Prevailing attitudes
Liza Williams tells us about her series exploring why it took so long to catch Peter Sutcliffe
The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story TV BBC Four Scheduled for March In May 1981, lorry driver Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven others. But how did a man questioned nine times during the investigation into his crimes evade capture for six years?
A new series by filmmaker Liza Williams approaches Sutcliffe’s crimes from a new perspective. “The series is about how entrenched attitudes towards women, and those who were involved in prostitution in particular, influenced the investigation, and society’s reaction to the crimes,” says Williams.
“We’ve combed through various reports and documents that catalogue how the investigation unfolded. It’s interesting looking at this with modern eyes, because you see things that contemporaries might not have picked up on, regarding attitudes to women.”
As well as archive footage, the series also features new interviews with police officers, victims and their families, and journalists. In the case of reporters, says Williams, “female journalists often saw the crimes very differently”. She adds: “It was really enlightening to hear how the media’s attitude to the police investigation changed. At the beginning there was very little criticism of the police, but by late 1980 it was a very different story.”
One of the problems with the cases was the sheer amount of information that was gathered, yet this doesn’t exonerate the police from criticism. As the government-commissioned Byford Report (1982, made public in 2006) made clear, organisational failings undermined the investigation by the West Yorkshire Police. “A huge amount of paperwork had amassed over the five-year investigation period, and the system of cross-referencing this information became completely ineffectual,” notes Williams.
The filmmaker says she is immensely grateful to those who gave interviews, some of whom are speaking for the first time. “The case has cast a shadow over everyone involved, and the trauma for loved ones never goes away,” she says. “It was a privilege to speak to relatives who felt able to open up about what happened. But for many it is still too difficult to talk about.”
“The Ripper case cast a long shadow. The trauma for loved ones never goes away”