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 during the period 1978–1979.

Humble sent a taped message spoken in a Wearside accent and three letters, taunting the authorities for failing to catch him.

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 hindered his potential arrest for eighteen months.

Between March 1978 and the end of June 1979, Humble sent three letters claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper.

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.

First letter: 8 March 1978

Written to Detective George Oldfield

"Preston '75" was a reference to the murder of Joan Harrison.

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.

Sutcliffe denied any knowledge and was not charged for this crime.

The recording on a cassette tape ended with a segment from the 1978 single "Thank You for Being a Friend" by Andrew Gold.

George Oldfield and other senior officers were informed by the FBI that the creator of the tape was a blatant hoaxer.

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.

Despite this, the police focused on Humble's Wearside accent.

Together with voice analysts, they decided (based on dialectology) that the accent was distinctive to the Castletown area of Sunderland.

This led to 40,000 men being investigated to no avail, as the killer, Sutcliffe, came from Bradford.

Police also commenced a substantial publicity campaign, including 'Dial-the-Ripper' hotlines, 5,000 advertising hoardings, and advertisements in 300 newspapers.

Chief Constable Ronald Gregory diverted £1 million from the inquiries budget into the publicity campaign alone.

A few weeks after being played the recording, the voice experts began to try to persuade the police that the tape was created by a hoaxer, but were not listened to.

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.

"I'm Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you George, but Lord! You are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. They can't be much good, can they?"

A confidential police document issued in September 1979 by the West Yorkshire Police murder incident room instructed detectives to disregard from their inquiries any suspect without a North-East accent.

Peter Sutcliffe, who committed the murders, was interviewed and released nine times over five years.

Four of these occasions followed the police decision to search for the man heard on the tape.

Each time he was rejected as a suspect because he did not have a North-East accent.

In July 1979, Sutcliffe was interviewed by two Detective Constables who became suspicious.

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.

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.

This detail raised the suspicion of a Northumbria Police Detective Inspector that the Wearside Jack evidence was a hoax (as the writer of the letter made no reference to this crime) and submitted a report to West Yorkshire police in September 1979, but the report was ignored.

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.

It was this which was taken as definitive proof the Yorkshire Ripper was the same man as had sent the letters and the tape.

While the West Yorkshire Police were investigating the leads, Sutcliffe murdered three more women, and attacked two others.

It was only after Sutcliffe's confession that Wearside Jack was demonstrated to be a hoax.

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.

Other survivors' evidence, photofits which were close to Sutcliffe's appearance, were also rejected.

It emerged during Humble's own trial that Sutcliffe had told police after his arrest in 1981 that "While ever that was going on I felt safe. I'm not a Geordie. I was born at Shipley."

The son of Sam and Violet Humble, Humble attended Hylton Road Junior School and Havelock Senior School on Fordfield Road in the Ford Estate in Sunderland.

ACC Oldfield took early retirement following what he considered to be a total humiliation; he died in 1985 aged 61.

More than 25 years after the event, a fragment from one of Humble's envelopes was traced to him through DNA, and in 2006, Humble was sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice.

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.