RIPPER NEVER WAS MAD – BROTHER
As killer fights move to tough new jail, family says he made up claims of mental illness
THE Yorkshire Ripper has faked madness for decades to avoid being sent to a tough maximum security jail, his brother insisted last night.
He spoke out after it emerged serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, 69, is set to be moved from Broadmoor psychiatric hospital to prison because his treatment for paranoid schizophrenia has now finished.
His younger brother Carl Sutcliffe, 50, said: ‘I’ve never believed Peter was mad. He never showed signs of schizophrenia as a child.
‘I know he’s been trying to get out of Broadmoor for a while. He’s fed up with it, even though it’s fairly cushy.’
He claimed he understood that when the killer was arrested he had planned to ‘make out he was mad and then he’d get an easy ride’. Carl added: ‘He’s wicked. I don’t care if he’s in prison or in Broadmoor, as long as they never let him out.’
Yesterday there were fears that Sutcliffe, who has already squandered hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money on legal bids for freedom, could challenge any ruling in the courts. This would mean even more taxpayers’ cash being wasted on him – and bereaved families and survivors being put through fresh agony.
Sutcliffe was given 20 life terms in 1981 for murdering 13 women and trying to kill seven more in a spree between 1975 and 1980 across Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.
He was sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. But three years later the former trucker and gravedigger, who said he believed he was on a ‘mission from God’ to kill sex workers, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and moved to Broadmoor.
Sutcliffe is now likely to move to a top-security prison, where he will be held in a highly restricted unit and shielded from other inmates.
He may be sent to HMP Wakefield – dubbed ‘Monster Mansion’ because of its high-profile prisoners, among them Sarah Payne’s killer Roy Whiting. In an extraordinarily self- pitying whinge, the Ripper is said to have told a friend: ‘It might be Wakefield prison. What a disaster. I’ve lost all hope. Category A prisons are a pit of black despair and hopelessness. I will spend the rest of my days there.
‘I don’t want to go back to prison. And if I moved, all my letters and phone calls would disappear as well.’
An independent mental health tribunal will meet to discuss the recommendation as early as February. Justice Secretary Michael Gove must then make the final decision on a move to jail.
Prisons minister Andrew Selous yesterday sought to reassure the public that Sutcliffe’s move from the secure psychiatric hospital in Berkshire to prison would not pave the way for his release. Asked if it would begin a process preparing him for freedom, Mr Selous said: ‘Absolutely not.’
The High Court ruled in 2009 that he should never be released.
Sutcliffe is thought to be furious he could have to leave Broadmoor after 31 years.
In the taxpayer-funded £330,000-a-
‘If it makes his life harder, he should go’
year unit he eats chocolates, watches television, listens to music and writes letters – as well as being allowed visitors four days a week. His brother said inmates ‘just walk about the place and there are a couple of snooker tables’.
Victim Marcella Claxton, 59, who was 20 when Sutcliffe attacked her with a hammer, said: ‘He should be moved to a prison, he’s not sick is he? He wasn’t mentally ill when he attacked me. He should be treated like anyone else.’
Julie Lowry, 55, whose mother Olive Smelt survived a brutal attack by Sutcliffe in 1975 when she was a 46year-old office cleaner, also welcomed the news. She said: ‘I don’t really think he was ever really mad. If it makes his life harder, yes, he should be moved out of Broadmoor.’
John Stainthorpe, a retired senior detective who worked on the original Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, said he was ‘just a plain, evil killer’.
He added: ‘I have always said that I never believed that it was he who thought up this “voices from God” defence. That was put into his mind by someone.’
Author Richard McCann, 46, whose mother Wilma was the first woman murdered by Sutcliffe in Leeds when she was 28, added: ‘It doesn’t bring my mum back but it does matter because it’s costly for him to be in [Broadmoor] and he’s living more freely than your typical prisoner. So, if it’s deemed that his mental health would allow him to go back into the normal prison regime, well I think that’s right.’
Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire, where Sutcliffe worked for an engineering and transport company in the 1970s, said: ‘He belongs in prison. He’s been having a far too cushy number in Broadmoor.’
Michael Spurr, chief executive of the National Offender Management Service, told the Commons’ justice select committee: ‘Clinicians make a determination about whether an individual still requires detention in a hospital. They have determined this individual does not.’
Last year, Sutcliffe suffered a suspected heart attack and was thought to be close to death. He also has Type 2 diabetes.
West London Mental Health NHS Trust, which runs Broadmoor, could not be reached for comment.