My mum Anne met John Humble in a fish and chip shop in Sunderland.

She was working behind the counter at the time and the first words he ever spoke to her were “Fish and chips twice please, luv.”

It’s a standing family joke. It could have been a bit more romantic.

I was about 18 at the time and my young brother Joseph was just 11 years old.

John used to chat her up at the chippy and tell her what great legs she had. He was younger than mum by five years and she loved the attention.

Mum had never married my real dad Gordon and by then she was in her late 30s.

That was back in 1989. Mum is 54 now and John who is 50 is in prison.

Mum married John in 1991. In those days he had good jobs either working at the Nissan car plant in Sunderland or as a window cleaner.

He was clean cut and his nickname back then was Flipper, because he was always in the bath or taking a shower. He was a tidy looking fellah, to be honest.

But the marriage was always stormy. Mum even tore up her marriage certificate the day she married him after a big row.

I think I knew he was hitting her right from the beginning. The signs were there.

Then in the years after they were married mum often used to call and say he had been knocking her about. But when I went round she always ended up taking his side. She would tell me it was none of my business and to go away. I was very worried but mum would say she didn’t interfere in my life and I shouldn’t interfere in hers.

He smashed their council house up once in the 1990s after they had been together for five years.

The TV was smashed up, there were cups of coffee thrown against the wall and the furniture was all smashed. That’s when his drinking first started to be a real problem. Mum was crying on the phone. My brother Joseph was badly upset as well because he used to live with them and that worried me more than anything. There wasn’t any real reason for his temper. It was the drink. From then on I tried to stay out their rows.

I was happy when they split up and he left home. The booze had got the better of him by then and I knew mum and Joseph were better off without him.

He would walk around Sunderland with a ruck sack on his back with his beers and bottles of cider in it. He just drank all the time. Everyone called him ‘John the alcoholic’ or ‘John the bag’ because he went around with drink in his back pack.

But even though they had been separated for three or four years he used to go round to the house and tell mum he still loved her. But he also used to ask for money. Then he would get violent when he didn’t get what he wanted.

He put her in hospital in 1997 for three days with broken ribs and a back injury. He held a knife to her once and threatened to strangle her. It was terrifying and a real worry.

But I had to get on with my life. I met Richard my partner at a girlie weekend in Blackpool and I moved down to Nuneaton to be with him. That was last year (2005). I started a new life.

Then one day when I was visiting mum in Sunderland I just put her in the car and brought her down to Nuneaton to be with me and Richard.

I’ve got three children of my own. Stefan, 17, Marc, 7, and Mackenzie, 5, from two previous relationships, and being here with Richard, 30, and the kids was a better environment for mum. She has washed her hands of him now. She has even torn up the pictures she had of him.

One day last year (2005) after mum had moved down I had a phone call at work from a newspaper reporter telling me John had been arrested. The same day mum saw his face on TV in a shop in the town, but she didn’t realise it was him.

The reporter said to me my step dad had made some tapes pretending to be the Yorkshire Ripper. It seemed unbelievable. I was amazed.

When we got home there were reporters outside the house. So we sat down and watched the news. It was weird. We didn’t know what was going on. It was all over the telly.

I called the local police to find out and they told me the whole story. John really had been arrested for pretending to be the Yorkshire Ripper in the late 1970s. He was the man they called Wearside Jack who made a tape and sent it to police. Everyone in Sunderland knew the story. While the police were hunting for a man with a Sunderland accent the Yorkshire Ripper killed three more women. And it was all one big hoax. Now, 26 years later I was being told my step dad was Wearside Jack. My mum’s husband! Mum still didn’t believe it and kept saying it couldn’t be him as we watched the telly that night. It was the big story on every channel.

I recognised his voice immediately when they played that tape on the telly.

“I’m Jack. I see you are having no luck catching me,” the voice said. He was taunting the police. I knew it was him.

But mum was still in denial. The news said he had been living like a tramp on a run down estate in Sunderland. That didn’t surprise us.

Gradually it sank in though and mum accepted it.

Then she started remembering all the times over the years she had been with him when there had been things on the telly about Wearside Jack.

He would be lying on the settee and used to ask mum if she had any idea who Wearside Jack was.

‘Are you for real?’ she used to say back to him, ‘How on earth would I know? It could be anybody.’ It’s creepy thinking about it.

But it wasn’t just the Yorkshire Ripper. He was obsessed with crime in general. Serial killers, that sort of stuff. He used to collect those magazines that you got binders for to build up a big collection. There were stories in there about the Mafia, the Triads, the Kray twins, gangsters, drug lords and all that sort of stuff. He once took a book out of the library about Sutcliffe but we never thought that much about it. We had no way of knowing what he had done many years before.

In March 2006 John was sentenced to eight years for perverting the course of justice.

Then I started asking myself why? Why did he do the hoax?

He says he did it for a laugh. But he is a reasonably intelligent man. There is more to it. I know there is.

That is partly why I started to visit him at Armley Prison in Leeds – to try to get some answers.

I’ve spoken to him about it a lot now and I have worked out it is something to do with the unsolved murder of a prostitute called Joan Harrison, 26, in Preston in 1975. John referred to her in one of his hoax letters. Peter Sutcliffe has always denied killing her. I don’t think John Killed her but I think he knows who did.

John used to go for lads’ weekends in Blackpool in those days and Preston is just a stone’s throw from Blackpool. When I mentioned Blackpool during one of my prison visits he looked shocked and said not to tell the police, but of course I have. He is protecting someone in connection with that murder. I really believe that.

I think he made the tape and wrote those letters in the first place to throw the police off course to protect someone over the Joan Harrison murder. I know that is still wrong, very wrong, but it would explain to the family why he went so wrong in life. Why he did it.

I’ve had a quite a few letters from him in prison and he has expressed a lot of remorse for what he did. I write back to him because there is nobody left who cares about him any more. Even his younger brother Harry and his sister Jean don’t want to know.

I may sound like I am close to him but I am not. There are unanswered questions. I know he has done wrong - he has done really, really wrong.

The last time I visited him he said he was going to write to Peter Sutcliffe because he reckons they are both partners in crime and will go down in history together. I must admit that made me feel sick.

He tried to commit suicide a couple of years after sending the tape to police because of guilt over what he did and also I believe because of what he knew.

He jumped off the Wearmouth Bridge in Sunderland after taking some tablets. It’s called suicide bridge. The police were waiting for him and pulled him out of the water. He was on tablets for depression at the time and I think it is connected.

There was nothing wrong with John until the Joan Harrison murder. Then he became an alcoholic and did the Ripper hoax. He just went downhill after her murder.

I feel sorry for him. He told me he has been on suicide watch in prison. He’s sad, not bad. Not really bad. He has had threats in prison he told me.

I have a lot of sympathy for the relatives of the three victims the police say may not have been killed if it hadn’t been for John’s hoax. But I also know there is more to this story than has come out. I think that’s why I can forgive him.

But he did make that tape and it’s creepy to hear it on the telly. It’s not nice at all.

I’m not defending him. He has done wrong and is guilty as charged and he is doing his time. He did something very, very stupid that has had serious consequences for him and worse for others. My mum has got a lot of hate for him. A lot.

But like I said, John is more sad than bad.

In a letter to Colleen and his wife Anne before he was sentenced to eight years Humble wrote:

What the judge said.

Alcoholic Humble, 50, was sentenced in March 2006 at Leeds Crown Court to eight years in prison after he admitted four charges of perverting the course of justice.

He admitted sending three letters and a tape to police falsely claiming he was the Yorkshire Ripper.

Judge Norman Jones QC told Humble his deception had contributed to Peter Sutcliffe, 59, not being caught sooner.

And he said the murderer’s final three victims, Margot Walls, 47, and students Barbara Leach and Jacqueline Hill, both 20, might not have been killed if police had not been concentrating on Wearside Jack.

The judge said:” The least that can be said is that those victims would have stood a better chance of not being attacked had police resources not been misdirected.

“It is likely Sutcliffe who had already come to police attention may have been placed much higher in the list of suspects had police not been seeking someone with a Geordie accent.”

When he was arrested Sutcliffe said the hoax had made him feel safe.

How Humble was caught

The Wearside Jack case is one of the most infamous hoaxes in British criminal history.

Humble went undetected for 26 years until in 2005 scientists obtained a DNA profile of the hoaxer from saliva on one envelope. This matched a sample taken from Humble following a caution for being drunk and disorderly in 2001. The police had their man.

The infamous hoax

Humble sent three letters pretending to be the Yorkshire Ripper who butchered thirteen women in the 1970s. The first two were sent in March 1978 and the third the following March. The tape was sent to George Oldfield the senior detective on the Ripper murder hunt in 1979.

He referred to the Joan Harrison murder in his first letter.

In his Wearside accent Humble said on the tape: “I’m Jack. I see you are having no luck catching me.”

The tape was played repeatedly on TV news and in shopping centres in the hope someone would recognise the voice. The police investigation into the hoax cost £6million.

But while detectives hunted in the north east for someone with a Wearside accent, the real Ripper preyed on three more victims.

He was finally caught and convicted in 1981.

Comments (1) >>

Show/Hide comments

...
written by Noel O'Gara, May 12, 2008

http://yorkshireripper.com/johnhumble.htm

Write comment

Show/Hide comment form

Name

Comment

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment