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.
The murders have left a stain on our collective memory, especially in the north. “I had just turned one when he was caught,” says Barnsley-born actor Katherine Kelly, who plays Emily Jackson, the second victim. “But anybody older than me lived with the terror of those five years. There was a monster on the loose and he was walking among them.” The stories she has heard from that time, she says, reveal how “everybody’s life had to change” in response to the murders. People would set alarms “and go and meet the next door neighbour’s daughter off the bus” at night, to ensure that women were safe, Kelly says, “and then when [Sutcliffe] was caught, there was disbelief, because there’d been rumours that he had been caught before. It took a long time to unravel the terror, to believe that you’re safe again”.
When it came to tackling the notorious case for TV, screenwriter George Kay, best known as the creator of Netflix’s Lupin, tried to “open up the scope of it to include some of the stuff you don’t normally see in true crime drama”. The result is a show that “shines a light on each of the victims’ stories”, placing them at the “forefront”, says Daniel Mays, who plays Jackson’s husband Sydney. “The police cover these stories many times in their careers, whereas something tragic like a murder will happen to a family, if ever, once, and so that defines their family dynamics and their futures,” Kay adds. He decided the show would “barely feature” Sutcliffe, and would avoid his “Yorkshire Ripper” moniker almost entirely; the nickname was the invention of the press, alluding to similarities with the “Jack the Ripper” case, but the victims’ families find it distressing and disrespectful.
Acutely aware that he is “a man from the south [of England]”, Kay knew he would “have to triple down on my research… spending time in the place, going to meet women who were sex workers at the time [and] people who worked on the case” as well as surviving victims and their families. He was “so keen to go back to primary sources”, he explains, “because with a story like [this], there are hundreds of documentaries – but the problem is that the people who make those documentaries just watch the previous documentaries”. As a result, the story has been distilled over time “into a simpler and simpler version, whereas actually, if you went back and you did look up the names of the people who were there at the time and tried to meet them, you could create a new truth and an originality for the story”.
The police investigation – and media coverage – focused on the fact that many of the murdered women were sex workers. These women were often viewed as disposable, or were implicitly blamed for “loose” behaviour, like going to pubs, and it was not until Sutcliffe killed 16-year-old schoolgirl Jayne MacDonald that the police took the case seriously. “It was the perception at the time among the police that prostitutes who went out and put themselves in terrible danger were somehow responsible for crimes committed against them,” Kay says. He opted to present the police force’s ingrained misogyny in a matter of fact way throughout the series. “Police calling women slags and whores, things like that, it was just so casual,” he explains. “There’s no point in making a dramatic play on that. The better way to explore that is just for it to be incidental. And you realise, as a viewer, ‘God, that was how people spoke to each other.’” Kelly agrees. “You have to show the period, warts and all,” she says. In 2020, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police apologised for the “language, tone and terminology used by senior officers at the time”.
You have to show the period, warts and all— Katherine Kelly
Emily Jackson, who was 42 when she died, had recently started doing sex work to earn extra money for her family; she did so with the grudging agreement of husband Sydney. “It was just this heartbreaking scenario that this married couple finds themselves in,” Mays says. “They’re struggling to make ends meet… living in an affluent, sort of middle-class area, trying to keep up with the Joneses. And they keep getting continuous red bills – it’s about how they come to that unimaginable decision of her going out soliciting.” The show received the blessing of Emily’s son Neil, who was 17 when she died, and Mays travelled to Leeds to speak to him in person. “We sat for an hour and he was incredibly generous,” the actor says. Neil learned that his mother was a sex worker when her murder was announced on the news; meeting him helped Mays “crystallise” what that must have been like, as well as teaching him more about Sydney. “As much as you do all the reading and watch the documentaries, I think the most beneficial thing I could have experienced was to sit with [Neil],” he says.
When Emily went out on the night of 20 January 1976, she had been hoping to earn some money to put towards a bridesmaid’s dress for her daughter. “You don’t [always] do extreme things because it’s your only option left,” Kay says. “Sometimes you do it because there’s a temporary problem and it’s a solution in the moment.” The Jacksons’ story is shaped by the cost of living crisis in the Seventies, which the show foregrounds in its opening episode with archive footage and audio telling of skyrocketing prices and living standards “being eaten away”. “The context of this is so vital, and to make the audience go on a journey to appreciate the parallels with today is really important,” Kay says.
Daniel Mays as Sydney Jackson— (ITV)
Sutcliffe’s final victim was 20-year-old Leeds University student Jacqueline Hill, who was killed just a few hundred feet from her halls of residence in 1980; she had been walking back from a nearby bus stop after attending a meeting about becoming a probation service volunteer. After her death, women walked together through the centre of Leeds in the dark, lit by torches, as they had been doing regularly since the first “Reclaim the Night” marches in 1977. The protests were a response to the spate of murders, but also to the police’s advice. “Do not go out at night unless absolutely necessary, and only if accompanied by a man you know,” one warning printed in the Yorkshire Evening Post cautioned.
There are striking parallels with the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard: in the immediate aftermath, the Met Police told women not to go out alone after dark in Clapham and Brixton, near to where the 33-year-old was abducted by serving Met Police officer Wayne Couzens. When it came to recreating the “Reclaim the Night” marches for the show, Kay decided to “include only the placards that have been in both protests, just to show how clearly things haven’t changed”. Slogans like “She was just walking home” and “Stop killing us” feel frustratingly familiar.
David Morrissey as Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield— (ITV)
An estimated 2.5 million hours of police time were spent on hunting the killer, and The Long Shadow doesn’t shy away from the flaws in that investigation. Officers discounted important testimony from survivors who didn’t fit the victim profile they had created. One of them was Marcella Claxton, played in the series by Jasmine Lee-Jones, who dialled 999 from a phone box after she was attacked by Sutcliffe in Roundhay Park in Leeds; her account helped police create a photofit, but it was discounted, in part because officers assumed that her assailant was black. The case was passed from senior officer to senior officer, with Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield (played by David Morrissey) taking over from Dennis Hoban. There was an element of ego, it seemed, in each man’s desire to be the one to crack the case. “There may be more pawns in this war before I catch you, but I will catch you,” Oldfield said in a 1979 TV appearance.
A lot of the people who worked in West Yorkshire Police during our story were well-intentioned and didn’t mess up on purpose— George Kay
Police kept track of interviewees and potential suspects using a cumbersome manual system of index cards, which eventually weighed so much that the incident room floor had to be reinforced. “While [this room] should have been the effective nerve centre of the whole police operation, the backlog of unprocessed information resulted in the failure to connect vital pieces of related information,” Sir Lawrence Byford wrote in his review. The lack of cross-referencing, he concluded, “allowed Peter Sutcliffe to continually slip through the net as the evidence and details of clues… were split up and divided between at least two name cards, instead of one.”
And yet Kay didn’t want the show to be “bashing the police at every turn” either. “A lot of the people who worked in West Yorkshire Police during our story were well-intentioned and didn’t mess up on purpose,” he says. “And they were trapped by old-fashioned attitudes. Some of them were misogynist and unacceptable in their behaviour a lot of the time, but not necessarily all of them… They got it wrong because they wanted to get it right. They got the wrong idea about what the way to do that was.”
Mays concedes that The Long Shadow is often “a difficult, harrowing watch”, but he’s hopeful that the series “will enlighten people’s minds on a case that they thought they knew about”, while Kay sees the show as “an invitation to see the world as it is today” as much as a period piece. “If [viewers] choose to make that connection, that’s great,” he says. Kelly, meanwhile, is fully satisfied that the show does justice to Emily Jackson’s story. “That’s the thing that matters,” she says. “I feel like I could meet a relative of the Jacksons in a shop and look them in the eye and say, ‘We did our best.’”
‘The Long Shadow’ is on ITV1 and ITVX on 25 September at 9pm
