then the public at large, the families of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims, the media, the taxpayers of West Yorkshire, MPs, even seasoned high-ranking detectives closely involved in homicide investigations, were never given answers. The key questions had been: Why did it take so long to catch this terrible serial killer? Had the police been up to the task? Who should be held accountable for mistakes that were made? The reason for this was the huge sensitivity surrounding shocking errors in the investigation.
Sutcliffe’s official toll was thirteen dead and seven attempted murders. We now know that he attacked many more women and that there were many opportunities to apprehend him which were tragically missed. In recent times, public disquiet over the Stephen Lawrence murder in London and the multiple killings by Dr Harold Shipman resulted in full and transparently open inquiries. In contrast, public disquiet over the Yorkshire Ripper investigation was flatly dismissed with platitudes that everything would be better in future. No open inquiry took place. Serious questions were posed but the answers only emerged behind closed doors. A high-level secret inquiry had recommended revolutionary changes in the way the police investigated serious crime, and yet openness, transparency and the acknowledgement that the public had a perfect right to know the truth about the police hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper were nowhere to be seen.
In January 1982, seven months after Sutcliffe was given twenty terms of life imprisonment, the then Home Secretary appeared before Parliament to announce the findings of an internal Home Office inquiry by one of Britain’s most senior and respected policemen, Mr Lawrence Byford. He had brilliantly investigated what went wrong with the Yorkshire Ripper case, but William Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, refused to publish Byford’s penetrating report which stripped bare all the mistakes that were made. Instead a brief four-page summary of its main conclusions and recommendations was placed in the House of Commons library. This summary only scratched the surface of the body of crucial facts garnered during Byford’s six-months-long inquiry by an eminent team of senior British police officers and the country’s leading forensic scientist, which was a model of its kind.
In a quiet and unsensational way, Byford’s report laid out its unvarnished and unpalatable truths in more than 150 closely typed pages. It contained much extraordinary detail. Such was the confidentiality surrounding the report that it was printed privately outside London and not by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. No senior civil servant, not even the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, was allowed to view a copy until Mr Byford delivered it personally to William Whitelaw. As one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary, Byford knew that in preparing the report he and his inquiry team had a grave duty to perform not merely for the benefit of the police service, but for the country as a whole.
Byford and his team did not shirk their responsibility. The changes his report recommended were truly ground-breaking, so much so that a cynic might say that if there had been no Yorkshire Ripper, it might have been well to invent him, as the sole means to force dramatic but profoundly necessary changes upon a creaking police service.
As a staff writer for the Sunday Times based in Yorkshire from 1979 to 1982, I became closely acquainted with some of the detectives, pathologists, forensic scientists and outside advisers who were most closely involved in the Ripper case. Over the succeeding years many of the figures principally involved in the investigation spoke to me off the record about their work on the Ripper Inquiry and how it personally affected them. Some, like Dick Holland and George Oldfield – key members of the Ripper Squad – went to their graves feeling they had been scapegoated. Others felt their actions and motives were totally misunderstood. Until I had got my hands on a copy – some seventeen years after it was written! – the Byford Report had remained an official secret. It was not till the summer of 2006 that the Home Office at last released the report and some of their own files, following an application under the Freedom of Information Act. Britain’s most senior detectives, those with responsibility for investigating major crimes, had not been allowed to study this vital account of what had gone wrong.
I read the Byford Report for the first time in 1998, and realized that here was a sensational story. Answers now fell into place. All too many mistakes had been made, and a good number of those closely involved with the most important criminal investigation in British history agreed that the full story deserved to be told so that the British public – and more urgently, future generations of detectives – could learn its lessons. Hence this book.
For me the real story was as thrilling and chilling as any crime novel, containing as it did such complex characters and so many twists and turns. The more I got to know the detectives the more fascinated I became by who they were – and why it was that some of them had got it so disastrously wrong. These were not one-dimensional figures, and I endeavoured, as I wrote the narrative, to put flesh and bones on some of them so that they could be seen for what they were, human beings trying to do a difficult job.
Some were clearly better than others, but I have no intention of pillorying anyone for mistakes that were made. As a writer you cannot examine how an institution works and forget the very people who make up that institution. When the institution fails you need to look at its whole structure, which in the case of the police service starts with ordinary policemen and women on the beat and progresses upwards through a hierarchy, beyond the chief officers, to the Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Home Office civil servants in the Police Department, and then the ministers in charge, ending with the Home Secretary.
You had to live in the North of England to comprehend how such a terrible series of crimes terrified a major part of the British Isles. Still today, what most people want to know is: What went wrong? Why did it take so long to catch Peter Sutcliffe?
Even thirty years later, and allowing for the benefit of hindsight, some of what has emerged about the investigation seems truly shocking. As with other notorious murder cases, when the subject of the Yorkshire Ripper is mentioned it brings dreadful memories flooding back for those most intimately involved. The families of Sutcliffe’s victims deserved to know what really happened during that awful period when a beast called Peter Sutcliffe roamed the North of England creating outright terror. They also needed to know that some good came out of that terrible era and that lessons were learned about complex cases.
The police officers trying to track down this utterly ruthless killer were decent and honest men. Amid the chaos that gripped the investigation there were some brilliant detectives. Most were totally committed, but tragically some, just like the police service for which they worked, were way out of their depth. The British police have an extraordinary record in solving homicides, and G.K. Chesterton’s reflection that ‘society is at the mercy of a murderer without a motive’ is now only partially true. Random prostitute murders are still every senior investigating officer’s worst nightmare, but in recent times we have seen successful investigations into the serial killing of call-girls in Suffolk and a fresh round of prostitute murders in Bradford. It is very different now from that period in the last century when the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was so complex and protracted that it simply overwhelmed the West Yorkshire Police. Many of the detectives involved paid a high price – ruined careers, ruined health, ruined marriages – and in a few cases it led to their premature deaths.
Now as then, I am not remotely interested in Peter Sutcliffe, the individual. Many have asked whether I ever wanted to interview him. The answer was a resounding. ‘No!’ What could he tell me that I didn’t already know – that he was a sick and perverted killer who got powerful sexual thrills from having women at his mercy as he slaughtered them? For me it would have been a worthless exercise to ask Sutcliffe serious questions and expect believable or valuable answers. The detectives though were another matter completely. I was intrigued by them as people, and by the service for which they worked. I wanted to put the reader in their shoes, as they attended a murder scene or an autopsy or a press conference. There can be no freedom without a system of laws and we need these dedicated men and women to enforce those laws. The British police service remains one of our pivotal institutions; it safeguards much of what we take for granted.
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