Peter Sutcliffe

Who is Peter Sutcliffe?

Peter William Sutcliffe is a British serial killer who was dubbed by the press "The Yorkshire Ripper" during his crime spree. In 1981 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others.

Sutcliffe regularly used prostitutes in Leeds and Bradford. His obsession with killing female streetwalkers seems to have originated with an argument over payment, but he later claimed to have been sent on a mission to kill prostitutes by the voice of God. In a meeting with his family shortly after his arrest he was heard to say "the women I killed were filth — bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets. I was just cleaning up the place a bit."

He carried out the murder spree over a five year period, during which the public were especially shocked by the murders of some women who were not prostitutes. When arrested in January 1981 for driving with false number-plates, police questioned him about the killings and he confessed that he was the perpetrator.

At his trial, he pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility, owing to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, but this defence was rejected by the jury. He is currently serving twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment in Broadmoor High Security Hospital. After his conviction, Sutcliffe began using his mother's maiden name and became Peter William Coonan.