The Ripper
BOXSET
Over the years there have been numerous documentaries about the brutal killings committed by Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper.
Sutcliffe, who died last November, murdered 13 women in Yorkshire between 1975 and 1980, going undetected for longer than he should have due to well-documented failings in the West
Yorkshire Police’s approach. Hot on the heels of filmmaker Liza Williams’s excellent 2019 BBC4 documentary The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story which viewed the case from a feminist perspective, putting the misogynist attitudes of the time under the microscope, comes this exhaustive four-part series from Netflix.
Featuring people who were involved in investigating or reporting on the murders at the time, as well as to relatives of some of the victims, it builds up a picture of the scale of the police investigation and the atmosphere of fear that the people of Yorkshire, women in particular, were living under. Among those offering their recollections of that dark period are journalists working for the local and national press, the forensic pathologist who examined the bodies of the victims, a retired police officer, a young constable at the time, who says he is still haunted by the killings and asks himself “could I have done more?” and Richard McCann the son of Wilma McCann, Sutcliffe’s first victim, who was just five years old at the time of his mother’s death.