Former gravedigger who robbed the dead and preyed on women

The weedy child who became a monster and claimed that a ‘voice from God’ told him to murder

ABradford lorry driver, Peter Sutcliffe, became known as the Yorkshire Ripper. His (at least) five-and-a-half-year rampage across decaying urban stretches of West Yorkshire, with occasional forays into Manchester and beyond, instilled genuine and almost tangible fear among millions of women across the north of England.

On at least five occasions, Sutcliffe’s name had been “in the frame” for the killings, but each time he had been released, there being no centralised computer system in the 1970s to coordinate and cross-check the efforts of three separate police forces involved in deploying what proved to be a disastrously disorganised dragnet.

When Sutcliffe was finally caught, in January 1981, he realised the game was up. “I think you have been leading up to it,” he told the interviewing officer. “Leading up to what?”

“The Yorkshire Ripper.” “What about the Yorkshire Ripper?” “Well,” Sutcliffe replied calmly, “it’s me.”

At his trial, Sutcliffe’s defence was insanity. He claimed that while working as a gravedigger he had experienced a spiritual revelation when he heard a “voice from God” speaking to him from a tombstone, ordering him to kill sex workers.

The eldest of six children, Peter William Sutcliffe was born on June 2 1946 at Bingley, a small mill town near Bradford, West Yorkshire. His father worked nights at the local Co-op bakery, his mother was an office cleaner and, unlike her husband, a Roman Catholic.

As a child he was considered introverted, weak and weedy, always clinging to the hem of his mother’s skirts.

From 1957, having failed his 11-plus, he attended Cottingley Manor, the town’s Catholic secondary modern school where, having no friends, he was bullied by older boys.

In the summer of 1961 when he was 15, Peter Sutcliffe left school and found work as an apprentice fitter at Fairbank and Brearley, a local engineering firm.

At home, he spent silent hours locked in the lavatory preening himself. He left his factory job after less than a year, and having toned up his weedy physique with a home course of bodybuilding, started work as a £9 a week gravedigger at Bingley cemetery in the summer of 1964 – “a real job,” he liked to joke. “I’ve five thousand under me and not one of them complains.”

He was eventually sacked for poor timekeeping, but got away with looting the bodies of the newly dead by unscrewing coffin lids and helping himself to rings from their fingers.

His colleagues considered him inscrutable; he would sit in a silent, trance-like state in pubs, and his darting near-black eyes, trim dark beard and curly, dense square-shaped hair earned him the nickname Jesus.

As to his motivation in attacking defenceless women at night, one theory held that during his courtship of his wife Sonia, in the late 1960s, Sutcliffe wrongly suspected her of infidelity with another man.

To “level the score”, as he put it, he picked up a sex worker, who swindled him out of £10 and made him a laughing stock in a crowded pub, filling Sutcliffe with rage and embarrassment. The criminologist Colin Wilson would subsequently ascribe his slashing and stabbing as “an orgasmic release from his usual sense of inferiority and ‘ambivalence’”.

Another writer on murder, Brian Masters, noted signs of Sutcliffe’s failed attempts to manufacture maleness in himself.

His obsession with machines led him to keep the engine of a favourite motorbike under his bed; “the hammers and screwdrivers which he drove into the flesh of his victims were likewise his instruments of manhood”.

His slashing and stabbing was ‘an orgasmic release from his usual sense of inferiority’