03/05/01 - Letters to the Ripper
Joan Smith
The Guardian

He is a notorious serial killer. These women are his pen pals. What possessed them?

He is not obvious pen pal material: 20 years ago this month, Peter Sutcliffe was sent to prison for murdering 13 women and attacking seven more. In the late 1970s, women in the north of England lived in fear of his modus operandi, which involved immobilising his victims with blows to the head and then inflicting terrible mutilations on their torsos.

The Yorkshire Ripper, as Sutcliffe quickly became known, was the stuff of most women's nightmares. In the intervening years, something strange has happened.

During Sutcliffe's incarceration in Broadmoor Special Hospital in Berkshire, dozens of women have been writing letters to him - sympathetic letters, love letters, even ones discussing marriage. One of these women, Sandra Lester, apparently hoped for a long-term relationship with the convicted murderer.

Her hopes were crushed when she tried to have her name put on Sutcliffe's visiting list and was told by the Broadmoor authorities that he wanted to have a number of female friends rather than an exclusive relationship with one.

Being two-timed would, for most of us, pale into insignificance compared with the knowledge that the object of our affections was a serial killer.

But Lester, like the other women interviewed in Letters to the Yorkshire Ripper, a documentary to be screened on BBC1 next Wednesday, knew from the start that the man she was writing to had been convicted of some of the most sickening murders in British criminal history.

So did Diane Simpson, who has exchanged more than 500 letters with Sutcliffe and spent 400 hours visiting him in Broadmoor over a 10-year period. Why did they do it?

Simpson says Sutcliffe kept hinting that he would confess to other crimes; she'd had some professional involvement in the original investigation, as a handwriting analyst, and had remained fascinated with it after his conviction.

Another woman, Olive Curry, exchanged 500 letters with Sutcliffe and visited him in Broadmoor after becoming convinced he had once visited her workplace with a man who had a Geordie accent - like the voice on the notorious fake "Ripper" tape.

Both women had, to begin with, practical reasons to justify what most people would probably view as a very bizarre correspondence.

For while it is not difficult to see what Sutcliffe got out of it - contact with the outside world, a feeling of importance, perhaps a sexual thrill from the attention of strangers - it is harder to understand why any woman would want an intense relationship with a man who slashed women's bodies with a sharpened screwdriver.

The film suggests that Curry's interest in the case eventually became an obsession, while Lester got in touch with Sutcliffe at a vulnerable point in her life, when she was coming to terms with the abuse she had suffered as a child.

At the time, she believed she was simply offering him a "Christian hand of friendship" after reading an article about him. Yet Sheila Isenberg, an American author who has studied such relationships, says the only common thread she found was a history of abuse on the part of the women.

Of course there is a difference between writing to someone on death row, as many people do because they oppose capital punishment, and the kind of friendship she is talking about. Women who become fascinated with serial killers often persuade themselves that the men are not responsible for their crimes, blaming them on mental illness, drug abuse or family problems.

"A woman is living out this passionate, fantastic existence that has no basis in reality," Isenberg says, "because if the man were not in prison they would have no relationship." Clearly such friendships do not start in an accidental way, as so often happens in real life.

It may be that women who have been abused are drawn to experience again the kind of danger they encountered as children, in the knowledge that this time the perpetrator is safely behind bars; it may also be that they are attracted to male power, which they have learnt to associate with extreme violence and brutality.

In her book Eve Was Framed, Helena Kennedy QC suggests that women sometimes feel "strangely flattered at being chosen by such men, as though they had been singled out from the ordinary run of womankind".

Emily Brontë vividly describes one such relationship in Wuthering Heights, when Heathcliff relates how Isabella was willing to elope with him even though she had just seen him hang her little dog. Others develop a rescue fantasy, convincing themselves that the man has been redeemed by their love - or would not have got into trouble in the first place if only he had met the right woman.

Yet such obsessions are not as divorced from the wider culture as they might at first appear. While vulnerable women write letters to Peter Sutcliffe, male authors continue to be obsessed with Jack the Ripper, churning out endless books that supposedly reveal his identity as a member of the royal family or an obscure Polish seaman.

Serial killers occupy an ambivalent place in contemporary culture, simultaneously demonised and offered an outlaw status that approaches the heroic. How far Sutcliffe is aware of this is hard to know, but what he seems to share with Hannibal Lecter, hero of Thomas Harris's bestselling novels, is an ability to manipulate people.

A former West Yorkshire detective who has interviewed him on many occasions says that Sutcliffe enjoys the attention of his female correspondents and describes the letter-writing as "just a game". For the women concerned, according to Isenberg, it is more like a romantic novel or a soap opera.

This may not be as odd a theory as it sounds, given the way in which serial killers have come to embody fantasies about sex, power and violence. After all, millions of people have recently been to see the movie Hannibal, in which the murderer eats his adversary's brains - and gets the girl, his former FBI nemesis Clarice Starling.