Yorkshire Ripper never to be released, rules London court

LONDON - The Yorkshire Ripper, Britain’s notorious serial killer who slaughtered 13 women, will never be released and must spend the rest of his life in a prison or a fortified psychiatric hospital, the High Court in London has ruled.

Peter Sutcliffe, a former lorry driver from Bradford in West Yorkshire, now 63 and known as Peter Coonan, came to be dubbed as the Yorkshire Ripper for the murder of 13 women and the attempted murder of seven others in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester during the 1970s.

Dismissing the killer’s latest application to have a minimum term set on his detention, Justice Mitting of the High Court said he had read statements by relatives of the murdered victims and was in no doubt that they represented the unspoken accounts of others affected by his crimes.

“They are each moving accounts of the great loss and widespread and permanent harm to the living caused by six of his crimes. This was a campaign of murder which terrorised the population of a large part of Yorkshire for several years.”

Sutcliffe’s reign of terror across Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Lancashire began in July 1975 after he attacked 36-year-old Anna Rogulskyj with a hammer and slashed her stomach with a knife. She survived after his attack was disturbed by a neighbour.

The serial killer went on to attack or kill 19 others, including 28-year-old Wilma McCann, a mother of four from Leeds, whom he struck twice with a hammer before stabbing her 15 times.

Although not all his victims were sex workers, Sutcliffe has said he believed he was on a “mission from God” to kill prostitutes and he mutilated his victims using a hammer, screwdriver and knife.

He was finally caught after a routine police check found the car he was travelling in with a prostitute had false number plates. He was convicted at London’s Old Bailey in 1981 and received 20 life terms for murder.

He is currently being held in the Broadmoor top security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire after being transferred from prison suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Initially he had refused treatment, but in 1993 the Mental Health Commission ruled it should be given forcibly.

(Venkata Vemuri can be contacted at venkata.v@ians.in)