Fatal mistakes: It took police years to finally arrest Peter Sutcliffe. Photo: Justin Slee
It's been almost three years since the serial killer appeared. Peter Sutcliffe died aged 74, confined to a hospital bed in North Durham, after contracting Covid-19. More than four decades have passed since his random arrest in a red-light district finally brought an end to his brutal murders, but the crimes have left an indelible scar on the nation's collective memory. With The Long Shadow, a seven-part drama about these events, ITV is stepping into a place haunted by unimaginable pain. Some questioned whether it was worth doing at all.
The Long Shadow, however, avoids sensationalism — Sutcliffe barely appears as a character — and tries to restore respect for the victims and their families, including the 25 children who lost their mothers. Sutcliffe was eventually found guilty of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others, causing life-changing injuries, in a series of horrific attacks that occurred between October 1975 and November 1980.
But as author Michael Bilton explains, the true number is «at least 30, possibly more — police know he was involved with at least 10 others.» Bilton, a former Sunday Times investigative reporter turned television producer, is the author of Wicked Beyond Creed: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, a remarkable and disturbing work of research first published in 2003, which provides essential source material for Drama by George Kay
The book, over 800 pages, details the bungled police investigation that allowed Sutcliffe to slip through the net nine times, killing and killing again. The inquiry was so flawed that after the death of student Jacqueline Hill in 1980, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to dissuade him from going to Leeds to head it herself.
Bilton's book also provides The Long Shadow with much of the information about the real lives of the women killed by Sutcliffe, in some cases hard lives, such as that of 28-year-old Irene Richardson (Molly Vevers), whom Bilton describes as «penniless» » and stand up for yourself in very difficult circumstances.” She suffered from severe depression and in the last 10 days of her life “wandered the streets practically destitute.” On the night of her murder in February 1977, she reportedly got into a car with a man to have sex for money.
Her death played a role in a story that turned out to be catastrophic for the investigation. Following the murder of 42-year-old Emily Jackson (Katherine Kelly) a year earlier, Detective Chief Inspector Dennis Hoban (Toby Jones) told TV reporters: «We're pretty sure this man hates prostitutes.»
“They didn’t see him targeting women,” forensic scientist Jane Monckton-Smith tells me, “but the women he had access to were sex workers.” This fatal mistake led police to call the murder of 16-year-old shop assistant Jane McDonald in June 1977 a «mistake». This was due to a systemic failure to believe women and almost certainly institutional racism.
A man in a white car (Sutcliffe was driving a white Ford Corsair) attacked Marcella Claxton (Jasmine Lee-Jones), a black woman, with a hammer in Roundhay Park, Leeds, nine months before Richardson was killed there. A close-up photo of Claxton could provide an important clue. Instead, she was labeled an unreliable witness, and when she later applied for compensation for criminal damages, West Yorkshire Police said she had misled them during the investigation (she insisted the attacker was white; they didn't believe her; this was Sutcliffe). ).
Fourteen-year-old Tracey Brown (Emily Coates) suffered a fractured skull in several places when she was attacked with a hammer by a man walking and talking to her outside her home in Keighley, back in August 1975. Two years later, when she went to the police station to report that she believed the serial killer was the same man who had hospitalized her with severe head injuries, she recalled: “They were just grinning… they treated it like one big joke. I think because I wasn’t a prostitute, they didn’t think anything of it.” She provided an accurate photograph and described the man as speaking with a Yorkshire accent. Sutcliffe later admitted to the attack.
Twelve of the 13 Sutcliffe women were found guilty of murder. Photo: PA
As late as October 1979, Detective Jim Hobson (Lee Ingleby) was still saying: “He made it clear that he hated prostitutes. Many people do this. We, as the police, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But now the Ripper is killing innocent girls.» In 2020, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police issued a formal apology for «the language, tone and terminology used by senior officers at the time», but Bilton notes that the same could equally be said of Attorney General Michael Havers in his address to the jury at Sutcliffe's trial at the Old Bailey in 1981. Havers told the jury: “Some [the victims] were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest thing is that some were not. The last six attacks were committed on completely respectable women.”
Bilton insists the officers he knew well were not misogynistic and were very concerned about making sex workers vulnerable: «These were their communities.» The press, however, became obsessed with the issue of prostitutes, finding parallels between the unsolved Whitechapel murders in Victorian London and the Yorkshire Ripper. This opened the door to a hoax perpetrated by «Wearside Jack» that derailed the entire investigation. A series of letters sent by Sunderland man John Humble (identified and jailed 25 years later thanks to a DNA test) to George Oldfield (David Morrissey), the assistant chief constable appointed to lead the assassination squad, ruin all the progress that had been made. .
The letters were styled after the most famous example of hundreds of hoax letters sent to newspapers in the late 19th century, claiming to be from «Jack the Ripper.» And when Humble sent a tape directly ridiculing Oldfield with the words «I'm Jack», the detective lost his way, which ruined any chance of catching the real killer.
Toby Jones as the lead detective on the original case, Dennis Hoban Photo: Justin Slee
«It proved it wasn't about the victims,» Monckton-Smith says. “It was about the cop and the killer sticking their chests out at each other. It was incredibly courageous. Where do women fit into this narrative? They were disposable items in a fight between two men.” Convinced that the tape and letters were genuine, despite the growing doubts of those around him, Oldfield focused his attention on the fact that the killer had a north-eastern accent. This meant actively excluding suspects (including Sutcliffe) with Yorkshire accents whose handwriting did not match the letters.
Sutcliffe, who worked as a lorry driver, was warned back in 1969 for assaulting a sex worker with a piece of brick in his sock and the same year was convicted of being «willing to steal» after he was caught with a hammer in his sock. Red light district. In his youth he worked as a gravedigger. By the time he was interviewed in connection with the serial murders, he was married to Sonia Sutcliffe, who provided him with an alibi for most of the murders.
Two officers who interviewed Sutcliffe (Mark Stobbart) at his home 18 months before his arrest reported they were «not entirely satisfied with the man» but when one of them tried to press the issue to a senior detective, he was threatened with punishment. get back in shape. One astonishing piece of detective work has narrowed down the people who might have received a new £5 note found in the handbag of murdered 21-year-old Jean Jordan in Manchester in October 1977 to the pay packages of just 240 staff. Sutcliffe was number 76 on the list. However, the disorganization at the center of the incident room meant that no file linked all the incriminating categories that should have pointed to Sutcliffe as the prime suspect.
He was eventually caught «outright inciting», according to a police sergeant who decided to question a man who had been spotted in a car with a sex worker in Sheffield's red light district in January 1981. (Sutcliffe later admitted that he had intended to kill her.) The sergeant checked his license plates, which turned out to be stolen. When Sutcliffe was taken into custody, he often lied and appeared disingenuous. Officers alerted an incident room in Leeds; a ball hammer and a large knife were found 24 hours later near the scene of the arrest.
Even after this, when Sutcliffe began to confess in full detail to the murders, costly mistakes were made. In a rush to bring the killer to justice so that the success could finally be announced to the press, Chief Constable Ronald Gregory (Michael McElhatton) ordered the rapid completion of Sutcliffe's voluntary application, which already totaled 34 pages. than they painstakingly brought it to completion and provided a full report.
The serial killer wasn't even thoroughly searched; Under his clothes he was wearing a V-neck sweater, turned upside down, his legs crossed over his arms, his underpants had been removed, exposing his genitals. As Bilton points out, this in itself indicated a sexual motive for his crimes. Claxton already said he masturbated because of her.
However, the press report allowed Sutcliffe to portray himself as on a “mission from God” to kill prostitutes, Monckton-Smith claims. “They gave him a bag full of excuses and he used them.” Psychiatrists' reports persuaded the Crown to accept the plea that Sutcliffe was «not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility», believing Sutcliffe to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. The judge, however, ruled that the case should be tried by a jury, which found Sutcliffe guilty of murder.
Fatal mistakes: it took police years to finally arrest Peter Sutcliffe Photo: Universal Images Group
There was anger when, after Sutcliffe was serving 20 concurrent life sentences at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, he was subsequently transferred to the secure Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, where a more relaxed regime included visits from Jimmy Savile, who had an office and bedroom at the hospital. “We must be honest with the people who make decisions. I mean [Sutcliffe] was clearly mentally ill,” Bilton says. “You can’t kill and attack people like that without being mentally ill. The question is, did he know what he was doing? And I believe that yes, he did it.»
Does he think justice has been done in the Peter Sutcliffe case? “I think people are very cruel and cruel… and Sutcliffe was cruel – I read every forensic report on every murder he committed. And it was a massacre…” Bilton seemed to be overcome with deep sadness. “I felt for the families. All these children. And he continued to kill. That young girl, 18 years old, [Helen Rytka], who was in the red light district with her sister because they had nothing, no money. I remember going to talk to her brother to see if he could talk about it, but he just couldn't, it was too painful.
“The question is, do you know what society should do? What should society tolerate? I believe that the law should be reasonable and proportionate. And when someone goes on and on with their mistreatment of people… When someone harms society on that level… — He stops. «My instinct is to hang this crap.»
The Long Shadow starts on ITV1 and ITVX on Monday
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