Peter William Sutcliffe

[Uncle Wally One Ball]

Equally amazing how he deceived WYP to that extent.

I was always intrigued by the accuracy of the experts who pinpointed the accent to the extent they did, to a particular district in Wearside. I think I've got a decent ear for an accent, but not even remotely to that extent.

They had it bang on to the village. The problem was George Oldfield was so desperate to resolve it he swallowed it hook line and sinker

 

[SidJames]

I was born in 74 so the 70s are a blur but when i see photos and tv footage of that time everyone just looks scruffy as fuck, the streets looked full of litter. It looked a horrible decade.

" the Streets looked full of litter"...................and white dog shit :-)

Dont see it much anymore.

 

[SidJames]

Growing up in the seventies was grim.

everyone's mum and dad worked full time around the clock back then.

Girls in primary school were going home and cooking,and cleaning the House.

Life back then was a team effort.

Kids today dont know they are born.

A good and bad thing.

 

[johnnytapia]

I'm not sure that's entirely correct. I highly doubt all four psychiatric reports would have been commissioned by the defence. At least one would have been via the prosecution (and would have been disclosable to the defence even if it wasn't used in evidence as part of the prosecution case). Inconceivable that the prosecution didn't have a psych report if the defence had been granted leave by the court to get one.

Just checked what Michael Bilton says in his seminal Ripper book, "Wicked Beyond Belief". The Crown, through QC Sir Michael Havers initially accepted the plea of diminished responsibility. The judge, Justice Boreham asked Havers for the evidence that gave the doctors their basis for this plea. "For the next two hours Havers took the judge through the reports and Sutcliffe's own explanation"
So you're quite correct, wasn't the defence.
Talks too about court and all the "props" being on display each day: seven ball-pein hammers, a long kitchen knife, eight screwdrivers of assorted length, a knife with a wooden handle, a short length of rope and a cream-coloured raffia handbag which had belonged to Jacqueline Hill.
That sort of stuff focuses the mind I'd imagine.

 

[johnnytapia]

Sonia Sutcliffe didn't divorce him until 1994.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Just checked what Michael Bilton says in his seminal Ripper book, "Wicked Beyond Belief". The Crown, through QC Sir Michael Havers initially accepted the plea of diminished responsibility. The judge, Justice Boreham asked Havers for the evidence that gave the doctors their basis for this plea. "For the next two hours Havers took the judge through the reports and Sutcliffe's own explanation"
So you're quite correct, wasn't the defence.
Talks too about court and all the "props" being on display each day: seven ball-pein hammers, a long kitchen knife, eight screwdrivers of assorted length, a knife with a wooden handle, a short length of rope and a cream-coloured raffia handbag which had belonged to Jacqueline Hill.
That sort of stuff focuses the mind I'd imagine.

Completely prejudicial, of course.

The Judge's ruling left Havers (who I'm sure you know was Nigel Havers' dad) having to cross examine witnesses whose evidence he had previously sought to rely upon!

Sonia Sutcliffe didn't divorce him until 1994.

Presumably on the grounds of estrangement!

 

[johnnytapia]

Completely prejudicial, of course.

The Judge's ruling left Havers (who I'm sure you know was Nigel Havers' dad) having to cross examine witnesses whose evidence he had previously sought to rely upon!

Presumably on the grounds of estrangement!

Yeah, bizarre, but I guess the feeling at the time may have been one of, "let's get this done and put the **** away". Few would have been questioning the actions of the judge, especially when it seemed the judge wanted to see him prosecuted for murder and not manslaughter.
As for Sonia, she still carried on visiting him up to 2015. Maybe at that point she might have begun to have 2nd thoughts!
Not sure who was advising Frank on his PR:

 

[Bluesince1979]

The film, DOA, shows perfectly, just how fucking grey everything was in the '70s. Fuck all worked, phones, trains, cars etc. Everyone and every thing beholden to the unions (and I say that as a strong union supporter).
Politically, a fascinating era, Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thorpe, Grimond. Then Thatch rocked up, well, that's for a different thread!

I shall have a gander at that.

 

[johnnytapia]

I shall have a gander at that.

One of the best documentaries ever made. Charts the (sad) demise of The Sex Pistols as heroin takes a brutal hold on Vicious. Interspersed with gems from various bands in schools, halls and all other places that those bands could play in. All on a shoestring, mainly winging it but with a real "Fuck You" attitude. And all against a bleak British backdrop of uncollected bins, strikes and the political class seemingly oblivious to the atrophying, crumbling country they claimed to govern. Utterly brilliant.

 

[petrusha]

in fact, in light of that medical evidence, before the trial, the prosecution wanted accept those diminished responsibility pleas (and therefore drop the murder charges), but the judge denied the prosecution leave to accept those pleas against the overwhelming weight of the medical evidence and the trial was therefore put before a jury. An outrageous decision in terms of blind justice, but a highly pragmatic one too.

There was no way the establishment was going to play with a straight bat with Sutcliffe, which is somewhat understandable. He was a horrible ****.

Going against four psychiatric reports is pretty hardcore, though. I guess the Judge was doing what was required of him, by any means necessary. Refusing those pleas was pretty mental, highly unusual and unexpected - and was doubtless politically motivated.

At least two of the psychiatrists testified that, if Sutcliffe were shown to have a sexual motivation for the crimes or derive sexual pleasure from them, their diagnosis would fall. There was plenty of evidence to that effect, not all of it put forward by the prosecution during the trial.

Given the medical professionals' own words, I believe that the judge was vindicated in wanting the jury to measure Sutcliffe's recorded actions against his self-serving version of events which was the sole basis for the psychiatrists' diagnoses. Nor do I think it was unreasonable for the jurors to reach the verdict that they did. My opinion is that the Crown, in first accepting a manslaughter plea, wanted to stop aspects of the investigation coming to light in the trial that would seriously embarrass the police.

I do believe that Sutcliffe was indeed mentally ill, but he was a mentally ill sex attacker. I don't buy the idea that he was on what he believed to be a God-instructed campaign to rid the streets of sex-workers. Two months before he killed his first commonly attributed murder victim, he tried to kill a 14-year-old schoolgirl in a country lane, which I can't square with that divine mission stuff. I see the latter as a way to evade responsibility for the sexual element of his crimes.

I shouldn’t laugh and not sure whether anyone is aware but there’s a conspiracy theory that Sutcliffe wasn’t the real killer and it was an Irish bloke called Billy Tracey instead. The conspiracy theorist - I think he wrote a book about it - accepts Sutcliffe was responsible for a few of the murders but reckons the majority were committed by the other guy ffs!

The conspiracy theorist is a bloke called Noel O'Gara, who employed Tracey in Ireland at the time of the Ripper killings. His book came out decades ago now and I bought it out of interest. It was appallingly written and full of unsubstantiated allegations that he cites as evidence of his theories. Ultimately, though, when you look at the substance of what he says, it seems pretty bonkers: if true, it means that someone was flying in from Dublin to Manchester on a regular basis and travelling round on public transport, or in taxis, or in hire cars to kill women, and that seems scarcely credible to me.

O'Gara does seem a bit of a crank, though, in general and not just with regard to the Ripper case. He produced a website alleging that Steve Wright wasn't guilty of the series of killings in Ipswich at the back end of 2006 and had been framed because there was a lack of desire to prosecute another man previously arrested in the inquiry. And I saw him on Twitter the other day banging on about the Joanna Yeates murder in 2010 leading to a miscarriage of justice, the convicted Dutch neighbour Vincent Tabak being innocent and the weird landlord Christopher Jeffries (who was originally pilloried in the press) being the real killer.

I was always intrigued by the accuracy of the experts who pinpointed the accent to the extent they did, to a particular district in Wearside. I think I've got a decent ear for an accent, but not even remotely to that extent.

Remember that the two guys were eminent and experienced specialist dialecticians, so they'd spent decades studying what caused differences in the manner of speech between different geographical areas. In other words, they no doubt start off with an exceptionally good ear, but they then develop it over an extended period.

What they did in the Ripper investigation was spend a few weeks going round Sunderland interviewing people, then comparing the recordings with the Wearside Jack tape. They ultimately decided that the speech patterns in the former mining community of Castletown most closely mirrored the pronunciation of the man on the tape. I believe that John Humble had spent time in Castletown when he was growing up but lived a couple of miles away when he perpetrated the hoax, so they basically got it right.

The two linguists actually told the police in October 1979 that they thought the tape was likely a hoax. This was based on the fact that they thought police must already have encountered the man responsible, and if he'd been discounted as a suspect, he must have had an alibi. In fact, they never interviewed him - though Humble claimed they did see his next-door neighbour, a man called Ernie IIRC.