Around halfway through The Long Shadow, ITV’s seven-part dramatisation of West Yorkshire Police’s attempt to catch serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Hoban (Toby Jones) has a revelation. “We’ve been looking for a monster,” he says, “but what you’ll find is someone forgettable, a normal man, otherwise you’d have spotted him by now.”
Lorry driver Sutcliffe was interviewed by officers nine times; when he was eventually apprehended in Sheffield in January 1981, it was by chance, after he was stopped with a sex worker in his car. This “forgettable” man – described as “otherwise unremarkable” in the Byford Report, the December 1981 inquiry into the police’s investigation – had been able to hide in plain sight, murdering 13 women across the north of England between 1975 and 1980 and brutally attacking a further seven. The inquiry suggested it was likely that he had killed more women before and during that period, too. Sutcliffe was sentenced to 20 concurrent life imprisonments, converted to a whole life order in 2010; he died of Covid in 2020.
