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The post room of the West Yorkshire Police Headquarters on
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a summer morning in 1979. A padded envelope. Inside, an
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ordinary audio cassette. A detective carries it upstairs, into the
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office of the man in charge of the biggest manhunt
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in British history. He slides the cassette into a tape player.
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He presses play. A voice fills the room, a slow,
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mocking voice in a heavy northeast accent. I am Jack.
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I see you are having no luck catching me. The
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detective stops the tape, and in that moment, the investigation turns.
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It turns away from the killer, and the killer keeps killing.
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My name is Marcus, and this is Case Files. We
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are telling the complete story of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper,
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one episode at a time. Last time, we ended in 1978,
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with the Manhunt questioning and releasing the real killer again
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and again. Tonight, we meet the man who never killed anyone,
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but who may have blood on his hands anyway. This
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is the story of Wearside Jack, the hoax that derailed everything.
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We have to go back a year, March 1978. A
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letter arrives at West Yorkshire Police, postmarked in Sunderland, a
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city to the northeast. It is addressed to George Oldfield,
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the assistant chief constable running the Ripper investigation. The writer
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claims to be the killer. He taunts the police. He
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gives details about the murders that are supposed to prove
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he is the real thing. That letter arrived on the
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8th of March, 1978. Then came more. Between that March
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and the end of June, 1979, three letters arrived in total.
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Two went directly to Oldfield. One went to the Daily Mirror.
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a major national newspaper. Each one claimed to be from
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the Yorkshire Ripper. Each one mocked the police for failing
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to catch him. And here is the detail that should
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have made every detective stop and think. The letters mentioned
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a 1975 murder in Preston, the killing of a woman
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named Jean Harrison. The police had wondered whether that killing
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Load full transcript
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was part of the Ripper's series. That looked like inside knowledge.
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But years later, DNA testing proved the Preston killing was
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done by a completely different man, and the details in
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those letters had already appeared in newspapers. The writer was
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not the killer. He was a reader. He was just
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reading the news and pretending. But the police did not
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see it that way. Not at first, not with the letters.
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And then, on the 17th of June, 1979, the cassette arrived.
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The voice on the tape was unmistakable, a wear-side accent
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from the Sunderland area.' I am Jack,' I see you
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are having no luck catching me. I have the greatest
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respect for you, George, but, Lord, you are no nearer
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catching me now than four years ago when I started.
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That is what the voice said. George. He called the
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head of the investigation by his first name. It was intimate.
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It was insulting. And Oldfield believed it was real. the
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entire machinery of the investigation pivoted. Remember the scale of
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this manhunt. Two hundred officers, more than one hundred and
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thirty thousand interviews, and now all of it turned toward
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the northeast, toward Sunderland. Detectives were told to look for
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a man with that accent. Men with Northeast accents were interviewed,
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then eliminated on the basis of the tape and the
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handwriting in the letters. The accent became the single most
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important clue in the case. The real killer, Peter Sutcliffe,
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spoke with a West Yorkshire accent. He did not sound
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like the voice on the tape at all. And that,
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in a twisted way, is what protected him. Now, this
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is the part that is hard to forgive. Experts raised
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the alarm early. Two of Britain's top linguists examined the
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letters and the tape, Stanley Ellis and Jack Windsor Lewis,
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and they told the police the tape was probably a hoax.
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The voice did not fit the crimes. Where side Jack
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and the Yorkshire Ripper were almost certainly two different people.
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A profiler from the American FBI said much the same thing.
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The warnings were on the table. Oldfield and his team
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set them aside. Think about what that decision cost. While
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the investigation chased an accent in Sunderland, the real killer
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was free in Yorkshire. In April 1979, Sutcliffe murdered Josephine Whitaker,
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a 19-year-old bank clerk walking home in Halifax. In September 1979,
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he murdered Barbara Leach, a 20-year-old student in Bradford. These
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women died while detectives were listening to a tape recorded
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in a kitchen in Sunderland. Investigators now estimate the hoax
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delayed Sutcliffe's capture by around 18 months. 18 months. That
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is 18 months of a killer walking free. And the
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man behind the voice knew exactly what was happening. His
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name was John Samuel Humble. He was born on the
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8th of January, 1956, in Sunderland. He was a laborer.
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He did not know the killer. He had never met him.
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He borrowed his brother's tape recorder, sat in his messy kitchen,
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recorded that message, and posted it to the police. And
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the biggest manhunt in British history bent itself around his voice.
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It could not last. Humble began to understand what he
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had done. Every radio, every newspaper, every television was talking
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about Wearside Jack. It was his voice, his joke. And then,
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another murder happened. On the 14th of September, 1979, at
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five in the afternoon, Humble called the Sunderland police station.
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He told them the truth. The letters were a hoax.
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The tape was a hoax. He was not the Ripper.
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He gave no name. He gave no address. He hung up.
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And here is the cruel irony of this whole story.
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The police had decided his fake letters and his fake
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tape were genuine. And now, when he called to tell
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the truth, they decided the truth was fake. His confession
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was dismissed. The voice of Wearside Jack stayed at the
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center of the investigation. And John Humble stayed free, carrying
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the secret of what he had done. He carried that
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secret for more than 25 years. Then, DNA caught up
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with him. A fragment of an envelope from one of
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his letters was tested with DNA techniques that did not
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exist in 1979. The DNA matched a sample the police
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had taken from Humble back in 2001. In March 2006,
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he stood in court and pleaded guilty to four counts
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of perverting the course of justice. He was sentenced to
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eight years in prison. The judge condemned him openly for
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derailing one of the biggest murder investigations in British history.
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He was released in 2009. He died on the 30th
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of July, 2019, at the age of 63. So, let
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us be clear about what the hoax really was. It
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was not just three letters and a tape. It was
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18 months of a killer's freedom, bought with a voice
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on a cassette. It was expert warnings ignored because the
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man in charge had fallen for a taunt. It was
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a manhunt that learned the wrong lessons from the wrong man,
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while the right man walked out of interview rooms again
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and again. And it is a reminder of something that
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runs through this whole case. The police were not defeated
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by a criminal mastermind. Peter Sutcliffe was an ordinary, careless
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man who made mistakes. The police were defeated again and
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again by their own certainty. Certainty about where the killer
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came from. and certainty for 18 months about the voice
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of a man from Sunderland who never killed anyone. Next time,
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The Final Victims, 1979 into 1980. The women the killer
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took while the investigation chased a ghost. And the survivors,
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the women who fought back and lived. I am Marcus.
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This is Case Files. We will see you tomorrow.