Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter William Coonan, was an English serial killer. On 22 May 1981, he was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. Sutcliffe was transferred from prison to a high-security psychiatric hospital in March 1984 after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In August 2016, it was ruled that Sutcliffe is mentally fit to be returned to prison, and he was transferred that month to HM Prison Frankland in Durham.
About Peter Sutcliffe in brief
Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter William Coonan, was an English serial killer. On 22 May 1981, he was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. All except two of Sutcliffe’s murders took place in West Yorkshire; the others were in Manchester. Sutcliffe was transferred from prison to a high-security psychiatric hospital in March 1984 after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In August 2016, it was ruled that Sutcliffe is mentally fit to be returned to prison, and he was transferred that month to HM Prison Frankland in Durham. He died on 13 November 2020 at the age of 74. He used his mother’s maiden name of Coonans to avoid confusion with his father, who was also called Peter William. He spent much of his time spying on prostitutes and seeking their services. His victims were known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ because they were known to have been murdered by Sutcliffe. He had an affair with an ice-cream van driver during which time he developed a growing obsession with voyeurism and voyeuristic humour. He appeared to have moved to red-light districts because he was attracted by the vulnerability of prostitutes. It has been speculated that he had a bad experience during which he was conned out of money by a prostitute and her pimp. Other analyses of his actions have not found evidence that he actually sought the services of prostitutes, but note that he nonetheless developed an obsession with them, including watching them soliciting on the streets of Leeds and Bradford.
It was one of the largest and most expensive manhunts in British history. West Yorkshire Police were criticised for their failure to catch Sutcliffe despite having interviewed him nine times in the course of their five-year investigation. In 2019, The Guardian described the manhunt as \”stunningly mishandled\”. The findings were made fully public in 2006 and confirmed the validity of the criticism against the force. The report led to changes to investigative procedures which were adopted across UK police forces. He left school aged fifteen and had a series of menial jobs, including two stints as a gravedigger in the 1960s. He met Sonia Szurma on 14 February 1967; they married on 10 August 1974. Sonia suffered several miscarriages and they were informed that she would not be able to have children. When she completed the course she and Sutcliffe used her salary to buy a house in Heaton Lane, Heaton, which they moved into on 26 September 1977, where they lived for a year. In his late late adolescence, Sutcliffe developed a sense of macabre humour and he spent much time spying and seeking the men and women who were seeking their murder services. After his arrest in Sheffield by South Yorkshire Police for driving with false number plates in January 1981 he confessed to being the perpetrator, saying that the voice of God had sent him on a mission to kill prostitutes. He pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility.
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This page is based on the article Peter Sutcliffe published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
