100 Most Infamous Criminals (33 page)

‘Wife died in bath. We shall see him again.’

In December the following year, Smith ‘married’ once more. But this time he was in a hurry – and it proved his undoing. For on the 17th, he ‘married’ a clergyman’s daughter whom he’d already persuaded to take out life insurance and the next day in London – having speedily got her to make a will and see a doctor about her fits – he killed her. There was no problem with the landlady – ‘Mr. Lloyd’ had returned to the house with a bag of tomatoes before going upstairs – and there was no problem with the coroner, who recorded a verdict of death by misadventure a few days after Christmas. The problem this time was the popular press, for whom this was a story too good to miss. ‘Found Dead In Bath,’ ran the headline in the News of the World: ‘Bride’s Tragic Fate On Day After Wedding!’ The story was read both by the landlady in Blackpool and by the father of one of his two dead ‘wives’. It was a coincidence too far.

Smith was arrested in February 1915 and, since he could be only be tried under British law for one murder at a time, proceedings began with the death of Bessie Mundy. Evidence from the other two cases, however, was soon permitted and he didn’t help his case by hectoring witnesses, even the judge. The jury in the end took just twenty-two minutes to find George Smith guilty. He was hanged on August 13th 1915 at Maidstone Prison, mourned only by Bristol ‘wife’ Edith Pegler: the only one of them all he’d never stolen from, exploited or murdered.

Peter Sutcliffe

P
eter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was a hen-pecked husband who had difficulty in getting or maintaining an erection. He only had sex with one of his thirteen female victims, and on the night he was caught – January 2nd 1981 – he was again having difficulties with a prostitute called Ava Reivers, who would have become his fourteenth. Impotence, in fact, may have driven him to murder in the first place; and killing may have been his sinister way of finding its solution and cure. For at some time in the late-1960s, he’d been publicly humiliated by a prostitute for his inadequacy. So he took his revenge: he began to rape them, not with his penis, but with a knife, a hammer, a sharpened screwdriver – any tool that came to hand.

The first mutilated body was found on playing fields in Leeds on October 30th 1975; the second, less than three months later, in an alleyway nearby. Thirteen months after that a third victim was discovered, stabbed to death, in the same general area, though this time in a suburban park. Though the police took action in all three cases – and the name ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was coined in a national newspaper – the respectable folk of the city were not particularly concerned. For all three women, however brutally murdered, had been streetwalkers, sinners, and the killings had been centered on the red-light district of Chapeltown.

With the next two killings, though, the respectable folk of all Yorkshire learned to change their minds. For the Ripper now let it be known that he moved around and might attack any woman at all. On April 24th 1977, he killed a fourth prostitute in another Yorkshire city, in Bradford; and then, back in Leeds again, an ordinary sixteen-year-old who was involved in nothing more sinister than walking home after an evening out dancing.

With this fifth murder, especially, the people of Yorkshire, indeed of the whole country, began to wake up. The police were inundated with telephone calls, tips, information, supposition – and began to sink under the burden. By this time they had only two pieces of information that firmly linked the murders together: the savagery of the killer’s attacks and identical shoeprints that had been found near the bodies of two of the victims. But then, when with the next two attacks really important clues were offered, they clearly failed to see them.

Sutcliffe was found guilty of 13 murders and 7 attempted murders

What drove Sutcliffe to murder so many young women? He has never revealed his motivation to commit murder

The first, again in Bradford, was on another prostitute who, this time, was savagely beaten but not killed, as if the Ripper had been interrupted. When she recovered from surgery, she told police that her attacker had been blond and had driven a white Ford Cortina. The second was much further afield, in Manchester in Lancashire; and the victim, again a prostitute, had actually been attacked and mutilated twice, the second time eight days after her death. The police, who found her body a day after the second attack, also found her handbag nearby; and in it was a brand-new £5 note, which turned out to have been issued by a bank in Shipley, Yorkshire. It had formed part of the payroll at the engineering and haulage works where Peter Sutcliffe worked as a truck-driver.

Sutcliffe photographed on his way to court

The friendly, unassuming Sutcliffe was interviewed – he was actually interviewed eight times in all during the enquiry. But, though he drove a Ford Cortina, he was not blond, so he was on this occasion eliminated. Apparently the police didn’t pay much attention to the handwritten placard this neatly-dressed, diffident man had put up in the cab of his truck:

‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep.’

Sutcliffe seems to have been unfazed by this, his first brush with the law. In short order after this, he battered and mutilated three more prostitutes, in Bradford, Huddersfield and again Manchester; he then killed a nineteen-year-old building-society clerk as she took a short cut through a park in Halifax. Whatever suspicions the police might have had of him were, in any case, soon dismissed. For the investigating squad at this point received an audio-tape with a taunting message from ‘the Ripper’, which seemed to contain inside information about the crimes. But the accent ‘the Ripper’ spoke in wasn’t from Yorkshire, as Sutcliffe’s was. It was Geordie, said phoneticists – i.e. from the area around Newcastle.

The whole investigation, then, went off at a highly-publicized tangent, and Sutcliffe was free to strike again. In September 1978, he killed a nineteen-year-old university student in the centre of Bradford and the following August, a respectable forty-seven-year-old civil servant on her way home from the Department of Education in Pudsey. He went on to attack, first a doctor in Leeds and then a sixteen-year-old girl in Huddersfield – though both survived, the first because he seems to have changed his mind and stopped, and the second, because her screams brought people running and scared him away. His final onslaught came more than a year later when a twenty-year-old student at Leeds University got off a bus in a middle-class suburb and started walking towards her hall of residence. Sutcliffe got out of his car and beat her about the head with a hammer, before dragging her across the road into some bushes. He undressed her and stabbed her repeatedly, once straight through the eye, with a sharpened screwdriver because,

‘she seemed to be staring at me,’

he said later.

He was finally picked up in Sheffield on January 2nd 1981, while sitting in his car with Ava Reivers in a well-known trysting-place for prostitutes and their johns. Police stopped by for a routine check, and wondered why Reivers’ client’s car seemed to have false number plates. Sutcliffe did his best to get rid of the weapons in the back of the car, but both he and Reivers were taken back to a police-station and the weapons were later recovered. After a while, the man who’d given his name as Peter Williams confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper.

There’s been endless speculation about what drove Peter Sutcliffe to murder. Was it because of his worship of his mother and his shyness with girls as a boy? Or because of the time he spent as a young man working first in a graveyard and then in a morgue? Or was it because of the prostitute who’d mocked him in public or the wife who continually nagged him? Was the whole killing spree triggered by his discovery in 1972 that his adored mother was only too human after all – and had long been having a love affair? Whatever the trigger, though, Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on each count, with the recommendation that he not be released for at least thirty years. The man with the Geordie accent who sent the police the hoax audiotape – and caused indirectly the deaths of three women – was finally identified, in 2005, as one John Humble and subsequently sentenced to eight years.

Dick Turpin

L
ike the hero-villains of the Wild West and of the Australian bush, the highwayman Dick Turpin, still familiar until a few years ago to every British schoolboy, belongs as much to folk-myth as to history.

Turpin belongs as much to folk-myth as to history

The real Dick Turpin was born in Essex in 1705, the son of a farmer, and was given enough education for him to be able, much later, to pass himself off as a gentleman. Apprenticed to a butcher, by the age of 21 he had his own shop, which he stocked with sheep and oxen stolen from his neighbours. He was spotted, unfortunately, during one of his raids. So he took to the road; became briefly a smuggler and then joined the famous Essex Gang, which specialized in breaking and entering.

The exploits of the members of the Essex Gang were widely written up in the London newspapers at the time. They were violent, knowledgeable about valuables and not above the occasional rape or two in the line of duty. A large reward was put on their heads, and two of them were arrested and hanged in chains. Turpin, who’d only escaped by jumping out of a window, went on the run, hooked up with another highwayman, and began a notorious career robbing travellers and coaches on the roads in and out of London.

Bounty-hunters went after him to no avail. He even appeared from time to time in the City of London. Then, by accident, he shot his partner in a scuffle with a constable and though he continued his hold-up career on his own for a while, he decided, when the bounty on his head doubled, to quit the south of England and ride northward.