The Ripper went to ground. It was nearly a year before he killed again, with a temporary change in method.
He was driving through Farsley, a district of Pudsey between Leeds and Bradford, when he saw walking towards him Miss Marguerite Walls, a 47-year-old executive officer at the local Department of Education and Science. She was going on holiday and had been working late. It was late in the evening, about 10.45 p.m., on 20 August 1980. Sutcliffe was already in a rage, heading for Liverpool with the intention of killing a prostitute. Miss Walls happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sutcliffe parked the car, went after her and struck her on the head. As he did so he shouted out, ‘You filthy prostitute.’ Bloodstains were found by the gateway of the house where she was attacked. Sutcliffe dragged her into the driveway, across a rockery and into a wooded area where he strangled her. He stripped her body naked except for her tights and hid it under some grass cuttings where it was discovered the next day after her shoes were found by the driveway and, near the rockery, her skirt, shopping bag and cheque book. It was his twelfth killing.
The change of method caused the police to rule out any connection between this and the other murders. Not until Sutcliffe confessed to it some five months later were they aware of the link. Even then he was reluctant to admit to it, fearing that it could open up completely new lines of inquiry on other murders which he hadn’t done, including one at Preston that had already been wrongly attributed to him.
Asked why he had changed his method of killing, Sutcliffe said that it was because of the stigma that had been attached to him. He added that he did not like strangulation because that way his victim took too long to die. Clearly he did not abandon it, however, since a length of cord was found in his pocket when he was arrested.
Just over a month elapsed before he struck again. Dr Uphadya Bandara was on a year’s scholarship at Leeds University’s Nuffield Centre. On 24 September 1980 she was walking home when she heard footsteps behind her and she moved to one side to let the person pass. Next thing she knew, a bearded man had slipped a rope about her neck and she was struggling to prise it free. She lost consciousness. When she regained her senses a policeman was standing over her. Sutcliffe hadn’t had time to finish her off.
Although a link was established between this attack and the murder of Marguerite Walls, neither was seen as part of the Ripper attacks. Nor was the next one, this time on bonfire night, 5 November, when he attacked sixteen-year-old Theresa Sykes only thirty yards from her home in Huddersfield. She had gone to buy some cigarettes and was on her way back when Sutcliffe struck. Asked why he had picked her Sutcliffe could only reply, ‘I think something clicked because she had on a straight skirt with a slit in it. She crossed the road in front of me.’ As the girl fell screaming to the ground Sutcliffe struck again at her unprotected head. She tried to grab at the weapon but already her screams had been heard by her boyfriend who came racing out into the street. Fast as he was, Sutcliffe was faster. It was the nearest he came to being caught. He escaped by hiding in a front garden until the boyfriend went back to the injured girl.
He murdered his last victim, number thirteen, on 17 November 1980. Jacqueline Hill was a trainee probation officer planning to become a full-time one when she left Leeds University. She was walking back to her hall of residence in Headingley, having been to a seminar, when Sutcliffe, who had just got off a bus, saw her at about 9.30 p.m. He attacked her with his ball pin hammer just as a car appeared. He threw himself to the ground as it passed by, and surprisingly was not seen. Jacqueline Hill was still alive and moving about so he struck her again before dragging her fifty yards onto some waste ground, tearing off her clothes and stabbing her in the lungs with a screwdriver.
‘Her eyes were open and she seemed to be looking at me with an accusing stare. This shook me up a bit, so I stabbed her in the eye.’ (In court the Attorney-General held up the yellow-handled screwdriver, bent at the tip, and demonstrated how it was placed on the eyeball and then banged down with the palm of the hand.)
The murder coincided with the formation of a ‘think tank’ of experienced police officers drawn from different forces to bring fresh minds to the problem of how to secure the Ripper’s capture. In 1978 there had been a Prostitute Murder Squad of a dozen men; the squad had been named thus to avoid using the press label of ‘The Ripper’, although the Ripper Squad is what they were immediately called. Later on, there were references to Ripper Task Force officers. The clumsy and inaccurate name Prostitute Murder Squad was an attempt to avoid glorifying the killer by the more famous nomenclature. Failure to capture him led to increasing criticism. At a press conference the West Yorkshire police were asked if they were going to call in the Yard to help them catch the Ripper. There was a pause before one of the investigating officers witheringly replied: ‘Why should we? They haven’t caught theirs yet.’
To have brought in the Yard might have seriously shaken morale as well as betrayed a lack of confidence in the investigating officers. Fortunately there was no need.
Sutcliffe was caught on Friday, 3 January 1981, not by any super squad but by two policemen on a normal patrol who saw him parked with a 24-year-old prostitute named Olive Reivers. A fee of £10 had been agreed, but Sutcliffe didn’t really want sex. He just wanted to talk about his domestic problems. He had come away from home because of his wife’s constant nagging, he said; and then the girl herself had put him off by telling him that she had just been with a big fat taxi driver who smelled. When questioned, Sutcliffe told the policemen that Reivers was his girlfriend, but that story disintegrated when he could not tell them her name. This alerted them that all was perhaps not as it should be. A call on their radio revealed that his Rover licence plates were false. Both of them were arrested. But Sutcliffe, saying that he needed to urinate, was allowed to go behind a nearby storage tank, where he got rid of his ball pin hammer and knife. At the police station he managed to drop a second knife into a lavatory cistern. All three weapons were subsequently recovered. In his pockets was found the length of cord he had wound about Dr Bandara’s neck.
Reivers would have been his fourteenth victim. Reviewing the range of weapons he was carrying, the Attorney-General said that ‘All the options were covered.’
After his first police interview it was a further twenty-four hours before Sutcliffe was questioned again. This time lapse was crucial to the inquiry as it was then that one of the arresting officers went back to the oil tank and found the hammer and knife. In Sutcliffe’s pocket they had already found the cord used on Dr Bandara. In his garage they found the yellow-handled screwdriver and hacksaw. When interviewed for a second time Sutcliffe was challenged by Detective Inspector John Boyle on his reason for going behind the oil tank: ‘I think you went there for another purpose.’
When he didn’t reply, Boyle asked: ‘Do you understand what I am saying? I think you are in serious trouble.’
Sutcliffe answered: ‘I think you have been leading up to it.’
‘Leading up to what?’
‘The Yorkshire Ripper?’
‘What about the Yorkshire Ripper?’
‘Well, it’s me.’
After this admission Sutcliffe felt the need to talk. He unburdened himself in a statement that took nearly sixteen hours to take down. Asked if he knew the names of his victims, he replied: ‘Yes. They are all in my brain, reminding me of the beast that I am.’
In Armley Gaol, Leeds, Sutcliffe was interviewed eleven times by a consultant forensic psychiatrist, Dr Hugo Milne. Milne was one of three psychiatrists who gave evidence at the trial. Although presented by the prosecution their evidence was also the basis of the defence. Milne began his interviews with the suspicion that Sutcliffe might try to feign madness but by the time of the third he was sure that he was ill, extremely dangerous, and that he had been a paranoid schizophrenic for the past fifteen years. In Sutcliffe’s past there was already the model of a schizophrenic; this was his wife Sonia, who had suffered from the same delusions
of grandeur in 1972. She had had a delusion that she was the second Christ. Sutcliffe’s symptoms were similar to those displayed by his wife. She had been treated for her illness and it was subsequently suggested that he could have learned in this way how to simulate mental illness. The most that Milne would concede was that Sutcliffe could have learned ‘ideas of reference’ but not schizophrenic thinking. His ability to detach himself from his crimes was one of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Other symptoms were uncontrollable impulses, paranoia concerning prostitutes, over-controlled behaviour, misidentification (‘his confusion at times to identify absolutely and with certainty who were and who were not his victims – that is, prostitutes’), religious delusion (ideas of grandeur and special powers), mind control, thought argument (between his mind and a voice) and psychotic detachment (his ability to divorce himself from the enormity of what he had done). A schizophrenic could be in and out of touch with reality. In layman’s terms schizophrenia was a madness but it was Dr Milne’s opinion that ‘because people might be clinically mad they are not necessarily out of contact with reality’.
On the third day of cross-examination Dr Milne was reminded that prison officers had given evidence that Sutcliffe expected to go to prison for a long time unless he could convince the doctors that he was mad. Asked what he made of that in the context of the evidence, Dr Milne replied: ‘Either he is a competent actor or I am an inefficient psychiatrist … Perhaps I have been duped.’ There were only three matters that could confirm Sutcliffe’s account of his illness: photographs of Bingley cemetery where Sutcliffe said he had heard the voice (the judge commented in his summing-up that this was like being told that someone had swum the English Channel and, in response to a request for proof, being shown the Channel); Sutcliffe’s evidence; and forensic evidence relating to Yvonne Pearson, one of his murder victims.
Sutcliffe consistently denied that his attacks had given him sexual excitement. The psychiatrist said that there was no suggestion that he had sexual sadistic deviation. He was convinced that the killings were not sexual and that the stabbings had no sexual components. In one of the eleven interviews Sutcliffe had related how he had heard a voice coming from a Polish grave: ‘It was an echoing voice, vague and distant … and it was direct from the stone itself.’ He had decided that it was some kind of message from God. He had been encouraged to kill ‘scum’. Sutcliffe denied trying to mutilate his victims. There was no reason to do so. He exposed them, pushing the clothes up above the breasts or below the pubic region to show them for what they were. ‘It’s only a matter of killing them,’ he said.
Milne could find no definite reason for Sutcliffe stabbing his victims through the same wound hole on repeated occasions. He did not believe that the action contained any significant sexual symbolism. Sutcliffe had wondered if the killings had been part of God’s purpose to get him back into the faith. He had been brought up a Catholic and was regularly attending mass in prison. God was in the dock with him. Sutcliffe added, ‘I surprised myself I had to confess so little. God shares the killings with me.’
Milne’s conclusion was that Sutcliffe believed he had a mission to kill prostitutes and that it was at the direction of God, with whom he was in constant communication. Sutcliffe had been mentally ill at the time of his attacks on all twenty women and this had substantially diminished his responsibility for them.
One contradiction was immediately apparent. He now believed that all of his victims were prostitutes, which contradicted an earlier statement that some of them were not.
The Attorney-General analysed the dates of the interviews with Dr Milne. It was not until the seventh, two months after his arrest, that Sutcliffe had spoken of his mission. The voice from the Polish grave was not mentioned until the eighth. This posed the question why had it taken him so long to tell the doctors of this compelling reason for the attacks. Dr Milne had described Sutcliffe as being of higher than average intelligence. That would be the requirement for sustaining a lie; it would be very difficult to do so with a poor IQ.
Cross-examined, Dr Milne agreed that if Sutcliffe knew that the last six women he attacked were not prostitutes then the divine mission theory was in smithereens. Milne explained to Mr Ognall, who was cross-examining, that Sutcliffe never wanted to be seen as a sexual killer. Mr Ognall dealt with this by retorting that the reason why Sutcliffe didn’t want to be seen as a sexual killer was that if he put himself forward as that then the divine mission went out of the window. The greater number of instances of sexual molestation there were the more the validity of the diagnosis was undermined. Mr Ognall then reminded the jury of certain components of some of the attacks which were quite clearly sexual. It had been a sexual act to insert the screwdriver three times into Josephine Whitaker’s vagina; to stab Jacqueline Hill through the breast; to push a piece of wood against Emily Jackson’s vagina; to scratch Olive Smelt’s buttocks with a piece of hacksaw blade; and to leave fingernail scratches on the entrance to Marguerite Walls’s vagina. Although agreeing that there were obvious sexual components in the attacks, Dr Milne would not agree with Mr Ognall’s assertion that ‘This isn’t a missionary of God, it is a man who gets a sexual pleasure out of killing these women.’
Dr Terence Kay, a consultant forensic scientist, agreed with his colleagues that Sutcliffe was a paranoid schizophrenic. He did not believe that Sutcliffe was a sadist-killer. Had he been so, he would have expected the sexual aspect to have been present in all except the first one or two cases and to spread, so that in the final killings there would have been greater mutilations than in the first. Nor did the use of a hammer, because of its speed, suggest a sadistic killer. Multiple knifings could be explained by a sadistic killer but the usual emphasis was on the slowness of death and the agony of the victim.
A third psychiatrist said that it had taken him only thirty minutes to diagnose paranoid schizophrenia.
Mr Ognall’s devastating cross-examination of the psychiatrists, and the judge’s decision to have committed the case for trial, led to a thorough investigation of the medical diagnosis which the psychiatrists had not expected to have to defend publicly. But as the judge said when summing up, the psychiatrists were not on trial.
In the prosecution’s final address the Attorney-General said that what the jury had to decide was whether Sutcliffe was ‘mad or just plain bad’. He reminded them that the doctors had based their views on the statement of just one man – Sutcliffe. His hatred of prostitutes was nothing to do with a message from God: ‘How convenient after that for the mission to appear.’
Summing-up, the judge said that the question that had to be answered was whether Sutcliffe believed that he was directed or instructed by God to kill prostitutes. ‘Put it another way: did he, though deluded, believe that he was acting under a divine mission to kill prostitutes?’
It took the jury just under six hours to reach their verdict. By a majority of 10–2 they found Peter Sutcliffe guilty of murder. They rejected the divine mission; in their view he was sane.
Sentencing Sutcliffe to life imprisonment, the judge said that he hoped that the sentence would mean precisely that, but added a recommendation that he should serve a minimum of thirty years. The judge further added that the psychiatrists were of the opinion that he should be locked up for life. (It was estimated that, at the current rate of inflation, the cost of keeping him in prison for that length of time would be likely to reach about £3,000,000.)
Asked by his brother why he had done the murders, Sutcliffe smiled and said: ‘I were just cleaning up the streets, our kid. Just cleaning up the streets.’
10. Conclusion
I have tried throughout this book to take a long, hard look at what is known about Jack the Ripper, and attempted to clear away some of the many obscurities that bedevil researchers. My modest objective has been to return to basics and to encourage others to do the same, while we are still close enough to the Ripper’s time to add – with luck – just a few more facts to the precious few t
hat we do know about him. Nobody can stop the ‘legend’ of Jack the Ripper from finally triumphing over these facts. Indeed, it can be argued that it has already done so. Jack the Ripper, over a hundred years of his crimes, is already part folk hero, part myth.
There is one thing, however, of which we can be sure. Children once used to chant it in skipping games in the East End of London.
‘Jack the Ripper’s dead,
And lying on his bed.
He cut this throat
With Sunlight soap.
Jack the Ripper’s dead.’
Commercial Street, Spitalfields.The Britannia public house (‘Ringers’) is on the corner of Dorset Street (bottom left).The Ten Bells public house is the corner building on the right.
Dorset Street looking towards Commercial Street. The woman on the left must be standing within a door or two of Annie Chapman’s lodgings at 35 Dorset Street.
Mortuary photograph of Annie Chapman
Annie and John Chapman, taken c. 1869
Women outside a Spitalfields lodging house in Flower and Dean Street
Double event: the murders of Eddowes and Stride
Mortuary photograph of Polly Nichols
Mortuary photograph of Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 37