PETER SUTCLIFFE CASE STUDY

Peter Sutcliffe was born in Bingley in the West Riding of Yorkshire into a working-class family. He was brought up as a Catholic by his parents, John William Sutcliffe and his wife Kathleen Frances, née Coonan. Reportedly a loner, he left school aged 15 and had a series of menial jobs, including two stints as a gravedigger in the 1960s. Between November 1971 and April 1973 Sutcliffe worked at the Baird Television factory on a packaging line. He left when he was asked to go on the road as a salesman.

After leaving Baird, he worked night-shifts at the Britannia Works of Anderton International from April 1973. In February 1975, he took redundancy and used the pay-off to train as an HGV driver and gained his licence on 4 June 1975. He began work as a driver for a tyre firm on 29 September. On 5 March 1976, he was dismissed for the theft of used tyres. He was unemployed until October 1976, when he found a job as an HGV driver for T.& W.H. Clark (Holdings) Ltd. on the Canal Road Industrial Estate in Bradford.

Sutcliffe, by some reports, used prostitutes as a young man, and it has been speculated that he had a bad experience during which he was conned out of money. Other analyses of his actions have not found evidence that he actually sought their services although he clearly expressed unusual behaviour before the killings.

He met Sonia Szurma on 14 February 1967; they married on 10 August 1974. She suffered several miscarriages and they were informed that she would not be able to have children. She resumed a teacher training course, during which time she had an affair with an ice-cream van driver. When she completed the course in 1977 and began teaching, they used her salary to buy a house in Heaton, Bradford, into which they moved on 26 September 1977, and where they lived at the time of Sutcliffe’s arrest.

Through his childhood and much of his teens, Sutcliffe showed no signs of abnormality. Later, in part related to his occupation as a gravedigger, he developed an unhealthy, macabre sense of humour. In his teens, Sutcliffe developed a growing obsession with voyeurism and spent much time spying on prostitutes and the men seeking their services.

Sutcliffe’s offending behaviour began in 1969 when he assaulted a prostitute. Sutcliffe went onto murder and try to murder over 20 women before he was arrested in 1981. In January, Sutcliffe was stopped by the police with a 24-year-old prostitute in his car. After some initial car checks, he was arrested and transferred to Dewsbury Police Station. He was questioned in relation to the Yorkshire Ripper case as he matched many of the known physical characteristics. The next day when police returned to the scene of the arrest, they discovered a knife, hammer and rope. After two days of intensive questioning, Sutcliffe declared he was the Ripper and calmly described many of his attacks. Weeks later, he claimed that God had told him to kill the women. At trial, he pleaded not guilty to 13 charges of murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He pleaded guilty to 7 charges of attempted murder and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by four psychiatrists. Sutcliffe was found guilty of murder on all counts and was sentenced to 20 concurrent sentences of life imprisonment.

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