How Yorkshire Ripper was cossetted at a cost of £10 MILLION: Peter Sutcliffe had celebrity visitors, pottery classes, Valentine's cards and visits from fascinated women - while ballooning to 20 stone on fry-ups... as his victims' families still suffer
The headline on the front page of The Daily Mail on May 23, 1981 was short and to the point: ‘They’ll never let him out.’ And nearly 40 years on, it has proven to be entirely accurate. Handed 20 life sentences for the murders of 13 women and the attempted murder of seven more, for once life really did mean life. And yet Peter Sutcliffe’s time behind bars was rarely far from controversy. At his trial the jury rejected evidence that he was suffering from a mental disorder when he killed. They convicted him on the basis he was a sadistic sex murderer – not a madman. Sutcliffe meets boxer Frank Bruno and the late paedophile Jimmy Savile at Broadmoor in 1991. The visit was set up by Savile, says Bruno And yet after spending just three years in a high-security prison, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. That led to him being transferred to Broadmoor, the top-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, where he would spend the next 32 years. At a cost of £300,000 a year, his time th