The hunt for serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, now the subject of new ITV drama, The Long Shadow, was one of the largest ever to be undertaken by any UK police force.
Despite a project involving thousands of police officers, 2.5 million hours spent combing through paperwork, and thirty thousand statements taken, the police nevertheless failed to catch Sutcliffe for almost six years: between 1975 and 1981. During that period, he murdered thirteen women and attacked several more – yet the police missed vital clues, ignored crucial evidence and chased false leads (such as that of the infamous Ripper hoaxer) that cost them years.
How did detectives get things so badly wrong, and how many times did they miss Sutcliffe? We examine why it took them so long to find and arrest him.
Before the killings
Even before the killings started, Sutcliffe had had run-ins with the police for attacking a sex worker. In 1969, he attacked a woman with a ‘stone in a sock’ – it is thought that this was in revenge for another woman stealing money from him.
"I got out of the car, went across the road and hit her,” Sutcliffe said in a later statement. “The force of the impact tore the toe off the sock and whatever was in it came out. I went back to the car and got in it.” On this instance, he was accompanied by Trevor Birdsall, who was driving the car in question but was not involved in the attack.
The next day, he was visited by two police officers: the woman he had hit had seen Birdsall’s registration plate, but he was “lucky”, they said. She didn’t want to press charges. However, this wasn’t the only brush Sutcliffe had with the law. The 1981 Byford Report, which examined the police handling of the case, noted that he had actually been arrested in 1969 in Bradford’s red light district for being in possession of a hammer (it was assumed he was a burglar); he also came to police attention for attacking a sex worker with a cosh.
Nobody has ever conclusively found out why Sutcliffe seems to have remained inactive between 1969 – which marked the first incidents of trouble from Sutcliffe – and his many violent attacks starting in 1975, but as the report says, “it is my firm conclusion that between 1969 and 1980 Sutcliffe was probably responsible for many attacks on unaccompanied women, which he has not yet admitted, not only in the West Yorkshire and Manchester areas, but also in other parts of the country.”
The first killings
On October 30, 1975, Sutcliffe killed his first known victim: Wilma Mary McCann. A mother of four, she was struck across the back of the head twice and stabbed repeatedly with a sharpened screwdriver. The resulting police investigation was huge: 150 officers of the West Yorkshire Police were drafted in to help find the killer, and they conducted 11,000 interviews between them.
Sutcliffe struck twice in 1976 – attacking Emily Monica Jackson and Marcella Claxton – and the investigation went on, but a major handicap to the case was the fact that everything had to be written down and filed by hand.
In the days before computers, all the information was recorded on index cards, and filed in the evidence room. The police ended up with tonnes of paperwork: so much so that the floor of the evidence room had to be reinforced to stop it caving in. As a result, it was very hard to cross-reference information, even when multiple bits of evidence pointed to Sutcliffe.
These murders did provide the first clues: in the case of Emily Jackson, police found a boot print on her thigh from where the murderer had stamped on her before leaving her in an alleyway by the Gaiety pub in Leeds. The police managed to ascertain that it was a size 7 Warwick Dunlop boot, but they failed to narrow down their field of suspects any further.
Another major shortcoming was police prejudice. From the start, officers on the investigation were convinced that Sutcliffe was targeting exclusively sex workers: both Jackson and McCann had been attacked while soliciting for business.
This undoubtedly had an effect on how seriously they took the killings: it was the murder of teenager Jayne MacDonald, described by police as a “respectable young girl” in 1977 that finally marked a change in their attitude towards the killer and turbocharged their efforts to find him.
In one press conference, Jim Hobson, a senior detective, said that Sutcliffe “has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies.”
The five pound note
One major clue was missed in relation to Sutcliffe’s attack on Marcella Claxton, who was walking home from a house party in Leeds in October 1976. Claxton managed to escape from Sutcliffe by hiding in a phone box, but suffered traumatic injuries to her skull. When interviewed by the police, she provided an accurate description of his face, shoe size and even the gap in his teeth. However, Claxton’s evidence was dismissed on the grounds that she wasn’t a sex worker and therefore couldn’t be a Ripper victim.
The second major opportunity came after Sutcliffe attacked 20-year-old Jean Jordan in Manchester on October 1, 1977. He had given Jordan, a prostitute, a five-pound note for her services before attacking her in his car and dumping the body on wasteland by the Southern Cemetery.
Sutcliffe returned to the body afterwards – having realised the note was traceable – but failed to recover it, and it was subsequently found in a secret pocket in her handbag eight days later, when the body was discovered. It was traced to certain branches of the Midland Bank in Shipley and Bingley – and from there, to roughly 8,000 employees from the companies that traded with the bank.
One of those employees was Sutcliffe – and over three months, the police interviewed 5,000 men, including him. However, he gave an alibi (that he had attended a family party) which was believed, leading police to close the investigation into the origin of the note in early 1978.
The nine interviews
Barely two months after his attack on Jean Jordan, Sutcliffe struck again, attacking 25-year-old sex worker Marilyn Moore in the back of his car in Leeds. She escaped after Sutcliffe lost his balance attempting to hit her, and provided a description that matched Claxton’s photofit of Sutcliffe. Tyre tracks from the scene matched those at previous crime scenes, and Moore even provided a description of his car.
Again, Sutcliffe was interviewed, but managed to slip through the net. All in all, he was interviewed nine times – on one of those occasions, he even wore the same boots with which he left a shoe print near a body in the photo they were showing him. Sutcliffe’s car was spotted in the red-light district of Leeds – a common hunting ground of his – sixty times, and in the months before his capture, he was even reported to police as a suspect by his old friend Trevor Birdsall, who had been with him at the time of his first attack in 1969. As he described it, Birdsall saw Sutcliffe get out of his car to pursue a woman with whom he had had an argument in Halifax on August 1975: the same date and location as the attack on another Ripper victim, Olive Smelt.
Though Birdsall’s letter was marked with ‘Priority No.1’, the letter remained in a filing tray until Sutcliffe’s arrest. Birdsall’s follow-up visit to the police station was not acted upon: in the Byford Report, it was stated that “the failure to take advantage of Birdsall’s anonymous letter and his visit to the police station was yet again a stark illustration of the progressive decline in the overall efficiency of the major incident room. It resulted in Sutcliffe being at liberty for more than a month when he might conceivably have been in custody. Thankfully, there is no reason to think he committed any further murderous assaults within that period.”
"It was just a miracle they did not apprehend me earlier – they had all the facts,” Sutcliffe said at his Old Bailey trial. A miracle is one word for it: despite multiple clues pointing his way, and despite matching the photofit, he was not considered a likely suspect.
The hoaxer
One major factor in delaying the police’s investigation was the appearance of hoax tapes purporting to be from the Yorkshire Ripper, which were sent to the West Yorkshire Police in 1979. Addressed to Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was leading the investigation, the tape recorded a man’s voice taunting him.
“I’m Jack. I see you’re having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord, you’re no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started.” The hoaxer, called ‘Wearside Jack’ by the press, also sent two letters to the police and Daily Mirror in March 1978, in which he boasted about his crimes and signed off as ‘Jack the Ripper.’
With the help of linguists, the police managed to deduce that the man was from the Castletown area of Sunderland (Sutcliffe was from Bingley, Yorkshire), but failed to find him until the case was reopened in 2005. DNA evidence taken from the letters eventually revealed him to be John Samuel Humble, a man from Sunderland who was longterm unemployed and an alcoholic.
At the time, it diverted crucial police resources into finding the real killer – so much so that Doreen Hill, the mother of Sutcliffe’s last known victim Jacqueline, maintained her daughter would still be alive if it weren’t for police failings. In the Byford Report, the Inspector of Constabulary Lawrence Byford criticised the leader of the investigation, George Oldfield’s unusual obsession with the tapes, adding that he had ignored advice from survivors of Sutcliffe’s attacks and specialists, including from the FBI in the US, that they were a hoax.
Instead of ruling out the tapes, the police investigation ruled out Sutcliffe, as he did not fit the profile of the tape and letters’ sender – and though they contained information supposedly not released to the public at the time, Humble had actually acquired them from his local newspaper and pub gossip.
The capture
In the end, Sutcliffe’s arrest was more of an accident than anything else. He was pulled over in Sheffield on January 2, 1981 with sex worker Olivia Reivers in his car. The probationary constable Robert Hydes established that Sutcliffe had false number plates; he was duly arrested. Before he was taken to the police station, Sutcliffe headed off on the pretext of being “bursting for a pee” and stashed a knife, hammer and rope behind an oil storage tank. When in the police station, he hid another knife in the station’s toilet cistern.
The following day, Sergeant Robert Ring decided on a hunch to return to the scene of the arrest and discovered the weapons. On January 4, 1981 Sutcliffe confessed to being the serial killer the police were hunting for, bringing an end to years of terror for the women of the north of England – and of failure for the police, finally bringing an end to a botched investigation that could have been concluded several times.
