I had a brush with the official aftermath the 'Yorkshire Ripper' investigation. Here's what I remember of it...
The BBC are broadcasting The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story. A certain amount, we’ll see how much, of the work that has gone into the making of this series will have been mine.
Not that I’ve had any direct involvement. But any serious exploration of this ‘Very British Crime Story’ will centre round just how incompetent the police were in stopping Peter Sutcliffe. The generality of that failure has always been obvious and can still be seen in cemeteries across Yorkshire and greater Manchester. The details though were less obvious, in fact, concealed.
They lay in a report commissioned by then Home Secretary William Whitelaw soon after Sutcliffe’s conviction. Carried out by Sir Lawrence Byford and completed in December 1981, it was (barring a 7 page executive summary) kept under wraps until 2006. It was only published as a result of an application under the Freedom of Information Act – my application.
Even now it still seems random. I was at face, or any other, value an unlikely person to be bringing the heartbreakingly bleak facts of the matter out of the basement of the Home Office into the daylight.
When Sutcliffe committed his last crime I was thirteen and living in Grangemouth. I can’t remember when I first heard the term ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. I would have been reading the papers that came into the house (Daily Record, Sunday Post) and I’d see the six o clock news – so presumably about 1977. There are random specifics I still recall from the time. A Nationwide report purporting to show Police care and concern for prostitutes. The ringing declaration (probably in the same report) that “what no one has ever said is “Bring in the Met”. Then there was a tape sent to the police with someone with a thick Geordie accent saying “I’m Jack" and claiming responsibility. This was all over the TV and radio – a hotline was set up that people could call and listen to see if they recognised the voice. The message was, scandalously, put to a beat – at the time that would have been a ‘disco' beat – and apparently played in clubs as ‘The Ripper Rap’. A lorry driver called Peter Sutcliffe was arrested and then jailed. Soon after that I picked up my first ever copy of Private Eye – second hand at a jumble sale. It featured a ‘hilarious’ piece about cops letting him away with murder because he wasn’t a Geordie
In early 2005 I was working in the BBC’s Scottish Parliament Unit. Crime wasn’t and hadn’t been an interest either professionally or personally. I was part of a small under resourced unit grinding out what is called now, but wasn’t really then, ‘content’ for TV and radio. The deficiencies of Northern English police forces were far from being a concern.
I had been reading Misogynies by Joan Smith. A book, like much else from the period, I’ve long since lost. Of its contents as a whole, other than a focus on male misdeeds, I’ve almost no memory at all. There was a piece about the unlikely pop career of page three girl Samantha Fox and a dramatic reconstruction of Ms Smith being ignored by a plumber who preferred speaking to the man of the house. What I do remember is that there was also a discussion of the Sutcliffe case, the men who had failed to catch him and some suggestions as to why.
The details that remain from that account are that Ms Smith was working as a reporter, if not actually labelled ‘junior’ then certainly young, for the local press. Her discomfort at being the only or at least one of very few women in the room during press conferences. The sexism of the police and press – displayed most obviously in the distinction they made between victims who were ‘prostitutes’ and ‘decent ordinary women’. Her contempt for the men running the investigation was total. At this distance in time I can’t quite remember what her dismissal of the West Yorkshire Police’s hubristic declaration that “if the Ripper were in this room we’d spot him fairly quickly” was. It was either along the lines of ‘only because you’d be looking in a mirror’ or ‘you’ve got so much in common you’d never pick him out’. Whichever it was she’d shown enough evidence.
What the context was for my mentioning that essay to a librarian colleague was, I have no idea. She volunteered the information that the card index used in the investigation was so incompetent that it was taught in “library school” (her term) as an example in how not to do it.
This caught my interest. Partly and obviously because librarianship and serial murder aren’t usually connected. It was more than that though. A murder inquiry, a serial murder inquiry, with an increasingly active perpetrator, so badly run it becomes a cautionary tale well outside of policing? That was shocking – and shocking in a way that Smith’s portrayal hadn’t been. Her tale was depressing enough, but there had been more than enough evidence of police racism, corruption and violence in different environments that institutional sexism barely seemed an addition to the repertoire. An inability to grasp the very fundamentals though? That did surprise me.
Wanting to know more I did the briefest of online searches - anything more than that led quickly to odd and unpleasant places – that brought up a review by (not of) David Peace from a couple of years before. Peace mentioned the “secret Byford Report”. The first I’d seen. Again a degree of disbelief “there can’t be anything still secret by now?” a brief check showed there was.
Twenty three years after being given to then Home Secretary the Byford report was still unpublished.
I put in an FOI request, quite possibly my first ever, to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. They got back saying I’d need to speak to the Home Office. I submitted the request to the Home Office – they knocked it back, but said I could appeal. An appeal went in – which was rejected. It was I think at this point the phrase “material which might be of relevance to further prosecutions” made its appearance as the reason for refusal.
This was a line I just couldn’t take seriously at all. It did make me wonder though. The basic facts were plain enough. Was concealing the details just about retaining some shred of police pride – or was there more?
The obvious course of action was to do what I hadn’t done until then. Immerse myself in the case. Make a thorough study of what was known. Develop a close knowledge of the crimes and their investigation, the man and the manhunt. That was the obvious course of action, and it was later assumed that was what I’d done (with the corollary that a half a dozen emails over a period of time was ‘months of work’), I hadn’t though. I’d very little interest in this becoming an interest.
Whatever research I did was casual and unsystematic. Pursued on a whim in infrequent idle moments. The work’s online subscription service was certainly the main and probably the only port of call – but what actual sources I gleaned from there, I’ve forgotten long ago. Then as now, the True Crime section of the library heaved with titles promising ‘the Real’, ’the Inside’, ‘the Untold’, ‘the Hidden’ and so on and increasingly conspiratorially on, Story of Sutcliffe and his doings. Then as now these visceral recapitulations held no appeal. There were two agreed upon as ‘serious’ books Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son by Gordon Burn and The Streetcleaner by Nicole Ward Jouve. Did I read either of them? I cannot recall – although I certainly read about them.
The result of this was that when my dismissal of the Home Office “future proceedings” excuse got its own dismissal from the Information Commissioner. I’d learned a little bit about Sutcliffe and his crimes.
Even now there are a number of certain facts and reasonable conjectures I learned then and can still recall.
That Sutcliffe grew up in an environment that even by the standards of time and place seems emotionally bleak. That his mother was abused and humiliated by his father – an exercise the rest of the family participated in. That the misogyny was all pervasive. That there were other, earlier, assaults which might well have been Sutcliffe. That the police made an appeal to ‘the ripper’ to turn himself in after he had murdered not a prostitute ‘but an ordinary decent woman’. That senior members of the investigation were at the centre of major miscarriages of justice – that of Judith Ward and Stefan Kiszko. That Sutcliffe had been interviewed, and cleared of suspicion, several times. That the senior figures were convinced that the “Wearside Jack” tape was ‘their man’. That Sutcliffe was arrested – not by detectives from “The Ripper Squad” but by bobbies in a patrol car. That the police offered him a ‘diminished responsibility’ manslaughter plea which would have avoided a full trial – and much police embarrassment. At the time there would have been more – but to be frank not hellish much. As a stock of knowledge about 13 murders, 7 (at least) other serious crimes and the biggest police operation in UK history it is, and was even then, a fairly small body of knowledge.
Then, a few months after my definitively final knockback there was a curious development. Towards the end of October 2005 police arrested someone in connection with the 'Wearside Jack' hoax. Given the police had said they had given up looking for whoever the culprit in 2003 – I was more than a little surprised. What could possibly have prompted this? Might it be something to do with whatever was in the Byford report? The guy concerned – an alcoholic with a Jack the Ripper fascination – was jailed for 8 years in March 2006.
By the start of June I’d put all of it to the back of my mind when I received an email from the Home Office – at about 11 am telling me they had decided to accede to my FOI request. The Byford Report had been put on their website that morning. They had also put out a press release. I really hadn’t, for reasons shortly to become obvious, envisaged this as ever turning into some sort of fantastic scoop. I do though remember being disappointed that it hadn’t been sent to me first before going on, so to speak, general release. I was also aware that I was in Edinburgh and whatever notes I had were in Glasgow.
Things moved quite quickly. While I was trying to look at the report, agency copy on the its release (PA probably) appeared on the wires. The release then made the radio bulletins & BBC online The BBC’s own internal copy service (known as RNS? GNS?) sent round their own summary. This pointed out that the release came as a result of an FOI request.
I messaged them saying that we (ie the Beeb) should take a bit of credit by saying it was our (ie my) request. They rang me and I gave someone a couple of minutes of background. Their copy was then resent. Correctly saying it was a BBC FOI, with a less than entirely correct addendum that the FOI had been mine and I was “something of an expert on the case”. The phone started to ring…
Among the calls was the editor of the Radio 4 six PM bulletin asking for a voice piece. They later changed their mind – but the mere offer of such a spot had been enough to bring one of my more ambitious colleagues to the point of tears (not of joy I should stress). BBC Local Radio stations requested 2 -ways (short interviews with the presenter) for drive time shows.
In between all this. I was of course trying to look at the report. Some 150 pages - scanned photocopies - not searchable, in a small typeface, tightly spaced. There was no possibility of reading or even trying to properly assess all of it before having to talk about it.
I’d gone straight to the section on ‘Wearside Jack’. That made for grim reading. The leadership of the inquiry failed to carry out the basic task of asking what information in the letters and tape had been in the public domain before they were sent. The answer was all of it. Northumbria Police worked that out when they were tasked with finding the guy – assumed to be local to them.
The faith put in the authenticity of the letters and tape by West Yorkshire derailed the investigation catastrophically. From my narrow perspective it made holding the report back in order for a last effort at finding the hoaxer look highly plausible. It still does.
My slots on the various BBC local Stations came up. The first couple were somewhere down South (Sussex, Devon, Borsetshire?) they went fine. I conformed to the category of expert – ie I knew something rather than nothing at all. The next two however were Northern English stations. At which point it all began to feel a bit uncomfortable.
Until that day, for me, this had been somewhere between a curiosity and a procedural exercise. It wasn’t even in any meaningful sense part of the day job. Now I was very aware of the possibility people who had been affected might be listening.
At all costs I wanted to avoid saying what I hadn't seen explicitly stated stated so far, but was obvious from even my limited reading of the report. That had the investigation been competent – Sutcliffe would have been arrested sooner and a number of victims would still be alive. That might be something that people affected either wanted to or ought to hear. I didn’t though want them hearing it from someone who had found himself taking a day trip round an atrocity exhibition and was going to try and walk away with nary a backward glance.
In the end I got through them without incident or notable embarrassment. News 24 (as was) wanted a two way later on, so I stayed late and did that. I may have talked about how I had more interest in card indexes than criminals. Shortly afterwards, as I was dealing with emails the phone rang. It was a retired hack – whose name I’ve forgotten – who had covered the investigation for one of the broadsheets. He thanked me for my efforts saying that there was much that was known but not reported at the time. He accused Oldfield of being drunk in charge for much of the period. After that, I went home. I don’t remember if I read the report on the train.
The next day every paper had a serious amount of coverage of the release of the report (none mentioned the BBC that I recall). They mostly seemed to have stopped reading at the point where Byford commented about the seeming gap in Sutcliffe’s activities.
I ploughed on over the next couple of nights through the lamentable catalogue of failures and inadequacies, the missed opportunities and half arsed follow ups. By which time I’d very little doubt in my mind that the fairest outcome would have been if some of these guys had been in the dock alongside Sutcliffe charged with being accomplices.
Of course, none of that happened. This is after all ‘A Very British Crime Story’. No one was charged, no one was sacked, no one was disciplined. The report was kept under wraps. Wearside Jack was looked for a bit once Sutcliffe was jailed, then forgotten until about the same time as someone started asking questions about the report. A coincidence I’m sure.
Was it - as they say – a learning experience? Well I learned a great deal about the unpleasant actions of some unpleasant people. I learned a certain amount about the damage those actions left in their wake. I learned enough to point out what interventions could have kept some of those women alive. The wider lesson though, that officialdom tends to prioritise its own interests, was hardly something I needed taught. Whenever I think about it, I still get angry.
