But the Bradford lorry driver’s arrest was anything but a pre-planned swoop, with the man who had terrified women across the county for more than five years ultimately snared by two Sheffield bobbies on anti-vice patrol.

They had no reason to suspect anything until a radio check on a parked-up Rover confirmed that the vehicle’s number plates, fastened on with sticky tape, didn’t match the car.

Peter Sutcliffe

Inside, they found Sutcliffe, who lived with his wife in Garden Lane, Heaton, with a prostitute he had picked up.

He was detained and when he appeared at a special sitting of Dewsbury magistrates the following day, he was charged with stealing two car registration plates, valued at 50p, belonging to a scrap yard in Brighouse.

Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe dies

He was also charged with the murder of university student Jacqueline Hill, whose body had been found the previous November behind the Arndale Centre in Leeds.

The Ripper’s reign of terror began in July, 1975, and resulted in the brutal murders of seven women and the attempted murder of seven others.

Many of his victims were mutilated before being stabbed or beaten to death.

Sutcliffe's victims

When Sutcliffe was arrested, the two officers involved agreed to allow him to go behind a wall to relieve himself before being detained into custody as he said he was “bursting for a pee.”

When news broke that he was being questioned by the Ripper Squad, one of the pair, Sergeant Bob Ring, returned to examine the scene.

There, on leaves behind an oil storage tank, he found a ball-pein hammer, a knife, and a rope, with Sutcliffe also found to have later hidden a second knife in a toilet cistern at the police station.

After two days of interrogation, Sutcliffe suddenly confessed that he was indeed the Ripper. He dictated a statement which took him more than 15 hours, detailing in full his 13 killings and other attacks.

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He told officers that God, speaking to him from a headstone in Bingley Cemetery, where he worked as a gravedigger, had told him to go out and kill prostitutes, who were the “causes of all the evil in the world.”

When he later stood trial in front of a jury at The Old Bailey, he claimed that the fact that many of his victims were not prostitutes was, in effect, God’s fault.

Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty to 13 charges of murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, with psychiatric reports stating he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Boreham, insisted the case be dealt with by a jury and on May 22, 1981, Sutcliffe was found guilty via a majority verdict on all 13 counts.

The jury had decided that the Ripper was bad, not mad. He received twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 30 years.

A special conference of all the top detectives involved in the Ripper murders in 1978

The front page of the following day’s T&A, which had documented the ‘trial of the century’, led with the headline ‘Justice - Yorkshire delivered from evil. The Ripper is locked up for life.’ After the case, media asked questions as to whether an inquiry into the Ripper investigation was needed, with officers admitted Sutcliffe was spoken to on nine separate occasions, mainly after being seen in red light areas, but never charged.

West Yorkshire’s then Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, told the T&A: “There were many more men - 40, 50, sometimes 60 men - under greater suspicion. Some were under constant surveillance.”

Mr Gregory also admitted that police had made a mistake by focusing too heavily on a tape that later turned to be a hoax from someone dubbed ‘Wearside Jack’, in which a man claiming to be the Ripper taunted authorities for failing to catch him.

Police task force officers search land at the back of houses in Garden Lane, Heaton, January 8, 1981

Police said the tape allowed Sutcliffe at least another year of freedom, and ultimately admitted he was able to remain at large for so long because “he was clever enough not to leave any clues.”

In March, 1984, Sutcliffe was moved from HMP Parkhurst to Broadmoor Hospital under the Mental Health Act. In December 2015, it was deemed he was no longer mentally ill and he was reportedly transferred to Frankland Prison in Durham in August, 2016.

In July 2010, a parole hearing at the High Court had issued Sutcliffe with a whole life tariff, meaning he is unlikely to ever be released.

At the hearing, Mr Justice Mitting stated: “This was a campaign of murder which terrorised the population of a large part of Yorkshire for several years.

“The only explanation for it, on the jury’s verdict, was anger, hatred and obsession. Apart from a terrorist outrage, it is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which one man could account for so many victims.

“Those circumstances alone make it appropriate to set a whole-life term.”

In February 2018, widespread rumours surfaced that detectives had interviewed Sutcliffe in prison about his alleged responsibility for other murders and attacks, but West Yorkshire police confirmed there were no plans to charge him for any further offences.