The answer on the question sheet was "Peter Sutcliffe", with "The Yorkshire Ripper" in brackets – implying that the latter is background information, and not required as part of the answer.
In fact, Wearside Jack couldn't pretend to be Peter Sutcliffe as at the time no one (except Sutcliffe himself obviously, and possibly a very few close associates) knew that Peter Sutcliffe was the Yorkshire Ripper.
Another pedantic point, you may say; but if 'Peter Sutcliffe' was the answer that the setter required, the question should have been phrased differently.
I can't see many question masters refusing to award the points to a contestant who answered "the Yorkshire Ripper"; but when there's a possibility of a dispute or grievance (as there always is when setting quiz questions), consistency is everything. And as I've said elsewhere, if you're using a supplementary then there already has been a dispute – or else someone has made a mistake, in which case there's quite possibly a grievance.
The Yorkshire Ripper was one of the UK's most notorious serial killers. Between 1975 and 1980, twelve women were murdered in West Yorkshire and one in Manchester. Seven other attacks on women were linked to the same perpetrator. Many of the women, but not all of them, were prostitutes.
In 1978 and 1979, Yorkshire Police received three letters and one audiotape, from someone who claimed to be the Yorkshire Ripper. The first letter was signed "Jack the Ripper". From the voice on the audio tape, experts placed the sender's home to the Castletown area of Sunderland. The hoaxer (as he turned out to be) came to be known in the media as 'Wearside Jack'. Forty thousand men were investigated in Sunderland, but to no avail.
On 2 January 1981, a man was stopped by police in Broomhill, Sheffield, in the company of a prostitute. After it was found that his car had false number plates, he was arrested; he was Peter Sutcliffe, a 34-year-old lorry driver from Bradford. He was married but had no children; he had worked in a number of low-skill jobs.
After two days of questioning, Sutcliffe confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper. At a preliminary hearing the judge dismissed the defence's plea of diminished responsibility on the grounds of mental illness (paranoid schizophrenia). The trial proper began on 5 May 1981, and after two weeks Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of thirty years each. In 2010 the High Court issued a whole life tariff, meaning that Sutcliffe is unlikely ever to be released. In February 2017 he was 70 years old.
The search for Wearside Jack continued, until in 2003 the BBC announced that it had been called off. But two years later, Yorkshire Police decided to re-open it. A small piece of the envelope that one of the hoaxer's letters had been sent in had been kept, and some DNA was found on it. It matched that of John Samuel Humble, a labourer from Sunderland, who had been arrested and cautioned in 2000 for being drunk and disorderly. By this time he was an alcoholic loner; in 2005 he was 49 years old.
Humble was convicted on four counts of perverting the course of justice, and sentenced to eight years in prison. During his questioning and trial he said that the motive for his crime was a desire for notoriety, although a BBC documentary later suggested that he had a hatred of the police dating back to 1975 when he was imprisoned for assaulting a police officer.
© Macclesfield Quiz League 2017