Yorkshire Ripper victim Tracy Browne will tonight reveal on TV how she survived a hammer attack at his hands.
Tracy was a 14-year-old schoolgirl when she was attacked by Bradford lorry driver Peter Sutcliffe as she walked home on a lonely farm road at Silsden in August 1975.
On a Channel Five documentary screened tonight, Tracy tells how Sutcliffe struck up a conversation with her before hitting her five times in the head with a hammer.
She survived because the Ripper was disturbed by an approaching car. He dumped her over a fence and ran away, leaving her bleeding and barely conscious.
Sutcliffe, who was convicted of murdering 13 women and trying to kill seven more in a five-year reign of terror across the North in the 1970s and 1980s, did not confess to the attack on Tracy until 1992 when he spoke to former West Yorkshire Chief Constable Keith Hellawell.
She describes her ordeal in ‘Left For Dead By The Yorkshire Ripper,’ a new documentary on Sutcliffe told through the experience of his victims who got away.
Also featured in the programme is Marylyn Moore, who was attacked in Leeds and has never told her story before on television.
A spokesman for Channel Five said those who Sutcliffe attacked, but who lived to tell the tale, bravely recounted what happened to them in “heart-stopping, intimate first-person interviews.”
The programme also charts the story of Sutcliffe’s murderous rise and fall, and claims that the failure of detectives to listen to the survivors contributed towards their botched investigation.
A spokesman for the documentary said: “All the survivors have had to live with the emotional and physical scars left by Sutcliffe.
For the first time, they meet to share their stories and attempt to lay their demons to rest.”
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