London - The Yorkshire Ripper’s second victim has died at the age of 82.
Olive Smelt was attacked by Peter Sutcliffe at the start of his six-year reign of terror in August 1975.
Smelt, then 46, was struck twice on the head with a hammer and slashed with a pickaxe near her home in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
On Sunday night her daughter, Julie Lowry, said: “She never got over that night. She did well to survive and had to learn to accept what happened mentally. But physically her mobility was never the same.
“She has been through hell and suffered in silence. She never complained. May she rest in peace.”
Smelt, who also leaves another daughter, Linda, and son Stephen, died from pneumonia in Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. She was the second of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims. He attacked his first only a month earlier.
Between 1975 and 1981, Sutcliffe murdered 13 women and attacked seven others.
Smelt had been dropped off by a friend after an evening out when she was attacked on August 15.
Sutcliffe approached her and said: “Weather’s letting us down, isn’t it?”
Smelt replied: “Yes”. She later said she was struck by his thick, black hair and Yorkshire accent.
“He wasn’t frightening so I wasn’t anxious,” she recalled. “The next thing I knew I was waking up with my head in bandages in Leeds Infirmary’s intensive care unit.
“He later admitted he would have killed me but a passing car’s headlights disturbed him.
“The infirmary more or less told my husband, Harry, they didn’t expect me to live. My skull was like a crushed coconut shell.”
Crucially, police refused to believe Smelt when she told them her attacker had a Yorkshire accent.
“It was two years before the police told me I had been a victim of the Yorkshire Ripper,” she added. “If they had taken me seriously, I believe he could have been caught earlier.”
Sutcliffe, 64, will never be freed after losing an appeal against his whole life sentence in January.
Dubbed the Ripper because of the way he mutilated the bodies of his female victims using a hammer, a sharpened screwdriver and a knife, Sutcliffe has been held at Broadmoor top-security psychiatric hospital since 1984.
At his Old Bailey trial in 1981, he claimed God’s voice had told him to murder his victims. - Daily Mail