Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper"

Thirteen women

Between 1975 and 1980, Peter Sutcliffe killed thirteen women in West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester and tried to kill seven more. The women he murdered were Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Helen Rytka, Vera Millward, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls and Jacqueline Hill. They ranged in age from 16 to 47. Wilma McCann, killed in Leeds in October 1975, was a mother of four. Jayne MacDonald was 16 when she was killed in Leeds in 1977, Josephine Whitaker was 19 and was killed in Halifax, and Jacqueline Hill, the last woman he killed in November 1980, was a student at Leeds University. Seven other women survived attacks, among them Marcella Claxton and Olive Smelt.

Five years of attacks

Sutcliffe was born in Bingley, West Yorkshire, in 1946. His first known attack on a woman took place in July 1975, and over the next five years he attacked women in Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax, Manchester and surrounding areas. The press gave the unknown attacker a nickname that dominated headlines, and fear spread across northern England. The killings stopped only when he was caught by chance at the start of 1981.

An investigation that went wrong

The inquiry became one of the largest in British history. Officers visited more than 23,000 homes, checked around 150,000 vehicles and carried out more than 130,000 interviews. Sutcliffe himself was questioned and released nine times. The incident room at Millgarth police station in Leeds relied on a paper card index that grew so large it could not be properly cross-referenced, so links pointing towards him were lost. Senior officers also focused heavily on the idea that the killer targeted sex workers. As a result, the 1976 attack on Marcella Claxton, who survived and whose description helped police build a likeness of her attacker, was not connected to the series. In 1978 and 1979 detectives received letters and a tape from a man claiming to be the killer. Police concluded the attacker had a Wearside accent, which pushed attention away from Sutcliffe, a Bradford man. The hoaxer, John Humble, was eventually identified and sentenced, long after Sutcliffe's conviction.

Arrest, trial and sentence

On 2 January 1981, two officers in Sheffield checked a car with a couple inside in the city's red-light area and found it had false number plates. They arrested the driver, Sutcliffe. The next day police recovered a hammer he had hidden nearby, and during questioning he admitted to Detective Inspector John Boyle that he was the man they were looking for. At the Central Criminal Court in London, he was convicted on 22 May 1981 of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders, and he received twenty concurrent life sentences. The trial judge recommended that he serve at least 30 years. In 1984, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was moved from prison to a secure psychiatric hospital.

A whole-life term and his death

Because no formal minimum term had ever been set, Sutcliffe's legal position remained uncertain for years, and in 2008 it emerged that he was seeking a route to release by arguing that his human rights had been breached. In 2010, Mr Justice Mitting ruled in the High Court that the appropriate sentence was a whole-life term, meaning he would never be released. Harry Smelt, whose wife Olive survived an attack, had said publicly that he wanted Sutcliffe to remain locked up. In 2016 a tribunal decided he no longer needed hospital treatment for a mental disorder, and he was returned to prison. He died on 13 November 2020 after contracting Covid-19, still serving his sentence. That confidential report into the original investigation had suggested he was probably responsible for further crimes beyond those for which he was convicted, but those suspicions were never tested in court.

The language used about the victims

For decades relatives criticised the way officers and newspapers had described the women. Several victims were labelled as sex workers, and police at the time spoke of Jayne MacDonald as the first "innocent" victim, implying that the others were somehow less deserving of sympathy. Wilma McCann's son, Richard, asked West Yorkshire Police to apologise for such remarks. After Sutcliffe's death, Chief Constable John Robins did so, apologising for the language, tone and terminology used by senior officers and acknowledging that, while those attitudes may have reflected wider society at the time, they had always been wrong.

What the case changed in Britain

The failures of the inquiry led to a review by Sir Lawrence Byford, dated 1981 but, according to ITV, not released publicly until more than two decades later, and to a further review by Colin Sampson, a former chief constable of West Yorkshire. Their findings on lost information, poor coordination and blinkered assumptions became lessons that West Yorkshire Police says shaped how serious and complex crimes are investigated in modern British policing. The case remains a warning about how assumptions about who victims are can distort an investigation, and it continues to be revisited in British and international reporting more than forty years after the arrest.