AUGUST: Leeds. Marguerite Walls murdered at Farsley. SIO: Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson. Unacknowledged Ripper killing.
24 SEPTEMBER: Leeds. Uphadya Bandara attacked at Headingley. SIO: Detective Superintendent Tom Newton. Unacknowledged Ripper attack.
5 NOVEMBER: Huddersfield. Teresa Sykes attacked. SIO: Detective Superintendent Tony Hickey. Unacknowledged Ripper attack.
17 NOVEMBER: Leeds. Jacqueline Hill murdered. SIO: Detective Superintendent Alf Finlay.
25 NOVEMBER: ACC (Crime) George Oldfield sidelined as head of the Ripper inquiry. Jim Hobson takes over with temporary rank of ACC.
26 NOVEMBER: External advisory team appointed by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Mr Lawrence Byford. Reports to the chief constable before Christmas.
1981
2 JANUARY: Peter Sutcliffe arrested in a car with a prostitute in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
5 JANUARY: Peter Sutcliffe charged with murder of Jacqueline Hill.
22 MAY: Peter Sutcliffe found guilty of thirteen murders. Sentenced to life imprisonment.
2006
18 OCTOBER: John Humble arrested in Sunderland and later convicted for being the sender of the Ripper hoax letters and tapes.
PREFACE
Poor Wilma. A strong-willed and feisty woman, she was determined to live life on her terms. It was either her way or no way. A driver picked her up. She agreed, late one night in October 1975, to a risky proposition from a total stranger: sex for a fiver. With a bunch of small kids to care for on her own, this was how she got by. And now? She was dead, the first publicly acknowledged victim of the Yorkshire Ripper.
Her body – shrouded by a low-hanging mist at the edge of a football field – was found early the next morning. The damp and miserably cold vapour clung as grimly and insistently to the frail corpse lying on that grassy bank as it did to the rest of the city of Leeds that autumn.
The fog was almost a symbol of the terror and fear that was to come. It seemed to hang perpetually over the North of England for some considerable time, like some mysterious and impenetrable miasma. And it never lifted for five long years. It enveloped and chilled the lives of millions who lived there, men and women, young and old. But most of all women.
A year later, MPs in the House of Commons voiced deep concerns about a major police investigation that turned into a fiasco with tragic results. There was little or no glory for the detectives who had led the hunt for the notorious killer called the ‘Black Panther’, who turned out to be Donald Neilson from Bradford – a vicious and cold-blooded criminal, wanted for the murders of three sub-postmistresses and the kidnapping and murder of heiress Leslie Whittle. As in the Yorkshire Ripper case there had been an all-important hoax tape-recording that threw detectives off the trail of the real killer. Like the Ripper case the hunt involved several police forces. Like the Ripper case there was a great deal of resistance to calling for help from outside, and when the end came it was two bobbies in a patrol car who made the arrest, not realizing they had caught a vicious killer. Finally, as in the Ripper case, when it was over there was a need for scapegoats: the officer in charge suffered the humiliation of being shifted sideways – out of CID and into uniform.
Some MPs demanded an inquiry into the mismanaged conduct of the Black Panther investigation, but the then Labour Government refused. Home Office Minister Dr Shirley Summerskill told Parliament the case:
has been discussed by chief officers of police collectively and I am quite sure they are fully aware of the need to learn any lessons which may be learned from such an investigation … the fact that a particular investigation is a matter for discussion by chief officers of police is a reflection of our system of policing in this country. The local control of police forces is an essential element of that system. Chief constables in this country, unlike some continental countries, do not come under the direction of a Minister of the Interior, in the enforcement of the law. The responsibility of deciding how an offence should be investigated is for them and them alone.
But when the Yorkshire Ripper case concluded five years later in 1981 it was abundantly obvious that Britain’s chief constables, and the police service as a whole, had disastrously failed to learn the lessons of the Black Panther investigation. Government ministers, senior officials at the Home Office and the Government’s law officers saw little merit in an agonizing public debate over the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. MPs’ demands for transparency were turned down, and there would be no public inquiry. But there was a major shock in store for the criminal justice establishment when Sutcliffe’s trial opened at the Old Bailey in London.
The prosecution, led by the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, pushed for a suspiciously speedy hearing, accepting a guilty plea to manslaughter from the accused, Peter Sutcliffe, on the grounds that mental illness had diminished his responsibility for his crimes. It all seemed done and dusted. The court proceedings would be over within half a day because both defence and prosecution were in complete accord.
However, they had not reckoned with the Judge’s reaction. To his very great credit Mr Justice Boreham refused what was in essence a plea bargain. Instead he ordered a full and open trial by jury to determine whether Sutcliffe was mad or bad. The jury would hear the evidence and decide for themselves whether Sutcliffe was guilty or not guilty of murdering thirteen women; or was guilty of manslaughter because he did not know what he was doing. Justice demanded that this gravest of matters should not be swept under the carpet. Ultimately he was convicted and given a thirty-year minimum sentence.
It seems extraordinary that nearly thirty years later the arguments about Sutcliffe’s responsibility for his crimes had never gone away. A new team of lawyers came back with a vengeance in 2010, when the Yorkshire Ripper went to court saying that having served his minimum sentence, he was entitled to know when he would be released. For the public at large the very idea seemed preposterous, incredible even; but Sutcliffe’s psychiatrists at Broadmoor secure hospital had declared their great success in treating him and were arguing that all along he had suffered from mental illness, meaning that his responsibility was diminished when he committed his crimes. Sutcliffe’s lawyers argued this meant he was entitled to a reduction of his minimum sentence.
All this was made possible because the European Court of Human Rights in 2002 ruled that judges – not the Home Secretary – should decide how long a lifer spends in gaol. So once again Peter Sutcliffe stood at centre stage making headlines, once more his activities invaded the psyche of the British public, fearful that the courts might actually believe he was almost an unintended victim of the Ripper case and set him free. Politically, the very idea was quite toxic, and the Prime Minister and Justice Secretary were both put on the spot, as an anxious public demanded to know: ‘Is this man actually going to be freed?’
Dealing as it did with one of the most notorious killers in British criminal history, the Yorkshire Ripper case raised crucial questions. Before her death, Myra Hindley – the 1960s Moors murderer of several children – had routinely tested the patience of the public with her woeful cries that she had served her time. Now another notorious serial killer was following suit. Thirty years before, the thought that Sutcliffe would ever be freed would have seemed utterly fanciful. Then Britain woke up and found that three decades had slipped by, the thirty-year minimum sentence passed at the Old Bailey in May 1981, was almost at an end – and now the law was different.
After Sutcliffe was snared in January 1981, there were enormous issues raised which needed truthful answers, especially about the failure of the police to solve very serious crimes. Today, such matters
