Yorkshire Ripper. The long shadow

Boinger said:
I thought it was Margurite Walls she replaced, but I'm probably wrong.

It must be because the families refused permission.
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It wasn’t Marguerite Walls as she was never believed to be a ripper victim until he admitted it after he was caught. He changed his MO and strangled her to try to avoid it being linked
 


Locke's SAFC said:
For most of the period of the murder series the opposite was true. It was the reason why they didn't connect the dots with Sutcliffe: they were overwhelmed with information they'd taken to the point the floorboards were literally creaking where they stored this information.

Where they did make a huge mistake that was very poor police work, was when they laid their eggs in the Wearside basket. There was absolutely nothing in those letters that should have led them to believe he was the murderer. The bits of details that Humble mentioned were all in the press. That said, they were desperate and grabbed at an opportunity. So, when a police officer went 'round to interview Sutcliffe, and Sutcliffe looked like the photo-fit, and Sutcliffe looked like he had the right sized feet, and Sutcliffe had a gap in his teeth; that was reported back and it was ignored due to the Wearside thing. 'Very poor policework but on the other hand they were working ridiculous hours and didn't know which way to turn.

The way information is stored these days, Sutcliffe's record prior to the murders, the number of times his car was spotted in red light districts, the number of times he was interviewed; would have all been in one place readily accessible for everyone to see. In those days, information was all over the show and it was lost among the hundreds of thousands of statements and sightings they had stored. It's very easy to pour over what we know now and think it is obvious and why didn't they see it, but, as I say, the method of storing information simply wasn't fit for purpose and certainly wasn't fit for a case of that magnitude.

The Wearside thing was incompetent, but apart from that I don't think a police force of a similar standing in another county would have done better, for the reasons stated.

They did actually bring in more senior and experienced police figures, forensic experts and profilers. The profiler got it absolutely right in terms of the area where he thought Sutcliffe lived. In hindsight, these people should have been brought in earlier in the case.

I wouldn't forget that the police weren't the murderer and they worked long and hard in an attempt to solve it, some damaging their own health. As I say, they got the Wearside thing wrong and they shouldn't have done, but apart from that it really wasn't easy to catch a murderer with no connection to his victims in those days.
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They failed to narrow down the search due to poor policing. The ignored the evidence of victims. Accent, photo fits, height etc. He was a B secreter, 1 in 20 people.

The fiver was eventually narrowed down to the wage packets of 300 people. Some of these would have been women, say around half, you're down to 150. No gaps in teeth, lose another 75, etc. etc. Check them for B secreter you more or less have about 4 people!
 
The other day I came across a bit of TV news footage of the initial examination by detectives of the body of one of the victims in the place it was found. Naturally it didn't show anything of the victim but just detectives crossing the police line on what looked like some waste ground.

They were clearly entering the crime scene but shockingly by todays standard they were all in their day to day clothes. There was about half a dozen of what must have been senior detectives in their suits & trench coats with big boots & no hats or hair covering.

It underlined the very basic way in which murder enquiries were conducted 35 years ago. The appearance of the detectives & the way they were
tramping over an area that I guess was just feet away from where the murder had been committed & the victim was still lying seemed to be almost laughable. Of course there was no question of collecting DNA samples or microscopic pieces of forensic evidence in the 1980's as none of that was available to the police.

The coppers did make mistakes but it was a massive enquiry and everything had to be done the hard way & in long hand. It involved thousands of police all over the country especially after the hoax calls. (Traced because I was a Sunderland man even I was interviewed for the purpose of elimination and I had been living in London for 6 years). The investigation looks bad now but it really wasn't surprising that without computers the cross referencing of evidence was poor and bits of paper got lost. At the time I was never under any other impression than the police understood how important it was to catch the bugger and to do so quickly .
 
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I wasn't born but ive seen enough Ripper documentaries over the years. This one was brilliant and for once focused on the victims and their families as apposed to Sutcliffe.

I have also read this entire thread and agree with the majority that it was poorly led Police investigation. Some of what was missed is simply unbelievable.

I could be completely wrong here, but I am sure there was an emalgamation between some of the Yorshire forces in the early 70s. Between the Officers, there would have been alot of local knowledge lost and wouldn't have helped any.
 
Is that the way they actually caught him then with going back and finding the hammer?I thought they managed to trace back a £5 note to where he worked or something like that.
 
Onto episode six and what comes across strongly in every single episode is how terrible the police or the time were. Sexist, misogynist dinosaurs even for that time.

As for getting thrown off the scent by Humble, obviously it’s ultimately he who was responsible but they just fell for it when closer examination would’ve shown them it wasn’t him.
 
Jgrainger said:
Is that the way they actually caught him then with going back and finding the hammer?I thought they managed to trace back a £5 note to where he worked or something like that.
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Good coppering in Sheffield. Even then, the Leeds detective wanted to release him because he didn’t have a “geordie” accent.
 
Houghtoner said:
Onto episode six and what comes across strongly in every single episode is how terrible the police or the time were. Sexist, misogynist dinosaurs even for that time.

As for getting thrown off the scent by Humble, obviously it’s ultimately he who was responsible but they just fell for it when closer examination would’ve shown them it wasn’t him.
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The letters were examined at the time and it was shown that they incorrectly recorded the number of victims at the time they were written. One body hadn't been found and hence wasn't known about and that everything in the letters was already in the public domain. The police ignored the analysis showing this. It was also shown that the letters used many phrases from the original ripper letters from the Victorian case, some of the language used wasn't still commonly used at the time of the Yorkshire ripper. There's a Netflix documentary that details all of this.
 
Quench said:
The letters were examined at the time and it was shown that they incorrectly recorded the number of victims at the time they were written. One body hadn't been found and hence wasn't known about and that everything in the letters was already in the public domain. The police ignored the analysis showing this. It was also shown that the letters used many phrases from the original ripper letters from the Victorian case, some of the language used wasn't still commonly used at the time of the Yorkshire ripper. There's a Netflix documentary that details all of this.
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Seen that one mate and the BBC one, female journalist forgotten her name. Both very good.
 
Just finished the drama having watched the documentary about a year again and now re-watching it.

You need to watch them both to fill in some blanks. It annoys me that they totally excluded the £5 note element from the drama. That was one of the biggest fuck ups of the whole police investigation. They were constantly trying to find something to narrow the search down and had the opportunity to limit it to about 3000 people and didn’t take it.

Instead they focussed on the wearside jack tapes & letters.

They undoubtedly had a really difficult job, but it was a perfect storm of lack of evidence, some of the most incompetent police officers in the country in charge, completely insufficient systems & some glaringly obvious errors.
 
DonaldDownTheWing said:
Just finished the drama having watched the documentary about a year again and now re-watching it.

You need to watch them both to fill in some blanks. It annoys me that they totally excluded the £5 note element from the drama. That was one of the biggest fuck ups of the whole police investigation. They were constantly trying to find something to narrow the search down and had the opportunity to limit it to about 3000 people and didn’t take it.

Instead they focussed on the wearside jack tapes & letters.

They undoubtedly had a really difficult job, but it was a perfect storm of lack of evidence, some of the most incompetent police officers in the country in charge, completely insufficient systems & some glaringly obvious errors.
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What comes across is the sexism, misogyny and ignorance of those officers. It’s disgusting to be honest. They didn’t really care about many of those women cos they were sex workers.

The scene once Sutcliffe was caught of them all sat laughing makes me angry so can’t imagine what the families of victims and the victims who lived felt.
 
Houghtoner said:
What comes across is the sexism, misogyny and ignorance of those officers. It’s disgusting to be honest. They didn’t really care about many of those women cos they were sex workers.

The scene once Sutcliffe was caught of them all sat laughing makes me angry so can’t imagine what the families of victims and the victims who lived felt.
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Something that some forces still have a massive problem with now.
 
Jgrainger said:
Is that the way they actually caught him then with going back and finding the hammer?I thought they managed to trace back a £5 note to where he worked or something like that.
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I haven't saw this documentary but read details about his arrest a while back and yes after his car was found to have a false plate and he had a prostitute with him he was taken in. I think some of his answers sounded fishy and one of the coppers remembered after they picked him up he asked if he could go around the corner of a building for a slash so they went back and searched that area and found his hammer. I think he basically confessed after they told him they had found the hammer.
 

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