A MAN arrested after a 27-year police probe has admitted being the notorious hoaxer known as ''Wearside Jack''.

John Humble has confessed to writing the letters and making the tape which were sent to detectives hunting the Yorkshire Ripper.

Humble's barrister David Taylor told a court yesterday that while he admits being the hoaxer he denies intending to pervert the course of justice.

The 50-year-old former labourer and window cleaner will face a trial on four charges of perverting the course of justice at Leeds Crown Court next month.

The charges relate to each of the three letters and the infamous audio tape which taunted detectives involved in the Ripper inquiry in West Yorkshire the late 1970s.

Humble was not in court for yesterday's short hearing, during which Judge James Stewart, QC, lifted reporting restrictions on the case.

At a hearing in December, the case was described by prosecutor Richard Hebbett as "one of the great unsolved mysteries of British criminal history".

Defence counsel Mr Taylor told the first hearing that Humble had made confessions when he was interviewed at Wakefield Police station following his arrest in October.

Yesterday, Mr Taylor said: ''A defence statement has now been drafted whereby the defence concedes that he wrote the letters and in fact made the tape.

''The issue now is not one of whether it actually was him, it's solely the question of intent.''

Mr Taylor stressed that Humble's not guilty pleas still stood.

Two of the letters were sent directly to Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who led the investigation.

A third letter was sent to a national newspaper office in Manchester.

The audio tape, which purported to be from the murderer and taunted the police for not catching him, was played to a spellbound public by detectives in June 1979.

Following the receipt of the letters and the tape, a huge police effort was concentrated on the Sunderland area after senior officers decided the Wearside voice on the tape was the murderer.

But the letters and tape were exposed as a hoax when Peter Sutcliffe was arrested in 1981 and confessed to being the Ripper.

Sutcliffe, now 59, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, was jailed for life later that year for the murder of 13 women and is currently being held at Broadmoor Special Hospital.

A subsequent appeal was denied, and the serial killer has been told he will never be released and will die a prisoner.

Judge Stewart, QC, adjourned Humble's case until March 20 when he is due to go on trial.

Humble was arrested at his home in Flodden Road, Sunderland, on October 18 following a cold-case review of the hoax investigation.

The breakthrough in the case came when detectives matched DNA samples from the envelopes in which the letters were sent to a man in Sunderland who had been arrested for drink-driving.

Humble's neighbours were stunned to learn that the man who had been living alongside them on the city's Ford estate could have been Wearside Jack.

The police swoop on the council semi Humble shared with his brother marked the beginning of the end of a mystery which has spanned four decades.