I forgive Ripper for killing my mother
Son of first victim reveals how a meeting with Desmond Tutu helped him erase lifetime of anger
AFTER his mother was murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper, few would blame Richard McCann for hating the serial killer.
He was just five in 1975 when his mother Wilma McCann, 28, became Peter Sutcliffe’s first victim. But the 46-year-old has revealed that, incredibly, he has now forgiven him.
‘I’m not angry any more,’ Mr McCann said. ‘It’s not there, I have let it go.’
In a poignant interview with the BBC, Mr McCann tells presenter Aled Jones that he ‘ absolutely forgives’ Sutcliffe and felt a spirituality at making the decision.
‘I let it go after listening to [Archbishop] Desmond Tutu talking about forgiveness,’ the married father of three said. ‘I realised I’d hung on to that anger for decades and I let it go that day. I felt spiritual, I felt connected to a deeper part of me.’
Mr McCann told the Daily Mail: ‘I’d wanted Sutcliffe dead. I celebrated when he was stabbed in the eye in prison [in 1997]. I wanted all sorts of things to happen to him, but I realised all that anger was harming me.’
As a young boy, Mr McCann and his three sisters were on the at-risk register, his father was rarely around and his mother would regularly leave them alone to go out drinking. Then, one night in October 1975, she never came home.
Mr McCann said he has a vivid memory of being woken up by his older sister, Sonia, then just seven, and going out in the early hours, dressed in their pyjamas, to look for their mother.
Her body was found a few hours later. It emerged she had tried
‘I pity Peter Sutcliffe now’
to thumb a lift home from a pub and had been picked up by Sutcliffe, who murdered her in a field 100 yards from her Leeds home with a hammer, before stabbing her 14 times in the stomach, neck and chest.
She was the first of 13 victims who Sutcliffe killed in a fiveyear reign of terror.
The siblings were taken to a children’s home, before moving in with their estranged and abusive father. It was years, however, before Mr McCann was told exactly how his mother died.
‘It wasn’t until I was 16 years old that I was told where Mum was buried. It took me ten years to say goodbye,’ he said.
‘It was almost brushed under the carpet, it was such a taboo subject, but it was such a massive news story you couldn’t get away from it. I bottled it up instead and obviously that had a detrimental effect on me.’
Even Sutcliffe’s conviction in 1981, sentenced to 20 life terms for 13 murders and seven attempted murders, brought little comfort. ‘My mum was gone,’ said Mr McCann. ‘Him being arrested, of course, as an adult looking back, that was positive, but as a kid that didn’t change anything, it didn’t bring my mum back.’
After leaving school, Mr McCann joined the Army but was kicked out after going on a violent vandalism spree when colleagues learned his mother, who he had said had died in a car crash, was actually killed by The Ripper.
He fell into a series of deadend jobs and started taking drugs, eventually being sent to prison for six months, aged 28, for drug dealing.
He then wrote a book about his life – Just A Boy – which sold more than 400,000 copies when it was published in 2004. On the back of that he now runs a successful motivational speaking business, giving talks about his experiences around the world.
Sadly, Sonia never got over her mother’s death and killed herself aged 39 in 2007.
Mr McCann told the Mail his ‘revelatory’ moment came three years later, in 2010, when he went to watch Archbishop Tutu give a talk on forgiveness in London. Listening to the clergyman talk about an incident at a Truth And Reconciliation Commission hearing he chaired after the abolition of apartheid in his native South Africa, changed Mr McCann’s life.
‘He blew me away,’ he said. ‘It was a revelatory moment. I actually chased after him when he walked off stage and I told him what he said had helped me forgive a man who murdered my mother. He just hugged me, it was incredible, it’s a moment I will never forget. But it had taken me 35 years to get there.’
Sutcliffe, 70, who calls himself Peter Coonan, had spent three decades in a psychiatric unit at Broadmoor Hospital before he was transferred to a mainstream prison in August when a tribunal decided his paranoid schizophrenia had been treated.
Mr McCann added: ‘ I pity Peter Sutcliffe now. My instinct is he hasn’t got long left on this planet. I don’t think he will cope very well in there.’
Going Back, Giving Back is on BBC1 at 3.45pm today.