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The Arrest, the Failures, and What the Byford Report Exposed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times before a stolen number plate finally ended his killing spree — so why did the system fail so completely? This chapter examines the card index collapse, the victim bias, and the damning Byford Report that changed British policing forever.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A police officer shines a torch into a parked car in Sheffield. It's the second of January, nineteen eighty-one.
Wilma McCann was twenty-eight years old. She was a mother of four, living in Leeds.
Here's the key point about how that investigation worked, or rather, how it didn't. The police operation was one of the largest in British history.
The card index failure was a technical problem. But there was a deeper failure running underneath it, and it was human.
Then came the tape. In nineteen seventy-nine, West Yorkshire Police received a cassette recording.
Which brings us back to Sheffield. January second, nineteen eighty-one.
The Yorkshire Ripper case didn't end with Sutcliffe's conviction. What came next, in terms of how British policing changed, may have mattered just as much.
Two and a half million police hours. Nine interviews with the killer himself.
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