A MILD-MANNERED MONSTER
To friends and colleagues he was the kindly, shy mummy’s boy ‘who had it all’. So what WAS it that turned Peter Sutcliffe into a twisted savage who revelled in torment?
ENTERING the reception area at Clark’s engineering and haulage contractors in Shipley, West Yorkshire, the first thing visitors saw was a blown-up photograph of the firm’s ‘star driver’ posing proudly at the wheel of his lorry. With his saturnine good looks, neatly trimmed goatee and the same drooping black moustache as Jason King (Peter Wyngarde), a dashing TV heart-throb of the time, Peter Sutcliffe was just the man to burnish the company’s image, his bosses thought.
As he spent hours polishing his lorry, had become an expert at finding the fastest delivery routes and was a devoted husband with apparently high moral standards — he frowned on the pornographic pin-ups that decorated other drivers’ cabs — he was considered a model employee.
Those who knew Sutcliffe away from work held him in similarly high regard. In the respectable Bradford suburb of Heaton, where he and his wife Sonia lived in a detached house in Garden Lane for which they paid £16,000 in 1977, neighbours recall his willingness to ‘do good turns’ such as mending their cars.
He was a dutiful (macho friends would say ‘henpecked’) husband, forever decorating and gardening; a devoted uncle; a family stalwart who hosted regular Sunday lunches for his parents and five siblings. Every Christmas he would visit an old people’s home to spread some cheer and hand out gifts.
On the surface, it was almost impossible to imagine a less likely serial killer than Peter William Sutcliffe. Impossible to imagine that this ostensibly kind, contemplative, mild-mannered man with a high-pitched voice, who would giggle and blush in awkward social situations, secretly harboured a savage hatred of women.
It was a hatred so twisted, so deep- seated and uncontrollable, that even after he had bludgeoned them to death with his trademark ball pein hammer, he felt impelled to mutilate their intimate parts
‘My brother had a nice house and a steady job...’
using a variety of tools including a sharpened screwdriver.
Although several of Sutcliffe’s acquaintances claimed to have suspected he was the Yorkshire Ripper before 1981, when his fiveyear murder campaign was brought to an end — his long-time friend Trevor Birdsall had even named him in an anonymous letter to the police — to almost everyone who knew him, it beggared belief that he was capable of inflicting such systematic suffering.
His youngest brother, Carl, encapsulated the shock that family and friends felt when he told Gordon Burn, the author of Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son: The Story Of The Yorkshire Ripper: ‘I imagined him [the Ripper] to be an ugly hunchback with boils all over his face. Somebody who couldn’t get a woman and resented them for that.
‘He [Peter] had everything going for him. Nice house, steady job, enough money, good-looking.’
At his Old Bailey trial in 1981, Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven others. Although he is suspected of further attacks, this places him third in the grim table of recent British serial killers, behind Harold Shipman and Dennis Nilsen.
Yet because his method was so chilling — he would use his unassuming charm to lure vulnerable women, then dispatch them with precise savagery — and his stalking-grounds were so widespread, he became the most feared murderer of modern times.
His crimes are the subject of many books and documentaries. But you had to live in the North of England during the 1970s and early 1980s to fully understand the sheer terror he instilled. As body after body was discovered, first in Leeds, then Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax and Manchester, trepidation turned to hysteria.
Schools offered self- defence classes for girl pupils. Feminist groups went on ‘Catch the Ripper’ marches and protested at cinemas that were showing films considered to incite violence towards women. Pepper sprays and sharpened nailfiles were secreted in handbags. Pubs and discos were deserted.
As the investigative author and film-maker Michael Bilton notes in Wicked Beyond Belief, his masterwork on the Ripper investigation, the story opened many people’s eyes to the seedy underbelly of life i n depressed, post- i ndustrial northern towns and cities.
In the worst areas, misogyny and even violence towards women was depressingly common. Back-street sex was on offer and plenty of married men took advantage of it, while poverty drew desperate single mothers into the dangerous world of prostitution.
In November 1975, when my wife Angela — then my girlfriend — and I were lodging in Preston, where we were student journalists, the existence of this grim world was
made apparent to us. In a lock-up garage two streets away from our communal house, the body of a prostitute named Joan Harrison was found. She had been viciously kicked and beaten, bitten on her breast and possibly raped, then her black knee-boots had been placed carefully on top of her legs.
The previous month, mother-offour Wilma McCann, who lived in Scott Hall, a district of Leeds next to the red-light area of Chapeltown, had also been murdered.
Heading home the worse for drink one night, she was picked up by a ‘ punter’ who had what witnesses described as a Zapata moustache. He took her to a patch of waste ground, cracked her over the skull with a hammer and stabbed her repeatedly in the neck, breasts and navel.
Some months before, two other women had survived similar latenight attacks in West Yorkshire — and although Leeds and Preston are nearly 70 miles apart by road, police feared all these attacks might have been the work of the same man, with a maniacal hatred for prostitutes.
So, when the long and catastrophically mishandled search for the man who would become known as the Yorkshire Ripper began, I was among hundreds of men in Preston required to provide a saliva sample. This was so my blood group could be matched, in those days before DNA testing, against that of the man whose semen had been found on Joan Harrison’s body.
I was later told that police were also studying my bite, as the man who bit Harrison had an unusually wide gap between his front teeth.
Meanwhile, for Angela and her female friends there were no more late-night trips to the corner shop; no walking home from college alone. After dark they ventured out only in threes.
It later transpired that Wilma was the first victim murdered by Sutcliffe, though he had previously attacked others.
Not until 2011, 36 years after Joan Harrison was murdered, did advances in forensics prove she had been killed by another man.
The Ripper — who by coincidence also had a wide gap between his front teeth — was telling the truth when he insisted his murders did not extend to Preston.
Peter Sutcliffe was born at Bingley and Shipley Maternity Hospital on June 2, 1946. His father
John, then aged 23, had recently been demobbed from the Merchant Navy and worked in a bakery. His 25-year-old mother Kathleen was employed in a munitions factory.
Sutcliffe was the first of their seven children, one of whom — a brother — died after three days. He had two other brothers, Mick and Carl, and three sisters, Anne, Maureen and Jane.
On the surface they were a typical outgoing Yorkshire family. John Sutcliffe, a flamboyant and athletic man, played football and cricket for Bingley, sang and acted in an amateur dramatics group and prided himself on keeping the finest garden in the street.
His wife, who had been ‘quite a catch’ in her youth, with her trim figure and luxuriant black hair, was a devoted mother and homemaker; a kindly woman to whom neighbours would turn in a crisis.
But behind the neat facade of the family’s homes — first a rented, stone-built cottage; later a council house on a modern estate — life for young Peter Sutcliffe was less straightforward.
Perhaps because he was such a delicate child (he weighed just 5lb at birth) and his mother had lost her second son prematurely, she fussed over him constantly.
He had weak ankles and was slow in learning to walk, so he would literally cling to her apron strings — and as he grew older, he showed no desire to play outside like other children, preferring to read.
He loathed all sports and, until the age of 18, remained an altar boy at the Roman Catholic church he and his mother attended. This disappointed his brash, extro
He loathed all sports and clung to his mother
Girls found his black, bulbous eyes unnerving
verted father, who dismissed him as ‘weedy’ and chastised Kathleen for ‘mollycoddling’ him. Years later, he would even blame his wife’s overindulgence for helping to turn their son into a mass murderer.
At least, Mr Sutcliffe consoled himself, his unathletic son was ‘brainy’ (at his trial he was said to have an above- average IQ of between 108 and 110).
But Peter failed his 11-plus and went to a tough secondary modern, where he was bullied and played truant to avoid his tormentors.
His character contrasted sharply with that of his brothers — particularly Mick, who had a reputation as a local ‘hard-nut’.
Although the Sutcliffe parents presented themselves as paragons of strict virtue, his siblings were all owed to sl eep with t heir boyfriends and girlfriends in the house from an early age and his sister Maureen fell pregnant at 16.
His father was notorious for ‘mauling’ the young girls Mick and Carl brought home, and openly boasted of his one-night stands to his sons. As he ruled the house with an iron rod, they were too frightened of him to remonstrate.
Tired of his cheating and frequent absences, Kathleen secretly embarked on an affair with a police sergeant. When this came to her husband’s notice, he formulated a plan to humiliate her.
Pretending to be her lover by disguising his voice, he phoned inviting her to spend a romantic night with him at a hotel, reminding her to ‘ bring something nice to
wear in bed’. When she arrived for the rendezvous, she was horrified to be confronted not only by her husband — who snatched her bag and produced the negligee she had brought with her — but by her children, whom he had summoned so they could see the kind of woman their ‘sweet, homely’ mother really was.
Peter, the ‘mummy’s boy’, was disgusted that his father had humiliated her in this way.
The marriage stumbled on but was never the same. John Sutcliffe self-righteously took his revenge with various mistresses; Kathleen’s health began to fail and she would die at the age of 58, leaving her eldest son bereft.
Quite how Peter Sutcliffe was affected by all this we will never know.
Although he grew up to be good-looking, spending hours in the bathroom manicuring his Van Dyke beard and dressing in colourful shirts and platform-heeled boots, he always seemed uncomfortable in the presence of girls, veering between shy and over-excitable.
When he made his first, tongue-tied teenage advances to a neighbour’s pretty daughter, she rejected him as ‘too creepy’. According to a friend, girls were unnerved by his eyes, which were ‘bulbous, bloodshot and near-black’.
‘They were what everyone noticed first,’ she told Sutcliffe’s biographer Gordon Burn. ‘They darted back and forth when he spoke, sneaking glances at everything except your face.’
Many others felt similarly uneasy, including Dr Hugo Milne, the consultant psychiatrist tasked with assessing Sutcliffe after his arrest.
‘I remember very markedly his piercing eyes, which tended to follow you round the place,’ he
As a gravedigger, he looted coffins for jewellery on bodies
said, recalling their first encounter in a remand cell at Armley prison in Leeds.
The Sutcliffe family were always hard up (John was even fined for stealing food from a neighbour’s house), so Peter was expected to leave school at the earliest opportunity to earn his keep. He did various menial jobs and in 1964, when he was 18, found work as a gravedigger at Bingley cemetery.
It was there that a sadistic streak in his character first became apparent. He was caught throwing a rock at an uncovered corpse — ‘this’ll wake the bugger up’, he scoffed — and looted coffins for jewellery.
He would later claim that it was in the graveyard’s Roman Catholic sector that he first heard ‘the voice of God’.
Describing this ‘wonderful’ event at his trial, Sutcliffe said: ‘I was digging and I just paused for a minute. I heard something — it sounded like a voice similar to a human voice, like an echo. I looked round to see if anyone was there but no one was in sight.’
He could not make out the words, he said, but the voice had come ‘from the top of a gravestone, which was Polish. I remember the name on the grave to this day. It was a man called Zapoloski.
‘It had a terrific impact on me. I felt as though I had just experienced something fantastic... I felt I had been selected.’
If we believe him, this happened in 1967, when he was 21. He heard the voice ‘ hundreds of times’ afterwards and at first it was benign and reassuring. Two years would pass before the divine messages darkened, sending him on a ‘ mission’ to ‘ remove the prostitutes — to get rid of them’.
By then Sutcliffe was no longer a weedy wallflower. Determined to bulk up, he bought a Bullworker bodybuilding device and worked out obsessively. Though he was only 5ft 8in tall, he developed an impressive physique.
He also appeared in court for several petty crimes that included attempting to steal from a parked car, stealing tyres and driving without a licence or insurance.
He began socialising with his cemetery workmates, who would booze and ogle the girls in a disco at the Royal Standard pub, where a topless female DJ cracked filthy jokes. They also considered it ‘ a laugh’ to go carousing in Bradford’s red-light area, the streets of redbrick terraces around Lumb Lane, after closing time.
Sutcliffe appears to have been both disgusted and enthralled by these sorties, sometimes shouting insults at the ‘ slags’ yet once picking up two prostitutes and taking them to a friend’s flat.
Everything changed when, one night in the Standard, his lizard eyes fell on demure and dowdily dressed Sonia Szurma, then only 16, who sat in a corner, eyeing the r aucous crowd disdainfully. Sutcliffe was fascinated by her.
When they began talking, his interest grew. The daughter of Czech immigrants, she was seriousminded and shared his love of reading; her ambition was to become an art teacher. Sonia was not put off by his eerie eyes or any strange mannerisms and soon they began courting.
Although his family sneered at his ‘snooty’ girlfriend, Sutcliffe was besotted. When Sonia enrolled for a teachers’ training course in London, he would make a 400-mile round trip from Bradford to spend weekends with her, sleeping in a tent pitched in the college grounds.
When Sonia suffered a breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, f orcing her to abandon her college course and r eceive hospital t r eatment, Sutcliffe helped her to recover with singular devotion.
Then one day, his world fell apart.
His brother Mick came home to reveal he had just seen Sonia in a red Triumph Spitfire sports car being driven by the local ice-cream seller, a handsome young Italian.
Beside himself with jealousy, Sutcliffe confronted her and she admitted two-timing him.
There is a suspicion that he may have murdered even before this bombshell dropped. In 1966, an intruder had robbed and beaten to death popular Bingley bookmaker Fred Craven, who had a hunchback and was just 4ft 7in tall.
Sutcliffe’s brother Mick was among the initial suspects because he was seen in the vicinity at the time, but he was exonerated. Mr Craven’s son was always convinced the real killer was Peter, not least because the disabled bookmaker was easy prey — added to which, his daughter had once spurned Sutcliffe’s advances.
Whatever the truth, Sonia’s fling, although it soon fizzled out, may have lit a fuse deep inside 23-yearold Sutcliffe’s psyche.
Determined to ‘level the score’ with Sonia, he sought out a prostitute, agreeing to pay her £5 for sex in her squalid flat. But as she undressed he felt nauseated and called off the transaction. He would still pay her fee, he said, but he had given her a £10 note and wanted his change.
She said she would have to change the note, so Sutcliffe drove her to a garage. But there he was confronted by two burly men who banged on the roof of his Morris 1000 and warned him to clear off or take a beating. Furious, he drove away empty-handed.
His ignominy was compounded when, a few days later, he recognised the woman in a pub and demanded his money back. Surrounded by her friends, the prostitute just laughed at him, and soon he was being mocked by the entire room.
‘I left the pub feeling humiliated and outraged and embarrassed, and I felt a hatred for her and her kind,’ Sutcliffe would say years later to police. ‘I got depressed and was having this trouble with violent headaches, and blamed prostitutes for all my problems.’
I t was t hen, Sutcliffe t old psychiatrists, that ‘ divine voices’ told him to embark on his mission (although he made no mention of this in his statement to the police).
The prosecution maintained that he invented this story while awaiting trial, in an attempt to suggest that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and so should be sent to hospital, not to prison.
Sutcliffe i s believed to have attacked a prostitute for the first time in August 1969, a few weeks after being cheated out of his £10.
Eating a fish and chip supper with his friend Trevor Birdsall, who had parked his van in the area where Bradford’s sex workers touted for business, he saw a drunken woman staggering along the street. Sutcliffe sprang from his seat and dashed after her.
When he returned, breathless and excited, 10 or 15 minutes later, he admitted he had followed her to her house and hit her over the head with a piece of rock inside a sock.
The next day, after tracing Birdsall’s van, police questioned Sutcliffe, but he claimed he ‘only’ hit her with his hand — and as the woman didn’t press charges, he escaped with a caution.
He is suspected of attacking other women over the next few years, including a 19-year-old clerk whose screams alerted a neighbour, but there is no proof he did so.
In fact, the years between 1969 and 1974, when he and Sonia were married at Clayton Baptist Church and honeymooned in Paris, seem to have been a period of comparative stability. They
‘I were just cleaning up the streets, our kid,’ he said with a satisfied smile. ‘Just cleaning up the streets’ ‘I blamed all my problems on prostitutes’
began married life in her parents’ house but after three years had saved enough for a mortgage on 6 Garden Lane, a bow-fronted house which was, they proudly announced, their ‘dream home’.
Sutcliffe abandoned his old friends and spent his spare time doing DIY, often tinkering in the driveway with second-hand cars.
Stashed neatly in his garage were tools including hammers, screwdrivers, a hacksaw and lengths of nylon rope, which he needed for his work. No one suspected they might have a dual purpose.
Sutcliffe was now moving up in the world. Taking voluntary redundancy from the Water Board, where he worked after leaving the cemetery, he used half of his £400 payoff to retrain as an HGV driver and landed a £7,000a-year job at T. and W.H Clark, where, notwithstanding his poor timekeeping, he soon earned plaudits.
‘He appeared to be a very deep, sensitive person. If he was told off, his eyes would fill with tears,’ recalled his boss, Tom Clark. ‘He was always neatly dressed, very quiet, a bit of a loner. He spoke slowly and was very deliberate in his actions. And his cab was like a palace compared to some.’
Sutcliffe’s job took him to towns across the North and Midlands, and occasionally to Denmark — which would later prompt Scandinavian police to investigate his possible culpability for a string of unsolved murders. It also often required him to sleep overnight in his cab. This gave him an excuse for being away from Sonia, and the opportunity to stake out his killing grounds and find quick escape routes.
When detectives began questioning thousands of kerb- crawlers whose vehicles had been sighted repeatedly in red-light areas, it also gave him a ready excuse. On some of the nine occasions when he was interviewed by the Ripper Squad, he explained genially that he had just been passing through on his way to and from work. He had no interest in prostitutes; he was a happily married man.
The first attacks to which Sutcliffe later admitted came in 1975. On July 5 of that year, shop assistant Anna Rogulskyj, 34, was battered with a ball pein hammer as she walked home at 2am after a night out in Keighley. Her attacker had then lifted her clothes and made strange abrasions on her lower abdomen.
Miraculously, she survived but her life was effectively destroyed, not only by her physical and psychological injuries but because, through association with the Ripper, she was wrongly assumed (like several other victims) to have been a prostitute.
Five weeks later, Sutcliffe struck in Halifax. Somehow Olive Smelt, 45, also escaped with her life, despite two depressed fractures of the skull. The marks on her body were similar to those found on Anna.
Then, as the end of school summer holidays neared, 14-year- old Tracy Browne was followed by a bearded, frizzy-haired man as she walked home from a friend’s house in the Yorkshire Dales town of Silsden.
‘There’s not much to do in Silsden, is there?’ Sutcliffe said to her affably, in his squeaky voice. He then moaned that he had a cold and there was no one to give him a lift home — the sort of banal chatter he always used to reassure and distract his targets.
Then he reached into his pocket and brought out his hammer. Tracy recalls how he grunted each time he wielded it. She was spared when a car came down the lane.
This attack was one Sutcliffe never admitted to, perhaps because Tracy was so patently young and innocent, he felt a pang of shame.
Other victims were women whose lives had been cruelly shaped by circumstances — having children out of wedlock, meeting the wrong men, becoming homeless, slipping away from mainstream society.
But as Sutcliffe admitted, hi s supposedly divine quest to expunge what he called ‘coarse and vulgar’ women eventually morphed into an uncontrollable urge to kill all women, regardless of their lifestyles.
His victims included 16-year-old Jayne MacDonald, just starting her first job as a sales assistant in a shoe shop; Josephine Whitaker, 19, whom he struck with his hammer after asking her to check the time for him on a church clock as she walked home from her grandparents’ house; and Barbara Leach, 30, a social science student.
Sutcliffe’s evil spanned at least five years, from summer 1975 to winter, 1980, growing ever more grotesque.
It would be obscene to describe in detail some of the wounds he inflicted. Suffice to say he choked one woman by thrusting horsehair stuffing down her throat, and that he stabbed his final victim, English student Jacqueline Hill,
He spent hours in the waxworks horror chamber
through the eye because she seemed to be looking ‘accusingly’ at him.
Somehow, he managed to commit these atrocities while leading an outwardly humdrum life.
On October 9, 1977, he was the life and soul of a housewarming party he and Sonia arranged. Then, after driving his relatives back to their houses, he made a detour across the M62 to Manchester, found the body of his sixth victim, Jean Jordan, whom he had murdered nine days earlier, and tried to saw off her head — to make it look as though she wasn’t a Ripper victim, he later nonchalantly explained to the police.
Other attacks were committed shortly before or after family seaside trips to the Cumbrian village of Arnside, where his grandfather had a caravan, and Morecambe, where his sister Anne lived with her two daughters, to whom Sutcliffe was a protective and doting uncle.
According to his brother Mick, though, there was a more macabre reason why he liked the Lancashire resort across the Pennines.
In the Madame Tussauds waxwork museum there, a truly shocking chamber called the Macabre Torso Room was too much for most holidaymakers to stomach — but Sutcliffe would stare at the exhibits for ages, taking in every grim detail.
The man finally revealed as the Yorkshire Ripper told police he would have continued killing and mutilating women if he had not been caught.
He had just lured his intended 14th victim, Sheffield sex worker Olivia Reivers, into his Rover saloon and was getting ready to retrieve his hammer and screwdriver from the glove compartment when he was arrested on January 2, 1981.
Having led the North’s finest detectives a merry dance for years, he was finally snared by two uniformed patrol
offi cers. Spotting Sutcliffe’s car parked suspiciously at 10.50pm in the grounds of some offices, Sgt Robert Ring and PC Robert Hydes asked the couple what they were doing.
Sutcliffe claimed his name was Dave and that he was with his girlfriend but it was clearly a lie — and when they discovered the Rover had false registration plates, Sutcliffe was held. Before being taken to the police station he had thrown his hammer and screwdriver over a wall — but when the officers returned to the scene and found them, he knew his number was up.
‘I think you’ve been leading up to it,’ he told the detective interviewing him. ‘Leading up to what?’ ‘The Yorkshire Ripper... well, it’s me.’ In a confession lasting many hours, Sutcliffe then recounted his crimes in extraordinary detail. Did he know all his victims by name, he was asked. ‘Yes, I know all of them,’ he replied. ‘They are all in my brain, reminding me of the beast that I am.’
In their hurry to take his statement and get him into court, though, detectives failed to remove his clothes and bag them up as exhibits.For beneath them, Sutcliffe was still wearing his ‘murder kit’.
Before setting out to kill, he would remove his underwear and pull the arms of a V-neck sweater over his legs, leaving his crotch exposed.
Had this ghastly attire been found earlier, it would have strengthened the prosecution’s assertion that he killed for sexual gratification, not because God had sent him on a ‘mission’.
In the event, he admitted having sex with only one of his victims, 18-year-old Helen Rytka, from Huddersfield. He could hardly deny this, as his semen had been found in her, but he claimed it had been a purely ‘ mechanical’ act intended to silence her as she lay dying. This explanation failed to pacify Sonia, who had been fetched to the police station so Sutcliffe could reveal his appalling secret to her personally.
‘What on earth is going on, Peter?’ she asked when she saw him.
‘It’s all those women,’ he replied. ‘I’ve killed all those women. It’s me. I’m the Yorkshire Ripper.’
‘What on earth did you do that for, Peter?’ she mouthed — adding, to the amazement of the detectives: ‘Even a sparrow has the right to live.’
From the moment West Yorkshire’s jubilant Assistant Chief Constable, George Oldfield, staged
The jury at his trial had to judge whether he was ‘mad or bad’
a press conference to announce the arrest, the nation clamoured to know all about Sutcliffe.
At first, however, it seemed he would not even face trial, for when the case opened at the Old Bailey on April 29, 1981, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, said he was prepared to accept the defence’s plea of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, on the grounds that Sutcliffe had been suffering from schizophrenia.
However, the judge, Mr Justice Boreham, said he had ‘very grave anxieties’ about the suspect and his pleas. Although the psychiatrists who examined Sutcliffe were convinced he was mentally ill, their prognoses were based solely on what he himself had told them.
It was for a jury to decide whether he was telling the truth when he claimed to have heard voices, or whether he was using this as a ploy to escape prison. In common parlance, they had to judge whether he was ‘mad or bad’. So, before a panel of six men and six women, Sutcliffe went on trial, declaring himself ‘not guilty’ of 13 murders and seven attempted murders.
In a way, psychiatry itself was on trial during the two-week hearing, as the experts who had assessed Sutcliffe stuck to their guns. ‘There is no evidence that he is a sadistic sexual deviant,’ Dr Milne asserted. He was not ‘simulating’ when he claimed to hear voices.
Yet by a majority of ten to two, the jury decided Sutcliffe was not ill. He was, rather, a ruthless serial killer in full possession of his faculties.
Sentencing him to life on each of the 20 counts, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 30 years in jail, Mr Justice Boreham said he found it so difficult to describe the full brutality of Sutcliffe’s actions, he would ‘let the catalogue of your crimes speak for itself ’.
When his brother Carl visited him in prison and asked what had possessed him, Sutcliffe’s black eyes glinted. ‘I were just cleaning up the streets, our kid,’ he said with a self-satisfied smile. ‘Just cleaning up the streets.’
This article features extracts from Wicked Beyond Belief, by Michael Bilton, published by harperPress, and somebody’s husband, somebody’s son, by Gordon Burn, published by Faber and Faber.