COSSETTED AT A COST OF £10M
Celebrity visitors. Pottery classes. Valentine’s cards and endless visits from fascinated women – all while ballooning to 20 stone on fry-ups. As his victims’ families suffer all these years later, how Sutcliffe was...
THE headline on the front page of The Daily Mail on May 23, 1981 was short and to the point: ‘They’ll never let him out.’ And nearly 40 years on, it has proven to be entirely accurate.
Handed 20 life sentences for the murders of 13 women and the attempted murder of seven more, for once life really did mean life.
And yet Peter Sutcliffe’s time behind bars was rarely far from controversy. At his trial the jury rejected evidence that he was suffering from a mental disorder when he killed. They convicted him on the basis he was a sadistic sex murderer – not a madman.
And yet after spending just three years in a high-security prison, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. That led to him being transferred to Broadmoor, the top-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, where he would spend the next 32 years.
At a cost of £300,000 a year, his time there cost the taxpayer almost £10million in today’s money.
One of his regular visitors was the late Jimmy Savile. A fellow inmate claimed that the radio DJ and TV presenter, who was revealed to be a serial paedophile after his death, would take tea with the Ripper in his cell.
On one occasion Savile introduced Sutcliffe to Frank Bruno when he visited Broadmoor in 1991. The boxer was photographed shaking hands with Sutcliffe but later claimed he had no idea who he was and the stunt had been organised by Savile.
The accommodation, facilities and regime at Broadmoor enjoyed by Sutcliffe were markedly different from that of a normal jail.
Assigned his own room complete with Freeview TV and a DVD player, he whiled away the hours watching reality TV shows such as The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing. His favourite comedy was Mrs Brown’s Boys. At weekends he boasted that he was allowed to lie in until 8am.
Also available to those on his ward was a communal area complete with comfy chairs and sofas where he could talk with the dozen or so other patients on the unit.
Among those he befriended was Robert Napper, who stabbed mum Rachel Nickell to death on Wimbledon Common in front of her two-year-old son Alex in 1992.
So-called therapeutic workshops on offer included pottery classes and cooking – indeed his Yorkshire puddings were deemed to be of such high quality that he was allowed to cook them for a ward meal. But Sutcliffe’s hopes that he would see out his days amid such cushy surroundings came crashing down when a panel of doctors decided he was no longer mentally ill.
DESPITE protesting that the move would kill him, in 2016 he was transferred to Durham’s Frankland Prison – dubbed Monster Mansion for its roster of inmates – where he would spend his final days.
There a battery of health problems left him blind and incontinent, reliant on a fellow prisoner to help guide him around the prison and to read out the ‘fan’ mail that he continued to receive until his death.
Because, given the vileness of his crimes, it might have been imagined that Sutcliffe would have been shunned in prison. The reality was very different.
On the day of his conviction his wife Sonia made it clear that she had no intention of abandoning him. ‘ Of course i’m standing by him,’ she said. ‘i still love him.’ She added that she intended to visit him as often as possible – and was true to her word for much of Sutcliffe’s time inside.
‘She has always remained loyal as she knows the kind of person i am!’ he once wrote of her in correspondence leaked to the Press.
in another he noted: ‘i had a visit from Sonia on Friday afternoon which was nice but she couldn’t visit in the evening. So alas, we only had one-and-a-half hours.’
Only in the last years of his life did that contact diminish. Sutcliffe blamed it on the influence of Sonia’s second husband, Michael Woodward. The pair married in 1997.
‘i have been ringing Sonia but Michael tells her off if i speak to her or leave messages,’ Sutcliffe complained to a friend following his transfer to Frankland: ‘He acts like a spoilt brat and should get over his jealousy and accept we are friends.’
The only other close family member to visit him was his brother Mick, 69, who is now an invalid living in sheltered accommodation.
For years, Sutcliffe rang him every Monday morning at 9am for a 15-minute chat. But those calls stopped three weeks ago – presumably due to Sutcliffe’s declining health – and Mick’s repeated calls to the prison went unanswered. The oldest of six children, Sutcliffe was not in touch with sisters Jean and Maureen. Another sister, Anne, died from cancer in 2005.
He had intermittent contact with his other brother, Carl, but when he was approached earlier this week, Carl said he wanted nothing more to do with his brother and thought he should die in jail for the terrible crimes he committed. He also said he would not attend his funeral.
Sutcliffe was also ‘friends’ with a number of women. Much of his time inside was devoted to letterwriting – using an old-fashioned pen and paper and he would send 30 or more letters a week.
MORE latterly, Sutcliffe also had access to email. Monitored by staff, they would print out messages sent to him and hand them over personally. The vast majority of his correspondence was with female ‘admirers’ who, attracted by his notoriety, had always written to him, often sending in pictures of themselves.
‘Women write to him all the time and some send pretty raunchy photos,’ said a source.
Over the years he put together a gallery of the ones he found most attractive, pinning them to the walls of his ward and cell.
They were also decorated with watercolours painted by Sutcliffe.
Alongside rural scenes copied from magazines he also turned out a number of altogether more chilling works while at Broadmoor.
One painting showed a man in a lime-green Capri approaching a woman walking a dog in broad daylight. He owned a similar car when he attacked and killed a number of his victims in the mid-1970s.
A second painting was a Christlike crucifixion scene featuring a man who resembles Sutcliffe nailed to a cross. Criminologists have speculated that the first picture was him ‘memoralising’ his previous crimes as a form of ‘perverted pride’, while the second showed that Sutcliffe regarded himself as a victim, rather than perpetrator.
inevitably, details of his correspondence with female admirers leaked to the Press.
Written in a looping hand, he would sign his letters Peter Coonan, adopting his mother’s maiden name. Many of the notes were decorated with children’s stickers, including butterflies, love hearts and teddy bears.
The tone was openly – and outrageously – flirtatious, for example asking one woman if she had a steady boyfriend and telling another: ‘i’m thinking of you 24/7.’ The killer even sent a Valentine’s card to one admirer, signing off with the words ‘i love you’.
Much of the thrust of his letters was to encourage women to visit him – both in Broadmoor and Frankland – or discuss visits they had already made. ‘Don’t worry, i’m very easy to talk to and i will put you at ease,’ he wrote to one. ‘i’m very fond of you. i guess you know that by now.’ Another read: ‘i’m way up on cloud nine after seeing you today i can tell you. OK then gorgeous, take care for now.’
SUTCLIFFE was allowed up to four face-to-face visits a week. Visitors had to be assessed for ‘suitability’ in an interview with social workers, something Sutcliffe would tell them was nothing more than a ‘formality’.
Even aged into his seventies, Sutcliffe continued to make the most of his notoriety. One of his female Polish penpals was just 17 years old. He spoke with her on the phone, encouraging her to travel to the UK and visit him in jail.
That was despite an increasingly complex range of medical problems that left him blind and virtually incontinent.
He also suffered from a persistent hacking cough, raised blood pressure and angina and had undergone a hernia operation.
underlying all those issues was Type 2 diabetes, a problem exacerbated by his poor diet and excessive weight. Partly as a consequence of his visitors’ misplaced
generosity, Sutcliffe always had the cash to indulge his love of junk food – Diet Coke and chocolate bars on top of three canteen meals a day followed by toast and honey in his room at night. All of which contributed to dramatic weight gain.
Indeed, despite being banned from eating fry-ups and encouraged to eat more fruit, he tipped the scales at some 20st in the years leading up to his death.
Diabetes was also to blame for his fading eyesight, details of which emerged in 2015 when he was seen in public for the first time heading in to Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey for treatment to his right eye. (In 2005 he had been secretly allowed out of Broadmoor to visit the Lake District where his father’s John’s ashes were scattered.)
Sutcliffe had been blind in the other eye since 1997 when he was stabbed in the face with a pen by fellow Broadmoor patient Ian Kay.
Convicted murderer Kay pinned Sutcliffe to the floor after asking to borrow an envelope. He then stabbed him about ten times with the homemade weapon. Sutcliffe had further treatment to the right eye in 2017 when he underwent laser surgery. At the time MPs and victims complained that the NHS’s scarce resources should not have been wasted on him.
‘My dad had a degenerative eye disease and was almost blind by the time he died,’ said Julie Lowry, whose mother, Olive Smelt, was one of Sutcliffe’s first victims. She miraculously survived after being struck twice on the head with a hammer and slashed with a pick-axe near her home in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
‘ There wasn’t anything they could do to save his sight. How many other people could they have spent that money on?’ Then in September 2018 he was taken to a special unit at Sunderland Royal Infirmary for emergency treatment after collapsing in prison with a bladder problem, where he was fitted with a catheter and bag.
While he would be returned to prison after a short stay in the end, it was Covid-19 that brought Sutcliffe’s life to an end. He reportedly refused all treatment for the virus at the University Hospital of North Durham, where he had also been taken two weeks ago, after suffering a suspected heart attack. For the relatives of his victims it has not come a day too soon. Back in 1981 many spoke of how they wished Sutcliffe could have faced the death penalty rather than be jailed.
And none will have sympathy for the suffering he endured in the almost four decades he was behind bars. ‘Nothing will be bad enough for him in my view,’ said Irene MacDonald, whose daughter Jayne, 16, was killed by Sutcliffe, speaking at the time of his conviction. ‘It was like he was stepping on beetles – not killing human beings.’