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He helped the Ripper kill three women

The man who fantasised about being a mass murderer got off lightly, says chris boffey

In a bitterly cold cemetery perched on a hillside overlooking her family home, 20-year-old Jacqueline Hill, the Yorkshire Ripper's final victim, was buried six days before Christmas 1980.

I was one of the reporters who witnessed her parents, Doreen and Jack Hill, weeping in the graveyard of St Wilfrid's Church for their lost daughter, and later listened to bone-weary detectives make another pledge to find the serial killer of 13 women.

But they were looking for the wrong man. Eighteen months earlier, a hoaxer had convinced police in a series of letters and a chilling tape-recorded message that he was the killer. Police had questioned and discounted Peter Sutcliffe, the real murderer, because his Yorkshire accent did not match the voice on the tape.

Sutcliffe had already killed 10 women before
By the time he sent the ‘I'm Jack’ tape, he was revelling in the notoriety

the police interviewed him and he went on to butcher three more young women before finally being caught in 1981.

While Jacqueline Hill and Barbara Leach, both university students, and Marguerite Wells, a civil servant, were killed at the hands of Sutcliffe, they were equally the victims of John Humble (left), the man who claimed to be the Ripper in his infamous "I'm Jack" tape.

After his arrest, Sutcliffe acknowledged that he had felt confident to continue the killing while the hunt was on for the man with the Geordie accent.

Yesterday, Humble, finally brought to trial a quarter of a century later, was jailed for eight years after admitting intending to pervert the course of justice.

Humble, now 50, delivered his first hoax letter as a prank but, by the time he sent the "I'm Jack" tape, he was revelling in the notoriety. His duping of police made him an accessory to three murders.

He should have been given life. The man who lived the fantasy of being the Ripper should have been forced to face its reality.

FIRST POSTED MARCH 22, 2006