The Yorkshire Ripper’s ashes were scattered in a beautiful seaside location that ‘meant so much to his family’, his niece revealed.
Peter Sutcliffe, 74, was serving a life sentence for a monstrous killing spree that terrorized Yorkshire and northern England throughout the 1970s before dying in 2020.
He was finally caught in 1981 and found guilty of murdering 13 women in what he described as a ‘mission from God’ to ‘kill prostitutes’.
Sutcliffe spent nearly three decades in a secure psychiatric unit before being found fit to serve his sentence in a regular prison and transferred to Frankland.
Sutcliffe died in hospital on 13 November after contracting Covid, where an inquest last year revealed he knew he was going to die just hours before his death.
The court heard that he suffered from shortness of breath and received additional oxygen in the days before his death.
Sutcliffe’s niece Emily spoke for the first time and told the Mirror that some of his ashes were scattered in the rural village of Arnside in Cumbria – a location he would visit as a child.
The Ripper visited the area as a boy, staying in his uncle’s caravan.
Emily, 28, said: ‘I was taken there once or twice as a child. It is kind.
‘This area means a lot to the whole family. We had family living in the area at the time and we visited them.’
Speaking for the first time about her uncle, Emily said the killer had a terrible impact on her life.
The young mother added: “When he died, I felt a bit of freedom, a relief.
“When I looked in the mirror, I saw a monster because I was convinced that I looked like it. When I was younger, I was told that I looked like my father, that I had similar features to my uncle.
“It was so bad that I wanted plastic surgery to change everything about my appearance. If I had money, I would.
The Yorkshire Ripper’s ex-wife Sonia Sutcliffe was named his executor and it is believed the ashes were divided and sent to family and friends.
She said: ‘I remember going to school and telling my friends why I thought my uncle was famous. I didn’t understand what he had done then.
‘Unfortunately, it was the perfect age for bullying and it scarred me.’ She said a close friend in elementary school told how her parents knew one of the victims. Emily added: ‘I wanted to say ‘I’m sorry but it wasn’t me’.
‘My family told me ‘you’re quiet, you’re artistic like Uncle Peter’.
“I was afraid that I was inherently evil and thought I must have evil running through my veins. It had a crazy impact on my self-esteem. I developed an eating disorder and was extremely underweight due to stress.
Emily thinks that the Ripper crimes may have influenced her decision to study criminology and psychology. She said: ‘In the months before he died, I was seriously considering visiting him.’
She thinks her uncle’s alcoholic father may have caused the murder spree by smashing a beer glass over the Ripper’s head when he was a young boy.
Emily said it was similar to the Ripper’s hammer attacks. She added: ‘His crimes affected so many people – even me, many generations later.’
This comes after a friend of the serial killer said he scattered his ashes in Lanzarote to grant him one of his last wishes in August last year.
Timeline of victims of the Yorkshire Ripper
- October 1975 – Wilma McCann, 26, of Chapeltown, Leeds, was hit twice with a hammer and stabbed 15 times in the neck, stomach and abdomen. Her body was discovered on playing fields a few hundred meters from her home.
- January 1976 – Emily Jackson, 42, was picked up by Sutcliffe outside the Gaiety pub in Leeds, taken to some abandoned buildings, hit over the head with a hammer and stabbed more than 50 times with a sharp screwdriver. A boot print was left on her thigh, which served as a clue to the police.
- February 1977 – Irene Richardson, 28, was hit in the head with a hammer three times and then stabbed in the neck and stomach in Leeds. Her body was found behind a sports hall in a park with tire tracks next to her body.
- April 1977 – Patricia Atkinson, 32, was picked up at The Carlisle Pub in Bradford. Sutcliffe returned to her apartment and attacked her with a hammer as she walked through the door, leaving a footprint on a bloodstained sheet.
- June 1977 – Jayne MacDonald, 16, was attacked while walking home from a night out in Leeds. She was hit three times in the head with a hammer and stabbed about 20 times in the chest and back. Her body was found in a playground by children the next morning. The clerk was Sutcliffe’s first victim who was not a sex worker.
- October 1977 – Jean Jordan, 20, was picked up by Sutcliffe in Manchester’s red light district, taken to an empty lot near a cemetery and hit 11 times with a hammer. His body was found 10 days later and the police realized that the body had been moved and mutilated after the murder. Police found a new £5 note inside her purse and traced it back to Yorkshire couriers T and WH Clark, who employed Sutcliffe. Detectives interviewed him twice, but were convinced by his alibi that he was at a housewarming party with his family.
- January 1978 – Yvonne Pearson, 21, is picked up by Sutcliffe in Bradford and taken to a vacant lot behind an industrial area. He hit her on the head several times with a hammer when she got out of the car. When another car pulled up, Sutcliffe dragged her onto an old sofa, pulled out our horsehairs, and shoved them down her throat to stop her screaming. After she stopped breathing, he dug a makeshift grave out of dirt and rubble and covered it with the couch. Her body was found two months later.
- January 1978 – Helen Rytka, 18, was picked up by Sutcliffe in the red light district of Huddersfield, hit in the head with a hammer and stabbed several times in the chest. She was the only known victim Sutcliffe had sex with.
- May 1978 – Vera Millward, 40, was picked up by Sutcliffe and taken to a Manchester Royal Infirmary car park regularly used by prostitutes. Sutcliffe hit her three times in the head with a hammer and stabbed her corpse in the abdomen and back.
- April 1979 – Building society worker Josephine Whitaker, 19, was walking home alone in Halifax when Sutcliffe started talking to her and walked with her. As they cut down some playing fields, he attacked her with a hammer and stabbed her with a screwdriver, 21 times in the chest and stomach and six times in the right leg.
- September 1979 – Barbara Leach, 20, was murdered just yards from her home after a night out in a pub near the University of Bradford. The student was hit in the head and stabbed eight times.
- August 1980 – Marguerite Walls, 47, was leaving her office late and walking home to Leeds when Sutcliffe saw her. He got out of the car and ambushed the employee, hitting her in the back of the head with a hammer and strangling her with a piece of rope.
- November 1980 – Jacqueline Hill, 20, was walking back to her student accommodation in Leeds when Sutcliffe got out of the car and started following her. He knocked her over the head and dragged her to some vacant lot and stabbed her in the chest and eye with a screwdriver.
The woman – who regularly visited the Ripper in prison – claimed to have traveled to the Canary Islands with his remains in an urn and dumped them in the Atlantic Ocean.
After his death over two years ago, Sutcliffe’s ashes were buried near his hometown of Bingley, while some were sent to perverted ‘superfans’.
A part was also reportedly thrown into the sea at Arnside, about half an hour from where some of her family members live.
Sutcliffe was allowed to visit the village in 2005 under the supervision of Broadmoor Hospital staff to pay tribute to his father.
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