Facing the Yorkshire Ripper: The Art of Survival

By Mo Lea

Decades after her brutal attack by the notorious serial killer, an artist tells her story of survival and recovery in this uplifting memoir.

Mo Lea was a young art student in Leeds when her life was changed forever by a deadly assault. On October 25th, 1980, serial killer Peter Sutcliffe attacked her with a hammer and stabbed her with a screwdriver. Surviving with a fractured skull and PTSD, Mo spent years wrestling with a morbid narrative that cast her as a victim.

Now Mo offers a fresh perspective on her life, sharing valuable insight into her successful recovery process. While art had always been important to her, it became a vital outlet for exploring her pain, her anger, and her ultimate triumph over them. Drawing a meticulous portrait of Sutcliffe, she then found catharsis in tearing it to bits—ripping up the Ripper.

In candid words and stirring illustrations, Mo reclaims her own story, telling of her journey from tragic despair to calmness and acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526777591

Book preview

Chapter One

Liverpool Art Lessons

Iknelt on the highly polished floor in one of the rooms in the Walker Art Gallery. I was hunched over a large piece of grey sugar paper, pressing down hard with my wax crayons trying to get the shapes and lines to resemble the Pre-Raphaelite drawing that I was copying. I remember being discouraged because the colours just weren’t the same as the painting and that I couldn’t get a fine line with the blunt broad edge of the cheap school crayons. The harder I pressed, the worse the marks became. Feeling despondent, I had to make do with what I had, and reluctantly completed the picture.

At the age of 8 I understood that this was just the beginning of an artist’s journey, one where I would try to replicate what was in front of me as honestly as I could. While I was copying the picture, staring up at the painting, I wondered what was going on, people were eating and drinking, and someone was kicking a whimpering dog.

The painting, by John Everett Millais, illustrated the fable of Isabella and Lorenzo. On one of the dining chairs, a hawk perched eating a white feather, symbolising impending violence. On the white tablecloth, salt had emptied out of its cellar, a symbol of the blood that would be spilled. One dinner plate had a picture of David beheading Goliath and on another, someone’s entrails were being pecked out by an eagle. On reflection, the painting mirrored the underlying tensions in an otherwise everyday event: demonstrating how the thin veil of civility can disguise fear and terror.

I was huddled underneath the painting, unaware of the symbolic contents above my head. I was more intent on struggling with the surface issues of drawing people, furniture, and long plaited hair. Unbeknown to me, my life would go on to hide a macabre secret just like the painting above me.

My work was chosen to go up on the classroom wall. I should have been pleased, but I knew this act of praise wasn’t justified and that I could do much better.

These were my enduring memories of my childhood in Liverpool. I was born in October 1959, and in that autumn term of 1968 I was lucky enough to be able to go to the Walker Art Gallery every week for quite some time. My school, Rice Lane Primary in Walton, understood the importance of art education and my pictures were often up on the classroom walls. After passing the Eleven Plus, I went to Liverpool Girls’ College where I waited patiently for the weekly art lessons to begin in the sunlit attic rooms of the old Edwardian building. Here I developed a passion for drawing, learned how to use pencil, charcoal, watercolour and pastels, and began to understand the importance of line and the endless subtleties of tone, contrast and colour.

I would often draw when I was on the family holiday, as an escape from petty family squabbles. Drawing made me calm. It was a quiet occupation and the solitude it required gave me much pleasure. Drawing in isolation meant you could make mistakes without retort, reinvent your world, and transform a blank piece of paper into something meaningful. It was comforting and uplifting.

Home life was a time of contrasts from singing in the choir at the local church to trespassing on the fields and derelict railway sidings at the end of our road. I would argue and fight with my brothers and friends and then be lost in thought, trying to draw buttercups and dandelions alone in my little box room.

We lived in a semi-detached house that my mum, Pauline, and dad, Robert, had bought new, soon after their wedding day, They were proud, positive people who embedded a sense of fair play and kindness in us. Dad was out of the house by 7.00 am every weekday as he cycled to work at Ogdens Tobacco factory. Mum would make sure we had polished our shoes before our half-hour walk to the local school. Mum loved the garden which was always full of colour; my favourites were the fragrant wallflowers and the white climbing roses that covered the old coal house in the garden just in front of the kitchen window.

Mum was shrewd with Dad’s wages and made most of our clothes. I loved my fresh cotton summer dresses and my cardigans always had a little pocket in which to store a handkerchief. We had a pet mutt, a well-behaved dog called Scampie, and I would walk him around the block of houses. As he stopped regularly to have an inquisitive sniff, I would take the opportunity to stare into the neighbours’ gardens and windows.

Dad ensured we travelled as much as we could. When I was 4, my two brothers and I were put into a sidecar. Rob, my eldest brother by four years, sat in the front, while my other brother, Philip, who is 13 months my senior, shared the back seat with me. Then, with just a suitcase between us and the Matchless motorbike driven by Dad, and with Mum sitting pillion, we took off to France to visit my aunt. We thought this was normal, but the neighbours were bemused and teased as they waved us off saying, ‘Bon voyage…see you in ten minutes!’ They made me realise that you could go anywhere if you put your mind to it. It wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds. Those days the motorways were new and pretty empty. We watched at the harbour edge as the motorbike and sidecar were hoisted onto a pallet into the bow of the hull of the Channel ferry. In later years, we all squished into an old-fashioned caravan that my dad towed with a two-tone grey Rover 90.

We had an unremarkable life. We enjoyed roast dinners after church on Sunday, if we had lamb it was my job to laboriously mix the vinegar with dry mint in the pantry under the stairs – I would slowly stir the ingredients in a jam jar until the aromas blended together. My dad would smoke his pipe after his rice pudding and listen to classical music. After washing up, my mum would pick up her knitting and we’d all sit in the lounge with the gas fire on watching the football or a black and white film. If I got bored, I’d get my bicycle out of the garage and cycle round the neighbourhood, walk Scampie round the block, or knock on someone’s door to see if they wanted to come out to play. There was a lot of freedom in those days; freedom to learn about yourself and have time to explore. The streets seemed safe.

I was a daydreamer. I spent a great deal of time travelling to my secondary school on top of double-decker buses, staring out of the windows, transfixed by all that passed by. I’d catch snippets of other people’s lives through the passing windows, like a flicker-book show. I watched the graffiti and political posters go up and come down in Liverpool in the 1970s – ‘Troops out of Ireland’ and comments against abortion, stuff I didn’t understand at the time.

Apart from the strict disciplined parenting of the time and bearing the brunt of the some childish bullying, I was a friendly kid, interested in people but pretty insecure. I was a bit of a tomboy, as I grew up trying to be like my brothers. Being a girl made me feel as though I was somehow the weaker gender. In the long school holidays, after the boys in the street had exhausted all their adventures they would start to pick on me – throwing stones and name calling. It was petty stuff, but it did affect me and sometimes made me too scared to go out. I would walk the long way home if they were playing football in the street as I would always be targeted with the ball.

When I was older, boyfriends became a ticket to freedom, I wouldn’t just see them once a week, I would spend as much time as possible with them, favouring their houses, their lives and their families to my own. I grew up wanting independence but didn’t have the confidence to go it on my own.

Throughout my adolescence, during the early to mid-1970s, I continued with my drawing. One day when I was 15 and Mum was cooking bacon and eggs for a Saturday breakfast treat, I told her that I’d like to become an artist. ‘All artists that I know of are long dead,’ she said. ‘What’s the point of that? How on Earth will you ever be able to make a living?’

I said nothing, but her comments made me all the more determined.

Chapter Two

Art School

The sullen-faced careers teacher yawned when I told her I wanted to be an artist. She said I’d be better off becoming a window dresser or interior designer and arranged an interview for me to do a diploma in interior design at Liverpool College.

I was accepted and my dad managed to find a portfolio that had come from a friend of his who had worked at the local Thompson funeral directors. It was originally used as a presentation book to showcase caskets and coffin designs, but had been replaced with photographic catalogues. I carried it proudly to college on the train; it was a symbol of my how important my art and design work was to me, and it made me stand out from the crowd.

After a year there, the art teacher spotted my talent for drawing and persuaded me to do a foundation course at Liverpool School of Art. This was a step up from the local college, as its Edwardian building was situated in the middle of the cultural centre of the city. The audiences for the nearby Everyman Theatre and Philharmonic Hall were enticed into the busy bar-lined streets situated between the two iconic Liverpool cathedrals. I had a fascinating time there, meeting so many artists, musicians, actors and theatrical types.

My drawing skills were developing and even now, looking back, I can see the emergence of a skilled draughtswoman. In those days it wasn’t enough to just be good at drawing and the college encouraged exploration. I learned how to take and develop my own photographs, make silkscreen prints and experiment with sculpture and paint. It was a challenging creative experience. Everyone was busy making things and I was always involved in one project or another. It was as though the students decided what to do and the lecturers just let us get on with it, which was very empowering. At one point, I made a film about the public’s perception of modern art and I encouraged people in the town centre to paint onto a huge canvas. It was great fun. Liverpudlians didn’t hold back and they had a lot to say. The canvas soon became a meaningful mass of marks; a clear response that captured their thoughts. The film was funny and quirky and well-received by my peers and tutors. I was developing the confidence to take a few risks and forging my own path in the art world in which I was becoming immersed.

My friends and I would go to the pub and chat about what we wanted to do with our art. Some wanted to be graphic designers but I wanted to be a fully fledged artist and had grand ideas of selling my work. I’d pass the art shop on Bold Street on my way to college and the inspiring displays in the window would draw me in. I’d look at the postcards and picture books on sale and couldn’t believe that people could make a world of their own out of nothing but their imagination. I wanted to do that too.

As the academic year progressed into the summer, I was selected to apply to do a Fine Art degree at Goldsmiths University in London. It was such a popular course that you could only apply by invitation. My dad took me to London with my canvasses and portfolio of drawings. I remember arriving in the capital and sitting in the back of our Volkswagen caravanette eating jam crackers and listening to Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street on the radio. I looked out onto the busy streets, longing to be among the workers striding around with purpose. Unfortunately, as I arrived at Goldsmiths, the toothache I had tried to ignore on my journey down, started raging and I felt distracted and under par. I didn’t come across well in the interview as I felt intimidated by the all-male panel, and I received a rejection letter a week later. I wasn’t surprised but it left me disheartened as I really wanted to experience life in London.

Fortunately, I was accepted to study at my second choice at Leeds Polytechnic. Mum and Dad were cautiously pleased for me. They never mentioned anything about the horror story emerging in the daily news about a serial killer who was striking in Leeds and surrounding areas. They were most likely trying to protect me from becoming anxious and I was so excited about my future, it didn’t cross my mind to worry. By the autumn of 1978 I was living in a cosy bedsit in the student centre of Headingley in Leeds. I was thrilled to have front door keys to my first home and I started the three-year degree with great expectations. All freshers were given designated studio spaces. We were put in groups, and then into little rooms. We marked our territory by decorating the wall space behind our desks with postcards and artwork. It was new and strange as we all tried to get used to each other and our new surroundings. The first few weeks were filled with something new every day. We found our way round the streets and shops and discovered the coolest places to hang out. For a while, it was like being on holiday.

I didn’t read the local papers that often. As far as I was concerned, all they were used for was to protect the floor from paint. However, it soon became hard to ignore the rows of grainy black and white photographs of young women staring out from the pages. They were closely cropped mugshots, showing their heads in disembodied isolation. Their identities weren’t important, they were just faces linked with dates, times and places, lined up like a collection of cigarette cards. They were grim trophies picturing young women who had laughed and loved and been loved, but collectively as a line of images, they all had the same name – ‘victim of the Yorkshire Ripper’. I couldn’t ignore the fact they’d all been murdered by a killer that the media had nicknamed the Yorkshire Ripper, a modern-day reference to Jack the Ripper, the unidentified killer who prowled the streets of late Victorian London. The Yorkshire Ripper was equally faceless and nameless but he was very much alive and like me, he was based in West Yorkshire.

No one in my circle of friends spoke about the murders – perhaps we didn’t want it to spoil our fun. At first I avoided reading the sordid stories but it soon became impossible. The newspapers referred to these women in a derogatory way, as simply ‘prostitutes’. The reports were more interested in the perpetrator and his mediafriendly moniker that helped sell papers. I wondered what this madman must have felt when he saw the headlines? How he must have gloated at his new-found fame.

The more I read, the more I realised some people were beginning to say that the murdered women got all that they deserved. They even empathised with the reason behind the killings. His actions were seen as one way of cleaning up the streets of the filthy ‘ladies of the night’. People thought that the hours of police time dedicated to hunting the killer could be better spent protecting ‘civilised people’ rather than wasting public money on these prostitutes. The daily onslaught of this horrific reality was often too much to take in. I became immune to it all.

At this point, the killings had been happening for years. The first known murder had taken place in 1975 in Leeds. Three years on and with the police no closer to catching the killer, perceptions of the police were changing. Everyone was beginning to wonder why they couldn’t find this monster.

After a while my friends and I became so used to seeing the headlines that it was no longer shocking. We had reached saturation point and become desensitised; we came to think that the Ripper was just another part of Yorkshire folklore. It all seemed so far removed from our experiences – after all, they were prostitutes and we were art students. If any of my friends said they felt unsafe going out, I was annoyed at their timidity.

Despite this backdrop in late 1970s’ Leeds, for a time I went about my daily business quite happily, as did all of my friends. I moved flats a few times. At one time I had a room in a house just opposite Leeds University’s white clock tower, near to The Corner Book Shop, right in the centre of student life.

I felt safe being in the art studios when I was actually being creative. My world made sense and everything else seemed secondary to that. But after a while I become bored and lost direction with my studies. The loose structure of the weeks didn’t appeal to me. Instead I got caught up in the arty student lifestyle, and went to concerts and Rock against Racism festivals – watching the punk posers was good fun. The nightclubs were cheap to get in or free and there were lots of new bands.

Lots of my friends were in bands or worked in funky secondhand clothes shops. I shared a house with Marc Almond before he, and another student acquaintance, Dave Ball, became famous with their band Soft Cell. We watched them

Reviews for Facing the Yorkshire Ripper

[pivic-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is written in a very brief way, which I enjoyed. Here’s an example of Mo Lea’s style:No one in my circle of friends spoke about the murders – perhaps we didn’t want it to spoil our fun. At first I avoided reading the sordid stories but it soon became impossible. The newspapers referred to these women in a derogatory way, as simply ‘prostitutes’. The reports were more interested in the perpetrator and his media-friendly moniker that helped sell papers. I wondered what this madman must have felt when he saw the headlines? How he must have gloated at his new-found fame.Simple: enough said.I can’t say how much I enjoy books where the author has made their voice available by being succinct.That September, the Ripper murdered Barbara Leach. She wasn’t a prostitute but a ‘respectable’ student, in the third and final year of her degree at Bradford University. I was shocked to read that she was killed by a hammer blow to her head. The Ripper had followed her home after she left the pub alone, after spending the evening with her friends. I wasn’t the only one to be taken aback by the news – the atmosphere in the student-populated areas of Leeds changed overnight in those darkening months of 1979. There was palpable tension in the poorly lit streets. Now it made more sense to have friends come round and stay in rather than go out. No one stayed late in the art school studios. People studied at home and visited each other in town centre cafes during daylight. We would have frothy coffees and flapjacks in the day rather than bus it out to the town centre pubs in the evenings.Lea’s brief stories, paved with short sentences, are sign of a story waiting to be told.Her story of surviving an attack by Peter Sutcliffe, also known as The Yorkshire Ripper, is a tragic tale of how police utterly mismanaged a case where the culprit should and could have been apprehended early on. The English BBC have done a massive job in airing the TV series The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story, which speaks truth of how the investigation was mishandled.On the other hand: Lea’s story of her life.The police played down the attack. They took me to a side room and took a statement from me. I told them I could draw the face of the attacker but they didn’t think that was required. There was certainly no mention of the Yorkshire Ripper and they had discouraged the matron and the nursing staff from talking to the press, who were sniffing around the hospital.At the same time as we were enjoying the fireworks in Birkenhead, far away in Huddersfield another young woman was being attacked. A 16-year-old girl called Theresa Sykes was followed as she walked back home from a grocery shop after buying cigarettes. A man emerged from the shadows wielding a hammer and struck her on the head from behind. She was hit twice and the second blow left a half-moon shaped scar. Thankfully, she survived. The news shook everyone and chilled me to the bone. Now the streets of Yorkshire had become completely deserted.Lea also tells a horrifying story of not being a cis-gendered woman in the twentieth century:One night I booked a table at a local Italian restaurant. For most of the time we were unaware of other customers and on occasion would gently touch each other’s hands across the table. As we chatted away I became aware of the table next to us getting louder. Some women in a hen party had spotted that we were more than just good friends. They began by giving us dirty looks and making sly comments. I folded my arms tightly feeling awkward and embarrassed, but to my surprise Sophy pulled her chair up to their table and asked if they had a problem and if so, could she help. She returned to our table telling me that it was always a good strategy to meet this kind of aggravation calmly and head on. However, as she was talking one of the women threw a cup at us. I ducked and it smashed inches above my head and hot coffee splattered across my chest, burning through my white sweater.I was close to a furious outburst, but Sophy pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at the drips with a comedic flourish. This made me crack up with laughter. One of the women stood up and screeched: ‘Your type makes me wanna puke. You’re sick in the head the pair of you!’ This made us laugh even more. Sophy asked if I would be alright on my own. I reassured her I was OK. I felt I had to learn how to cope if this was what I was due to expect. She went to the front desk to ask if the manager would kindly ask the noisy guests to calm down and she came to the table waving her arms apologising profusely. The waiters fussed around us, bringing us complimentary large brandies and coffee.I learned from Sophy never be bullied into leaving a situation. In her company, I felt strong. We sipped our drinks and let the hostile atmosphere settle, but my anger surfaced and I wanted an apology as my brand-new angora sweater was now ruined, as was our romantic dinner. When we decided to leave, I asked Sophy to collect our coats. I wanted to put into practice what she had shown me. I stood up, leant over their table and boomed loudly: ‘You are all an embarrassment to the human race let alone the women’s movement!’As we left the restaurant, we strolled off arm in arm laughing at the bizarre pantomime. It dawned on me what we were up against. I was surprised that our love for each other posed such a threat, but Sophy made me feel truly empowered.Lea paints a picture of her life: she travels to the USA where she advances as an artist. She continues life, and is reminded of what has once happened since her traumatic ordeal, especially considering how English tabloids work (and don’t work).Sadly, what makes this book work is also its downfall: Lea’s stories of different aspects of her life lack the rhythm of what made the beginning of this book feel exciting. While I appreciate how this book works, there’s not enough passion in the pages for me to keep it going.