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Real-Life Crimes

Why did it take so long for the Yorkshire Ripper to be brought to book? One reason that has been put forward by police chiefs and Home Office inspectors who later made a full analysis of the case was that so much happened so quickly that the West Yorkshire police were completely overwhelmed.

In the late 1970s police computer systems like HOLMES (Home Office Linked Major Enquiry System), as used today, simply did not exist. Everything was written down and filed under a card index system.

So much information had to be processed - forensic reports, witness statements, intelligence-gathering etc. - that it was too much for the clerks and detectives assigned to administer the running of the investigation.

Sutcliffe interviewed

The first four years of the case produced 151,000 typed reports by individual detectives alone. It became impossible to properly cross-reference each document. Sutcliffe was actually interviewed nine times, but was never listed as a major suspect because each report was filed under a different heading and no-one could look at all the reports together.

One example of the scale of the operation is illustrated by a single aspect of the investigation following the third Ripper murder. Irene Richardson was killed in Roundhay Park, Leeds, in February 1977.

A set of tyre tracks were found nearby: detectives had to trace every car in West Yorkshire fitted with that brand of tyre and then interview the owners. There were 53,000 of them.

Avalanche of paperwork

At the height of the hunt, West Yorkshire Police could only spare 150 people to work full time on the case. One detective said: "If we had had more it would not have helped because we could not process the information we had or make sense of it anywhere near fast enough."

Former Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Ronald Gregory, admitted after Sutcliffe was jailed: "We were buried by an avalanche of paperwork." The result of the log-jam of information was that many detectives found themselves checking out leads that had already been covered, sometimes months before, by their own colleagues.

And reports compiled by some officers that could have proved vital were not seen for months by senior men tasked with co-ordinating the inquiry.