Ripper’s sight saved by £2k laser surgery funded by NHS
THE Yorkshire Ripper’s sight has been saved using laser eye surgery paid for by the NHS – to the fury of his victims’ families.
Peter Sutcliffe, 71, reportedly told fellow inmates that he could now read and write again, as well as watch television, after he was taken from a high-security prison to have the procedure at a specialist unit.
But Neil Jackson, whose mother Emily was Sutcliffe’s second victim in 1976, said that he was horrified that the serial killer had been given the £2,000 treatment.
Mr Jackson, 59, said: ‘They should have let him go blind. He never had any pity on anyone so why should society bend over backwards to make him happy?’
Sutcliffe lost the sight in his left eye when he was attacked in 1997 and has been steadily losing vision in the other.
The lorry driver murdered 13 women and tried to kill seven more between 1975 and 1980. He claimed that God had told him to carry out the attacks.
Sutcliffe spent 32 years in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital before being transferred back to prison last August after a tribunal ruled that his paranoid schizophrenia had been sufficiently treated.
He was taken in handcuffs from HMP Frankland near Durham for the procedure at Sunderland Eye Infirmary.
The surgery involved reshaping his cornea by vaporising fine layers of tissue in order to focus light more accurately. A source told The Sun on Sunday: ‘They were not taking any chances and the total cost of the operation to get him to the unit would have been really high.
‘He was unsteady on his feet and his vision was very blurred straight after it happened, so he had to be helped around.
‘And he fell over in jail as well, injuring himself.’
The newspaper said that Sutcliffe had told a friend how the treatment ‘hurt like hell but was worth it’.
The laser surgery marks the end of two years of treatment, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of pounds.
In February, Sutcliffe was taken from prison for a cataract operation on his right eye at the same hospital.
It had previously been reported that he was likely to have gone blind without surgery. Vessels in his retina were damaged and his eye had deteriorated due to his diabetes.
Sutcliffe struck across Yorkshire and Greater Manchester before finally being arrested in Sheffield in January 1981.
He was initially jailed but transferred to Broadmoor as a paranoid schizophrenic.
He is one of about 50 ‘whole life’ tariff prisoners in Britain who will never be released.
Sutcliffe has been questioned about a number of cold-case hammer attacks going back to the 1960s, including a ‘dry run’ assault on Tracy Browne, then 14, in Silsden, West Yorkshire, two months before he killed his first victim.
Miss Browne told police she survived only because a passing car’s headlights disturbed her attacker.