JONATHAN Levi looked at the man sitting opposite over the top of his teacup and could hardly believe that he was the gaunt, shabby figure who had once struck fear in all of Britain.
Peter Sutcliffe’s dark, menacing gaze was long gone, replaced by an overweight, sickly old man who would later die of Covid – much to the relief of his victim’s family.
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Peter Sutcliffe in one of his last photographs taken in 2015. Credit: Ian Whittaker – The Sun
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The Broadmoor is home to some of Britain’s most violent and insane killers Credit: Rex
Documentary Jonathan said: “He looked like any other old man.
“He was sitting in a sweater and old pants. He was a very scruffy guy who was overweight and obviously not feeling well.”
Jonathan, 45, met the Yorkshire Ripper while filming the ground-breaking documentary which gave the UK its first real insight into life inside Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital.
He also came across notorious killers Robert Napper, who stabbed young mum Rachel Nickell to death in 1992, and Stockwell strangler Kenneth Erskine, who killed seven pensioners.
Read more about serial killers
The producer reveals that another of Britain’s most notorious names, Moorish killer Ian Brady, was still considered a danger to children when he died in 2017.
Jonathan first met Sutcliffe, who died in November 2020, to persuade him to publish his heinous crimes for a documentary – but he turned him down.
Jonathan said: “He was actually quite an introverted, quiet man. He just didn’t want to talk about his crimes.
“We even tried to convince him to go to the documentary anonymously to talk about Broadmoor, but he wasn’t interested.
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Peter Sutcliffe ended up being a scruffy old man
“Some killers seek publicity, but he just wasn’t one of them, despite everything that was written about him.”
Sutcliffe killed 13 women and attempted to kill seven more between 1975 and 1980, leaving women in Yorkshire to live in terror.
Jonathan first came across it in 2013 when he was given unprecedented access to Broadmoor for a documentary series of the same name that aired five years later.
He and wife Emma French wrote a book about a Victorian psychiatric unit that housed some of Britain’s most gruesome killers.
Psychotic killers
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One doctor claimed there is no cure for BradyCredit: PA: Press Association
Jonathan and Emma also visited Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside, where Moors murderer Ian Brady was held until his death in May 2017.
Psychiatric nurse Tom Mason, who worked at Ashworth when Brady was alive, previously described him as having “a look in his eyes that I will never forget. It was a flash that made you shudder.”
Jonathan said his doctor told him there was NO treatment to help Brady, who slaughtered five children with mistress Myra Hindley between 1963 and 1965.
He said: “The doctor said Brady was a narcissistic, psychopathic pedophile and no amount of medication would help him change.
“He said that if Brady was locked in a room with a child, he would still kill, decades after the first murders. He was not better at all.”
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Robert Napper killed young mom Rachel NickellCredit: PA: Press Association
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Rachel was with her son Alex when Napper struck
Jonathan says he was surprised on his first visits to Broadmoor to discover that the most vicious names in Britain are now hanging around the ward – including Robert Napper, who stabbed Rachel Nickell in front of her two-year-old son Alexander.
In a crime that shocked Britain, he stabbed the former model 49 times before sexually assaulting her at Wimbledon in July 1992.
Innocent Colin Stagg, now 60, spent 13 months in prison for wrongfully killing Rachel after police set him up in a ‘honey trap’ operation.
The Broadmoor also housed Stockwell’s strangler Kenny Erskine, now 60, who murdered seven pensioners around London in 1986.
Jonathan, director and co-founder of production company Content Kings, said many of the killers were now “clinically obese” due to medication and lack of exercise.
“They were kept in a ward with their own bedrooms and given access to a small outdoor area and a living room where they watched TV together,” he says.
“It was a ward where patients were placed only if they were generally polite and did what they were told.
“Many of them were on antipsychotics, which made them gain weight, and they were wobbly. It was almost like a nursing home in the living room.
“Such a place still leaves a mark. It stays with you.”
He added: “It’s a strange place, but one thing that really struck me is that the staff tend to stay for years and years. We’d talk to someone and they’d say ‘I’m a new addition, I’ve only been here 27 years’.
“I think they started because the place is so interesting, almost addictive in a way.
“Still, there were days that made me feel a bit dirty. He’d spend the whole day with these people knowing they’d done something really awful and he’d feel a bit sick.”
Monster’s Castle
Jonathan and Emma are now writing a book about Wakefield Prison, nicknamed the Monster Mansion because of the number of twisted inmates, including Robert Maudsley, a man so dangerous that he was kept in solitary confinement for 40 years.
Maudsley, nicknamed Hannibal the Cannibal, was jailed in 1974 after being found guilty of murdering builder John Farrell.
Three years later, at Broadmoor, he took another psychopath hostage in his cell and tortured him for nine hours, smashing his head “open like a boiled egg” with a dangling spoon.
He was transferred to Wakefield where he killed husband killer Salney Darwood and sexual assaulter Bill Roberts.
True to his nickname, he is now held in solitary confinement, in a Plexiglas cell described as a “Silence of the Lambs” design, 23 hours a day.
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Robert Maudsley killed three inmates after being imprisoned in 1974
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Maudsley must be kept in solitary confinementCredit: BBC
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Jonathan was shocked by what he found at Broadmoor. Credit: www.davidharrison.info
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