Stephen Griffiths trial: Shadow of the Ripper

This is the land blighted by Peter Sutcliffe, the sadistic serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper whose reign of terror in the late 1970s is seared into the town's consciousness. When sex workers go missing in Bradford, people notice.

So when posters started appearing on lamp-posts in the Yorkshire town in June last year about the disappearance of 43-year-old grandmother, heroin addict and part-time prostitute Susan Rushworth, the bad old memories came flooding back. "We haven't gone out at night since the Yorkshire Ripper," said local woman Barbara Richards. "The Ripper scared me more because we were younger then."

If there was already a palpable sense of unease among the town's women in general and amongst its 20 or so prostitutes in particular, that became undisguised alarm at the end of last month when a second prostitute, 31-year-old Shelley Armitage, vanished. By the time a third of the town's sex workers, 36-year-old Suzanne Blamires, simply disappeared into thin air following a blazing row in the street with an unknown man, the sense of panic in Bradford was reminiscent of the 70s.

But where Sutcliffe's reign of terror lasted for five years and encompassed 13 murders, this time around there was a swift arrest as events unfolded with dizzying speed. Last Monday, the world at large had its first glimpse of Stephen Griffiths, the 40-year-old "loner" taken in for questioning by police after Blamires' disappearance the previous weekend. By the middle of the week, Griffiths had been charged with the murder of the three women who had vanished.

Only on Friday did the full oddity of the case emerge as Griffiths made his first appearances in the dock to answer the charges. In an utterance that will go down in the annals of criminal history, the accused, casting aside the legal protection given to suspects to limit their replies to the bare facts, told an astonished court room that his name was "the crossbow cannibal" – the epithet that had appeared in the previous day's tabloid newspaper headlines. When asked to give his address, he added: "Here, I guess."

The realisation that a serial killer might be on the loose came in almost mundane fashion when the caretaker at a block of nondescript three-storey flats in Thornton Road, a down-at-heel street on the fringe of Bradford's red light district, looked over the weekend's CCTV footage, as he did every Monday. As always, he would put it on fast forward to go through the whole weekend in the space of an hour.

Even allowing for the grainy footage, there was no doubting what he saw on the fuzzy, black-and-white screen. The film taken in the early hours of last Saturday showed a man chasing a terrified woman along a corridor before catching her and administering a savage beating.

With the injured woman lying prone on the ground the man rushes off and reappears moments later carrying a crossbow. From almost point-blank range, he shoots the woman in the head, her lifeless body slumping to the ground before the man pulls it out of view. Over the next few minutes, the camera captures images of the same man making several trips away from the area carrying bin bags.

By mid afternoon that day, the police had sealed off the surrounding roads and taken Stephen Griffiths – a 40-year-old studying for a doctorate in criminology who has lived on the third floor of the flats for the past 15 years – into custody. Armed police officers hauled the University of Bradford postgraduate student out of his flat and, according to witness accounts, made him kneel in the road before handcuffing him. "As he was taken away the only thing he was bothered about was the police locking his door properly," said one neighbour.

The next day, body parts were discovered in a river at Shipley, three miles away. Later, a police spokesman said that an examination of human remains recovered from the River Aire had confirmed a positive match to Suzanne Blamires, as forensic teams scoured the area around the flats where they believe she had been dismembered. Within hours, Griffiths had been charged with the murder of Blamires, Shelley Armitage and Susan Rushworth, with police also looking at his possible involvement in two unsolved murders of young sex workers going back almost 20 years.

Because of the Ripper link, the town of Bradford has once again been collectively traumatised by the grisly discoveries, although, given the news that the police are investigating whether the killer ate part of Blamires, the events of the past week would be harrowing even without the historical precedent. There may be important differences between the events of the past week and the way in which the Ripper went about his business more than 30 years ago, but the similarities are striking.

While the prostitute-hating Sutcliffe murdered 13 women, only three of them – Patricia Atkinson, Yvonne Pearson, and Barbara Leach – were from his home town of Bradford. If, as the police allege, Griffiths is the murderer, is it really just coincidence that his almost crazy levels of recklessness meant that he was caught after three murders, mirroring the feats of Sutcliffe? Possibly not, and Griffiths' decision to employ Lumb & MacGill, the firm of lawyers who defended Sutcliffe back in 1981, will do little to dampen the perception of him as a man obsessed with the Ripper.

Griffiths certainly had a keen academic and personal interest in the whole area: he was studying the 19th-century murderer Jack The Ripper for his doctoral thesis while, as a criminologist with an apparently insatiable thirst for reading about serial killers in his spare time, it's probably safe to assume that there isn't much he doesn't know about Bradford's most infamous citizen.

The criminology student would certainly be aware of the psychological profile of Sutcliffe. Serial killers are generally reckoned by psychologists to fall into two general groups, with those who target prostitutes usually categorised as "organised non-social offenders". These are, surprisingly enough, not social inadequates but men with an above-average intelligence who will kill a woman in one place before disposing of her body in another.

There is rage, but it's secondary to chillingly methodical planning. US serial killer Ted Bundy, for instance, would have his arm in a plaster cast so he could get women to help carry his shopping to the car where he stored the crowbar with which he would batter them into unconsciousness.

Often, this category of sociopath actually comes across as well-adjusted; many even have wives or families. Sutcliffe did, yet there are also important differences between the Yorkshire Ripper and Griffiths.

If Sutcliffe was sufficiently well-adjusted to attract little or no attention during the Ripper years, then Griffiths' neighbours spoke of the 40-year-old former public schoolboy as an entirely different character, as an oddball and "a bit of a loner" who was nicknamed "the weirdo" by local children. Since his arrest on Monday, a picture of a profoundly troubled and introverted misfit has quickly emerged.

And that was before his bizarre antics at Bradford Magistrates' Court on Friday, just feet away from the attending friends and family of his alleged victims.

In hindsight, the behaviour of the former public schoolboy – he attended the private Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield in his teens – was as strange as his usual Goth-inspired garb, which would see him wandering around in a full-length black leather coat. "He suffered from depression," said a neighbour, "and he said he was doing a PhD in murder and Jack the Ripper. He also said he had a girlfriend in Shipley."

Other neighbours, such as Billy Parkin and Rachel Farrington-Naylor, have already spoken about his enthusiasm for two huge monitor lizards, which he kept at his flat. Parkin, an old friend, took a step backwards from their relationship when Griffiths swallowed a baby rat whole to amuse him, while Farrington-Naylor spoke of the fact that he kept 100 captive rats in a box under his bed to feed his lizards.

However, rather than anecdotal evidence from neighbours, it is likely to be through the internet that police manage to build up a fuller picture of the man who will be back in the dock tomorrow. Griffiths lived much of his life in cyberspace, and police already know that he signed up to The Guardian's dating website, Soulmates, in 2008, describing himself as "serious and disciplined" and looking for a woman who was "not afraid to let her hair down".

Griffiths was also a regular contributor to chatrooms under the name "Ven Pariah", on one occasion describing himself as "the misanthrope who brought hate into Heaven". In another posting, he said that "humanity is not merely a biological condition. It is also a state of mind. On that basis I am pseudo-human at best".

His MySpace pages have now been closed, but not before it had revealed his state of mind, which he described as "evil", before listing his interests as reading about "multiple homicide, capital punishment, and targeted political homicide". He also quoted a passage from the Book of Ezekiel which says "the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides", a line used by the killer played by Samuel L Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction.

As well as advocating independence for Yorkshire, Griffiths gave some insight into the degree to which his fascination with serial killers had taken over his life. His book reviews include Women and the Noose: A History of Female Criminals and Their Execution, while his wishlist includes 25 books and DVDs, including box sets entitled Notorious Killer, Serial Killers, Mass Murderers, Britain's Bloodiest Serial Killers and The International Murderers' Who's Who.

His favourite films include the vampire cannibals masterpiece Ravenous, the cult Burt Reynolds vehicle Deliverance, schlock horror Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, Reservoir Dogs, Scarface, The Blair Witch Project and David Lynch's Eraserhead. Of the 160 photos displayed on his site, only two are of him: the rest are of terrorists, sex killers and Nazis such as Reinhard Heydrich, "the butcher of Prague".

It is a collection of ephemeral thoughts which would be fine on a teenage blog, but coming from a murder suspect in the context of a major trial, smacks of an almost indecent and deeply suspect immaturity.

Yesterday, as detectives continued their search for the bodies of Armitage and Rushworth, Griffiths' father, also called Stephen, said his son had left home more than 20 years ago and he hadn't seen or spoken to him for a decade. "All our sympathies are with the victims and their families," said Griffiths sr, who lives in Batley. "That's all I want to say."

The chain of events that has traumatised Bradford in the past week are clear. But, this weekend, why they happened is, as yet, far from clear.

SHELLEY ARMITAGE

Disappeared on 26 April, and was last seen on CCTV in Rebecca Street. The 31-year-old lived in Allerton and was described as "a good egg" and "a genuinely pleasant person", although she was also waiting to be sentenced for assaulting a police officer while drunk. Armitage, whose disappearance was seen as odd because it meant that she would be parted from a recently purchased and much-loved puppy, had problems with alcohol and drugs. She was reported missing by her boyfriend on 28 April.

SUZANNE BLAMIRES

Described by her family as a "feisty, spirited and lovely" woman, she disappeared on Friday, 21 May after an argument with a man near her home in Allerton, Bradford. Known on the streets as Amber, the 36-year-old had worked as a prostitute for ten years and lived in a flat in Barkston Walk, just three streets from her friend Shelley Armitage. Bradford-born and bred, she had a happy childhood, but heroin and crack cocaine use saw her disowned by her mother. Blamires was reported missing eight days ago by her live-in boyfriend.

SUSAN RUSHWORTH

The 43-year-old grandmother, an epileptic, disappeared on 21 June last year in Manningham. Rushworth worked part-time as a prostitute after her marriage collapsed amid allegations of domestic violence and a new boyfriend introduced her to heroin. She had been drug-free for five weeks, but she did try to contact her dealer on the day she disappeared. Last Christmas, her children James, 24, and Kirsty, 21, made a newspaper appeal, saying: "Somebody knows what has happened to our Mum. We miss her so much."