THERE was a growing sense of fear in Bradford between 1975 and 1980.

Retired journalist Jim Greenhalf, who was working on the Telegraph & Argus at the time of Peter Sutcliffe’s murders, recalls “the fear that permeated the after-dark streets of Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield and Manchester”.

He writes: “Young women were advised to stay off the streets at night - lockdown by another name. If you were a single man who happened to be walking behind a woman on, say, Manningham Lane, you felt acutely conscious that she might be worrying about who you were.

“Such was the climate created by Sutcliffe’s killings, four of which were in Bradford, that West Yorkshire Police spent more than £1m looking for completely the wrong man - Wearside Jack. I was in West Yorkshire Police’s Wakefield headquarters the summer morning in 1979 when Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield played a cassette tape to assembled journalists and photographers. The voice, purporting to be that of the Yorkshire Ripper, clearly belonged to a man from the North East.

“George Oldfield believed the tape’s authenticity although others did not. One prostitute I talked to in a flat near the junction of Lumb Lane and Carlisle Road told me: ‘He’s a Bradford man. We’ll know him when they catch him.’

“She was right. Some among West Yorkshire Police also thought the voice on the tape was not the man they were looking for.

“He was not the man I was looking for either. I had visited the back-street terrace house, just off Lumb Lane, where Yvonne Pearson had lived before Sutcliffe murdered her one Saturday night and concealed her body under a sofa on wasteground in January, 1978. The same month a T&A photographer and I went out to a wood-yard in Huddersfield after police said the mutilated body of a young woman had been found. That was Helen Rytka. It was a bitterly cold night. To be standing yards away from the scene of the crime was not thrilling or chilling. I thought at the time: ‘Those who don’t believe in the existence of evil should stand in the vicinity where someone has died violently alone.’

“Peter Sutcliffe was serving his life sentence when, in 1982-83, circumstances found me renting a semi-detached house in Garden Lane, Heaton, directly opposite the pebble-dashed house where Sutcliffe had lived with his wife Sonia. There were days she could be seen cleaning the windows, her back turned to the road. If she wasn’t impervious to the eyes of Ripper tourists who occasionally drove over from Lancashire and elsewhere to gaze at the house of Britain’s biggest serial killer, she didn’t show it.

“One day, journalists knocked on my door, asking if they could secretly film Sonia from an upstairs room. I said ‘no’. I did not believe that press freedom included the right to snoop on the innocent.

"The Ripper’s capture in 1981 caused relief, joy even, that others in London and the West Country could not understand. After all, Sutcliffe had yet to plead in court. Only those who lived and worked in this part of the North understood what they could not.”

Rudi Leavor, a leading light in Bradford's Jewish community, recalls: “At the time of the murders my late wife Marianne would go to the gym once a week, usually by car. On one occasion she asked for a lift from one of the other people. On the way back she suggested that she be dropped off at the top of the road not far from our house but the friend reminded her, as if she needed reminding, that the Ripper was about. She insisted that she would be all right and walked the few hundred yards home. There was consternation a few months later when he was caught and found to live just a couple of hundred yards from our house.”

T&A reader Neil Liversidge, adds: “I was 12 in 1975 when the Ripper murders started and 17 when he was caught in 1981. By the end of 1980 it felt like it would go on indefinitely, that he’d never be caught.

“I recall my dad being in St James’s Infirmary in Leeds after an accident at work and my mother going to visit him armed with a can of hairspray and a pair of scissors, because the hospital was in Ripper territory.

“Girls my age not daring or being allowed to travel alone in the evenings. Being at Park Lane college September-December 1979 and seeing the anxiety of female students, none went anywhere alone in ‘Ripper-land’ if they could avoid it. I started work in 1980, women had to plan their commute around the Ripper threat. One male colleague who loosely fitted the Ripper photo-fit, whose job involved travelling, was repeatedly pulled in for questioning.

“Learning in 1986 that my then-girlfriend’s mother, a cleaner at a doctor’s surgery in Sheffield in 1980-81, had come close to being the Ripper’s last victim. The overwhelming sense of relief, and disbelief, when he was finally caught.”

Reader John Murphy remembers being questioned: “I went to a concert at the Princeville Club. Walking home a squad car pulled up and the officer asked me to get in for a few questions. It was Ripper related - the worrying thing was he didn’t confirm anything I told him as a radio call was coming through about something else. He cut the conversation and said I could go. Hardly surprising Sutcliffe led police up so many garden paths.”

Liz Francis remembers the sense of foreboding in the city : “I remember sitting on a bus opposite a poster saying ‘The person next to you could be the Ripper’. The fear he could be among us. My friend was at Bradford University, female students went everywhere in groups.”

Patricia Heath recalls the same sense of fear that no woman was safe: “I remember the fear and suspicion, wondering who it was, did I know him? Being afraid to go out. Worrying when and where he would strike again.”