A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Eight of the first nine victims - killed between October 1975 and May 1978 - were prostitutes.
Sutcliffe explained later that he had a grudge against prostitutes after one of them had swindled
him, then made him a laughing stock in a pub. But after the ninth victim he attacked women and
girls at random, killing four more and injuring two. One of the biggest police hunts in British
criminal history was totally unsuccessful - although Sutcliffe was interviewed several times during
the enquiry, his car having been observed in the red light area of Leeds. He was caught by a
fortunate accident.
Sutcliffe was a shy, introverted man with few friends; his relationship with his wife Sonia was
close but stormy. In the cab of his lorry police discovered a card that read: ‘In this truck is a man
whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nations, whose dynamic energy would overpower
those around him. Better let him sleep?’ Again, we observe the element of frantic ego-assertion that
is the characteristic of so many modern killers.
Sutcliffe’s defence was insanity - he claimed that, when working as a gravedigger, he heard a voice
speaking to him from a tombstone, ordering him to kill prostitutes. The jury chose to disbelieve
him, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Perhaps the strangest - and most characteristic - case of the 1970s was that of Ted Bundy. When
Bundy was first arrested, in August 1975, he was suspected of a dozen sex murders that had taken
place over the past year, the first eight in Seattle, the rest in the area of Salt Lake City. Bundy, an
intelligent, personable young law student, had moved from Seattle to Salt Lake City. The events of
14 July 1974 seemed typical of the killer’s method. A polite young man with his arm in a sling
approached a girl at a picnic table near Lake Sammanish and asked her if she would help him lift
his boat on to a car. She accompanied him, but when he told her the car was at a house up the hill,
changed her mind and went back. She saw the young man accost another girl, Janice Ott; he
introduced himself as Ted. Janice Ott went with him, and vanished. So did a girl named Denise
Naslund on the same afternoon. Their skeletons were found months later on a hillside near Lake
Sammanish.
In November 1974, a polite young man accosted a girl named Carol DaRonch in a shopping centre
in Salt Lake City, introduced himself as a police officer, and told her there had been an attempt to
break into her car. She went with him to inspect it, and agreed to go with him to view a suspect at
police headquarters. Once in his car, she was handcuffed, and he tried to knock her out with a
crowbar. She managed to jump out, and the man drove off as another car approached.
During the next nine months, more violated corpses were found. In August 1975, Bundy was
arrested for acting suspiciously late at night, and Carol DaRonch identified him as the man who had
tried to abduct her.
Bundy insisted that his presence in the area where corpses were found was an unfortunate
coincidence, and his plausibility and intelligence supported that view. He was a popular prisoner,
and conducted his own defence brilliantly. On 30 December 1978, he hoisted himself through a
hole in the ceiling and escaped.
Two weeks later, a man walked into the student sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, and
violently attacked four girls with a heavy piece of wood; one was shot and raped, and the man also
bit her. Another girl was strangled. These two died; two others survived the beatings. In a nearby
house, another girl was attacked and her skull fractured. The attacker fled when the phone rang. A
few blocks away, Ted Bundy was living in a students’ lodging house, using a false name and stolen