Serial Killer Investigations by Colin Wilson Page A

like an animal, it were. I think it may have turned his mind.’
    There was another factor: Kathleen’s lover was a policeman. This made it even worse. Coppers were not held in high esteem in their house. John had been arrested for breaking and entering. The second brother was always in and out of jail, and some of Peter’s best mates were burglars. The infidelity of Peter’s mother with one of the ‘enemy’ must have convinced him that even the nicest women were whores at heart.
    By this time, Peter himself was no longer the pathologically shy boy. Ashamed of being so weak, he had flung himself into bodybuilding until by his late teens he had the physique of a wrestler. As soon as he could afford it, he had bought his first car, and used to drive at 80 miles an hour through the narrow Bingley streets. For as much as he disliked his father, he also admired him, and wanted to be more like him.
    Where women were concerned he could never match his father or his brothers. He liked to drive around the red-light district of Bradford and stare at the women, but he never dared to accost one, even though he boasted to his mates about his (in reality nonexistent) sexual experience. With his obsessive, semi-incestuous feelings about his mother, Peter Sutcliffe was undoubtedly a psychological mess.
    Then he finally found himself a girlfriend. She was a Czech emigre named Sonia Szurma, was even shyer than he was, and so plain that even his father did not try to put his hand up her skirt.
    And it was the timid Sonia, oddly enough, who started the train of events that turned him into a killer. For when she began having an affair with an Italian who owned a sports car, Sutcliffe was thrown into a frenzy of jealousy. It was like his mother all over again; this young woman who seemed so shy and withdrawn was just like the rest of them. Peter finally took the plunge and went to a prostitute. But even this turned out to be a fiasco. He was unable to raise an erection, and the girl swindled him out of five pounds. Worse still, when he saw her later in a pub, and asked for his change, she jeered at him and told the whole story at the top of her voice, so he became a laughing stock.
    For the introspective boy who had been fighting all his life to feel like a man, the humiliation bit deep, and turned poisonous.
    One day, eating fish and chips in a friend’s minivan, he thought he saw the prostitute, and followed her. He was carrying in his pocket a brick inside a sock that was precisely for this kind of opportunity. He hit her on the back of the head, and then ran back to the van. But she succeeded in taking its number, and police questioned him. He managed to convince them that it had been an ordinary quarrel, and they let him go.
    But that act of hitting a prostitute had taken possession of his imagination. He realised that it had given gave him some deep and strange satisfaction that was intensely sexual. He became a kind of dual personality. While the Peter known to his friends and Sonia remained genial and courteous, another Peter enjoyed stopping his car by prostitutes and asking what they charged. When they told him, he would shout, ‘Is that all you’re worth?’ and drive off.
    In 1975, a prostitute turned him down and released once more the wellspring of rage; he followed her and hit her with a hammer, then raised her clothes and took out a knife. Someone called out, and he ran away. But the feverish excitement that swept through him again made him realise that what he really wanted was to assert his masculinity by killing a prostitute. A month later he again crept up behind a woman and hit her with a hammer; again he was disturbed and had to flee. But now it was only a matter of time before he committed murder.
    It happened two months later, when he picked up a drunken hooker who was thumbing a lift. He took her to a playing field, where he once again proved to be impotent. He then made up for it by hitting her with a hammer and