21/01/05 - The brutal father
who made him a monster
by COLIN WILSON
Daily Mail
When Peter Sutcliffe stood at the spot where his father's
ashes were scattered he must have been prey to desperate
emotions - sadness, guilt and furious hatred. For the
man to whom he was saying goodbye had not been a good
father, and his children made no secret of the fact
that they regarded him as a monster.
The real question is whether Sutcliffe, in the minutes
he stared out across the water, asked himself how far
this dead man had been responsible for his transformation
into the most sadistic of serial killers?
I personally have no doubt that if it had not been
for the brutal and self-centred character of John Sutcliffe,
who died seven months ago of bladder cancer, his son
would never have turned into the Yorkshire Ripper. For
Peter Sutcliffe was the last person in the world you
would have expected to become the grotesque disemboweller
of 13 women. As a child he was so gentle and timid that
he seemed destined for a life of self-effacement.
His father, who was mad about cricket and football
and regarded as something of a ladies man, treated him
with a kind of irritable contempt, which reflected his
feeling that his eldest son would always remain a sissy.
Yet, as we shall see, John Sutcliffe did something
so awful that he later admitted it might have been the
trigger which turned his son into a killer of women.
John Sutcliffe's large family - there were five children
- were terrified of him. He ruled with an iron fist
and was the kind of man who would walk into the room
when everyone was watching television, change the channel,
then sit so close no-one could see past him. One of
his daughters admitted that she daydreamed of murdering
him.
Peter, born in June 1946, was the first child and as
such his father expected the world of him. But he was
undersized and shy, a scrawny, miserable little boy
who spent hours staring into space.
At school he was so withdrawn and passive that few
of his teachers could recall his face when they were
told of his arrest.
His headmaster remembered him because Peter had once
played truant for two weeks after being bullied.
The Sutcliffe home in Bingley, Yorkshire, was no background
for an introspective child. With such a dominant, womanising,
self-assertive bully for a father, who apparently enjoyed
'feeling up' any young girl who strayed too close, Peter
inevitably took his mother Kathleen's side.
He had learned to walk quite literally by clinging
to his mother's skirts. And he continued to cling to
them for years after, worshipping the very ground she
trod on.
Boasted of non-existent sexual experience
But as much as he disliked his father, he also admired
him and wanted to be more like him. So in his teens
he flung himself into body-building and as soon as he
could afford it, bought his first car, and used to drive
at 80mph through the narrow streets.
Where women were concerned he could never match his
father or his brothers. He liked to drive around the
red light district of Bradford and stare at the women
but he never dared to accost one, even though he boasted
to his mates about his non-existent sexual experience.
With his obsessive, semi-incestuous feelings about
his mother, Peter Sutcliffe was undoubtedly a psychological
mess. Then he finally found himself a girl. She was
a Czech emigrée named Sonia, was even shyer than
he was, and so plain that even his father did not try
to put his hand up her skirt.
It seemed that Peter was finding his feet and at last
making a normal life for himself. Then came the turning
point.
Peter's mother, seemingly a quiet doormat of a woman,
had an affair with a local police sergeant. When her
husband found out his reaction was so extreme that even
he admitted before he died that it could have turned
Peter - who was 23 at the time and had become engaged
to Sonia - from a mummy's boy into a sadistic killer
overnight.
'Sleeping with the enemy'
Beside himself with rage, John Sutcliffe discovered
that his wife had arranged an assignation in a hotel
room with her lover. She had bought a negligee specially
to spice up the night of passion. John Sutcliffe persuaded
hotel staff to let him into the room the lovers had
booked. He ordered Peter, with Sonia, and several of
his other children to go with him and, once inside the
room, they waited for Peter's mother to arrive.
She duly did, expecting to find her policeman lover.
Instead she found her entire family to witness her shame
and a raging John Sutcliffe who called her a prostitute
and a slut. Then he made her open her night bag and
take out the expensive negligee and hold it up.
John Sutcliffe later said: "I remember Peter were
just standing there - he were shook rigid. He had a
look on his face, like an animal, it were. I think it
may have turned his mind." In those few cruel seconds,
Peter Sutcliffe saw his mother transformed from madonna
to whore. To make matters worse, her lover was a policeman.
Coppers were not held in high esteem in their house.
John Sutcliffe had been arrested for breaking and entering,
the second brother was in and out of jail, and some
of Peter's best mates were burglars.
Sleeping with the 'enemy' must have convinced Peter
that even the nicest women were prostitutes at heart
- a view to be compounded years later when Sonia (by
then his wife) began an affair with an Italian who owned
a sports car.
It was like his mother all over again; this girl who
seemed so shy and withdrawn was just like the rest of
them. Peter finally took the plunge and went to a prostitute.
But even this failed. He was unable to raise an erection,
and the girl swindled him out of £5.
Humiliation
Worse still, when he saw her later in a pub and asked
for his change, she jeered at him and told the whole
story at the top of her voice, so he became a laughing
stock.
For the introspective boy who had been fighting all
his life to feel like a man, the humiliation bit deep,
and turned poisonous. One day, eating fish and chips
in a friend's minivan, Peter thought he saw the prostitute,
and followed her.
He was carrying in his pocket a brick inside a sock
that was intended precisely for this purpose. He hit
her on the back of the head, then ran back to the van.
But she managed to take its number and he was questioned
by the police. He managed to convince them that it had
been an ordinary quarrel, and they let him go.
But that act of hitting a woman he believed to be a
prostitute had taken possession of his imagination.
He realised that it had given him some deep and strange
satisfaction that was intensely sexual. He became a
kind of dual personality.
While the Peter known to his friends and Sonia remained
genial and courteous, another Peter enjoyed stopping
his car by prostitutes and asking what they charged.
When they told him, he would shout 'Is that all you're
worth?', and drive off.
In 1975, a prostitute turned him down and released
once more the wellspring of rage; he hit her with a
hammer, then raised her dress and took out a knife.
Someone called out and he ran away.
But the feverish excitement that swept through him
made him realise that what he really wanted was to kill
a prostitute. A month later he again went up behind
a woman and hit her with a hammer; again he was disturbed
and fled. But it was only a matter of time before he
killed.
Taste for stabbing
It happened two months later, when he picked up a drunken
prostitute who was thumbing a lift. He took her to a
playing field, where he once again proved to be impotent.
Then he made up for it by hitting her with a hammer
and stabbing her repeatedly in the breast and stomach.
How does a man acquire a taste for stabbing and disembowelment?
All too easily, I suspect, if he has a furnace of rage
and self-contempt inside: contempt for a weakling who
would never dare to try to 'feel up' a woman and then
follow through with triumphant masculinity, like that
of his father.
What Peter Sutcliffe failed to realise, as he daydreamed
of revenge on 'whores', was that he was handing himself
over to a demon who would give him no peace.
He would have to carry on murdering and disembowelling
woman after woman, even when he knew perfectly well
they were not prostitutes, because only this could make
him feel fully alive.
An American expert on sex murder said: "Sex crime
is not about sex - it's about power." And a murderer
like Peter Sutcliffe is the living illustration of what
he meant.
Should such a man have been given permission to spend
a day visiting Cumbria? Perhaps not. But since his doctors
agreed that he needed 'closure' to prevent a plunge into
psychotic depression, perhaps it was not such a bad thing
that he should have been given this opportunity to confront
his father's ghost, and to decide once and for all whether
he loved or hated this 'monster' whose baleful influence
had made him what he was. |
