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The Tape, the Bias, and Nine Chances to Stop a Killer
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
West Yorkshire Police interviewed Peter Sutcliffe nine times and still let him walk free — here's how institutional bias and a hoax tape derailed the biggest manhunt in British history. This chapter examines the catastrophic failures hidden inside two and a half million hours of investigative work.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A cassette tape arrives at a police station. The voice on it is calm, taunting, northern.
In the previous episode, we established the broad outline of this case. Sutcliffe, born in nineteen forty-six in Bingley, West Yorkshire.
By nineteen seventy-seven, the killings had continued. More women dead across Leeds and Bradford.
In nineteen seventy-eight and nineteen seventy-nine, West Yorkshire Police received a series of letters and then, most significantly, a cassette tape. The sender claimed to be the Ripper.
Between the start of the murders and his eventual arrest, Sutcliffe was interviewed by police nine times. Nine separate occasions when officers sat across from the man responsible for those deaths and let him walk away.
That failure of connection leads directly to one of the most significant structural problems in this investigation. West Yorkshire Police were processing an enormous volume of information.
On the second of January, nineteen eighty-one, a Sheffield police officer stopped a car in the Broomhill area of the city. The driver had stolen number plates.
In May nineteen eighty-one, Peter Sutcliffe was convicted at the Old Bailey of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent life terms.
The Byford Report didn't just catalogue what went wrong. It produced a framework for change.
Thirteen confirmed murders. Seven surviving victims of attempted murder.
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