Peter Sutcliffe

Trevor and Peter would spend hundreds of hours over the next few years in pubs and cruising the streets of the red-light districts in Peter’s succession of cars. Peter had seemed to have a liking for prostitutes, mixed with a strange anger. Trevor remembered vividly a night in Bradford in 1969, when Peter had left him in the car for a few minutes. When he returned, Peter told him that he had tried to hit a prostitute with a brick he had put inside a sock, but the sock had fallen apart and the brick had fallen out. Despite his strange behaviour, Trevor would remain friends with Peter until his arrest in 1981.

Six months after his marriage to Sonia, Peter Sutcliffe took the opportunity of a £400 pound redundancy package. He used the money to acquire his licence to drive large trucks. On 4 June 1975, two days after his twenty-ninth birthday, he passed the HGV test Class 1 and then bought himself a white Ford Corsair with a black roof, while keeping his first car, a lime-green Ford Capri GT. During the following month, Peter was to tell friends and family of the sad news of Sonia’s many miscarriages. Soon after the latest miscarriage, Peter and Sonia were informed that Sonia would not be able to have the children that they had both wanted so much.

It was not long after this that Peter made his first reported attack. Anna Patricia Rogulskyj lived in Keighly. The slim attractive blonde in her early thirties had been divorced from her Ukrainian husband for two years. On the night of 4 July 1975, she and boyfriend Jeff Hughes, whom she expected to marry in the near future, had had a fight. Still angry, she had left him to go out drinking with friends at a club in Bradford. Her two Jamaican friends dropped her outside of her home at 1:00 am, where she expected to find her boyfriend. He wasn’t there. Her earlier anger with him soon resurfaced and she decided to walk across town to his house, to finally sort things out. As she fruitlessly banged upon the door, Peter Sutcliffe stood in the shadows watching. Finally, in frustration, she removed one of her shoes and broke the glass of a downstairs window.

Anna Rogulskyj

As she knelt to put her shoe back on, Peter quickly emerged from the shadows and struck her a savage blow to her head. Anna had not seen or heard anything and was unconscious as he dealt her another two blows with his hammer. Peter paused momentarily to catch his breath as the blood from Anna’s wounds seeped across the cobblestones. He lifted her skirt and pulled down her underpants. As he returned the hammer to his pocket and took out a knife, his anger, under control until now, found expression with each slashing cut across her stomach.

The voice of a concerned neighbour, disturbed by the noise, quickly quelled the frenzied outpouring of Peter’s rage. As the neighbour stood peering out into the alley, trying to focus in the poor light, Peter Sutcliffe pulled himself together and spoke calmly as he reassured the man that all was well and to go back inside, which he did. Peter straightened Anna’s clothing and was gone as quickly as he had come.

Site where Rogulskyj was attacked

After Peter returned home to his sleeping wife to continue his life as usual, Anna was found and rushed to the casualty department of Airedale hospital. From there she was transferred to Leeds General Infirmary for an emergency operation that lasted twelve hours. At one point, she was read the last rites. Miraculously, she survived but, unlike Peter, her life would never be the same after that night. She returned to her home where she would live alone with her five cats, barricaded behind a network of wires and alarms.

She is terrified of strangers and rarely goes out. When she does, she walks in the middle of the street, as she is afraid of the shadows and terrified of people approaching her from behind. There is no boyfriend now, and no prospects of marriage. The £15,000 she received from the Criminal Compensation Board cannot buy back her life. She wishes that she had died that night.

The police were mystified by the attack, which appeared to have no motive. No money was stolen and it had not been a sexual attack. Her boyfriend and all of her friends had been cleared and there were no further leads apart from a vague description, given by the neighbour, of a man in his late twenties or early thirties, about five-foot-eight and wearing a check sports coat.

During the next month, while Peter looked for work as a driver, Sonia decided to complete her teacher training and enrolled at the Margaret McMillan College in Bradford. On Friday 15 August, Peter drove his friend Trevor Birdsall to Halifax where they drank in a number of pubs. It was in one of these pubs that Peter had first seen Mrs. Olive Smelt.

Forty-six-year-old Olive had followed her usual Friday night pattern of meeting her girlfriends for a drink in Halifax, while her husband Harry stayed at home with their 15-year-old-daughter Julie and 9-year-old-son Stephen. Two men known well by the women, gave them all a lift home. Olive was dropped in Boothtown Road, a short walk from her home.

At the same time, Peter left Trevor alone in his car. As Olive took a short cut through an alleyway at 11:45 pm, Peter walked up behind her and overtook her. The last thing Olive could remember was Peter saying, "Weather’s letting us down isn’t it?" before he dealt her a heavy blow to the back of her head. He hit her again as she fell to the ground then slashed at her back with his knife just above her buttocks. He was again prevented from completing his task. A car was quickly approaching, so Peter left Olive and returned to the car where Trevor was waiting. A mere ten minutes had passed.

Olive could not recall how she came to be found some yards down the road, moaning and calling for help. Neighbours took her to their home where they called an ambulance and sent someone to inform Harry. She was initially rushed to Halifax Infirmary and then to Leeds infirmary, where she spent ten days. Once again, Peter had left another woman’s life in pieces. Olive would continue to suffer from severe depression and memory loss. For months, she would wish that she were dead as the repercussions of the attack took hold of her life. She was continually depressed and took no interest in her life. She lived in fear, especially of men, and would sometimes look at her husband and wonder, hadn’t he been a police suspect? Their relationship was permanently altered and she rarely felt like having sex. Her past enjoyment of home making and cooking was lost and she now completed these tasks in robotic fashion. Her oldest daughter suffered a nervous breakdown, which doctors were sure was a direct result of the attack, and for many years, her son would continue to lock the door whenever he left his mother alone in the house.

Despite the similarities between the two apparently motiveless attacks upon Anna Rogulskyj and Olive Smelt, police would not link them for some time. It would be three years before they would confirm that the attacker was in fact the Yorkshire Ripper.

On 29 September 1975, Peter Sutcliffe began working as a delivery driver for a tyre company. Exactly one month later, he would succeed in killing his first victim and his reign of terror would begin.

Wilomena McCann, who preferred to be known as Wilma, was a fiery, Scottish 28-year-old, and a mother of four. Her body was found on the morning of 30 October 1975 lying face upwards on a sloping grass embankment of the Prince Phillip Playing Fields, off Scott Hall Road, just 100 yards from her council home in nearby Scott Hall Avenue.

Wilma had never settled into the mundane life of a wife and mother, much preferring the excitement of the nightlife in the many Leeds hotels. On the night of her death, she had left her four children in the care of her eldest daughter, 9-year-old Sonje, to go out drinking. She was to drink heavily until closing time at 10:30 pm and then make her way home. Along the way, a lorry driver stopped when Wilma flagged him down, but continued on his way when he was greeted with a mixture of incoherent instructions and abuse, leaving her by the side of the road. She was seen at about 1:30 am being picked up by a West Indian man, who was the second last person to see her alive. Soon after 5:00 am, a neighbour found Wilma’s two oldest daughters huddled together at the bus stop. They were cold, confused and frightened. Their mummy hadn’t come home the night before and they were waiting in the hope that she would come home by bus.

Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Hoban was in charge of the inquiry. When Professor Gee, the pathologist, completed his report, Hoban learned that Wilma had been struck twice on the back of the head, and then stabbed in the neck, chest and abdomen fifteen times. There were traces of semen found on the back of her trousers and underpants. By the time the coroner’s verdict of "murder by person or person’s unknown" had been handed down, the one hundred and fifty police officers that Hoban had working on the case had interviewed seven thousand householders and six thousand lorry drivers. They had taken hundreds of statements from anyone with even the remotest connection to Wilma, each one painstakingly checked, but still they had not even come close to finding her killer.

On 20 November 1975, 26-year-old Joan Harrison’s dead body was found in a garage in Preston, Lancashire. She had been hit over the back of the head with the heel of a shoe and then kicked severely until she was dead. Before leaving her, the killer had dragged her to a more secluded part of the garage where he pulled her trousers back on and pulled her bra down to cover her breasts. Placing the boot he had removed earlier in between her thighs, he then removed her coat and covered her with it. He took her handbag and dumped it in a refuse bin, after removing all its contents. The killer was to leave a number of clues for the police. The first was a deep bite mark above her breast, which revealed that the killer had a gap between his front teeth. Tests on semen found in both her vagina and anus showed that the killer was what is known as a secretor, a person whose blood group information is secreted into their body fluids (approximately 80% of the population). The killer's blood group was of the rare B group.

Joan Harrison

Initially, Joan Harrison’s murder was not linked to Wilma McCann’s as there were too many differences in the killer’s method. This decision would be altered when police were later to receive a number of letters from a man claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper. He mentioned the murder in Preston, leading the police to incorrectly believe that Joan Harrison was also one of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims.