24/02/03 - How the Ripper wrought
panic among police
The Evening Standard
WICKED BEYOND BELIEF: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
by Michael Bilton (HarperCollins, £18.99)
SHOULD anyone need an example of a terrorist, using
the word nonpolitically and accurately, you could hardly
do better than the so-called Yorkshire Ripper (Peter
Sutcliffe), who really did terrorise the Leeds/Bradford
area for five years from 1975, attacking and slaughtering
women, mostly prostitutes, with a ferocity and foulness
scarcely imaginable.
Until he was caught by accident in 1980, he ran rings
around the West Yorkshire police, with the unwelcome
help of the famous hoaxer who sent them a tape-recording,
pretending to be the murderer and mocking their incompetence,
and destroyed their professional confidence.
It was a massive investigation, involving 152,230 checks
on cars, 194,771 interviews, and 25,200 house to-house
enquiries (this book is very solid on statistics).
Notoriously, Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times during
the course of the investigation, and single pieces of
evidence pointed directly to him as the killer - the
tyre-tracks made by his car, the pound sterling5 in
the purse of one victim which passed through the firm
that employed him, the many descriptions by people whom
he had attacked all separately describing him perfectly,
his sighting in three different cruising areas where
prostitutes offered themselves.
Marcella Claxton survived an attack and repeatedly
implored the police to heed the similarities between
her experience and the murdered women, but they simply
did not believe her. None of these clues, each on different
card-indexes, was tied to any other, and his file disappeared
for a year.
The author is admirably fair in declining to attribute
blame for this tragic muddle, while still allowing mistakes
to show clearly. This was, after all, before the age
of computerised analysis of records, and officers were
reduced to crawling on hands and knees to read printouts,
which stretched like lavatory paper across the floor.
The force was crushed into impotence by a 24-hour day
leaving "no margin for creativity", by the
usual press hysteria, and by genuine public alarm.
Michael Bilton says that he is not interested in Sutcliffe,
so the reader will find no explanations or psychiatric
speculations here. But the factual details he reveals
build a picture of a severe sexual sadist who tore women
apart for intense erotic pleasure.
We learn that he hit his victims on the head with a
hammer, and a huge grunt, in order to immobilise them,
and plunged his knife several times into the same wound
in simulation of coitus, afterwards wiping the blade
on her back. We also learn for the first time that the
murderer wore a V-neck pullover on his lower half, the
legs in its sleeves, kneepads fixed in the elbows, and
the neckopening displaying his genitals, the better
to enjoy his frenzy.
None of this is presented to shock (or indulge) the
reader, but quietly and firmly for its evidential value.
The book vividly depicts the lives of policemen under
pressure as well as the squalor of prostitution for
a fiver in the rubble. Amazingly, 4,000 drivers a night
are looking for such sex in Manchester alone. This kind
of reporting, alongside the narrative of the investigation
itself, is entirely useful.
Less so is the trivial personal stuff which Bilton
cannot resist: one detective "took the M62 across
country towards Bradford", another was wearing
"a striped light-grey two-piece", a third
was "a passionate supporter of Yorkshire Cricket
Club", to all of which one is bound to say, "So
what?"
This is all right for a Sunday newspaper, but should be
excised from what is otherwise a fine achievement in supplying
the historical record with a clear and serious account
of five years' panic and despair wrought at the hands
of an addictive killer. |
