TRANSCRIPTION 🔗
WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.410 --> 00:00:04.440
The post room of the West Yorkshire Police Headquarters on
2
00:00:04.500 --> 00:00:11.580
a summer morning in 1979. A padded envelope. Inside, an
3
00:00:11.800 --> 00:00:17.339
ordinary audio cassette. A detective carries it upstairs, into the
4
00:00:17.480 --> 00:00:20.579
office of the man in charge of the biggest manhunt
5
00:00:20.699 --> 00:00:25.620
in British history. He slides the cassette into a tape player.
6
00:00:26.519 --> 00:00:31.750
He presses play. A voice fills the room, a slow,
7
00:00:31.910 --> 00:00:37.670
mocking voice in a heavy northeast accent. I am Jack.
8
00:00:38.530 --> 00:00:42.310
I see you are having no luck catching me. The
9
00:00:42.350 --> 00:00:48.770
detective stops the tape, and in that moment, the investigation turns.
10
00:00:49.950 --> 00:00:54.619
It turns away from the killer, and the killer keeps killing.
11
00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:00.740
My name is Marcus, and this is Case Files. We
12
00:01:00.799 --> 00:01:05.560
are telling the complete story of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper,
13
00:01:06.219 --> 00:01:12.540
one episode at a time. Last time, we ended in 1978,
14
00:01:12.620 --> 00:01:17.109
with the Manhunt questioning and releasing the real killer again
15
00:01:17.310 --> 00:01:22.209
and again. Tonight, we meet the man who never killed anyone,
16
00:01:22.810 --> 00:01:26.930
but who may have blood on his hands anyway. This
17
00:01:27.489 --> 00:01:33.280
is the story of Wearside Jack, the hoax that derailed everything.
18
00:01:34.659 --> 00:01:40.280
We have to go back a year, March 1978. A
19
00:01:40.379 --> 00:01:45.519
letter arrives at West Yorkshire Police, postmarked in Sunderland, a
20
00:01:45.620 --> 00:01:50.000
city to the northeast. It is addressed to George Oldfield,
21
00:01:50.400 --> 00:01:55.900
the assistant chief constable running the Ripper investigation. The writer
22
00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:00.069
claims to be the killer. He taunts the police. He
23
00:02:00.129 --> 00:02:03.629
gives details about the murders that are supposed to prove
24
00:02:03.709 --> 00:02:07.349
he is the real thing. That letter arrived on the
25
00:02:07.670 --> 00:02:14.349
8th of March, 1978. Then came more. Between that March
26
00:02:14.650 --> 00:02:20.250
and the end of June, 1979, three letters arrived in total.
27
00:02:20.930 --> 00:02:25.960
Two went directly to Oldfield. One went to the Daily Mirror.
28
00:02:26.439 --> 00:02:31.020
a major national newspaper. Each one claimed to be from
29
00:02:31.060 --> 00:02:35.460
the Yorkshire Ripper. Each one mocked the police for failing
30
00:02:35.500 --> 00:02:40.090
to catch him. And here is the detail that should
31
00:02:40.099 --> 00:02:45.750
have made every detective stop and think. The letters mentioned
32
00:02:45.810 --> 00:02:51.409
a 1975 murder in Preston, the killing of a woman
33
00:02:51.750 --> 00:02:57.110
named Jean Harrison. The police had wondered whether that killing
34
Load full transcript
00:02:57.169 --> 00:03:02.490
was part of the Ripper's series. That looked like inside knowledge.
35
00:03:03.370 --> 00:03:08.330
But years later, DNA testing proved the Preston killing was
36
00:03:08.430 --> 00:03:12.599
done by a completely different man, and the details in
37
00:03:12.659 --> 00:03:18.180
those letters had already appeared in newspapers. The writer was
38
00:03:18.280 --> 00:03:22.379
not the killer. He was a reader. He was just
39
00:03:22.539 --> 00:03:27.840
reading the news and pretending. But the police did not
40
00:03:28.020 --> 00:03:32.370
see it that way. Not at first, not with the letters.
41
00:03:33.469 --> 00:03:40.189
And then, on the 17th of June, 1979, the cassette arrived.
42
00:03:41.069 --> 00:03:45.849
The voice on the tape was unmistakable, a wear-side accent
43
00:03:46.150 --> 00:03:51.030
from the Sunderland area.' I am Jack,' I see you
44
00:03:51.090 --> 00:03:54.490
are having no luck catching me. I have the greatest
45
00:03:54.550 --> 00:03:58.259
respect for you, George, but, Lord, you are no nearer
46
00:03:58.360 --> 00:04:01.620
catching me now than four years ago when I started.
47
00:04:02.740 --> 00:04:07.240
That is what the voice said. George. He called the
48
00:04:07.280 --> 00:04:11.740
head of the investigation by his first name. It was intimate.
49
00:04:12.800 --> 00:04:18.970
It was insulting. And Oldfield believed it was real. the
50
00:04:19.050 --> 00:04:24.629
entire machinery of the investigation pivoted. Remember the scale of
51
00:04:24.670 --> 00:04:30.209
this manhunt. Two hundred officers, more than one hundred and
52
00:04:30.329 --> 00:04:35.620
thirty thousand interviews, and now all of it turned toward
53
00:04:35.660 --> 00:04:41.579
the northeast, toward Sunderland. Detectives were told to look for
54
00:04:41.639 --> 00:04:46.699
a man with that accent. Men with Northeast accents were interviewed,
55
00:04:47.259 --> 00:04:50.300
then eliminated on the basis of the tape and the
56
00:04:50.379 --> 00:04:55.360
handwriting in the letters. The accent became the single most
57
00:04:55.439 --> 00:05:00.420
important clue in the case. The real killer, Peter Sutcliffe,
58
00:05:00.980 --> 00:05:05.290
spoke with a West Yorkshire accent. He did not sound
59
00:05:05.350 --> 00:05:08.569
like the voice on the tape at all. And that,
60
00:05:09.189 --> 00:05:14.629
in a twisted way, is what protected him. Now, this
61
00:05:14.709 --> 00:05:18.529
is the part that is hard to forgive. Experts raised
62
00:05:18.629 --> 00:05:23.899
the alarm early. Two of Britain's top linguists examined the
63
00:05:23.959 --> 00:05:28.600
letters and the tape, Stanley Ellis and Jack Windsor Lewis,
64
00:05:29.300 --> 00:05:32.740
and they told the police the tape was probably a hoax.
65
00:05:33.720 --> 00:05:38.019
The voice did not fit the crimes. Where side Jack
66
00:05:38.339 --> 00:05:42.560
and the Yorkshire Ripper were almost certainly two different people.
67
00:05:43.709 --> 00:05:47.850
A profiler from the American FBI said much the same thing.
68
00:05:48.930 --> 00:05:53.149
The warnings were on the table. Oldfield and his team
69
00:05:53.550 --> 00:05:59.509
set them aside. Think about what that decision cost. While
70
00:05:59.540 --> 00:06:04.680
the investigation chased an accent in Sunderland, the real killer
71
00:06:04.740 --> 00:06:12.519
was free in Yorkshire. In April 1979, Sutcliffe murdered Josephine Whitaker,
72
00:06:13.250 --> 00:06:20.980
a 19-year-old bank clerk walking home in Halifax. In September 1979,
73
00:06:20.980 --> 00:06:27.120
he murdered Barbara Leach, a 20-year-old student in Bradford. These
74
00:06:27.199 --> 00:06:31.220
women died while detectives were listening to a tape recorded
75
00:06:31.319 --> 00:06:36.620
in a kitchen in Sunderland. Investigators now estimate the hoax
76
00:06:36.699 --> 00:06:43.689
delayed Sutcliffe's capture by around 18 months. 18 months. That
77
00:06:43.750 --> 00:06:48.620
is 18 months of a killer walking free. And the
78
00:06:48.720 --> 00:06:54.180
man behind the voice knew exactly what was happening. His
79
00:06:54.279 --> 00:06:59.750
name was John Samuel Humble. He was born on the
80
00:07:00.029 --> 00:07:06.629
8th of January, 1956, in Sunderland. He was a laborer.
81
00:07:07.560 --> 00:07:11.100
He did not know the killer. He had never met him.
82
00:07:12.319 --> 00:07:16.870
He borrowed his brother's tape recorder, sat in his messy kitchen,
83
00:07:17.430 --> 00:07:22.310
recorded that message, and posted it to the police. And
84
00:07:22.370 --> 00:07:27.670
the biggest manhunt in British history bent itself around his voice.
85
00:07:29.170 --> 00:07:33.240
It could not last. Humble began to understand what he
86
00:07:33.300 --> 00:07:39.660
had done. Every radio, every newspaper, every television was talking
87
00:07:39.720 --> 00:07:46.410
about Wearside Jack. It was his voice, his joke. And then,
88
00:07:47.569 --> 00:07:54.230
another murder happened. On the 14th of September, 1979, at
89
00:07:54.410 --> 00:07:59.310
five in the afternoon, Humble called the Sunderland police station.
90
00:08:00.329 --> 00:08:03.939
He told them the truth. The letters were a hoax.
91
00:08:04.819 --> 00:08:08.139
The tape was a hoax. He was not the Ripper.
92
00:08:09.339 --> 00:08:14.019
He gave no name. He gave no address. He hung up.
93
00:08:15.730 --> 00:08:18.949
And here is the cruel irony of this whole story.
94
00:08:19.670 --> 00:08:23.230
The police had decided his fake letters and his fake
95
00:08:23.329 --> 00:08:27.149
tape were genuine. And now, when he called to tell
96
00:08:27.189 --> 00:08:32.509
the truth, they decided the truth was fake. His confession
97
00:08:32.590 --> 00:08:36.929
was dismissed. The voice of Wearside Jack stayed at the
98
00:08:37.049 --> 00:08:43.110
center of the investigation. And John Humble stayed free, carrying
99
00:08:43.169 --> 00:08:47.360
the secret of what he had done. He carried that
100
00:08:47.480 --> 00:08:53.399
secret for more than 25 years. Then, DNA caught up
101
00:08:53.460 --> 00:08:56.720
with him. A fragment of an envelope from one of
102
00:08:56.779 --> 00:09:00.799
his letters was tested with DNA techniques that did not
103
00:09:00.879 --> 00:09:07.279
exist in 1979. The DNA matched a sample the police
104
00:09:07.320 --> 00:09:14.519
had taken from Humble back in 2001. In March 2006,
105
00:09:14.519 --> 00:09:18.370
he stood in court and pleaded guilty to four counts
106
00:09:18.450 --> 00:09:23.090
of perverting the course of justice. He was sentenced to
107
00:09:23.289 --> 00:09:28.240
eight years in prison. The judge condemned him openly for
108
00:09:28.299 --> 00:09:33.039
derailing one of the biggest murder investigations in British history.
109
00:09:34.169 --> 00:09:39.240
He was released in 2009. He died on the 30th
110
00:09:39.279 --> 00:09:46.200
of July, 2019, at the age of 63. So, let
111
00:09:46.259 --> 00:09:50.500
us be clear about what the hoax really was. It
112
00:09:50.559 --> 00:09:54.629
was not just three letters and a tape. It was
113
00:09:54.629 --> 00:09:59.730
18 months of a killer's freedom, bought with a voice
114
00:09:59.929 --> 00:10:05.299
on a cassette. It was expert warnings ignored because the
115
00:10:05.379 --> 00:10:09.620
man in charge had fallen for a taunt. It was
116
00:10:09.700 --> 00:10:13.940
a manhunt that learned the wrong lessons from the wrong man,
117
00:10:14.759 --> 00:10:18.929
while the right man walked out of interview rooms again
118
00:10:19.370 --> 00:10:23.669
and again. And it is a reminder of something that
119
00:10:23.750 --> 00:10:28.500
runs through this whole case. The police were not defeated
120
00:10:28.860 --> 00:10:35.460
by a criminal mastermind. Peter Sutcliffe was an ordinary, careless
121
00:10:35.559 --> 00:10:41.340
man who made mistakes. The police were defeated again and
122
00:10:41.419 --> 00:10:47.350
again by their own certainty. Certainty about where the killer
123
00:10:47.450 --> 00:10:53.000
came from. and certainty for 18 months about the voice
124
00:10:53.070 --> 00:10:59.090
of a man from Sunderland who never killed anyone. Next time,
125
00:10:59.350 --> 00:11:05.190
The Final Victims, 1979 into 1980. The women the killer
126
00:11:05.250 --> 00:11:10.149
took while the investigation chased a ghost. And the survivors,
127
00:11:10.529 --> 00:11:14.169
the women who fought back and lived. I am Marcus.
128
00:11:14.600 --> 00:11:17.820
This is Case Files. We will see you tomorrow.