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Thirteen Murders and the System That Looked Away
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Between 1975 and 1980, Peter Sutcliffe murdered thirteen women across Northern England — and West Yorkshire Police had every chance to stop him. This is the story of how a failing card index, a hoax tape, and a hierarchy of victims let a killer walk free nine times.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Nine times. Police sat across a table from Peter Sutcliffe.
Start at the beginning. The thirtieth of October, nineteen seventy-five.
Here's where the investigation went wrong in a way that wasn't technical. It was moral.
By the late nineteen seventies, West Yorkshire Police were running one of the largest manhunts in British history. They'd generated more witness statements, more tip-offs, more evidence logs than almost any previous investigation.
In nineteen seventy-seven and into seventy-eight, West Yorkshire Police received letters claiming to be from the Yorkshire Ripper. Then, in June nineteen seventy-nine, they received a cassette tape.
Now the nine interviews. This is the thread the episode title pulls on.
The arrest, when it finally came, had nothing to do with the investigation. The second of January, nineteen eighty-one.
The trial at the Old Bailey in May nineteen eighty-one was contested. Sutcliffe had confessed to the killings, but his defence argued he was acting under divine instruction, a voice from God commanding him to kill.
The investigation's failures didn't go unexamined. The Home Office commissioned an independent review shortly after Sutcliffe's conviction.
The Yorkshire Ripper case is sometimes described as a failure of intelligence. The information existed to catch Sutcliffe earlier.
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