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Family background and childhood
Sutcliffe was born on 2 June 1946 at the Bingley and Shipley Maternity Hospital in Shipley, West Riding of Yorkshire, as the first child of John Sutcliffe (1922–2004) and his wife Kathleen (née Coonan, 1919–1978). They later had six more children, three boys (one of whom died as an infant) and three girls, born between 1947 and 1959.

Sutcliffe's parents were both from the small industrial town of Bingley, and had met at the beginning of Second World War. They married while John was on leave from the navy in 1945 and moved into their first shared home in Bingley only two months before Sutcliffe's birth. John worked as a weaver in a woollen mill, and played an active role in the local sports and amateur theatre scenes, as well as sang in a church choir. Kathleen was a housewife throughout Sutcliffe's childhood and took most of the responsibility for the children's upbringing, raising them in her faith, Roman Catholicism. In the mid-1960s, however, she began supplementing the family income by occasionally working as a cleaner. The Sutcliffes' marriage was strained by John's several extramarital affairs, with the situation escalating in the early 1970s, when they separated for a few months after he left to live with his mistress. Kathleen also had an affair in 1970. After finding out about it, John decided to retaliate by pretending to be her lover and inviting her to a local hotel. He also invited the oldest children, and once at the hotel, humiliated their mother in front of them by revealing the affair and showing them the new nightdress she had packed with her. According to one of Sutcliffe's sisters, the incident shocked him profoundly and altered his view of their mother. In addition to his constant infidelity, John was occasionally violent towards his wife and children, and sexually harassed his sons' girlfriends when they visited the family home.

Sutcliffe was a small baby, weighing only five pounds at birth, and remained physically weaker than his peers throughout his childhood. He also took longer than average to learn to walk. He was described by his family as a shy and sensitive child, attached to his mother and uninterested in sports and outdoor pursuits, much to the dismay of his athletic father, who compared him unfavourably with his physically larger and more outgoing younger brothers. Sutcliffe's first four years were spent in Bingley, until the growing family moved to a new council estate in the nearby village of Cottingley in 1950. In the same year, Sutcliffe also began school at St Joseph's R.C. Infants and Juniors in Bingley. He was described as a good although unremarkable student, but avoided the company of his peers, which coupled with his small size led to him becoming the target of bullies. After failing his eleven plus exam, Sutcliffe began secondary school at Cottingley Manor Secondary Modern in 1957. His bullying continued there, and he began skipping school, instead spending his days hiding in the loft at home. This continued for some weeks until the school notified his parents about his absence. In 1959, the family relocated back to Bingley to another council estate, where Sutcliffe would live with his family until his marriage in 1974.

Career and marriage
Sutcliffe left school aged 15 in 1961, and in the following years worked in a series of manual labour jobs for local companies, first as an apprentice fitter in an engineering works, then alongside his father at the mill and in a factory making asbestos products. In 1964, he started working as a gravedigger at Bingley Cemetery, and soon also found part-time work in a local morgue. Sutcliffe enjoyed his job and became more outgoing, often spending time with his co-workers at the local pub after work. However, many of them would later comment that he was seen as odd, and there were claims that he was stealing jewellery from the corpses, which led to a complaint being made to the police. One co-worker claimed that while he never saw Sutcliffe steal anything, he was in the habit of digging up corpses to stare at them. He was fired twice for turning up late to work, for the final time in 1967. He then began working at the local waterworks.

In the mid-1960s, Sutcliffe, who had previously had few hobbies, also became interested in motor vehicles and purchased his first motorcycle as well as taught himself about engineering by taking apart and reassembling motors. He also began buying, fixing and re-selling cars, a hobby that would later help him evade capture as he kept changing the cars that he drove while committing his murders. The new hobby also contributed to him becoming less socially isolated. He found friends from the local youths, began to dress in teddy boy style and often visited local pubs, despite not being a heavy drinker. He occasionally dated women and often visited the red-light district in the nearby city of Bradford, but did not have any longterm relationships until 1967, when he began dating Sonia Szurma (b. 1950), daughter of Czechoslovakian refugees who had arrived in Britain in 1947 and lived in Clayton, a suburb of Bradford.

Sutcliffe broke up with Sonia briefly in 1969 after she had an affair with another man. In 1970, she began training as a teacher in London, where he first visited her during the weekends, and in 1971 moved to Wimbledon, finding work as a car mechanic. He however disliked living in London and returned to Bingley after only a few weeks, beginning work on the production line at Baird Television Ltd. in Bradford. He still visited Sonia in London on the weekends, until she had to move back to Yorkshire after suffering a mental breakdown and being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the spring of 1972. Sutcliffe was supportive of her during her recovery, and they decided to get married. The ceremony took place on 10 August 1974 at the Clayton Baptist Chapel, after which the couple moved into her parents' home in Clayton. He still made frequent visits to his family home in Bingley, where he had begun to work on night shifts as a furnace operator at Anderton Circlips Ltd. in 1973.

In February 1975, Sutcliffe took redundancy from Anderton, using the pay-off money to obtain a heavy goods vehicle license in order to realise his ambition of working with cars. He began working as a lorry driver for a tyre company in Bradford in September 1975, but was fired in 1976 after it was discovered that he was stealing tyres. He then found a new position at T. and W.H. Clark, a firm transporting engineering goods all over the United Kingdom, in Shipley in October 1976. At Clark's, Sutcliffe became a well-liked employee, driving one of the company's two Ford Transcontinentals and even appearing in their print advertisements. Sonia also continued her teaching studies in 1976, graduating in 1977 and finding a position as a supply teacher at a local school the same year. Aided by the second paycheck, the Sutcliffes purchased a house in Heaton, Bradford in August 1977, where he would live until his arrest for the murders. Sutcliffe was arrested for drunk driving in June 1980, which would have led to him being fired from Clark's, but the case had not yet gone to court at the time of his final arrest.

First assaults (August 1969–September 1975)
It is not known when or where Sutcliffe committed his first assaults and murders. Since his arrest in 1981, the police have investigated the possibility of his involvement in a number of cold cases in West Yorkshire and London during the 1960s and 1970s, and believe he is likely to have had more victims than previously known (see Other possible victims). The first assault which Sutcliffe can be verified to have committed took place in August 1969, when he hit a prostitute over the head with a stone inside a sock in Bradford. He had been on a night out with his friend, Trevor Birdsall, and the pair had been eating in Birdsall's car when he had suddenly left the car and went after a prostitute. He returned running only ten minutes later, telling Birdsall to drive away fast. On the way back to Bingley, he told Birdsall what he had done. The police were able to trace the attack to Sutcliffe as the victim had been able to memorize the car's registration plate numbers. He admitted to having struck her, albeit with his hand rather than a stone, but she did not want to press charges due to her own legal troubles at the time. A month after the first attack, on 30 September 1969, Sutcliffe was arrested and fined for going equipped for theft after being found with a hammer in the garden of a private home in Manningham, Bradford; the prospect that he was intending to use the hammer as a weapon instead of a burglary tool has later been raised. According to Birdsall and Sutcliffe's brother Mick, he was also a frequent visitor to local red-light areas during this time, and often bragged about not paying the prostitutes and blamed them for having given him venereal diseases.

The next assaults which the police has been able to conclusively link to Sutcliffe took place in the summer of 1975, when he assaulted three females. The first assault took place in Keighley at around 2 AM on 4 July, when he attacked Anna Rogulskyj, a 34-year-old Irish shop assistant, on the street outside her boyfriend's house. In the weeks preceding the attack, Sutcliffe had twice intimidated her on the street and in a coffee bar where she worked. She was struck three times on the head with a ball-pein hammer and had deep scratches on her stomach. Sutcliffe had most likely planned on killing her, but noise from the attack attracted the attention of people living in nearby houses, causing him to flee. She was found on the street at 2.20 AM and taken to hospital. Although she required brain surgery, she survived without permanent injury, but was not able to provide a description of her attacker.

Five weeks later, around midnight on 15 August, Sutcliffe attacked Olive Smelt, a 46-year-old office cleaner, while she was walking home from the pub in Halifax. He had been in the same pub earlier that evening with Trevor Birdsall, and had accused Smelt of being a prostitute. Later, he had spotted her again while driving home with Birdsall, and had asked him to pull over, exiting the car to follow her on foot. Smelt had just turned to a narrow lane when he approached her, made a comment about the weather and then struck her twice on the head with a hammer. When she was lying face down on the ground, he pushed her skirt up and cut her twice on the back with a hacksaw. He was then disturbed by an approaching car and fled; the driver spotted Smelt on the ground and took her to hospital. She was left with a permanent brain injury, but was able to give a description of the attacker. Although he had not witnessed the attack, Birdsall was able to recognize her face from the newspapers the next day, and thought Sutcliffe may have been culpable, but decided not to report it to the police. The police noted the similarities between Smelt and Rogulskyj's injuries, but the attacks were not connected with the "Yorkshire Ripper" murders, which began less than three months later, until 1978.

The third attack came less than two weeks after the attack on Smelt, on 28 August, when Sutcliffe attempted to murder fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Tracey Browne in the rural village of Silsden. Browne was walking on a country lane towards her home from a friend's house around 10.30 PM, and engaged in small talk with Sutcliffe, who was going in the same direction. As she was nearing her home, he struck her five times on the head with a hammer, but was disturbed by a passing car and, lifting her over a fence to a field so she would not be seen, fled the scene. She managed to get to a nearby house, and was taken to hospital. Despite a severe brain injury, Browne was able to give a detailed description of the attacker, corroborated by a local resident, who had seen him in the village. Browne's assault was not linked to the earlier ones or with the Ripper case until 1978, when she herself recognised her attacker from the Ripper photofits circulated in the newspapers. However, the local police dismissed her claim, as the Ripper was thought to attack only prostitutes, and the information was not forwarded to the Ripper investigators. Browne's attack was officially connected to the case only after Sutcliffe had been apprehended; he confessed to it in 1992.

The first "Yorkshire Ripper" murders (October 1975–May 1977)
Sutcliffe committed his first known murder on 30 October 1975, when he killed Williamina "Wilma" McCann, 28, in Chapeltown, an impoverished district of Leeds. McCann was a single parent of four young children and worked as a prostitute. She had been out drinking that night and had gotten into Sutcliffe's car thinking he was a client. They got out of the car at the Prince Phillip Playing Fields, where Sutcliffe struck her several times with a hammer and then stabbed her fifteen times in the throat, chest and abdomen. He also ripped some of her clothes and left her lying on her back with her clothes pulled up so that her body was exposed. She was found by a milkman at 7.41 AM. After eliminating McCann's partners and regular clients from suspicion, the police, led by chief superintendent Dennis Hoban, had few leads from which to proceed. They appealed to possible witnesses by encouraging the local press to write emotional stories about McCann's children and downplay her work as a prostitute. They also set up roadblocks to conduct questioning on the streets she had last been sighted in, resulting in some vague statements about the car that she had gotten into and its driver.

By mid-January 1976, 137 police officers were working on the McCann inquiry, but with no results. On 20 January, Sutcliffe murdered Emily Jackson, a 42-year-old housewife who had recently began working as a prostitute after the family's roofing business had hit financial difficulties. He had picked her up from the same area where he had killed McCann, Chapeltown, and drove to a derelict piece of land on Roundhay Road in the neighbouring Sheepscar district, where he pretended that he had problems in getting the car to start. Opening up the bonnet, he asked Jackson to hold a lighter to aid him fix the issue, and when she did so hit her twice over the head with a hammer. He then dragged her to a nearby yard, where he exposed her body, stabbed her 52 times with a cross-ply screwdriver to her neck, breasts, abdomen and back, pushed a piece of wood up her vagina and stomped on her thigh with his boot. Jackson's body was found at 8.10 AM by a passerby. The police soon connected the murder with McCann's, and found a new lead, a size 7 (UK) boot print on her thigh and another nearby in the sand. The two murders also attracted the attention of the local press, who began calling the unknown perpetrator the "Yorkshire Ripper", drawing parallels between him and the infamous Jack the Ripper.

The next attack took place at 4 AM on 9 May 1976, when Sutcliffe attempted to murder 20-year-old prostitute Marcella Claxton in Leeds. She was not working that night but was instead returning home from a party. She was stopped by Sutcliffe in a car, and after explaining that she was not working, asked for a lift to her home on Roundhay Road. Once they got to the nearby Roundhay Park, Sutcliffe stopped the car and Claxton went out to urinate. Shortly after, he also got out of the car and struck her several times upon the head with a hammer. He then left, allowing Claxton to get to a nearby phone box and call the police. While waiting for them, she saw Sutcliffe driving around the area, apparently trying to find her. Although Claxton was able to give the police a detailed description of the attacker and his car, her testimony was disregarded and the case not immediately connected with the two murders due to police racism (Claxton is of West Indian heritage) and due to her low IQ (50).

After the assault on Claxton, Sutcliffe is not known to have committed other murders or assaults until several months later on 5 February 1977, when he murdered Irene Richardson. Richardson was recently divorced and homeless, and had resorted to prostitution to earn some money. Sutcliffe drove her to the same park he had gone with Claxton, Roundhay Park, and attacked her with a hammer when she went to urinate. He shattered her skull, and stabbed her with a utility knife to the extent of her intestines being exposed from the wounds in her stomach. He then re-positioned her clothes, pushing her skirt up, laying her boots over her thighs and draping her coat over her legs. The body was found at 7.30 AM by a jogger, and the case was immediately connected with the earlier murders both by the police and the media. The careful arranging of the body and the clothes made it clear that the murders were pre-planned and controlled, and the police also received a new lead when they found clear tire tracks near the body. The same tires were found to be used on over 100,000 vehicles in West Yorkshire, which the police began to check one-by-one.

As the red-light districts in Leeds were increasingly patrolled by the police, Sutcliffe committed his next murder in Bradford. Two months after killing Richardson, he murdered prostitute Patricia "Tina" Atkinson in her bedsit on Oak Avenue on 23 April 1977. After striking her several times on the head with a hammer, he pulled down her clothes, and then struck and clawed at her torso with both ends of the hammer, followed by several stabbings and slashings with a knife to her stomach, back and sides. He then covered the body with the bed linen and left, throwing the hammer to a field, where it was found by a farmer who used it for the next three years. Atkinson's body was discovered by her friend at around 6.30 PM. In addition to the similarity of the modus operandi, the police found boot prints that matched those found in the Jackson murder scene.

Nationwide publicity and widespread panic (June 1977–February 1978)
Until the summer of 1977, the "Yorkshire Ripper" murders had been mainly of interest to the local press in West Yorkshire and as all victims had been prostitutes, the case had not created widespread panic in the general populace. Sutcliffe's murder of Jayne MacDonald in Chapeltown, Leeds on 26 June changed this and made the case national news. This was due to the difference in victim profile: unlike the previous victims, MacDonald was not working in prostitution, but was a sixteen-year-old shop assistant who lived with her family in Chapeltown. She had been on her way back from a night out with friends and after missing the last bus and being unable to find a taxi, had decided to walk home. Sutcliffe had began following her, and had hit her on the head with the hammer on Reginald Street. He had then dragged her to a nearby adventure playground, where he exposed her body, stabbed her multiple times and embedded a broken bottle to her chest. MacDonald's body was found around 9.45 AM by local children. The panic and outrage of the public led to the appointment of experienced Chief Constable George Oldfield to lead the investigation.


 * 10 July 1977 Maureen Long attack
 * 1 October 1977 Jean Jordan
 * 14 December 1977 Marilyn Moore attack
 * January 1978 Yvonne Pearson (not found until March)
 * 31 January 1978 Helen Rytka

"Wearside Jack"-hoax and derailment of the inquiry (March 1978– March 1979)

 * 16 May 1978 Vera Millward

Final murders and attacks (April 1979–1980)

 * 4 April 1979 Josephine Whitaker
 * 2 September 1979 Barbara Leach
 * 20 August 1980 Marguerite Walls
 * 24 September 1980 Upadhya Bandara attack
 * 5 November Theresa Sykes attack
 * 17 November Jacqueline Hill

Arrest and trial

 * Decides to start killing in Sheffield in South Yorkshire as in the West the red light areas are more heavily patrolled
 * Picks up Olivia Reivers from ?, her story about how things went
 * Approached by two policemen on routine patrol. Sutcliffe tries to claim Reivers is his girlfriend but police familiar with her. Check Sutcliffe's registration plates and realise they are stolen. Sutcliffe admits this, blames insurance running out and impending sentence for drunk driving. Asks to go and urinate in order to dispose of weapons; again at the police station. Policemen become suspicious (why?) and go back to check. Interrogated and then confesses, followed by a 15 h confession
 * God excuse (claims no sexual component), head injury; leggings; home searched
 * Where kept before trial?
 * Trial – lots media/public attention, closed doors, no photography. Diagnosed with encapsulated paranoid schizophrenia, goes for diminished responsibility. Some evidence (leggings etc. left out). Judge decides to go against and jury decides is not ill. Sentence.

In prison and Broadmoor

 * Parkhurst, first attack and the Costello trial, move to Broadmoor; separation/divorce from Sonia
 * attacks while in Broadmoor
 * penpals; further confessions to Keith Hellawell; usually declines to see academics or journalists?
 * name change to Coonan
 * father's death
 * becomes friends with Jimmy Savile
 * current health issues: obesity, type 2 diabetes

2010 appeal for parole and whole-life tariff

 * EU law
 * 2009 statement from doctor
 * 2010 proceedings; why declined
 * whole life tariff

Pathology, modus operandi and victims

 * Sutcliffe's claims: head injury, hatred of prostitutes "He claimed the attack was motivated by his anger of having been cheated out of his money by another prostitute and her pimp some weeks earlier, when he had gone to buy sex after learning of Sonia's infidelity. He had later seen the prostitute again at a pub, and asked her about his money, ending up being ridiculed by her and the other patrons; according to Sutcliffe, the humiliation led him to hate prostitutes. "
 * personality disorder; known as manipulative and a pathological liar; criticism of diagnosis as based on solely his stories; no attacks while incarcerated & able to take care of himself, organised; pre-planning of crimes and attacking a specific group of strangers rather than carers/family; able to remain healthy without anti-psychotics.

Other possible victims
In addition to the assaults and murders Sutcliffe has confessed to, the British police believe that there is a strong possibility that he was responsible for other attacks and murders as well.


 * Fred Craven, a 60-year-old bookmaker, was murdered on 22 April 1966 in Bingley, Sutcliffe's home town. Craven had arrived at his office at around 11.30 AM and was soon after beaten with a blunt instrument, resulting in a fatal brain injury. A wallet with £200 had been stolen from him. Coincidentally, Sutcliffe's brother Michael was interrogated and cleared from suspicion as he had been in a nearby "chip shop" during the time of the murders. There is nothing conclusive to link Sutcliffe with the murder and he has denied responsibility for it, but Des O'Boyle, an investigator involved in the Ripper case has noted that he matches the description of a man who was seen near Craven's office during the time of the crime. In addition, the police believe that Craven recognised his murderer; the Sutcliffes and the Cravens knew each other as they lived on the same street.
 * John Tomey, a taxi driver, was attacked by a customer whom he had picked up from Leeds on the night of 22 March 1967. The customer had first asked him to drive to Burnley, located in the nearby county of Lancashire, but had changed his mind to Bingley after a while. By then driving in the countryside in the dark, Tomey was unsure where they were and stopped to look at a map. The customer then attacked him with a hammer, striking him several times on the head, and then exited the car in an attempt to access the driver's side of the car. However, Tomey always kept the door locked and while his attacker was attempting to break the window, he was able to drive away and find help. He survived but with a permanent brain injury, and feels that the attack "utterly destroyed his life", leaving him unable to work or to maintain normal relationships. According to O'Boyle, both Tomey's injuries and his description of the attacker bear strong similarity to Sutcliffe, but there is no conclusive evidence of his involvement and he has repeatedly denied culpability for the crime.
 * Gloria Booth was strangled in Stonefield Park, south Ruislip, London in June 1971, while walking home from work. Sutcliffe often travelled to London during the early 1970s to visit his girlfriend who was studying there, and the method with which Booth was murdered is similar to the one he used to strangle some of his victims in Yorkshire. The Metropolitan police began a review of the case in 2010.

Criticism of the West Yorkshire Police and the Byford inquiry

 * lack of modern technology
 * not checking all leads
 * misogyny within the police
 * lawsuits by relatives

Cultural representations
The "Yorkshire Ripper" case remains one of the most significant cases in British criminal history. In addition to several non-fiction books and television documentaries recounting the case, it has been the subject of a poem, "The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper" (1987), as well as an eponymous collection of poems (1987) by Blake Morrison and is a central element in David Peace's Red Riding (1999–2002) quartet of novels on police corruption in 1970s Yorkshire. The latter was also made into a three-part television adaptation by Channel 4 in 2009. A television docu-drama, This Is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was aired in 2000 by ITV, and an independent film, Peter: A Study for a Portrait of a Serial Killer, directed by Skip Kite and with Walt Kissack playing Sutcliffe, was released in 2011. The case and its effects on victims' families was the subject of Brian Daniels' play Where's Your Mama Gone, which premiered at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds in 2011, accompanied by an exhibition. Letters sent by Sutcliffe from Broadmoor were used by Glenn Chandler in his play Killers at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.