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Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son

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To his family in the small town of Bingley near Bradford in the north of England, he was known as "our Pete." To the police, who had hunted him for more than six years through the tiwns and cities of Yorkshire, he was known as the Yorkshire Ripper, the sadistic killer of thirteen women. In this study of Peter Sutcliffe, the man they finally charged, Gordon Burn has given us one of the most incisive and revelatory books ever written about the life and times, the family and social milieu of a mass murderer.

Peter Sutcliffe was tried and convicted in a sensational trial at the Old Bailey in 1981, but journalist Burn was struck by the fact that almost nothing had been brought out about the killer's background. Curious, he went north and found himself staying in Bingley lodgings for two years, getting to know Peter Sutcliffe's father, brother, sisters and close friends. We see Sutcliffe as a child literally clinging to his mother's skirts and refusing his boisterous father's attempts to make him play football, as an adolescent loner, a gravedigger, and a truck driver, courting his wife for seven years, bragging about women despite a prostitute's rebuff, and spending hours at a horrifying wax museum display. In all of this and so much more, Gordon Burn allows us to piece together the character and motivation of one of the most savage and mystifying murderers ever known.

In telling Peter Sutcliffe's story, Burn also reveals a whole way of life -- as fascinating to outsiders as any ever reported by Margaret Meadm as rich in sharply drawn individuals as a novel by Dickens. It is a society of northern men in which aggression toward women is commonplace -- a world of drinking clubs, fast driving, millhands, petty criminals, pimps, and prostitutes, through which Sutcliffewas able to move undetected while the police -- failing to coordinate their mass of information -- struggled in vain to track him down.

Rarely has a writer drawn so close to the inner truth about a killer and his crimes or, without sensationalism, told his story with such chilling and compulsive power.

There were a lot of good facts in this book. But, it was so poorly organized that it was very difficult to get any of those facts out. The chronology was very muddled, and it was very difficult to keep all the people straight. I understand that Peter Sutcliffe lived in England and the author was trying to be authentic, but there was so much English dialect in the various quotes that it was often difficult to get the gist of what someone was saying.