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Peter William Sutcliffe (born 2 June 1946) is an English serial killer who was dubbed "The Yorkshire Ripper" by the press. In 1981 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others. Sutcliffe had regularly used prostitutes in Leeds and Bradford. His outbreak of violence towards them seems to have occurred because he was swindled out of money by a prostitute and her pimp, but he claimed when interviewed by authorities that the voice of God had sent him on a mission to kill prostitutes. He carried out his murder spree over a five-year period, during which the public were especially shocked by the murders of some women who were not prostitutes. After his arrest in January 1981 for driving with false number-plates, police questioned him about the killings and he confessed that he was the perpetrator. At his trial, he pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility, owing to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, but this defence was rejected by a majority of the jury. He is serving twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, currently in Broadmoor High Security Hospital. After his conviction, Sutcliffe began using his mother's maiden name and became Peter William Coonan. West Yorkshire Police were criticised for the time they took in apprehending Sutcliffe, despite interviewing him nine times during the murder hunt. Owing to the sensational nature of the case, they were having to handle an exceptional volume of information, some of it misleading, including a hoax recorded message and letters purporting to be from the "Ripper". Nevertheless, the 2006 Byford Report of the official enquiry confirmed the validity of the criticism. The High Court dismissed an appeal by Sutcliffe in 2010, confirming that he would serve a whole life tariff and would never be released from prison. ==Early life== Sutcliffe was born in Bingley, West Riding of Yorkshire, to a working class family. He was brought up as a Catholic by his parents, John William Sutcliffe and his wife Kathleen Frances, née Coonan. Reportedly a loner, he left school at the age of 15 and took a series of menial jobs, including two stints as a gravedigger in the 1960s. Between November 1971 and April 1973 Sutcliffe worked at the factory of Baird Television Ltd, on a packaging line. He left when he was asked to go on the road as a salesman. After leaving Baird, he worked night-shifts at the Britannia Works of Anderton International from April 1973. In February 1975 he took redundancy and used the pay-off to gain an HGV licence on 4 June 1975 and began to work as a driver for a tyre firm on 29 September. On 5 March 1976 he was dismissed for the theft of used tyres. He was unemployed until October 1976, when he found a job as an HGV driver for T.& W.H. Clark (Holdings) Ltd. on the Canal Road Industrial Estate in Bradford. Sutcliffe, by some reports, saw prostitutes as a young man, and it has been speculated that he had a bad experience during which he was conned out of money.〔("Peter Sutcliffe: The Yorkshire Ripper – Famous Criminal", ) ''Crime And Investigation Network''〕〔 Other analyses of his actions have not found evidence that he actually sought their services, though he clearly expressed unusual behaviour before the killings.〔 He met Sonia Szurma (who was of Czech and Ukrainian parentage) on 14 February 1967; they married on 10 August 1974. His wife suffered several miscarriages and the couple were informed that she would not be able to have children. She resumed a teacher training course, during which time she had an affair with an ice-cream van driver. When she completed the course in 1977 and began teaching, they used her salary to buy a house in Heaton, Bradford, where they moved on 26 September 1977, and where they lived at the time of Sutcliffe's arrest.〔("Peter Sutcliffe" "A Killer's Mask" ), by Fiona Steel for Trutv.com〕 Though Sutcliffe's childhood and much of his teens did not notably have any signs of abnormality, in his later years, related to his occupation as a gravedigger, he developed a reputation as having an unhealthy, macabre sense of humour. His teens also featured a growing obsession with voyeurism in which he would spend much time spying on prostitutes and the men seeking them. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Peter Sutcliffe」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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