Families’ fury at Yorkshire Ripper’s joy as he brags about being pampered in prison
Notorious serial killer Peter Sutcliffe told friends in letters how other ‘kind’ inmates at tough HMP Frankland in Durham had bought him tea and milk
THE ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ has boasted about the perks he receives now he has been transferred from a mental hospital to a maximum security prison.
Peter Sutcliffe, 70, wrote a letter to a friend in which he crowed: “We can have our own DVD players in our cells (plus a TV of course) for a cost of £1 per week!”
In them Sutcliffe also complained that the decision to move him from a hospital – where his accommodation cost the taxpayer an estimated £11 million – to a prison was “political”.
He wrote: “I don’t think they’d ever want to move me back to a special hospital. I believe my case is political now since the whole life tariff was imposed only recently (even though I’ve always been a model patient and prisoner).”
He also claimed the law was an “ass” but that he was “very kind and considerate” and that he had a “strong inner spirit”.
Sutcliffe, who is currently serving 20 life terms after slaughtering 13 women and trying to kill seven more, has been slammed by the families of his victims for his self-pity.
Denise Long, 58, whose mother Maureen suffered horrific injuries after Sutcliffe violently assaulted her with a hammer in Bradford in 1977, said: “It makes my blood boil.”
She added: “He’s living a life of luxury while his victims’ families are left to suffer. He’ll never take full responsibility for what he’s put us through.
“He’s constantly on the news. I have to see him all the time and it’s really upsetting. I try not to talk about it because it still upsets me. He left the scars on my mum and she couldn’t get over it.
“You never forget. Now he’s claiming he’s ‘kind and considerate’. It’s disgusting and I want him to rot in hell. The whole thing makes me mad.”
Sutcliffe is currently being held in the prison’s A-wing with 108 other high-risk criminals that he described as being “vulnerable”.
The notorious killer was transferred there last month from Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, ending a three-decade stay at the psychiatric unit.
As well as continuing to bleat about the situation he finds himself in he also seems to accept that he will die in prison.
He wrote: “Yes I have been very ill over the years with paranoid schizophrenia, so even at my recent tribunal all the doctors admitted the affliction is still there, but two of them deemed me to be well enough to go back to prison which means, at the present time, until I die!
“Yes I am now a simple man but I am fortunate enough to have some very loyal friends out there who do not agree with how the legal system works.
“But they do say the law is an ass, stubborn and inflexible ... So here I am!”
He added: “I’m very kind and considerate but the gutter press have always had a field day at my expense!”
Sutcliffe is one of about 50 “whole life” tariff prisoners in Britain who will never be released. The Bradford native preyed on women across West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester between 1975 and 1980. He usually beat them to death with a hammer before mutilating their bodies.
Sutcliffe claimed last month that he would be murdered if he was forced to leave Broadmoor, and returned to the prison population, after a tribunal ruled that he was fit to do so.
He told his brother Carl, 58, that “people will be out to get me. I’ll be looking over my shoulder all the time. I might be attacked and killed. I fear for my life. I’m going to have to watch my back.”
He also moaned about the possibility that he could be “locked in a cell for 23 hours a day instead of being able to walk around as I please. I won’t be able to do my art.”
Carl believes his brother was never a paranoid schizophrenic but had faked the condition so he could avoid the hardships of a long prison stretch.
Sutcliffe, once a Catholic altar boy but now a Jehovah’s Witness, had claimed during his trial in 1981 that he heard voices that ordered him to kill his victims.
He also said that the voice of God came to him from the headstone of a Polish man in a cemetery where he worked as a gravedigger.
Carl said: “I think he’s mentally ill when it suits him. I’ve always had the view people like him should be executed. I’ve told him so a few times.
“He didn’t respond to that. He probably did not want to hear that from me.
“I do think he should have been executed. He wouldn’t have had anything to worry about then.”
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