Peter William Sutcliffe, Bingley, Yorkshire, England

[Eat Shit And Die]

Background information

Birth name: Peter William Sutcliffe
Also known as: Peter William Coonan, The Yorkshire Ripper
Born: 2 June 1946 (1946-06-02) (age 66) Bingley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England

Killings

Number of victims: 13
Span of killings: 30 October 1975–17 November 1980
Country: United Kingdom
Date apprehended: 2 January 1981

Early life

Sutcliffe was born in Bingley, to a working-class Catholic family in West Riding of Yorkshire, the son of John Sutcliffe and Kathleen Sutcliffe (née Coonan). Reportedly a loner at school, he left at the age of 15 and took a series of menial jobs, including two stints as a gravedigger during the 1960s. Between November 1971 and April 1973 Sutcliffe worked at the factory of Baird Television Ltd, on the packaging line. He left when he was asked to go on the road as a salesman.

After leaving Baird's, he worked nightshifts at the Britannia Works of Anderton International from April 1973. In February 1975 he took redundancy, used the pay-off to gain an HGV licence on 4 June 1975 and began working as a driver for a tyre firm on 29 September of that year. However, on 5 March 1976 he was dismissed for the theft of used tyres. He was unemployed until October 1976, when he found another job as an HGV driver for T & WH Clark (Holdings Ltd.) on the Canal Road Industrial Estate in Bradford. Sutcliffe frequented prostitutes as a young man and it has been speculated that a bad experience with one during which he was believed to have been conned out of money, helped fuel his violent hatred of women.

He first met Sonia Szurma (who was of Czech and Ukrainian parentage) on St Valentine's Day in 1967 and they married on 10 August 1974. His wife suffered several miscarriages over the next few years and eventually the couple were informed that she would not be able to have children. Shortly after this, she resumed a teacher training course. When she completed the course in 1977 and began teaching, the couple used the extra money from the course to buy their first house in Heaton, Bradford, where they moved on 26 September 1977, and where they were still living at the time of Sutcliffe's arrest.