1990, Humble married, after a six-week relationship with a woman. In the early years of the marriage, he was said to be a good step-father for her two children, but he became abusive to his wife and was eventually convicted of common assault, leading to the couple's separation around 1999. Humble returned to the Ford estate to live with his brother in 2002. DNA match leads to arrest A breakthrough came in 2005 after senior officers from West Yorkshire Police’s Homicide and Major Enquiry Team (HMET), headed by Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, decided to review the case. A small piece of the gummed seal from one of the envelopes was located in a forensic laboratory in London, and, following publicity about the cold case review, the original hoax tape was retrieved from a retired scientist who had worked on the original investigation. As a result of this cold case review, DNA from envelopes sent by Humble as part of the hoax were matched in the United Kingdom National DNA Database with samples police had obtained from Humble in an unrelated incident in 2001, when he had been arrested and cautioned for being drunk and disorderly. By this time, Humble had become a chronic alcoholic. The odds of a specific individual matching the DNA sample were one in a billion, very strongly indicating Humble was the culprit. Humble, who was living on the Ford Estate in Sunderland, was arrested on 18 October 2005. Described as an unemployed labourer at the time of his arrest at home, Humble and his brother were so inebriated that the police were required to wait almost a day before he could be interviewed; when he sobered up he needed to be told he was now in police custody. At times during police interviews, Humble appeared ashamed of what he had done, referring to the acts as "evil" and saying he deserved to be imprisoned. Humble admitted responsibility for the letters and the cassette, but denied perverting the course of justice, and his legal team pushed in vain for a lesser charge of wasting police time. He was charged on four counts of perverting the course of justice. Humble was motivated, according to Gregg after Humble's conviction, by a wish for notoriety, a hatred of the police and a fixation with the Jack the Ripper Whitechapel murders in late-19th century London. The contempt for the police