Wearside Jack
Wearside Jack is the nickname given to John Samuel Humble (8 January 1956 – 30 July 2019), a British man who pretended to be the Yorkshire Ripper in a hoax audio recording and several letters in 1978 and 1979.
The message, recorded on an audio cassette, caused the investigation to be moved away from the West Yorkshire area, home of the real killer, Peter Sutcliffe, and thereby helped prolong his attacks on women and may have delayed his arrest by eighteen months.
[3] Postmarked from Sunderland, two were addressed to Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield of the West Yorkshire Police who was heading the Ripper inquiry, and one to the Daily Mirror.
[5] The Yorkshire Ripper was believed at the time to have killed her, but the supposed connection was wrongly thought not to be in the public domain leading the hoaxer's claim to gain undeserved credibility.
It remained unsolved until 2011, when DNA evidence from the crime scene was matched to those of a deceased man named Christopher Smith (died 2008) who had been convicted of other offences, including attempted rape and manslaughter.
[8][9] On 17 June 1979, Humble sent a cassette to Assistant Chief Constable Oldfield, where he introduced himself only under the name "Jack" and claimed responsibility for the Ripper murders to that point.
The US profiling expert Robert Ressler indicated, in his co-written book, Whoever Fights Monsters, that he contacted them to inform them immediately after he heard the recording.
[16][17] Interviewed by Joan Smith for The Sunday Times in 1980, Olive Smelt, a victim of Sutcliffe who survived his 1975 attack in Halifax, was angry that the police had ignored her insistence that the perpetrator was a local man.
One of the officers, Detective Constable Andrew Laptew, in his report wrote that there was good evidence he was the killer, but the document was downgraded because of Sutcliffe's Yorkshire accent and the lack of a match with the hoaxer's handwriting.
[14][9] A then unknown victim of Sutcliffe at the time of Humble's first letter was Yvonne Pearson, whose body lay undiscovered, hidden under a discarded sofa in Bradford.
[20] One coincidence between Harrison's (then falsely suspected) killer and Wearside Jack was the secretion of their B-group blood cells in their saliva and semen, retrieved from her murder scene and from the gum of one of the letters, a quality shared by only 6% of men.
In the early years of the marriage, he was said to be a good step-father for her two children, but he became abusive to his wife and was eventually convicted of common assault, leading to the couple's separation around 1999.
[22] A breakthrough came in 2005 after senior officers from West Yorkshire Police’s Homicide and Major Enquiry Team (HMET), headed by Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, decided to review the case.
[3] Humble admitted responsibility for the letters and the cassette, but denied perverting the course of justice, and his legal team pushed in vain for a lesser charge of wasting police time.
[22] Before Sutcliffe was arrested, Humble twice phoned the police anonymously to indicate they had been hoaxed because he felt guilty for misleading the investigation, but his calls were discounted.
[1] I’m Jack, a novel by Mark Blacklock, also from Sunderland, is a fictionalised account of Humble in his prison cell mocking the ghost of George Oldfield with further letters.
