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Mike Hill looks at the role Morecambe played in the Yorkshire Ripper’s life and a warped obsession with the seaside town.

During the height of the Industrial Revolution the city’s textile workers would head en masse to the resort during the wakes week shutdown.

Specially chartered trains would transport tens of thousands of mill hands across the Lancashire-Yorkshire border for their traditional annual getaway.

The bonds were such that Morecambe is still affectionately known as Bradford-upon-Sea long after the demise of the old mills which placed the northern town at the heart of the global wool trade.

When Morecambe's Whitehall Cinema on the West End Promenade closed its doors in 1955 it became a waxworks - J Tussaud and G Nicholson Ltd.

Peter Sutcliffe’s family were typical of the Bradford families who looked forward to their fortnight of sun, sea and sand in Lancashire.

His grandfather Arthur was a regular visitor to Morecambe with a penchant for the resort’s ballrooms.

He kept a caravan across the bay at New Barns Farm, in Arnside, where he would entertain illicit affairs throughout his life.

Yorkshire Ripper’s ashes were scattered at beauty spot near Morecambe in ‘secret...

Library file pic of the Rover car in which the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was caught in. Ross Parry Syndication SWNS

He passed his love for the Lancashire coastline on to his son John who would take his own children on regular trips to the coast.

When John retired he moved to Arnside where he lived out his final years.

Sutcliffe’s sister Anne and grandmother Renee would also uproot from Bradford to settle in Morecambe.

With family in town the killer – a long distance lorry driver – would turn off the M6 at Lancaster a couple of times a month during the 1970s to call by.

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 women and attacked seven others between 1975 and 1980 across West Yorkshire, plus two in Greater Manchester. He was caught by chance while sitting in his car with a prostitute and potential victim in Sheffield in January 1981, and made a full confession to each attack to the police, even though they had only arrested him for having false number plates. At his trial later in 1981 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter but was convicted of 13 murders and was jailed for life. He was initially held in a mainstream prison before being transferred to Broadmoor Hospital. It was frequently reported in the media that he was among the prisoners to have been issued with a whole life tariff, but he was not on a list of 35 such prisoners which was published in December 2006. A whole life tariff was imposed by High Court on 16 July 2010. SWNS.COM

But in his acclaimed book Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son author Gordon Burn revealed it was rare that Sutcliffe would not add another, more sinister, stop off to these family visits to the resort.

During the 1950s the former Whitehall Theatre at the western end of the promenade had been transformed into a waxworks exhibition in the style of the famous Tussauds attraction in Blackpool.

The serial killer returned to the attraction time and again where he would linger in the Museum of Anatomy with its grotesque displays of dismembered torsos and diseased body parts.

In the Chamber of Horrors he would pore over the exhibits recreating the macabre worlds of Dr Crippen, Ruth Ellis, Reginald Christie and Jack the Ripper.

Burn recalls one visit with another brother, Mick, during which they made the journey from Bradford to Morecambe at full pelt completing the drive in little over an hour.

It was just days after the Yorkshire Ripper had savagely attacked a doctor with a hammer and loop of rope in Headingley, mercifully she survived the vicious onslaught.

Thirteen other women would not be so fortunate.

Burns writes: “Once through the turnstiles, Peter only gave a cursory glance to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath in the downstairs gallery before ushering Mick with some urgency to towards ‘the Macabre torso room’.

“There, as his brother pored over the ancient exhibits with a more than usually ‘salacious’ grin on his face, it occurred to Mick for the first time that the purpose of these visits might be to show him the error of his ways.

“‘He seemed to me to be enjoying what he was trying to show me. He gave me the shivers. I’ve never seen a grin like it, pointing out each detail of what happens to a man when it’s too late to control himself’.”

Yorkshire Ripper’s ‘warped obsession’ with seaside town of Morecambe