Wearside Jack
John Samuel Humble pretended to be the Yorkshire Ripper in a hoax audio recording and several letters in the period 1978–1979. Humble sent a taped message spoken in a Wearside accent and three letters, taunting the authorities for failing to catch him. The FBI told the police that the creator of the tape was a blatant hoaxer. In 2006 Humble was sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice.
About Wearside Jack in brief
John Samuel Humble pretended to be the Yorkshire Ripper in a hoax audio recording and several letters in the period 1978–1979. Humble sent a taped message spoken in a Wearside accent and three letters, taunting the authorities for failing to catch him. The message, recorded on an audio cassette, caused the investigation to be moved away from the West Yorkshire area, home of the real killer, Peter Sutcliffe. In 2006 Humble was sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice. More than 25 years after the event, a fragment from one of Humble’s envelopes was traced to him through DNA, and in 2006 he was jailed for eight years. The FBI told the police that the creator of the tape was a blatant hoaxer. Despite this, the police focused on Humble’s Sunderland accent. This led to 40,000 men being investigated to no avail, as the killer, Sutcliffe, came from Bradford. The case remained unsolved until 2011, when DNA evidence from the crime scene was matched to those of a deceased man named Christopher Smith, who had been convicted of other offences, including attempted rape and manslaughter. A then unknown victim of Sutcliffe’s blood was the killer at the time of Yvonne Pearson’s death.
This raised the suspicion of a Sunderland detective that the Wearside killer was the B-group of their killer. A report was submitted to the Northumbria Police in September 1979, but was ignored by the police. One of the officers wrote to the officers, Detective Constable Andrew Laptew, in his report that there was good evidence that Sutcliffe was the killer but the document was downgraded because of the lack of a lack of handwriting with the hoaxer’s handwriting. This detail raised suspicion of the detective that Wearside Jack was a hoax and he submitted a report to the police in September 1980, but the report was ignored. In July 1979, two Detective Constables became suspicious of the killer and the handwriting was found to match the handwriting of the Ripper. The handwriting was discarded under a hidden sofa in Bradford, whose undiscovered body lay undiscovered under a discarded sofa. This was the clue to the killer’s identity. The police decided to search for the man heard on the tape but ignored it because he did not have a North-East accent.
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This page is based on the article Wearside Jack published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 14, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
