After more than 40 years, narrowly avoiding monster still haunts me

Manchester on a damp October night. I’m out very late, new to the city, and I end up getting off at the wrong bus stop, close to the Southern Cemetery, and I have to walk back alone to my university flat feeling panicked.

Why does it stick in my memory? Because the next day, listening to the local radio news, I discovered how right I was to be nervous.

Peter Sutcliffe had been nearby, revisiting the scene of one of his dreadful crimes.

Sutcliffe will always be known as the Yorkshire Ripper, but he crossed the Pennines more than once to kill women.

On Oct 1, 1977, Jean Jordan, a sex worker from Manchester, became his sixth murder victim, and he dumped her body in wasteland near the Southern Cemetery.

A week later, after realising that the brand new £5 note he had given her was traceable, he drove back from Yorkshire, visited the corpse, moved it and mutilated it.

Sutcliffe failed to find the fiver, and what he feared came true: when the body was found, the police traced the note to his haulage company’s payroll.

But despite encountering him when they interviewed the lorry drivers, they believed his false alibi.

He went on to kill another seven women.

Listening to the news that Sutcliffe has died brought back the sensation of fear he caused that I and thousands of women in the North lived with in the late Seventies.

For me, it was especially heightened when he struck again in Manchester, killing his ninth murder victim, Vera Millward, in May 1978, and when the fake tape in which the alleged killer promised he would strike in Manchester next, was broadcast.

“I like it there, there’s plenty of them knocking about”, said the Wearside voice. The tape-maker’s “plenty of them” alluded to sex workers, and the majority of the women Sutcliffe killed were involved in prostitution.

But fellow female students and I did not make a distinction, even if the rest of society – and the police – seemed to think that women getting paid for sex were somehow of lesser importance, and this killer would not come looking for “respectable” women.

No, we felt threatened, and rightly so. For it turned out that Sutcliffe was not some crazed moralist but an opportunist picking whoever was unlucky enough to cross his path, such as student Josephine Whitaker, in April 1978 in Halifax. By that time, I was flat-sharing almost opposite

Manchester Royal Infirmary, in the grounds of which Sutcliffe had dumped the body of Vera Milward.

The police were warning women not to go out at night.

Unwilling to live under curfew, we had a system. Anyone leaving the flat alone would phone to say they had arrived at their destination safely. If someone didn’t call, those left in the flat alerted the police; I think that happened twice, when panic overcame our rational knowledge of how unreliable buses can be, and the rarity of working public call boxes in those pre-mobile days.

Sutcliffe continued killing until he was finally caught in 1981. But the fear we women felt then lingers.

However much I know that we should have every right to walk alone at night, I have always been careful, never crossing wastegrounds or venturing down ill-lit alleyways, and strolling close to the pavement’s edge near the lights of the traffic, rather than any more shadowy places.

Some say that Sutcliffe and all the barbarous men who attack women have won if we allow them to determine our behaviour.

True – yet 43 years on from that night when I came close to encountering him revisiting the corpse of Jean Jordan, there’s still a way that Sutcliffe haunts how I live.

‘Listening to the news that he had died brought back the sensation of fear he caused... That fear lingers’