The Yorkshire Ripper Trivia Quiz

Answer: Peter Sutcliffe

Sutcliffe was born and brought up in Shipley, West Yorkshire. He had worked as a gravedigger and a factory worker before gaining his HGV license. It was shortly after he began working as a long-distance lorry driver that he committed his first murder.

He was convicted of the crimes that the media dubbed "The Ripper Murders" at The Old Bailey in May 1981. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation of a minimum term of thirty years in jail. This sentence was extended to a whole life tariff (meaning that Sutcliffe would never be released) by Home Secretary, William Whitelaw.

Answer: Five years

The first confirmed attack by Sutcliffe was perpetrated on Anna Rogulskyj in July 1975. Thanks to the actions of a neighbour, who heard a commotion outside his house, the attack was not fatal as Sutcliffe was scared off. The first murder he committed occurred five months later when he attacked and killed Wilma McCann in Chapeltown, Leeds.

It wasn't until Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield in January 1981, and was presented with the evidence against him that he confessed to being the Ripper.

Answer: False

The majority of the crimes for which Sutcliffe was convicted were committed in Yorkshire; mainly in the West Yorkshire area. However, Sutcliffe travelled across the Pennines into Manchester and killed on two occasions. The unfortunate victims were Jean Jordan and Vera Millward.

Answer: Some money he had given to the victim.

Sutcliffe had given Jordan the five-pound note as payment for sex. He killed her and left her body on some allotments in Manchester. That night, Sutcliffe and his wife Sonia were hosting a house-warming party in their new home. Whilst showing no external sign of concern, Sutcliffe was worried that the note might lead the police to him as it was from a newly-printed batch of notes. After the party, Sutcliffe gave some of his guests a lift home and after dropping the last of them home, he drove across the Pennines to search for the note.

He was unable to find it and decided that the best course of action was to further mutilate Jean Jordan's body so that the police would not think it was a Ripper murder.

He was not successful in sufficiently disguising the attack so that when the body was discovered, police instantly recognised this was the Ripper's sixth victim. They also discovered the five pound note and through checking with the Bank of England they discovered that it would have been part of a batch sent to various businesses in Shipley and Bingley for inclusion in worker's pay packets. Sutcliffe was one of 8000 workers who were paid from this batch of whom 5000 were interviewed by the police.

It was the first of nine interviews between West Yorkshire Police and Sutcliffe before he was recognised as the killer.

Answer: Wearside Jack

The letters from Wearside Jack first came in March 1978 postmarked from Sunderland and signed "Jack The Ripper". They mentioned the Ripper's seven publicly known victims and an eighth murder, not attributed to the Ripper; that of Joan Harrison, killed in Preston in 1975.

The letters had been initially disregarded as the police deemed them implausible, due to a lack of mention about the Ripper's seventh victim, Yvonne Pearson, killed two months previously but not discovered at the time the letter had been received. However an unfortunate coincidence soon led the police to take the letters more seriously. In Jack's second letter a prediction was made that the next victim would be an older woman and it would be in Liverpool or Manchester.

When the body of 41-year-old Vera Millward was discovered in the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary in May 1978, the police began to take Wearside Jack more seriously and a manhunt was begun in Sunderland. After the receipt of a tape from the same hoaxer in June 1979, West Yorkshire police gave out a now infamous list of five factors that would allow an officer to disregard someone as a Ripper suspect; the crucial fifth factor being that if the suspect didn't have a North-Eastern accent then they could not be the killer.

Sutcliffe was once released after being interviewed by the police about the murders because his accent did not match that of Wearside Jack. He was not caught for another eighteen months, in which time the Ripper claimed three more victims.

In 2005, a DNA sample was obtained from the hoaxer's letters. With this new evidence the police finally tracked down Wearside Jack. He was 49-year-old John Humble of Sunderland; an unemployed former security guard. At his trial, Humble's motive for the hoax was given as hatred of the police over a burglary conviction when he was 17 years old. In 2006 Humble was convicted of four counts of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to eight years in jail.

Answer: The victim's body was carefully concealed.

Whilst Sutcliffe occasionally attempted to hide the bodies of his victims it was not common to all his victims. The most extreme case of concealment was after the murder of Yvonne Pearson. Her body remained undiscovered for two months after her murder, because Sutcliffe had partially buried it and placed a discarded sofa over her body. When her body was discovered, the police found a copy of a newspaper, dated one month after her death, deliberately placed under her arm. Sutcliffe denied ever having returned to the body after he killed her.

Sutcliffe's method of killing involved striking his victims from behind with a ball-pein hammer that was estimated to be one-and-a-quarter pounds in weight. Once the victims were motionless he would stab them.

Whilst the pubic regions of the victims were left exposed there was rarely any signs of sexual interference although this was not always the case.

Answer: She was strangled, not stabbed.

When 47-year-old civil servant Marguerite Walls' body was discovered, forensic experts determined that it was not a Ripper killing because of the lack of use of a knife. Walls had been strangled with a rope and, although there were many other links to the Ripper's method of killing such as the use of a hammer and the re-arranging of the victim's clothes, this was deemed enough to discount it as a Ripper murder.

During his confession, Sutcliffe initially denied responsibility for the death of Walls. When asked later about this denial, his reasoning was that "when I was questioned initially I knew I was in such deep water through killing through the method I normally use, that this would possibly open completely new lines of enquiry into other murders which could have been committed and which I knew I hadn't done."

Answer: For having false license plates on his car.

Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield on January 2, 1981. He had picked up Olivia Reivers, a prostitute, in the city's red-light district and had driven to a quiet road half a mile away. Two police officers on routine patrol, Constable Hydes and Sgt Ring, passed Sutcliffe's car and decided to investigate what they thought was a case of soliciting.

When questioned Sutcliffe gave the officers a false name and then excused himself as he needed the toilet. When out of sight of the policemen, he dumped the hammer and knife that he had had in his car. In the meanwhile the police officers checked his car's licence plates, which Sutcliffe had stolen from a scrapped Skoda earlier in the day, and on finding them false, they arrested him.

After a brief interview in Sheffield, Sutcliffe was transferred to Dewsbury police station, where the theft of the license plates had taken place. The Ripper Squad were then informed of the arrest as there was a directive in place that all arrests of men with prostitutes in suspicious circumstances should be reported to them.

Learning that the man in custody in Dewsbury had been someone questioned about the five pound note found in Jean Jordan's handbag, and matched the physical description of the Ripper, Detective Sgt Desmond O'Boyle travelled to Dewsbury to interview the man himself. Despite a subsequent blood test showing that Sutcliffe was one of just six per cent of the UK population with the correct blood group, O'Boyle thought it was unlikely that they had the Ripper in custody.

However, the breakthrough was made the following morning when Sgt Ring clocked in for his next shift in Sheffield. When he was told that the man he had arrested was being questioned by the Ripper Squad he thought back to the time of the arrest and realised that, when he went off to the toilet, Sutcliffe had had the opportunity to dispose of some items. He returned to the scene of the arrest and after a brief search he uncovered the ball-pein hammer and knife that Sutcliffe had placed behind an oil-storage tank.

When this discovery was put to Sutcliffe in Dewsbury, he immediately confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper.

Answer: The word of God.

Sutcliffe first heard what he considered to be the voice of God when he was working as a gravedigger at Bingley Cemetery at the age of 20. At his trial Sutcliffe gave the following statement;

"I heard what I believed then and believe now to have been God's voice. I was in the process of digging a grave."

"I was digging and I just paused for a minute. It was very hard ground. I just heard something - it sounded like a voice similar to a human voice - like an echo. I looked round to see if there was anyone there, but there was no one in sight... It was like a voice saying something, but the words were all imposed on top of each other. I could not make them out, it was like echoes. The voices were coming directly in front of me from the top of a gravestone, which was Polish. I remember the name on the grave to this day. It was a man called Zipolski. Stanislaw Zipolski."

Sutcliffe claimed that he received hundreds of messages from the voice, including an instruction to undertake a mission "to remove the prostitutes. To get rid of them."

Shortly after he was found guilty and sent to Parkhurst prison, Sutcliffe was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. The police had suspected this diagnosis prior to his trial and this was also proposed by Sutcliffe's lawyers in his defence. However, the trial judge, Mr Justice Boreham, was not convinced and declared Sutcliffe criminally sane and fit for trial.

Answer: 13

Sutcliffe was convicted of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of thirty years.

The full list of the victims for which he was convicted is Wilma McCann (Died 30 Oct 1975), Emily Jackson (Died 20 Jan 1976), Irene Richardson (Died 5 Feb 1977), Patricia Atkinson (Died 23 Apr 1977), Jayne MacDonald (Died 26 Jun 1977), Jean Jordan (Died 1 Oct 1977), Yvonne Pearson (Died 21 Jan 1978), Helen Rytka (Died 31 Jan 1978), Vera Millward (Died 16 May 1978), Josephine Whitaker (Died 4 Apr 1979), Barbara Leach (Died 2 Sep 1979), Marguerite Walls (Died 18 Aug 1980), Jacqueline Hill (Died 17 Nov 1980).

It is possible, indeed highly likely, that the Ripper committed more murders than those for which he was prosecuted. In 1996, the chief of West Yorkshire police, Keith Hellawell, announced that there were twenty further attacks that he believed could have been committed by Sutcliffe, due to the similar nature of the attacks and the descriptions given of the attacker.