcliffe had been
caught, tried and convicted was
replaced by recrimination and
questions as it became clear chances to
detain him earlier had been missed.
Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times by
detectives and his cars had been logged
in red light areas on 60 occasions.
He was never eliminated as a suspect
but nor did senior police realise they
had evidence to make him the prime
suspect. All the information from the
inquiry investigation was recorded on
handwritten index cards and the
weight of the paper meant that a police
station floor had to be reinforced.
A review by Sir Lawrence Byford in
1982 condemned multiple failures by
West Yorkshire police but was not
published until 2006. Its findings were
scathing about “the ineffectiveness of
the major incident room”, which was
described as “a serious handicap to the
Ripper investigation”.
The report said: “While it should
have been the effective nerve centre of
the whole police operation, the backlog
of unprocessed information resulted in
the failure to connect vital pieces of
related information. This serious fault
in the central index system allowed
Peter Sutcliffe to continually slip
through the net.”
The investigation had been42, Irene Richardson, 28, Patricia
Atkinson, 32, Jayne MacDonald, 16,
Jean Jordan, 21, Yvonne Pearson, 22,
Helen Rytka, 18, Vera Millward, 41,
Josephine Whitaker, 19, Barbara Leach,
20, Marguerite Walls, 47, and
Jacqueline Hill, 20.
As the death toll grew so too did
pressure on West Yorkshire police.
After the body of his 13th victim was
found, behind the Arndale shopping
centre in Headingley, on November 17,
1980, Thatcher had to be talked out of
travelling to Leeds to take personal
charge of the investigation.
Fear of the Ripper was now being
matched by public anger at the failure
to catch him. There were three nights of
protests in Leeds under the banner
“Women Against Violence Against
Women”.
Forty-six days after the death of
Jacqueline Hill, Sutcliffe was in custody.
Police spotted a car in a red light area of
Sheffield with a man and a woman
inside. They found the car had been
fitted with stolen number plates.
Before his arrest Sutcliffe got out of
his car saying he needed to urinate
behind a building. The next day police
found he had hidden a knife, hammer
and rope there. At the police station a
second knife was hidden in a cistern.
Two days into questioning, with his
story about being in the red light area
falling apart, Sutcliffe confessed.
“I think you’ve been leading up to it,”The crimes of Sutcliffe, at court in 1981,
were claimed by Jack Humble, leftNews
GETTY IMAGESThe victims
- Yvonne Pearson, 22. Peter
Sutcliffe took her to waste ground at
the back of Drummond's mill in
Bradford. - Patricia Atkinson, 32, a mother of
three. Sutcliffe picked her up and
took her to a Bradford flat before
killing her. - Jacqueline Hill, 20, an English
student at Leeds University, was
Sutcliffe’s final victim. - Jayne MacDonald, 16, was killed
in a Leeds playground. She was a
shop assistant who had left school
and was Sutcliffe’s youngest victim. - Josephine Whitaker, 19, a
building society clerk, was
approached by Sutcliffe in a park. - Wilma
McCann, 28, a
mother of four.
Sutcliffe picked
her up in his car. - Helen Rytka,
- Sutcliffe took
her to a timber
yard before
killing her. - Marguerite
Walls, 47, was a
civil servant who
worked for the
Department of
Education and
Science. - Vera Millward,
41, a mother of
seven children. Sutcliffe had taken
her to the Manchester Royal
Infirmary. - Barbara Leach, 20, a university
student who was about to start her
third and final year in social
psychology. - Irene Richardson, 28. Sutcliffe
killed her when she stopped to go
to the toilet. - Emily Jackson, 42. She left
behind three children. Sutcliffe had
pretended that his car would not
start and killed her as she tried to
help. - Jean Jordan, 21, who was born in
Scotland, was killed in allotments
next to a cemetery in Manchester.
Peter Sutcliffe
on his wedding
day in 1974. The
killings began
a year later3 4
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