JONATHAN Levi glanced at the man sitting opposite over the top of his teacup and could hardly believe the shambling, scruffy figure who once struck fear across Britain.
The dark, menacing stare of Peter Sutcliffe had long gone, replaced by an overweight, sick old man who would later die of Covid – much to the relief of his victim’s families.
Ian Whittaker – The SunPeter Sutcliffe in one of the final pictures taken of him in 2015[/caption]
RexBroadmoor houses some of Britain’s most violent and deranged killers[/caption]
Documentary maker Jonathan said: “He looked like any other old man.
“He was sitting in a jumper and old trousers. He was a very scruffy bloke who was overweight and clearly unwell.”
Jonathan, 45, met the Yorkshire Ripper while filming a ground-breaking documentary which gave the UK the first real insight into life inside psychiatric hospital Broadmoor.
He also came across infamous killers Robert Napper, who stabbed young mum Rachel Nickell to death in 1992, and Stockwell strangler Kenneth Erskine, who murdered seven pensioners.
The producer reveals that another of Britain’s most notorious names, Moors murderer Ian Brady, was still considered a danger to children when he died in 2017.
Jonathan first met with Sutcliffe, who died in November 2020, to convince him to go on the record about his abominable crimes for a documentary – but he knocked him back.
Jonathan said: “He was quite introverted really, a quiet man. He just didn’t want to talk about his crimes.
“We even tried to convince him to go on the documentary anonymously to talk about Broadmoor but he wasn’t interested.
Peter Sutcliffe was a shambling old man at the end
“Some killers seek publicity but he just wasn’t one of them, despite everything that has been written about him.”
Sutcliffe killed 13 women and tried to murder seven more between 1975 and 1980, leaving Yorkshire women living in terror.
Jonathan first came across him in 2013 as he was given unprecedented access to Broadmoor for a docuseries of the same name, which aired aired five years later.
He and wife Emma French went on to write a book about the Victorian psychiatric unit, which has housed some of Britain’s most chilling killers.
Psychotic killers
PA:Press AssociationOne doctor claimed there was no cure for Brady[/caption]
Jonathan and Emma also visited Ashworth Hospital, in Merseyside, which held Moors murderer Ian Brady 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 eye I will never forget. It was a glint that made you shiver.”
Jonathan said a doctor told him there was NO treatment that would have helped Brady, who slaughtered five children with lover Myra Hindley between 1963 and 1965.
He said: “The doctor said Brady was a narcissistic, psychopathic paedophile and that no medication would have helped him change.
“He said if you locked Brady in a room with a child he would still kill, decades after his first kills. He hadn’t got better at all.”
PA:Press AssociationRobert Napper killed young mum Rachel Nickell[/caption]
Rachel was with son Alex when Napper struck
Jonathan says he was surprised by his first visits to Broadmoor, where he discovered the most wicked names in Britain were now shuffling around a 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 on Wimbledon Common in July 1992.
Innocent Colin Stagg, now 60, spent 13 months in jail for wrongly killing Rachel after being set up in a ‘honeytrap’ operation by police.
Broadmoor also housed Stockwell strangler Kenny Erskine, now 60, jailed for murdering seven pensioners around London in 1986.
Jonathan, managing director and co-founder of production firm Content Kings, said many of the killers were now “clinically obese” because of the drugs and lack of exercise.
“They were kept on a ward with their own bedrooms and were given access to a small outdoor area and a day room where they watched TV together,” he says.
“It was a ward where patients were only placed if they were generally polite and did what they were told.
“A lot of them were on anti-psychotic medication, which had made them put on weight, and they were shambling about. It was almost like an old people’s home in the day room.
“A place like that does leave its mark though. It stays with you.”
He added: “It’s a weird place but one thing that really struck me was that the staff tend to stay for years and years. We’d speak to someone and they’d say ‘I’m a new addition, I’ve only been here 27 years’.
“I think they started because it’s such an interesting place to be, almost addictive in a way.
“There were some days it did make me feel a bit dirty though. You’d spend all day with these people knowing they’d done something really awful and you’d feel a little bit ill.”
Monster Mansion
Jonathan and Emma are now writing a book on Wakefield Prison, dubbed Monster Mansion due to the number of twisted inmates who include Robert Maudsley, a man so dangerous he has been kept in solitary confinement for 40 years.
Maudsley, dubbed 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, cracking his head “open like a boiled egg” with a spoon hanging out.
He was transferred to Wakefield where he killed wife killer Salney Darwood and sex attacker Bill Roberts.
In keeping with his nickname, he is now held in solitary confinement, in a perspex-walled cell described as a “Silence of the Lambs” design, 23 hours a day.
Robert Maudsley killed three inmates after being jailed in 1974
BBCMaudsley has to be kept in solitary confinement[/caption]
www.davidharrison.infoJonathan was shocked by what he found inside Broadmoor[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
