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The Ledger, the Tape, and the Fifteen Missed Chances
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Yorkshire Ripper investigation had Peter Sutcliffe's name in its files nine times — and a hoax cassette tape that sent detectives chasing the wrong man for years. This episode reconstructs the systemic failures that let Sutcliffe keep killing.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Nine times. Police sat across from Peter Sutcliffe nine separate times.
The case starts on the thirtieth of October, nineteen seventy-five. A woman named Wilma McCann was found on a playing field in Leeds.
Senior officers made a decision, early and explicitly, that shaped almost everything that followed. Because many of the victims were sex workers, they were treated as a distinct category.
West Yorkshire Police were handling a volume of information that was genuinely staggering. Witness statements, vehicle sightings, payroll records, interview logs.
In nineteen seventy-nine, the investigation received a cassette tape. A voice on the tape claimed to be the Yorkshire Ripper.
One detail from Sutcliffe's interviews stays particularly stark. During one of those nine encounters with police, officers showed Sutcliffe a photograph of a boot print found near a crime scene.
The arrest, when it finally came, had nothing to do with the investigation. On the second of January, nineteen eighty-one, a police officer in Sheffield stopped a car in a residential area.
In May nineteen eighty-one, Sutcliffe stood trial at the Old Bailey. He didn't maintain his confession in court.
The investigation was formally reviewed in what became known as the Byford Report, completed in nineteen eighty-one but kept classified for decades. When it was finally released, it confirmed what had long been suspected.
What happened between October nineteen seventy-five and January nineteen eighty-one was not a mystery in the conventional sense. Sutcliffe wasn't difficult to find because he was careful or brilliant.
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