BLUNDERS THAT FUELLED THE BLOODSHED
How police incompetence and misfortune helped him keep on killing for 5 YEARS
The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper changed the face of British policing. The investigation was so horrifically botched, and the methods of the leading officers so outdated, that following Sutcliffe’s trial the Tory government began a sweeping modernisation programme.
New Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had become so disgusted by West Yorkshire Police’s failure to catch the most notorious killer since the Moors Murderers that she decided to take personal charge.
According to her biographer, hugo Young, she was only dissuaded from doing so by home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, who warned her reputation could be ruined if she became directly involved in an inquiry that had become a national scandal.
Instead, Mr Whitelaw sent Lawrence Byford, an Inspector of her Majesty’s Constabulary, to find out what had gone wrong. Byford, later knighted for his efforts, identified a catalogue of tragic blunders which had allowed Sutcliffe’s murderous regime to continue for five years when he could have been apprehended very quickly.
When he was finally brought to justice (by luck rather than great detective work) Byford produced a 159-page critique of the investigation. It was so devastating that the Government decided it would demoralise the service and humiliate the Ripper Squad’s chiefs if it was published in full. Instead, a watered- down summary was placed in the house of Commons library.
The man who bore the brunt of the criticism was the county’s CID chief, Assistant Chief Constable George oldfield. his puffy, haunted face during desperate televised appeals for information had come to symbolise the force’s ineptitude.
humiliatingly relieved from his post in the final months of the manhunt, he was portrayed in the report as an uninspiring old-school copper who, despite enormous dedication, was unfit to lead the biggest investigation in British criminal history.
oldfield, who had declared it his personal crusade to catch the Ripper and had worked so ferociously towards that end that he suffered a heart attack, was a broken man. he quickly retired, and in 1983, two years after Sutcliffe’s trial, he died aged just 61. Yet his was not the only career to be ruined.
Soon after the case was concluded almost every senior officer in the Ripper Squad quietly quit the force. So too did West Yorkshire’s discredited Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, who caused further outrage by selling his inside story for £40,000.
As the investigative author Michael Bilton remarked in Wicked Beyond Belief, his searing analysis of the bungled Ripper inquiry, ‘carelessness piled upon misfortune piled upon incompetence’, with the tragic consequence that many women unnecessarily lost their lives.
These are just some of the f atal errors that allowed Sutcliffe to carry on killing . . .
FIEND WHO HID IN PLAIN SIGHT
PeRhAPS because he was so vain, or simply reckless, Sutcliffe never attempted to change his appearance to throw police off the trail during his six-year campaign.
When he was arrested he still had his drooping moustache, pointed beard and longish frizzy hair. he still wore loud shirts and stackheeled boots to boost his 5ft 8in frame. he also had an unusually high-pitched voice with a thick Bradford accent.
Many of these characteristics were recalled by the women who survived his attacks. Three of his targets managed to escape him in the summer of 1975, shortly before he murdered his first victim, Scots-born Wilma McCann.
The Byford report listed 13 more survivors whose cases police failed to link with the Ripper. This was because, though all were struck on the head from behind, the modus operandi differed slightly, or their wounds were made by a different sort of hammer than the type Sutcliffe habitually used.
Astonishingly, their descriptions were never matched to produce a composite photofit image of the Ripper — an oversight pointed out by a Forensic Science Service expert who was belatedly seconded to the inquiry in late 1979. he recommended that the key witnesses should be re-interviewed to produce a likeness that could be circulated to the Press and public. Yet his advice was ignored.
It meant that no one — not even the officers who interviewed Sutcliffe nine times — had any idea what the man they were seeking looked like. And it allowed Sutcliffe to hide in plain sight for years.
CHAOS OF THEIR INCIDENT ROOM
FoR several years the Ripper attacks were investigated separately by the police forces where they occurred. In those pre-computer days, it meant crucial information was often not shared. Five woman had been slain before the operation was brought under one roof, at the police headquarters in Millgarth, Leeds. But, as those who worked there remember, in the cluttered, stifling top- floor i ncident room, chaos reigned.
By New Year, 1980, the scale of the inquiry was unprecedented. Police had taken 24,693 statements, checked 152,230 vehicles, interviewed 194,771 people and conducted 25,200 house to house inquiries. The resulting documents weighed around four tonnes.
This mountain of data was supposed to be logged on indexed cards filed in cardboard boxes l i ni ng t he incident room walls. But the
cards were often filed incorrectly, or not at all, and many were not cross-referenced. And according to a forensics troubleshooter sent in at the eleventh hour to sort out the mess, there was ‘no logical weave’ running through the system. This meant, for example, that if a man’s car had been spotted repeatedly kerb-crawling in a red light district in, say, Manchester, it might not be known that it had also been logged in Leeds or Bradford. Nor that there were other grounds to suspect the driver: an uncorroborated alibi, perhaps, or the fact his job kept him out overnight and necessitated the use of hammers.
There were not even files containing all the autopsy reports and key forensic details: these were logged in many different places.
This laxity was fatal. By the late 1970s there were four separate cards relating to Sutcliffe in the central index. More confusingly still, two were logged under Peter William Sutcliffe and two under William Peter Sutcliffe and each had different dates of birth.
Byford said: ‘The incident room formed the nucleus of the Ripper inquiry and contained a wealth of information relating to Sutcliffe.
‘Tragically a number of errors and omissions ensured that much of this i nformation remained within the system. The ultimate conclusion is that far from maintaining its place at the nerve centre of the most important detective effort in history, the Millgarth incident room had the di direct effect of frustrating the work of senior investigating officers and junior detectives alike.’
THE T £5 NOTE AND CAR C TYRE FIASCOS
The Ripper left a number of vital clues each time he struck. On October 1, 1977, when he posed as a punter to pick up prostitute Jean Jordan in Manchester, he handed her a brand new £5 note from his weekly pay packet.
Nine days later, realising this could be traced to him, he returned to search her hidden body. he failed to find the note which Jordan had put in a secret compartment in her handbag. Police f ound the f i ver and it seemed a vital breakthrough. In what began as a brilliant piece of detective work, the head of Manchester CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Ridgeway, enlisted the Bank of england to t r ack down t he man who’d had t he note. Though they had its serial number, this proved a gargantuan task. They learned that it was delivered to the Midland Bank in Shipley, which supplied payroll money to local firms employing thousands. They eventually narrowed the note down to Clark’s, the haulage firm where Sutcliffe worked. As he was among just 241 people who could have got it, this ought to have spelled the end of his spree.
But when he was interviewed he no longer had any notes from that pay packet and the officer who quizzed him found an index card saying Sutcliffe had an alibi for the night the killer returned to Jordan’s body: his wife said he was at their housewarming.
Soon afterwards the £5 note avenue was side-lined as unproductive and too time consuming. Another golden opportunity had been missed and it cost several women their lives. Sutcliffe might have been trapped even earlier, after murdering Irene Richardson, in February 1977. his red Ford
Corsair left tyre marks on Soldiers Field, the Leeds park where he took her on the pretext of having sex before battering her to death.
By looking at their tracking width, forensics experts realised they corresponded with tyre imprints found at the scene of several other Ripper attacks.
They found that the tracks could come from 50,000 cars, of several types — including a Corsair — and set about interviewing each of their owners. It was such a task that Sutcliffe was not among the 20,000 motorists who had been seen by the autumn of 1977.
But he was still driving the Corsair when detectives called to question him about the £5 note. had had they checked his car they would have found the tyre match.
ARROGANCE OF SENIOR we OFFICERS
NO ONe could accuse George Oldfield and his inner circle of shirking. They often worked 16hour days, f uelled only by cigarettes and whisky, dossing down near the incident room.
Yet though plainly floundering, they were too arrogant to accept the help offered by Scotland Yard until Byford insisted they must do so. even when Commander Jim Nevill, the Yard’s crack murder sleuth, arrived in Leeds, his advice was largely ignored.
Oldfield, who refused to abandon his other duties to concentrate solely on the Ripper case, became fixated with his own theories, which were invariably wrong.
For a long time he was convinced a Yorkshire taxi driver named Terence hackshaw was t he murderer f or circumstantial reasons, such as his cab often being seen in red-light areas. So he and his men spent countless fruitless hours on this incorrect hunch.
Moreover, junior officers were so in awe of Oldfield that they feared approaching him with potentially crucial information.
Among them was a young detective constable, Andrew Laptew, who saw Sutcliffe at his home in July, 1979, and felt strongly that he was deeply suspicious. Added to this, he had a wide gap between his front teeth — one of the Ripper’s known features — he worked as a lorry driver and had been seen carousing in the prostitute areas of several northern towns.
But when Laptew relayed all this to the Ripper Squad’s hierarchy, he said later, he was made to feel foolish. And when he wrote a report suggesting Sutcliffe should be scrutinised more closely, this was not acted on.
TAUNTS OF THE ‘I’M JACK’ HOAXER
The gravest and most unforgivable blunder came when someone purporting to be the Ripper wrote three l etters — addressed to Oldfield and a national newspaper
— mocking the police’s incompetence. They were followed by an eerie taperecording, in which he taunted the hapless Oldfield for failing to catch him.
The first arrived in march 1978. Postmarked in Sunderland, written in appalling grammar, and signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, it appeared to contain details of the murders that could be known only to the real murderer.
The writer mentioned killing prostitute Joan Harrison, in Preston in 1975, and although West Yorkshire Police then believed she might be a Ripper victim, and were working behind the scenes with their Lancashire cashire counterparts, Oldfield was convinced d this link had never been made publicly.
Yet a simple check of a few newspaper er cuttings would have told him that this possible ossible connection had indeed been reported.
another of the letters alluded to medidical treatment that the Ripper’s ninth th victim, Vera millward, had undergone ne shortly before he pounced on her outside de a manchester hospital.
again, both Oldfield and his Ripper per Squad deputy Dick Holland felt sure that hat this fact could only have been divulged d by millward to her killer — forgetting that at it had been disclosed to the Press, both h by the police themselves and millward’s ard’s commonlaw husband.
Though they were repeatedly warned ed to treat the letters with caution, these basic oversights convinced the squad’s chiefs fs the letters were the work of the Ripper himself, imself, and not a malicious hoaxer.
When the same man sent the tape, Oldfield ldfield decided to go public. The Press conference ence at which he played the haunting recording ng was an epochmaking news event.
‘I’m Jack,’ a voice with a thick Wearside arside accent intoned over a whirring tape spool. pool. ‘I see you are having no luck in catching me.
‘I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord you are no nearer catching me now than four years ago, when I started. I reckon k your boys are letting you down, George. Ya can’t be much good, can ya?’
He went on to warn that he would soon strike again, adding: ‘at the rate I’m going I should be in the book of records . . . I’ll keep going for quite a white yet. I can’t see myself being nicked yet.’
He signed off by saying it had been ‘ nice chatting to you George’, and playing Oldfield a jaunty pop song by andrew Gold, called Thank You For Being a Friend.
The police chief left the millions of TV viewers who heard the tape in no doubt that he believed it to be genuine. and, as voice experts narrowed the man’s accent down to a small area of Sunderland, he pledged that it would prove to be the Ripper’s undoing.
a few months later, however, Sunderlandbased Detective Inspector David Zackrisson produced a bombshell ninepage report on the letters and tape.
In it, he pinpointed telltale errors in the sender’s arithmetic concerning the number of murders he claimed to have committed. ‘Wearside Jack’, as the Press had dubbed him, had glaringly omitted to remember one of the Ripper’s known attacks.
Having studied similarly goading letters penned by the original Jack the Ripper in the 19th century, Zackrisson also highlighted the si milar use of phraseology. Furthermore, he demonstrated how all the supposedly ‘inside’ information they contained could have been garnered from newspaper reports.
Yet even this warning was not sufficient to persuade Oldfield, and his chief constable Ronald Gregory, to change tack.
They had told the world that ‘Wearside Jack’ was their man, and they could not lose face by admitting that, in their desperation to trap the Ripper, they had been taken in by a callous hoaxer.
So for two more years the police and public discounted as a suspect anyone who did not speak with a Sunderland accent — including Sutcliffe, who continued to murder with impunity.
DISASTROUS £1M AD CAMPAIGN
TO make matters worse, Gregory decided to use the letters and tape as the basis for a massive advertising blitz, called ‘Project R’. In terms of audience reach, the £1million campaign was a huge success. It was impossible to escape the halfpage ads placed in 300 newspapers and posted on 5,500 billboards across the country, and the incessant broadcasts urging people to listen to the taperecorded voice and study the handwriting in the letters.
‘He may be standing next to you in your pub, club or canteen. Or in a queue. On a bus. He may be working at the next machine, desk or table. But he is in fact a vicious deranged maniac whose method of murder and mutilation is so sick he has turned the stomach of even the most hardened police officers,’ said the ads. The whole campaign was based on the authenticity of the I’m Jack tape and associated letters. ‘Look at his handwriting. Listen to his voice,’ was the plea, and if you recognised them call a hotline.
There was a £30,000 reward for anyone who provided information leading to a conviction. But since the tape and letters were bogus, it was a disaster. Nearly 19,000 callers phoned in claiming to recognize the voice or handwriting and each one had to be checked.
There was already a huge backlog of actions, and the police didn’t have the manpower to cope.
as Byford said, the situation ‘ought to have been foreseen by the Chief Constable and his senior officers... [and] this additional information further brainwashed the police and public alike into accepting the validity of the northeast connection.’
It was not until 2008 that Samuel Humble, a shambling alcoholic and smalltime criminal with a grudge against the police, was unmasked as Wearside Jack. He was jailed for perverting the course of justice.
By then, of course, the science of crime detection had been completely revolutionised by technology and the use of DNA.
The recognition that these changes were long overdue, and the speed with which they were implemented, was the one positive legacy from the Yorkshire Ripper debacle.
But it was scant consolation for the horrific suffering he inflicted during his long—and very preventable — reign of terror.