World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 2 - Peter Sutcliffe - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-On January the 2nd, 1981, two policemen approached a parked car on Melbourne Avenue
in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, to talk with the couple sitting in the front. The officers had no idea they were about to arrest
a man who'd murdered 13 women and evaded the authorities for over five years. -The relief that the man behind these horrible offenses
had finally been caught and was behind bars was immense. -Peter Sutcliffe, the man the press were calling
the Yorkshire Ripper, had a cold-blooded M.O. He was attacking helpless women with a hammer
before stabbing them to death with a screwdriver. -The streets became quieter and quieter
because on the horizon was this monster called the Yorkshire Ripper. -The whole of Britain was terrified
by the elusive murderer who seemed to kill for his own enjoyment. -Peter, in my opinion, was a ruthless,
coldhearted killer who actually enjoyed going out and killing. He got a thrill. He got a buzz.
-Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, had undoubtedly become one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Peter Sutcliffe is one of the most infamous killers in British history.
For five years, he evaded capture while brutally murdering 13 young women across the north of England.
It was an investigation with twists and turns and a case that still haunts the British public to this day.
-For years, women and girls felt that simply leaving their homes at night meant taking their lives in their hands.
-When Sutcliffe was eventually apprehended on January the 2nd, 1981, it brought an end to a manhunt
that had both terrified and captivated the nation. The press had dubbed him the Yorkshire Ripper.
For women, it was a very frightening time, and they were stuck in this awful position
of being told they shouldn't go out at night. It had an enormous social effect on the country.
-As well as his 13 victims, Sutcliffe had attacked at least seven more women. His arrest was a huge relief
for the under-pressure detectives at West Yorkshire Police. -And he attacked random.
We couldn't anticipate his moves. The whole of the north of England was held in a -- well, a grip of terror, really,
by this man. It was a sort of -- I can only describe it as a Gothic-type cloud over the area.
-But the Yorkshire Ripper's story begins over 70 years ago. Peter Sutcliffe was born on the 2nd of June, 1946,
in the market town of Bingley on the outskirts of Bradford, West Yorkshire. -He was the youngest of quite a large family.
His brothers and sisters were all of strong character. They were all working-class, could look after themselves,
but Peter was a shy boy and very much attached to his mother. -His mother was somebody who was very much dominated
and controlled by his father, so I think he had quite a lot of sympathy for his mum,
and he thought the world of her as a child, but Peter was somebody who was quite shy, quite awkward.
He was quite skinny and scrawny, and I don't think he ever lived up to his father's expectations,
and I think that planted that seed of shame in Peter Sutcliffe that would come to shape the rest of his life.
-Sutcliffe's awkward demeanor as a child manifested into a dysfunctional adulthood,
demonstrated in his early career choices. -Peter Sutcliffe had a variety of different jobs
throughout his life. He worked as a gravedigger for quite a period of time, and it was reported that he stole things from the corpses
that he was burying. Now, that suggests, to me, that he wasn't horrified or repulsed by dead bodies,
and that's something that would be quite influential later on. -On Valentine's Day, 1967,
21-year-old Sutcliffe met Sonia Szurma. The pair began a long-term relationship,
eventually getting married in August 1974. -The relationship that he had with his wife, Sonia,
appeared to have been a decent one, and I think he would have treated her fairly well
because she served a purpose for him. Women like his mother and his wife, he saw as carers and nurturers --
people who would look after him. Other women, I think, he saw somewhat differently.
I think Peter Sutcliffe's view of women is very black-and-white. They are either Madonnas, or they are whores,
so they're either these perfect domestic angels, or they're these sinful creatures.
-These opposing views on women collided with one another when a family revelation dramatically altered
23-year-old Sutcliffe's world. His mother, whom he'd looked up to as a child, had been unfaithful.
-His mother had had an affair with a policeman, and his father had decided to confront his wife
at a hotel where she was meeting this particular man and took Peter with him. -Peter's father basically humiliated her and said,
"Look. You know, I know all about what's going on, and the children found out, as well."
So I think this kind of further cemented ideas as to what women were, what could be expected of them,
always to be cautious and wary of them. -I think there is every possibility that after seeing his mother and seeing what happened,
that that possibly preyed on his mind and affected his attitude towards women. -Sutcliffe began to visit
the red-light districts of Yorkshire and find solace in prostitutes, but his feelings for these women
would soon lead to violence and eventually murder. -It's never been established precisely when Peter started his attacks.
The first recorded one, or the first known one, was sometime in 1969 when he was with a friend called Trevor Birdsong,
and Peter told Trevor that he was looking for a particular prostitute who owed him money,
and they cruised Leeds, and Peter told Trevor to suddenly stop the car. -He jumped out of the car, suddenly disappeared,
followed her down the street, and whacked her on the back of the head, and then ran sweating back to the car and away.
The following day, the police came around and confronted Sutcliffe. He acknowledged that he'd struck the woman.
He said he'd just given her a light blow with a hand, and because the woman was working as a prostitute,
she didn't want any more problems with the police, and so she didn't go ahead with a complaint.
Had he been arrested then, had he been listed as somebody attacking a woman in this aggressive way,
who knows whether or not it would have been much easier to find him. -Whether their were other attacks
between 1969 and 1975, nobody really knows, but his first real attack came in 1975.
-By October of that year, Sutcliffe was living with his wife, Sonia, in Bradford
and working as a long-distance lorry driver. On the morning of October the 30th, 1975,
just 12 miles away in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, the body of 28-year-old Wilma McCann
was discovered in a local park. -Wilma McCann was a Scottish woman who had come down to Yorkshire.
She was working as a prostitute. She was very hard up, and it was very difficult for her
because she had young children, young family, to support, and I think that was the only way she felt
she could get enough money. -The attack on Wilma McCann set in motion what would become a clear pattern
and regular method of ambush by the killer. -His modus operandi was to use a ball-peen hammer
and was to strike them very hard and very fast on the back of the head so they fell unconscious.
He used his hammer and hit her over the back of the head, and then he stabbed her 15 times in the neck, chest, and abdomen.
-But the police were no closer to catching the killer, and three months later, on the 20th of January, 1976,
another woman was murdered in Leeds -- 42-year-old wife and mother Emily Jackson
who'd vanished after a night out at her local pub. Emily's son, Neil, was 17 years old at the time.
He remembers receiving the tragic news on that fateful morning. -I've come downstairs.
My dad's loading one of the vans up for work, and I'm getting my boots on ready for going to work,
and having a pot of tea when there was a knock at the door, and it was the police,
and that's when I first knew -- first knew when life was over for Dad when the police knocked at the door.
I can still remember it plain as day. -Again, a hammer had been used in the brutal attack.
Emily had also been stabbed a total of 52 times with a screwdriver. Like Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson had been
working as a prostitute to make ends meet. -It was just to help a family in dire straits
is what I've been told afterwards. When family were at work, why, she went elsewhere,
but I didn't realize 'til well after. -This time, police were able to recover from the scene
a key piece of evidence. On Emily's right thigh was a very firm and visible footprint
from a size-7 Wellington boot. -For some inexplicable reason, he stamped on her thigh with such force
that it left an imprint of the sole of his boot on her thigh. Our police tried to trace that boot,
or the manufacturers of the boot, which they did, and then try and find out people who had bought them,
but it didn't come to anything. -Once again, the trail went cold. It was over a year until a murder
with a familiar M.O. took place in Leeds. On the morning of February the 4th, 1977,
the body of 28-year-old Irene Richardson was discovered. She'd been savagely murdered --
another prostitute killed with a hammer. West Yorkshire police were suddenly dealing
with a serial killer. What they didn't realize is that this was just the beginning
of what would become one of the most infamous series of murders in British history.
Less than three months after the death of a third victim, Irene Richardson, the killer struck again.
On the night of the 23rd of April, 1977, 32-year-old prostitute Patricia Atkinson
became victim number 4. She was murdered in her own flat, this time not in Leeds, but in nearby Bradford.
-She believed that if she invited customers into her flat, she was safe because all the killings had taken place
in isolated parks or back alleys. So she thought she was safe, but she wasn't. -The killer hit Patricia four times around the head
with a hammer and then mutilated her body with a knife. This time, detectives found a clue to link the murders
of Patricia Atkinson and Emily Jackson. -The police found the same boot mark on the bedclothes
at Patricia's house -- Patricia's flat -- as they had found on Emily Jackson's thigh.
-This crucial link confirmed the authorities' worst fears -- the killer was expanding his hunting ground,
and he seemed to have a favored target. All four murder victims had been working as prostitutes.
-They were very vulnerable women. It was very easy to persuade them to get into a car.
It was very easy to find them, and they were used to not being protected in any way,
and so he would be able to drive along, ask them if they were up for business, and they would get into the car.
And he realized then that as long as there was nobody watching what was going on,
he could do what he liked. -But the next victim would buck the trend and shock the nation.
On the morning of the 26th of June, 1977, just over two months after the murder of Patricia Atkinson,
two children in an adventure playground made a gruesome discovery -- the body of 16-year-old girl Jayne McDonald.
-She wasn't a prostitute. She was a young girl going home, minding her own business.
But suddenly a schoolgirl was attacked, and that changed everybody's perception of the sort of man they were looking for.
-By this stage, if it was a woman who was vulnerable, he was happy to kill them.
-Any woman was vulnerable if they were found on the streets late at night. -This latest kill caused a great public outcry.
Now courtesy of the tabloid press, the killer had a nickname -- the Yorkshire Ripper.
-After Jayne McDonald's murder, the press then, and television, actually, became more interested in what was happening.
-You have to remember that nothing had happened like this since the Jack the Ripper in London in the century before.
-What did become clear was the attitude of that time because she was described in some newspapers
as his first innocent victim -- as though, in some ways, the prostitutes had been guilty
of making themselves vulnerable to him. It caused a lot of anger amongst women, amongst feminists,
and amongst any commentator with a heart. She was a victim who prompted the police
to work much harder than, I think, they had been working at the time. -What this did in the public mind
was actually create mass fear. There was a great deal of fear, and as the killings went on and the attacks went on,
that fear increased on a monumental basis. Women were frightened of going out at night.
Women questioned where their husbands were, boyfriends were, what they were doing
when a particular attack had taken place, and they, perhaps, weren't where they said they had been.
-The increased media attention in the case intensified the ongoing suffering of the victims' loved ones.
-It was forced everywhere. It don't matter where you went. Papers, TV, buses, back ads --
It was advertised everywhere. There were no way you could get away from it. It made it harder for me, just seeing photo of Mum
and being not there to talk to her. -With a full-scale manhunt now taking place,
West Yorkshire police were desperate to capture the Ripper before he struck again,
but he was seemingly always one step ahead. His next murder would take place across the Pennines.
On the morning of the 9th of October, 1977, the heavily mutilated body of 20-year-old prostitute Jean Jordan
was discovered on an allotment in Manchester. She had been dead for over a week.
This time, detectives found an important clue -- a newly minted £5 note in Jean's handbag
which led them to a 31-year-old lorry driver from Bradford, Peter Sutcliffe. -The police found the £5 note.
They traced it via the banks and found that it had gone through the hands of, probably, 300 people,
one of them being Peter. Peter was interviewed, but on the night in question, he said he was at a party,
and his members of his family confirmed that he had been at the party. -The police didn't know it, but they had found the murderer.
It would not be the last time Peter Sutcliffe slipped through the fingers of the authorities.
Between December 1977 and May 1978, he would kill three more women, all of them prostitutes,
all of them bludgeoned to death with a hammer. -I think that the longer that serial killers get away with it,
the more bold and the more, kind of, dramatic their offending becomes and the more prolific they become
because they've been flying under the radar for so long. They may have even been interviewed by the police
and subsequently not charged with anything. Then you get to the point where they feel completely untouchable.
-On December the 14th, 1977, one woman survived an attack by the Ripper -- 25-year-old prostitute Marilyn Moore.
She described her assailant in detail to the police, and a photo-fit picture was released.
By May 1978, West Yorkshire police had interviewed Sutcliffe on seven different occasions
but continually ruled him out of the investigation. Lead detective George Oldfield's attention
had been diverted elsewhere. -I'm Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me.
I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord. You are no nearer catching me now
than four years ago when I started. -What really derailed the investigation -- well, largely derailed the investigation --
was a tape from a chap in the northeast from Wearside who sent George Oldfield a tape,
which became known as "Wearside Jack's tape," in which he said, "You haven't caught me.
You've been looking for four years," and really taunting the police. -He mocked George Oldfield and said,
"Your men are not doing very well. I've done another one, and you still haven't caught me."
And, you know, the Geordie accent or Wearside accent -- and as a result of that,
the police discounted people like Peter Sutcliffe. -It had been almost a year since Sutcliffe had struck,
but early on the morning of the 5th of April, 1979, a woman discovered the mutilated and bloodied body
of his 10th victim, 19-year-old building society worker Josephine Whitaker in Halifax.
The Yorkshire Ripper's 322-day hiatus had come to a devastating end. In August 1979,
West Yorkshire police would pay another visit to Sutcliffe's house in Garden Lane, Bradford.
Officer Andrew Laptew will never forget the day he stood face-to-face with the Yorkshire Ripper.
-The reason for going to see Sutcliffe was because his vehicle had been sighted in three red-light areas --
in Leeds, in Bradford, and in Manchester. Talking to Sutcliffe was like pulling teeth.
You'd say to him, "What do you do for a living?" "I'm a driver." "Where do you work?"
"Oh, Clarke's at Shipley." He wouldn't volunteer any information without it being asked from him,
and one of our ploys -- tactic, if you like, an icebreaker -- was to say to the wife,
"Now's your chance to get rid of your husband if you want." Now, said jokingly, but it was an icebreaker
to put everybody at their ease. With the Sutcliffes, there was no reaction whatsoever,
which I found strange 'cause at least you'd get a smirk or a laugh. He was quite an attractive man, you know, well-groomed,
but had no personality, no charisma about him whatsoever, no aura. There was nothing there.
-Laptew felt so uneasy about his encounter with Sutcliffe, he submitted a report to his senior officers
suggesting Sutcliffe needed to be investigated further. Laptew was within striking distance
of the force's most wanted. -I had the report typed up, and I says, "I've interviewed this fellow.
I don't like him." I says, "I've got a really bad feeling about this. It's an itch that I can't scratch."
Anything to do with the case was attached to the report, and I went directly to Dick Holland
in the incident room. -He put in a report to his senior officers that Peter was a person who should be of interest,
someone who should be looked at closely, and one of the key things that Mr. Laptew noticed
was that Peter had a gap in his two front teeth, and this, he felt, could mark up, or marry up,
with bite marks found on two of the victims. -He asked me if it was a Geordie. I says, "No, he's from Bradford. He's from around these parts."
I says, "but it's a dead ringer for the Marilyn Moore photo-fit," and then he hit the roof.
"If anybody mentions effing photo-fits to me, they'll be doing traffic for the rest of their service."
It wasn't so bad that I had the report rejected. It was the manner of the rejection
in front of about 50 people, so I could have crawled into the crack in the door after that tirade,
but you've got to remember, these fellows were like gods. That's how much in high esteem we held them.
-The senior detectives on the Ripper case were so convinced that the killer was the mysterious Wearside Jack
that they dismissed any other suspects. It was a mistake that would soon lead to the deaths
of three more women across West Yorkshire. -Police threw all their eggs into one basket
and discounted a lot of others and spent many, many man hours, days, weeks trying to track down Wearside Jack,
and that threw the whole investigation into kilter. It really did derail it. -He'd had many escapes -- Peter Sutcliffe --
during the investigation. He was interviewed a total of nine occasions. He lied his way out on every occasion,
and he was a very good liar. He always had quite a clever excuse as to why he had been somewhere.
He had the perfect alibi because he was a long-distance lorry driver, so he had a perfect excuse to be in different places
at odd times of the day or night. -I think Peter Sutcliffe was rather amused by what was going on in terms of the manhunt for him.
He'd been questioned by the police several times. He was right under their nose on multiple occasions,
and even Peter Sutcliffe himself has said, "I got to the point where I thought I must be invisible."
So he got to a stage where he felt untouchable. He felt so powerful. He thought that he was never going to get caught.
-As the police were trying to trace Wearside Jack, Peter then started killing again,
and in September 1979, he attacked a young Bradford University student called Barbara Leach.
-20-year-old Barbara was found murdered on September the 2nd, 1979, in Back Ashgrove, Bradford,
only 200 yards from where she said goodbye to her friends after a night out. The women of West Yorkshire
and the surrounding area were living in fear. Prostitutes were particularly in danger.
8 of the 11 victims had been working on the streets. -They were all very, very frightened.
They needed to keep working, but there was always this fear that the next man, the next client,
could be the Yorkshire Ripper. -He created fear and terror on the streets of West Yorkshire and Lancashire.
He was somebody who was striking at night. Nobody knew where he'd strike next. He was absolutely terrifying for people.
-The mood across the U.K. as a whole was stifled and tense, awaiting the next move from the man the public knew
only as the Ripper. -We'd never had anything like it. The media coverage was overwhelming about it,
so wherever you were, there was always something about the case -- that a million pounds worth of publicity,
with the hoaxer's handwriting on billboards, rewards were offered. It was a massive, massively intensive campaign, really,
both from a police point of view and a media point of view, and it saturated your whole life.
-The problem for the police was the days of before computers, and police, in those days,
would log information on index cards. Because of the notoriety of the attacks and the publicity,
the police were inundated with information. The had boxes and boxes and boxes full of index cards,
which filled an enormous room in West Yorkshire Police Headquarters. -There's been undue criticism of the police
who made every move with the best intention with the information that they had. You cannot sort of anticipate
what a murderer is gonna do at random. All the stops were pulled out because all the police wanted
from the top to the bottom was for this man to be captured so we could get back to normal, everyday policing.
-For almost a year, there were no more attacks until the body of 47-year-old civil servant Marguerite Walls
was discovered in Leeds on the 20th of August, 1980. She'd been hit on the back of the head,
and in a change to the usual method of the Ripper, she had also been strangled. -Ligature strangulation marks are often very characteristic.
The ligature will compress the neck. It will often graze it just a little bit, and when the person dies,
that area of the ligature mark will go quite yellow, quite hard, and it's usually very characteristic --
something that will be identified very quickly. -Now, why he changed his modus operandi,
nobody seems to know. -Marguerite Walls was Sutcliffe's 12th victim, but police were still no nearer to catching him.
A month later, in September 1980, 20-year-old student Mo Lea moved from Liverpool to Leeds to complete her degree.
She immediately felt the change in atmosphere, having arrived in the Ripper's home county.
-So in 1980, I'd just completed a foundation degree in art and design from Liverpool,
so I ended up going to Leeds to do a fine-art degree, but there was a strange atmosphere there.
The streets became quieter and quieter because on the horizon was this monster called the Yorkshire Ripper.
There'd be another murder, and it'd be closer to home, and we began to realize that, as women going out alone,
we were pretty vulnerable. -Despite the continued rise in fear across the county,
Mo and her friends felt an increased sense of unity against the unknown assailant.
-There was a curfew almost on women going out alone. There was that solidarity amongst the women
and female friends, and the blokes, as well, that they'd make sure that they would walk you home.
-Mo and her fellow students were an independent group who tried as hard as they could to be unaffected
by the events around them. But this would all change on October the 25th, 1980. -I had planned to go into the town center of Leeds
to meet a group of friends from art school, and I left that pub. I think it was about quarter to 10:00, 10:00.
My friends were saying, "Oh, we'll walk you into town," and, "Are you gonna be all right?"
And I -- "For goodness sake," you know, "I'm absolutely fine. It's not far." I got to the outskirts of the campus,
and there's a church, and you can either take the long way around or you can go through a shortcut street.
I made a decision that it would be much easier for me to go through that shortcut and get into town
so I could get home safely. -But Mo was not alone. -It was fairly dark, and as I was halfway through,
I heard this voice calling to me. So I stopped, and I turn 'round, and I walk towards this figure,
and it was a young man. I thought, "Maybe I do know him." He was so friendly, so friendly.
-But Mo was wrong. He was not a friend or even a kindly stranger. -So I realized I didn't know this chap,
and then I realized I was in danger. I just sensed this, and as soon as I started to run really quickly,
his footsteps were behind me getting quicker and quicker and quicker, and the fear -- my knees turned to jelly.
And all I remember was getting this massive whack on the top of my head, and I saw the ground come up towards me,
and that was all that I remember. But it was real fear -- like, nightmare, deep, deep fear.
I've never been frightened before like that ever or since. -Fortunately, Mo's attacker was disturbed
when a group of students approached after hearing her screams. The next thing Mo knew, she was waking up in hospital.
-I was pretty lucky. I think my bones are pretty strong, so the blow to the top of the head
has left quite a large dent and crack in my skull. I had two puncture wounds to the back of my --
top of my neck, just below my skull, and cuts and bruises on my knees and elbows
where I'd fallen to the floor. -The police could not be sure the attack on Mo Lea
was carried out by the Ripper, but they wouldn't have to wait long before he claimed his 13th victim.
On the 17th of November, 1980, in Leeds, Jacqueline Hill, a 20-year-old student,
was hit over the head, stabbed repeatedly, and mutilated -- an attack that bore all the hallmarks of the Ripper.
But Jacqueline Hill would be Peter Sutcliffe's final victim. Within two months, a routine police stop would lead
to one of the most sensational arrests of modern times -- the capture of the Yorkshire Ripper.
-Just after New Year on January 2nd, 1981, Peter went to Sheffield and picked up a prostitute.
On the same evening, a policeman with a lot of years of service decided to show a young rookie around Sheffield.
-The two police officers spotted Sutcliffe's car near offices on Melbourne Avenue
in Sheffield's red-light district. They decided to approach and talk to the pair.
-The cops asked, "What's your girlfriend's name?" He said, "I don't know. We've only just met."
And the policeman said, you know, "I haven't just fallen off a Christmas tree," so he already realized there was something odd going on.
-Peter said that he needed to urinate, and the officers let him go up to a wall by the side of the building.
While he was away, the young police officer did a PNC check on the registration of the car
and found that the plates were false, so Peter was arrested and taken to Dewsbury Police Station.
-Once down at the station, Sutcliffe was searched. He wasn't carrying any weapons, but this time detectives
weren't going to let him slip from their grasp. -So one of them thought, "Let's go back to that place
where we spotted him, and let's see if he did leave anything when he popped out of the car
saying he was going to have a pee." -The police returned to the scene of the original arrest.
-They found the hammer -- the intended murder weapon -- and they came back with them.
And gradually after that, Peter Sutcliffe realized that the game was up, and eventually he confessed,
and his only condition was that he be allowed to tell his wife, Sonia, before it became known to the general public
that he was indeed the Yorkshire Ripper. -It had been over five years since the murder of Wilma McCann,
but detectives finally had the Ripper in custody. All the years of terror for women in West Yorkshire,
all the years of frustration for the police, had come to an abrupt end. Andrew Laptew had suspected Sutcliffe may be the Ripper
for the previous two years. He vividly remembers the moment a fellow officer told him the incredible news.
-She came in and says, "They've caught the Yorkshire Ripper." I says, "What? Really? Who was it?"
And she said, "Somebody called Peter Sutcliffe." Well, it was like somebody punching me
in the chest from the inside. The bottom had fallen out of my world. -Sutcliffe's arrest made headlines across the country.
-He is being questioned in relation to the Yorkshire Ripper murders. We are absolutely delighted with developments at this stage.
-When Peter was caught, the press was all over it. At the time, it was probably one of the biggest stories
since the Moors murders. The capture of Peter was front-page headlines and on top of the news for days,
not only in Britain, but around the world. -His arrest was greeted with enormous relief.
For six years, this man had terrorized a large portion of the country. The relief that the man behind these horrible offenses
had finally been caught and was behind bars was immense, and that shadow that he cast over the country
for those number of years passed. -I think when he was finally apprehended, he would have felt a sense of resignation that this was over,
that he wouldn't be able to commit any more murders, but I think he probably would've been a bit shocked, as well,
'cause he'd been getting away with it for so long, that he thought he'd just be able
to talk his way out of it again. -A wave of relief spread across the country, but the announcement came as a shock
to the family members of those killed. -I'd seen on the telly when he got caught,
and at first, I couldn't believe it. When I started listening to it properly and realizing,
then I got confirmation all over the place. A bit of a relief to see that he had been caught.
People felt a bit safer. -Another viewer intently watching the story unfold was Mo Lea.
-I was at home in Liverpool, and his face appeared on the TV news. It was when he was actually taken from a prison van
into a courts, and there was really a good camera shot, and I recognized his face and his eyes.
I actually fell to my knees. I was alone at home. It was the 6:00 news. I thought, "That's the man I chatted to."
Then I was really horrified because it dawned on me that he had attacked me, so that was my first real understanding that,
for sure, it was Peter Sutcliffe. -On the 5th of January, 1981, at Dewsbury Magistrate's Court,
Sutcliffe was remanded in custody for the murder of Jacqueline Hill. Later, on the 20th of February,
he was charged with all 13 murders and a further 7 attempted murders. -Once he'd been charged, I think Peter Sutcliffe felt
that he had a chance of not going to prison but of claiming to be mad and, therefore, going to a secure hospital
where life would be much easier for him, and so he emphasized the fact that he believed
God had instructed him to clear the streets and that it had been the devil -- a devilish urge had made him carry these things out.
-The preliminary hearing began on the 29th of April, 1981, at the Old Bailey in London.
Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
-The trial judge at that particular hearing heard evidence from four psychiatrists --
two for the prosecution and two for the defense. -The judge stepped in and said, "We need to be careful here
because whilst I don't disagree with these psychiatrists, they're only going on what Peter Sutcliffe has told them,
so we need to be very careful about accepting the word of a multiple murderer." -Mr. Justice Boreham decided at the end of it
that Peter should stand trial in front of a jury on the charges of murder and attempted murder,
and that's what happened. -The trial began on May the 5th, 1981. -The crowds had waited for hours,
some through the night, to watch Peter Sutcliffe arrive from Brixton in a green prison van.
-The 14-day trial was essentially a discussion about whether Peter Sutcliffe was,
as judge Mr. Justice Boreham put it, "bad or mad." On May the 22nd, the jury had reached their decision.
-As each of the 13 women's names was read out, the answer was the same -- by majority of 10 to 2, guilty of murder on all charges.
-This seals the end of the largest murder inquiry in the history of the British police,
and we brought it to a satisfactory conclusion. -I think when you look at Peter Sutcliffe's offending behavior,
he's somebody who's very much in control of what he's doing. Yes, his crimes are quite bloody, quite gory.
They're incredibly violent. But he escapes. He gets away with it. He picks up again where he left off.
He goes prepared to the crime scene. So he's somebody who knows what he's doing.
He knows what he's doing is wrong, and yet, he's still continuing to do it. -On the 22nd of May, 1981,
Mr. Justice Boreham sentenced Peter Sutcliffe to 20 life sentences and a minimum of 30 years imprisonment
before being considered for parole. He was immediately sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight.
Despite being declared sane at his trial, in 1984, Sutcliffe was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia
and transferred to Broadmoor Secure Hospital in Berkshire. -There's a real difference between prison
and secure hospital, so prison is a place for prisoners, for offenders. Secure hospitals are a place
for people who are ill who need treatment. A lot of people speculate that his paranoid schizophrenia
was something that actually developed in prison. He was somebody who was vulnerable to this anyway,
but because of the stress of the circumstances of being in prison, it triggered the symptoms in him.
-In 2010, a High Court judge ruled that Sutcliffe's sentence should be increased to a whole-life tariff,
meaning he'll never be released from prison. And in 2016, Sutcliffe was moved out of Broadmoor
and back into prison at Frankland in County Durham. He is, without doubt, one of the most infamous murderers in the U.K.
-Britain is not a country which has a reputation for serial killers. I think that's why it grabbed the public's attention
to the degree that it did. -30 years after Peter Sutcliffe's killing spree, the world is very different -- very, very different.
You don't see people walking about in the way that they did 30, 40 years ago. Nowadays, everybody's very cautious.
Everybody's worried. -I think Peter Sutcliffe has become this kind of iconic figure, this kind of criminal celebrity,
and I think we need to be a bit cautious about that. We're gonna lose sight of the victims --
the people whose lives were lost in his killing spree. It's become more about him than it has about them now.
-Sutcliffe's legacy casts a deathly shadow over the lives he took and the lives he left behind.
-Peter Sutcliffe is never far from the headlines, you know? Barely a few months go past
without some mention of him in a national newspaper, and he is a notorious figure.
-In the years since his conviction, Sutcliffe has admitted carrying out a collection of other attacks on women,
including two back in 1975 before his first murder -- Anna Rogulskyj and Olive Smelt.
He's never admitted to the attack on Mo Lea. -Would it make any difference if Peter Sutcliffe confessed that he had attacked me?
It just seems so, so unlikely. I've had to learn to live with the fact that that will never happen.
-I just wish she were here 'cause I had some good, happy times with my mum. I just wish she were here.
It breaks my heart knowing my son and my grandson don't see her. -Since his incarceration over 35 years ago,
Sutcliffe has talked many times about his killing spree, regularly taking the opportunity to seize the limelight,
but he's still yet to give a reason for the brutal attacks. -Peter, in my opinion, was a ruthless,
coldhearted killer who actually enjoyed going out and killing. He got a thrill. He got a buzz.
Why he did it, only he knows. He's never actually given a proper explanation. He's never given a cogent reason
for killing in the manner that he did. -We may never know how many people Sutcliffe attacked or why he did it,
but we can be sure no woman who crossed his path was safe. His reign of terror shocked the world
as he evaded capture for over five years. The cold-blooded and brutal manner in which he murdered 13 helpless women
is why the name Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, continues to haunt the British public to this day.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Peter Sutcliffe, also known as The Yorkshire Ripper, was convicted of killing thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

The episode details Peter Sutcliffe's murders, arrest, and the societal fear he instigated as the Yorkshire Ripper.

Key points

The Yorkshire Ripper's Capture. On January 2nd, 1981, Peter Sutcliffe was arrested after evading authorities for over five years.
The Brutality of Sutcliffe's Crimes. Sutcliffe's modus operandi involved attacking women with a hammer and stabbing them to death.
Fear Grips Britain. The Yorkshire Ripper's reign of terror left women afraid to go out at night.
A Shift in Victims. The murder of 16-year-old Jayne McDonald shocked the nation, changing perceptions of the killer.
Peter Sutcliffe's Evasion. Sutcliffe felt untouchable, claiming he was invisible to the police.
The Attack on Mo Lea. Mo Lea's harrowing encounter with a stranger in Leeds left her terrified.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He got a thrill. He got a buzz.

1:09WatchJul 8, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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