Cops quiz Yorkshire Ripper over seven attacks dating back to 1964 — 11 years before known killing spree
YORKSHIRE Ripper Peter Sutcliffe has been quizzed by cops over seven attacks as early as 1964 — 11 years before his known killing spree began.
And Sutcliffe, locked up for gruesome murders of women and assaults between 1975 and 1980, has admitted to pals he carried out an attack in 1969.
Cold case police interviewed the killer, now 70, for the second time in prison last week over a string of unsolved crimes.
The Sun last month revealed officers were probing him over more attacks on females and had spoken to him in jail.
Detectives from the West Yorkshire force quizzed Sutcliffe on Wednesday and Thursday.
They have set up a task force called Operation Painthall and are believed to be focusing the investigation on seven or eight crimes.
The oldest case is from 1964 when a 12-year-old girl was attacked twice but survived.
It raises the chilling prospect he was preying on women for more than a decade longer than thought.
The fiend, who stalked victims before attacking them with knives, hammers and chisels, would have been 17 or 18 when that crime was committed.
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Sutcliffe, who is losing his sight, had a solicitor with him throughout the interview at Frankland Prison, Co Durham, and was offered a magnifying glass to look at maps.
A source said: “The police are taking this seriously - and so is Peter now.
“They spent hours with him, asking him about a range of crimes, mostly in West Yorkshire.
“They took in maps of the area in the hope that getting him to look at them may jog his memory.
“He has admitted he could have been behind one or two other attacks and mentioned one in 1969.
“But he is denying the 1964 one, saying that it had nothing to do with him and he wouldn’t target someone that young. He has said his ‘mission’ did not start until years after that.”
The lorry driver was arrested in January 1981 and jailed four months later for 13 murders and seven attempted murders.
It ended years of terror in the North of England as he targeted lone women in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.
Peter Sutcliffe, who was handed 20 life terms, told his Old Bailey trial he heard voices ordering him on a mission to kill vice girls.
But not he did not only target prostitutes and murder victims included 20-year-old student Barbara Leach and building society clerk Josephine Whitaker, 19.
The original investigation was dogged by mistakes and a 1982 report concluded he was “probably responsible for many attacks he has not admitted”.
Cops are targeting attacks similar to those known to have been carried out by Sutcliffe. They are focusing on women who survived and can describe what happened.
They are thought to include the 1974 case of Gloria Wood, 28, and the 1980 attack on Mo Lea.
West Yorkshire Police declined to comment on the probe’s progress.
COLD CASE ONE
STUDENT Gloria Wood was walking across a school playing field in Bradford in November 1974 when a man approached her and offered to carry her bags.
He hit the 28-year-old with a hammer, fracturing her skull and leaving her needing surgery.
Gloria described the man as in his 30s, 5ft 8in, with a short curly beard and dark hair – like Sutcliffe, who lived nearby.
COLD CASE TWO
MAUREEN Lea survived a hammer attack as she walked back from the pub one October night in 1980.
The 20-year-old art student, known as Mo, was grabbed from behind – like many Ripper victims – as she walked through the grounds of Leeds University, close to other Sutcliffe attacks.
She was hit repeatedly on the head with a hammer and stabbed with a screwdriver.