HOW COULD SHE STAND BY HIM?
That’s the haunting question of the wife who saw nothing ... then said the Ripper deserved compassion
OH NO! not again! My husband is not the Yorkshire Ripper!’ Bristling with indignation, these were the words of Peter Sutcliffe’s wife, Sonia, on October 23, 1979, when detectives called at their house — for the sixth time but not the last — to interview him in connection with the murders. By then, the police were so desperate to catch the maniac that they had issued an appeal urging every wife and girlfriend in the country to take a cold, hard look at their partner and ask themselves whether there was something — anything — that might make him a potential serial killer.
There were many reasons, one might think, why Sonia might have begun to wonder about Peter.
His lorry-driving job took him to many of the towns where the Ripper had struck and frequently kept him away overnight, for example; the murders invariably took place on nights when she was working in a nursing home; and he would sometimes put his clothes straight into the washing machine on returning home from work.
Yet her head remained firmly in the sand right up until the night of January 3, 1981, when she was taken to Dewsbury police station in West Yorkshire, where Sutcliffe was being held following his arrest, and he told her meekly: ‘It’s me, love. I killed all those women.’
After he had confessed, the Ripper Squad were astounded by her reaction. ‘What on earth did you do that for?’ she asked him, as though he had made some minor transgression such as forgetting the house keys or spilling his tea.
Bizarrely, she added: ‘Even a sparrow has the right to live.’
When Sutcliffe was escorted back to their detached house in the Bradford suburbs, so he could show police the garage where he kept the grisly array of work tools he used to kill and mutilate his victims, Sonia insisted on feeding him with left-over Christmas cake and warm milk before he was remanded to prison.
Down the years, this unswerving — many would say weirdly misguided — loyalty has never wavered. When Sutcliffe was sent down from the Old Bailey to begin his 20 life sentences in 1981, Sonia positioned herself strategically on a bench that allowed her to make eye contact with him and wave at him reassuringly. She would have given evidence on his behalf, she said later, but it wasn’t permitted. For 13 years afterwards she declined to divorce him and, even though she eventually remarried, to hairdresser Michael Woodward, she still lives in the detached house she and Sutcliffe shared — obliging her second husband (who cannot stomach the thought of sleeping in the Ripper’s lair) to reside in a nearby flat.
And for 35 years she held good to her promise to visit him as regularly as possible, often making a 450-mile round trip to Broadmoor where she would hold his hand and nuzzle up to him as they had intimate conversations.
According to journalist Barbara Jones, with whom Mrs Sutcliffe co- operated for a book, Voices From An Evil God, she was even embroiled in a plot to free her husband from the high- security hospital. After sawing through the bars of his window with a smuggled-in hacksaw, he would have been whisked to the coast in a getaway car and stowed away on a Channel ferry, Jones wrote. But the plan was aborted because the authorities were alerted.
Such stories have begged one question: was the woman who shared the Ripper’s bed really unaware of his true persona?
Having interviewed her at great length, believing there might be
When he was sent down she waved at him
grounds for charging her as an accessory or for harbouring him, the Ripper Squad were convinced she had no inkling of his crimes.
It was a view shared by psychiatrist Dr Hugo Milne, who had treated her for schizophrenia during her early 20 sand interviewed her again after Sutcliffe was charged to shed light on his character.
At the murder trial, he said he found Sonia ‘ naïve’ and ‘ selfcentred’, which went some way towards explaining why she believed her husband’s excuses for being out late at night. She was also temperamental and difficult, and their intense relationship swung between feelings of love and anger, said Dr Milne, adding that he could find no evidence that the couple were ‘sexually deviant’.
Speaking to Barbara Jones, Sonia explained why she never suspected the man who would greet her with a peck on the cheek moments after dispatching some hapless young woman. And why she so resolutely stood by him.
Although the Ripper case had gripped the country for a full five years, and speculation about his identity was a staple of everyday conversation in Bradford, she would never participate in this idle ‘gossip’. ‘I had other things on my mind — my schoolwork, f or example,’ said Mrs Sutcliffe, who taught art in a primary school, in her disdainful manner. ‘ Even if I had followed all the Yorkshire Ripper rumours, I would never have known it was Pete.
‘You must remember that it was only 20 nights in five years. And there was no blood for me to see. He often did his own washing. He was very considerate like that. They say I should have seen him coming home covered head to foot in blood. It wasn’t like that.’
With breathtaking insouciance, she added: ‘ The police even did tests in an abattoir and agreed with pathologists that there was not a lot of blood. People think I must have been naïve or stupid not to know. But the victims were not cut up. They were stunned,
and little blood ran.’ She said she believed Sutcliffe when he explained to her that he was driven to kill by ‘voices in his head’ and, since he was seriously ill, she felt ‘compassion for him’.
‘Too many people are ready to pass judgment,’ she said. ‘How many of them are paragons of virtue? I am a deepthinking person, but others have a very l i mited mentality. They have shown a great lack of compassion.’
She claimed the trial judge’s refusal to accept Sutcliffe’s plea of diminished responsibility was ‘ a political decision’. and she admitted in the book that she initially felt no compassion for the women her husband killed and maimed, describing some of them as ‘base’.
Nor did she sympathise with their bereaved relatives. Indeed, she was furious when she faced having to sell the house she and Sutcliffe jointly owned so he could pay the £25,000 compensation awarded to them (the sale was averted when she borrowed the money to buy his share of the property).
‘all my emotions were taken up with my own family. I was going through mental torture . . . and trying to help Pete when he most needed me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have any feelings towards those people, I didn’t know any of them. They just weren’t in the same circle as me.’
So why was she drawn to Sutcliffe — who was her s ocial and intellectual inferior — when other young women were repelled by his disquieting demeanour? Her parents arrived in Britain in 1947 as penniless r ef ugees f r om Czechoslovakia. For her highly-educated father Bohdan a career in academe had beckoned, but after being allocated a council house in Bradford he was forced to take a lowly job in a wool mill.
Soon, they had two daughters, marianne and Oksana — whose name was anglicised to Sonia when she began school. ‘ Frivolous’ pastimes such as watching TV and playing outdoors were banned in favour of reading and listening to classical music. They lived frugally, wearing homemade clothes and eating from the huge pot of goulash that simmered on the stove.
However, Sonia rebelled in her teens by going to pubs and discos. Her parents would have been angry had they known she was in the Royal Standard pub, on Valentine’s Day 1967, when she ought to have been revising for her CSE exams. Yet it was there that the 16yearold schoolgirl was chatted up by Sutcliffe, then aged 20 and working as a gravedigger.
already beginning to harbour a loathing for girls he regarded as cheap and vulgar, he was captivated by this frizzyhaired ‘little miss Prim’ (as his sister maureen described her) with her elocution accent and serious conversation.
Importantly, he told psychiatrist Dr milne, she also told him she was still a virgin. While other girls shied away from his darting, coalblack eyes and squeaky voice, Sonia apparently fell for him because he seemed deeper than other boys.
There was a brief crisis in their relationship when Sonia became i nfatuated with a sports cardriving icecream salesman — the catalyst, Sutcliffe later claimed, for his first forays into the red light district. However, when she enrolled for a teachertraining course in London, Sutcliffe drove to see her every weekend. Then, in 1972, when she suffered a breakdown, and was hospitalised with schizophrenia, he comforted her with undeniable compassion. Since her illness deluded Sonia to believe she was ‘ the second Christ’, prosecutors later claimed that Sutcliffe mimicked some of her symptoms to support his assertion that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when he committed the murders.
It would be four years before she had recovered sufficiently to resume her teaching career. On august 10, 1974, her 24th birthday, she was well enough to marry Sutcliffe. They honeymooned in Paris. Less than a year later, he slipped away from Sonia’s parents’ Bradford home, where they were lodging while saving for a mortgage, to carry out the first attack he admitted to, on anna Rogulskyj.
about that time, Sonia suffered a miscarriage — an event Sutcliffe cynically alluded to, on at least one occasion, when explaining to a prostitute why he had sought her services. Whether the loss of his unborn child really affected him we cannot know. His wife vowed never to try for a baby again.
In September 1977, when the couple paid £16,000 for the house in Garden Lane, a detached house in an affluent neighbourhood of Bradford, she became obsessively houseproud. She would nag Sutcliffe into helping her with the chores, even when he was exhausted after a driving trip.
Describing her behaviour to psychiatrists before his trial, Sutcliffe complained that she refused to allow him into the house before he removed his shoes, wouldn’t let him make a meal or even open the fridge. She was so ‘temperamental and difficult’ that when he tried to relax by watching television she would sometimes rip the plug from the socket.
Yet whenever police interviewed Sutcliffe over the Ripper murders, as they did on nine occasions, Sonia was his rock. On at least three occasions she gave him alibis, yet she made what turned out to be crucial omissions.
For example, asked to account for his whereabouts on October 9, 1977, she said he had been hosting a housewarming party. This was quite true. What she did not tell police was that he had left the house that night to drive family
‘I would never have known he had done it’
She fell for him while other girls shied away
members home and, since they lived only a few miles away, it had taken him an unusually long time.
In fact, after dropping them off, he took a detour across to Manchester, where, eight days earlier, he had murdered prostitute Jean Jordan.
Sutcliffe had concealed her body in an allotment, and wanted to recover a new £5 note he had given her, fearing the serial number could be traced back to the company he worked for.
When he failed to find the note, he vented his rage by further mutilating Miss Jordan’s body and attempting to behead her.
It must be presumed that when he returned home, his clothes surely soiled and bloodstained, Mrs Sutcliffe thought nothing of his protracted absence. Perhaps she was by then asleep in bed.
When detectives knocked at her front door yet again, in January 1981, this time having obtained Sutcliffe’s confession, Sonia was watching television. She continued staring at the screen as Detective Superintendent Dick holland tried to question her and he had to turn the sound down. She reported him for ‘discourteous behaviour’.
holland later described the house, decorated only with the abstract pottery pieces Mrs Sutcliffe sculpted in the attic, as ‘a morgue rather than a home — the most sterile place I have ever been. Very inhuman’.
While Sutcliffe was awaiting trial, Sonia fell out with Sutcliffe’s family, who accused her of controlling their conversations during visits. Sutcliffe broke off all contact with his parents and siblings.
She stayed briefly with her parents before, amid widespread disbelief, returning to the house where Sutcliffe had washed his bloodstained clothes and kept his grisly arsenal.
When a friend asked how she could bear to live there, she replied simply: ‘It’s my home. Nothing bad has ever happened to me here.’
Down the years, she has won at least nine libel actions against newspapers, magazines and authors who have falsely accused her of knowing her husband was a murderer and seeking to profit from his notoriety. She is reckoned to have amassed £370,000 from her various lawsuits.
The one action she lost was against the News of the World, which in 1990 claimed she had an affair with George Papoutsis, a Greek company director whom she met on holiday, and who bore a striking
‘A cold woman who danced on the graves of Sutcliffe’s victims’
resemblance to Sutcliffe. She said she had been ‘mortified’ to read the article, and that it would upset Peter. But the newspaper’s star barrister, George Carman QC, countered that she was a ‘clever, cold and calculating woman’ who had told untruths and ‘danced on the graves of her husband’s victims’.
Why she divorced Sutcliffe, despite continuing to visit him for many years afterwards, has never been convincingly explained. however, in May 1997 she married Woodward, ten years her junior.
With his dark hair and beard, Woodward, too, looked remarkably like Sutcliffe. The wedding, was shrouded in such secrecy that it was attended only by a handful of guests, plus six police officers.
The groom was bundled into church with a blanket over his head. his cousin, Gary Woodward, said the family was ‘shattered’ by his decision, adding: ‘I can’t see us inviting Sonia round to tea.’
She and Woodward lived for seven years in a flat in a converted mill, and her mother Maria lived in the so-called ‘house of horrors’ in Garden Lane. But after Maria died, Sonia moved back there alone, cleaning with all her old fervour.
of course, this prompted speculation that her second marriage might be over but she contacted the Mail to insist this was not the case.
In 2004, Mrs Sutcliffe raised eyebrows again when it was revealed that she had reinvented herself as, of all things, a ‘stress counsellor’. Yet by all accounts she was highly professional and good at her job.
even as late as 2015, she described herself as Sutcliffe’s ‘interested other’ — a status which entitled her to a free rail warrant when she travelled to Broadmoor. But following his transfer to Frankland Prison, in County Durham, a year later, the visits he cherished came to an abrupt end.
She also stopped writing to him and answering his phone calls. It is unclear why but a ‘heartbroken’ Sutcliffe went to his grave blaming ‘ jealous, insecure’ Woodward for refusing to accept that he and Sonia could remain friends.
As his wretched life drew to a close, he reportedly told follow inmates he wanted Sonia to scatter his ashes in Paris, the scene of their honeymoon.
Given everything we know about the woman who somehow saw goodness in the evil Peter Sutcliffe, she seems likely to grant him his last wish.