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Thirteen Deaths, Nine Chances: The Investigation That Should Have Stopped Sutcliffe
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
West Yorkshire Police interviewed Peter Sutcliffe nine times before his arrest — and still missed him. This chapter examines the card index failures, the Wearside Jack hoax, and the institutional bias that let a killer operate for five years.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people remember the conviction. May nineteen eighty-one, the Old Bailey, twenty concurrent life sentences.
The murders started in Leeds in October nineteen seventy-five. Wilma McCann was twenty-eight years old, a mother of four.
The key point here is this. Police did not fail to encounter Sutcliffe.
Part of that inability had a structural explanation. The investigation generated an enormous volume of information.
In nineteen seventy-nine, the investigation took a turn that cost more lives. Someone sent cassette tapes and letters to the senior investigating officer.
There's another failure running alongside all of this, and it's the one that's hardest to detach from the systemic ones. The way senior officers talked about the victims shaped how the investigation actually functioned.
On January second, nineteen eighty-one, a routine patrol in Sheffield stopped a car for displaying stolen number plates. The driver was Peter Sutcliffe.
In nineteen eighty-four, Sutcliffe was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and transferred from prison to Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital. He remained there until twenty sixteen, when a medical assessment concluded he was stable enough to return to an ordinary prison.
That's where the Byford Report comes in. Commissioned by the Home Office and completed in nineteen eighty-one, the report was written by Lawrence Byford, Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary.
The conviction of Peter Sutcliffe answered a specific legal question. It confirmed what he had done and imposed a sentence.
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