Peter Sutcliffe - The Yorkshire Ripper

The Yorkshire Ripper is one of the most notorious serial killers in British history. He is known to have murdered a minimum of 13 women and severely injured a further 7 (some experts believe that he may have been responsible for more, unsolved murders committed throughout Europe).

The Yorkshire Ripper's first known victims were in July and August of 1975. Somehow, both women survived the brutal hammer and knife attacks. But in October of the same year, the Ripper struck again. And this time the victim - 28-year-old Wilma McCann - did not live to tell the tale.

On January 20, 1976,  The Yorkshire Ripper killed for a second time, bludgeoning a woman with a hammer, before stabbing her 50 times. He would not strike again until the following year, killing 28-year-old Irene Richardson in February 1977 and 32-year-old Patricia Atkinson in April of the same year. Atkinson's body was mutilated after death.

So far, all of the victim's had been prostitutes - society's forgotten women. But the next one was different. On June 16, 1977, The Yorkshire Ripper attacked and killed Jayne MacDonald, a regular and well-liked 'girl next door'. Suddenly, no woman in the North of England could really relax: any one of them was a potential target.

Police officers were, of course, under immense pressure to catch the killer before he could strike again. But they had no real evidence to go on. Until, that is, they were sent a recording and several taunting letters that purported to come from the Ripper himself. They threw themselves into the analysis of the new evidence, wasting countless hours on what turned out to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax (the identity of the hoaxer was never revealed).

In a desperate bid to catch the killer, law enforcement officials across the North of England had taken to staking out places that they thought he might strike next. It seemed like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack, but one of the stakeouts noticed a man walking with a known prostitute. They decided to stop and search him just on the off-chance that he was the man they were looking for. And, by a stroke of good fortune, it turned out that he actually was. The police officers found that he was carrying weapons. Under interrogation, he confessed to the killings. His name was Peter Sutcliffe.

Peter Sutcliffe was sentenced to life imprisonment at HMP Parkhurst, but was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sectioned under Section 47 of the Mental Health Act 1983. He is currently incarcerated in the infamous Broadmoor High-Security Hospital. He claims to have been cured, but his appeals to the courts have all been rejected. He will most likely die within the bleak walls of Broadmoor.

You might also be interested in:
Albert DeSalvo - The Boston Strangler?, Richard Trenton Chase - The Vampire of Sacramento, Ted Bundy - The Charismatic Killer

John George Haigh - The Acid Bath Murderer

Image attribution: By Gps909 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

For a serial killer, one of the most difficult problems to solve is how to dispose of a body. You could, of course, just leave it lying in a ditch somewhere. But that would basically amount to handing law enforcement a whole lot of free evidence.

British serial killer John George Haigh believed that he had come up with the perfect solution to this problem. He would gain the trust of his victims over the course of several months, before luring them to an out-of-the-way location, where he would kill them quickly, often with the aid of a gun. Finally, he would dissolve the corpse in sulphuric acid, before forging papers that would allow him to take over his victim's material possessions.

English law has a concept known as corpus delicti, which basically means that a crime has to be proven to have occurred before a person can be convicted of it. John George Haigh assumed that if no body could be found, then it would be impossible to prove that a murder had been committed. Consequently, he could never be charged with the crime, however much the police suspected him.

This plan seems to work on the surface. But it is actually possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a murder has taken place even if the body is never recovered. For example, if a person goes missing and a large amount of her blood is found at the primary crime scene (more than a person could be expected to lose and survive), then that may be enough to prove murder in the eyes of the English legal system. As it happens, though, John George Haigh's disposal method didn't work quite as well as he had hoped. When the police searched his residence, they found human gallstones and bones. When combined with other evidence, this was enough to convict 'the acid bath murderer' (as he was dubbed by the media) of 6 murders. He would later confess to a further 3, but these were never proven.

Haigh tried to plead insanity, but this was rejected by the jury, who took only 15 minutes to find him guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to die by hanging, a punishment that was carried out on August 10, 1949.

John George Haigh appears to have been primarily motivated by greed and the challenge of committing the perfect crime. He was also possibly motivated by his strict upbringing. His parents were members of a strict Protestant sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. They were famous for their austere practices, as the young John George Haigh was only too aware. He spent an inordinate amount of time within the confines of a 10 foot fence that his father had erected around the family home to keep the world out. He was not permitted to play sports, and the only form of entertainment available to him was Bible studies. He would later claim that he was plagued from a young age with religious nightmares. But this might have just been a last ditch attempt to avoid the death penalty.

You might also be interested in:
Are All Serial Killers Insane?, Richard Ramirez - The Night Stalker, The Zodiac Killer

Amelia Dyer - The Angel Maker

Image attribution: By Wells Asylum authorities, 1893 (Wells Asylum, 1893) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In Victorian society, if a child was found to be illegitimate, then the father had no legal responsibilities. Furthermore, the woman would usually be sacked from any employment as soon as the fact became public knowledge. This left the mother-to-be in a virtually impossible situation. In many cases the only way she could keep her baby was to offer herself up for prostitution.

Where there is a problem to be solved there is usually also a profit to be made. A number of so-called 'baby farms' sprang up, ostensibly to help alleviate this social ill. They consisted of a person or group of people who were willing to essentially adopt newborn babies - in exchange for a fee of course. The struggling mother would either hand over her baby for temporary adoption in exchange for a weekly fee, or she would pay a one-off lump sum in exchange for permanent adoption of the child. The babies were often treated poorly; a large percentage would die. But there was one woman who would take baby farming to new, almost unimaginable levels of cruelty.

Amelia Dyer was a seemingly respectable woman of good parentage who was born in the English city of Bristol. She opened her own baby farm in the 1800s, drugging the babies in order to suppress their appetites and keep them quiet, maximizing her profits whilst minimizing her exertions. This abuse would often result in the death of the babies.

Eventually, Dyer allowed one baby too many to pass away before its time. She was arrested and sentenced to 6 months for child neglect.

Once she was a free woman again, Amelia Dyer spent a short while going in and out of psychiatric hospitals, before resuming her work as a baby farmer. But this time she worked with a different MO.

Instead of accepting a weekly fee for temporary adoptions, Dyer started demanding a one-off lump sum for permanent adoption. But once the money had changed hands, Dyer would strangle the infant and either dump his/her body in the River Thames or bury it in the garden of her rented accommodation. She moved around a lot to avoid detection, and operated under several assumed names for the same reason.

It is unclear just how many innocent babies this seemingly ordinary woman murdered. Some people estimate that it could have been as many as 300, or maybe even more. This would probably make her the most prolific serial killer in British history.

That a person could get away with killing hundreds of infants before she was finally caught shows that there was something seriously wrong with society in Victorian Britain. Thousands of children were dying in suspicious circumstances every year, but society as a whole did very little about it. It is shocking from our modern perspective to think of a time when the most vulnerable of our species were also the least protected. For more information about child abuse and how you can help to prevent it, visit the website of the NSPCC.

Amelia Dyer was eventually stopped after bodies were recovered in the River Thames that led back to her. She pleaded insanity, but this was rejected. She was executed by hanging in 1896.

You might also be interested in:
Madame LaLaurie, The Six Motivations of a Serial Killer, Richard Ramirez - The Night Stalker