TRANSKRYPCJA 🔗
WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.390 --> 00:00:05.230
The body had been lying there for two months, hidden
2
00:00:05.389 --> 00:00:09.769
under a discarded sofa on waste ground in the middle
3
00:00:09.869 --> 00:00:16.699
of Bradford. Two months! Women were walking past it every day,
4
00:00:17.300 --> 00:00:20.339
on their way to the shops, on their way to work.
5
00:00:21.379 --> 00:00:27.579
The biggest manhunt in British history was underway. Two hundred officers,
6
00:00:28.350 --> 00:00:33.340
and a killer was leaving bodies in plain sight. My
7
00:00:33.420 --> 00:00:37.840
name is Marcus, and this is Case Files. We are
8
00:00:37.920 --> 00:00:42.359
telling the complete story of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper,
9
00:00:42.939 --> 00:00:47.299
one episode at a time. Last time, we ended in
10
00:00:47.299 --> 00:00:54.149
1977 with a 16-year-old girl, Jane MacDonald, walking home from
11
00:00:54.210 --> 00:00:57.649
a night of dancing. and a city that had finally
12
00:00:57.770 --> 00:01:03.649
understood that no one was safe. Tonight, we enter 1978,
13
00:01:03.649 --> 00:01:09.780
the year the manhunt went wrong. But to understand 1978,
14
00:01:09.750 --> 00:01:12.159
we have to start a few months earlier, in October
15
00:01:12.219 --> 00:01:13.959
of 1977 in Manchester. Gene Jordan was 21 years old.
16
00:01:23.840 --> 00:01:27.120
She was last seen on the 1st of October in
17
00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:33.609
Manchester's Red Light District. Sutcliffe picked her up there. He
18
00:01:33.730 --> 00:01:37.489
killed Heard. He left her body in the allotments next
19
00:01:37.549 --> 00:01:41.329
to the Southern Cemetery. And then he made a mistake
20
00:01:41.390 --> 00:01:45.569
that should have ended everything. In one of her handbags,
21
00:01:45.969 --> 00:01:50.609
there was a brand new five-pound note. The police traced
22
00:01:50.689 --> 00:01:55.420
its serial number. Brand new banknotes are issued in sequence,
23
00:01:56.189 --> 00:01:59.510
so that note could be traced to the exact payroll
24
00:01:59.829 --> 00:02:03.069
of the exact firm where it had been handed out.
25
00:02:03.969 --> 00:02:09.330
That firm was a Yorkshire haulage company, T & W Clark.
26
00:02:10.490 --> 00:02:16.530
Peter Sutcliffe worked there. He was interviewed. He was interviewed twice.
27
00:02:17.530 --> 00:02:20.319
He told the police he had been at a housewarming
28
00:02:20.419 --> 00:02:24.340
party with his family on the night Gene Jordan died.
29
00:02:25.319 --> 00:02:31.689
It was a lie, and nobody checked it. He was released. Released!
30
00:02:32.810 --> 00:02:36.710
Let me say that again, because it matters. The police
31
00:02:36.789 --> 00:02:40.310
had him in the room. They had the banknote that
32
00:02:40.389 --> 00:02:45.370
pointed straight at him, and they let him... And there
33
00:02:45.449 --> 00:02:50.900
is a darker detail to Jean Jordan's story. Sutcliffe went
34
00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:55.879
back to her body. He went back days later looking
35
00:02:55.960 --> 00:03:00.550
for that five-pound note, terrified it would lead them to him.
36
00:03:01.550 --> 00:03:05.689
He tried to burn her body. He poured petrol over
37
00:03:05.770 --> 00:03:09.789
her and set her alight. Her body was not found
38
00:03:09.849 --> 00:03:15.430
until the 9th of October, badly burned. Even burning her
39
00:03:15.770 --> 00:03:20.259
did not stop him from being questioned. It was not enough.
40
00:03:21.400 --> 00:03:24.759
Nothing about this man was enough to make the police
41
00:03:24.879 --> 00:03:28.300
see him. Now we are in 1978. January, the 21st
42
00:03:28.319 --> 00:03:31.629
of January, 1978. Bradford. Yvonne Pearson was 22 years old.
43
00:03:31.689 --> 00:03:45.069
Sutcliffe attacked her with a hammer. He beat her to death,
44
00:03:45.590 --> 00:03:48.930
and then he hid her body. He dragged it onto
45
00:03:49.009 --> 00:03:52.979
waste ground near Lum Lane and shoved it underneath an old,
46
00:03:53.340 --> 00:03:59.639
disused sofa. Think about that, huh? A woman's body, hidden
47
00:03:59.759 --> 00:04:04.879
under furniture, on open ground, in a city where 200
48
00:04:04.879 --> 00:04:10.770
detectives were hunting a killer. And nobody found her. Not
49
00:04:10.849 --> 00:04:15.939
for two months. She was not discovered until the 26th
50
00:04:16.139 --> 00:04:22.199
of March, two months after she died. The manhunt had
51
00:04:22.319 --> 00:04:26.230
more men than ever, the files had more paper than ever,
52
00:04:27.110 --> 00:04:33.129
and still, the killer was invisible. Ten days after Yvonne
53
00:04:33.209 --> 00:04:37.449
Pearson died, he killed again. The 31st of January, 1978, Huddersfield,
54
00:04:37.470 --> 00:04:47.699
a new city. Helen Ritka was 18 years old. Sutcliffe
55
00:04:47.779 --> 00:04:50.899
met her near a pub, and she climbed into his car.
56
00:04:51.740 --> 00:04:54.660
As she climbed out at a timber yard on Great
57
00:04:54.759 --> 00:04:59.350
Northern Street, under the railway arches, he struck her on
58
00:04:59.389 --> 00:05:04.829
the head. Five blows. She tried to escape. She did
59
00:05:04.910 --> 00:05:09.350
not make it. Her body was found in the timber yard,
60
00:05:09.350 --> 00:05:14.790
18 years old. The killer was no longer staying in
61
00:05:14.910 --> 00:05:24.220
Leeds or Bradford. He was spreading. Manchester, Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds.
62
00:05:25.439 --> 00:05:30.680
Four cities now. Every new city meant a new police force,
63
00:05:31.430 --> 00:05:35.110
a new set of files, and more gaps for him
64
00:05:35.170 --> 00:05:44.459
to slip through. May. The 16th of May, 1978. Manchester again.
65
00:05:45.319 --> 00:05:50.540
Vera Millward was 40 years old, a mother of seven children.
66
00:05:51.560 --> 00:05:55.189
She told her boyfriend she was going out to buy cigarettes.
67
00:05:56.290 --> 00:06:01.149
She never came home. Sutcliffe attacked her on the grounds
68
00:06:01.209 --> 00:06:05.410
of the
Load full transcript
Manchester Royal Infirmary, hit her with a hammer,
69
00:06:06.149 --> 00:06:12.569
stabbed her. Vera fought back. She screamed. A man nearby
70
00:06:12.870 --> 00:06:17.889
heard her screams coming from the hospital grounds. And he
71
00:06:17.970 --> 00:06:21.670
did nothing. He assumed the cries were coming from a
72
00:06:21.769 --> 00:06:26.579
hospital patient. A woman was being killed within earshot of
73
00:06:26.639 --> 00:06:30.360
a hospital and a witness dismissed it as a patient
74
00:06:30.480 --> 00:06:34.980
in distress. Her body was found the next morning in
75
00:06:35.019 --> 00:06:39.850
the hospital car park. Vera Millward was the eighth woman
76
00:06:40.009 --> 00:06:46.810
Peter Sutcliffe had murdered. Eight women dead. Dozens more attacked.
77
00:06:47.680 --> 00:06:49.639
And here is the part of the story that should
78
00:06:49.720 --> 00:06:56.120
make you angry. The investigation was enormous. Two hundred officers.
79
00:06:56.939 --> 00:07:04.129
More than 130,000 people interviewed. Statements taken, door to door,
80
00:07:04.490 --> 00:07:09.089
day after day. It was the largest manhunt in British
81
00:07:09.189 --> 00:07:14.750
police history. And it was going wrong. The task force
82
00:07:14.800 --> 00:07:18.959
was led by George Oldfield, an assistant chief constable from
83
00:07:19.060 --> 00:07:23.500
West Yorkshire. Oldfield was convinced he knew what the killer
84
00:07:23.560 --> 00:07:27.740
looked like. The investigation had built a profile, and then
85
00:07:27.800 --> 00:07:32.449
it built its entire world around that profile. Officers were
86
00:07:32.509 --> 00:07:35.230
told what kind of man to look for, and they
87
00:07:35.290 --> 00:07:40.310
looked for him with total confidence. That confidence became tunnel vision.
88
00:07:41.089 --> 00:07:46.000
Anyone who did not fit the picture was filtered out, questioned, checked,
89
00:07:46.319 --> 00:07:53.000
and cleared, including Peter Sutcliffe. He was not questioned once.
90
00:07:53.879 --> 00:08:01.000
He was questioned again and again across the years, stopped, interviewed,
91
00:08:01.470 --> 00:08:07.959
checked against lists, and released every single time. He drove
92
00:08:08.040 --> 00:08:11.800
a car that matched the tire tracks. He had worked
93
00:08:11.839 --> 00:08:15.839
at the firm the five-pound note was traced to. He
94
00:08:15.879 --> 00:08:18.259
had been at the red light districts where the women
95
00:08:18.300 --> 00:08:22.680
were picked up. He sat in police interview rooms, and
96
00:08:22.720 --> 00:08:27.579
he walked out of them over and over. There is
97
00:08:27.639 --> 00:08:32.870
a word for this in policing— confirmation bias. Once the
98
00:08:32.919 --> 00:08:37.610
investigation had decided what the killer was, everything that did
99
00:08:37.669 --> 00:08:42.389
not fit was thrown away. The detectives were not lazy,
100
00:08:43.029 --> 00:08:50.820
they were drowning. 30,000 statements. Every murder generated thousands of pages.
101
00:08:51.759 --> 00:08:55.460
Every lead had to be checked by hand, by telephone,
102
00:08:55.860 --> 00:08:59.860
on foot, In a flood of paper, the real killer
103
00:09:00.120 --> 00:09:04.000
looked like one more name on one more list. He
104
00:09:04.059 --> 00:09:07.919
was interviewed so many times that he stopped being frightening.
105
00:09:08.639 --> 00:09:15.240
He became familiar. He became nobody. By the middle of 1978,
106
00:09:15.240 --> 00:09:20.600
the police were exhausted and the public was furious. Eight
107
00:09:20.759 --> 00:09:25.980
women murdered, the killer questioned and released. Women across the
108
00:09:26.080 --> 00:09:29.179
north of England were afraid to walk home after dark,
109
00:09:30.039 --> 00:09:33.600
and the investigation that was supposed to protect them was
110
00:09:33.759 --> 00:09:38.620
chasing its own tail. Oldfield's team kept digging in the
111
00:09:38.740 --> 00:09:45.789
same direction, deeper and deeper, while Sutcliffe kept killing. Remember
112
00:09:45.830 --> 00:09:54.740
their names. Jean Jordan, 21. Yvonne Pearson, 22. hidden under
113
00:09:54.820 --> 00:10:04.159
a sofa for two months. Helen Ritka, 18. 18. Vera Millward, 40.
114
00:10:04.559 --> 00:10:08.879
A mother of seven who fought back and screamed and
115
00:10:08.940 --> 00:10:13.440
was not heard. The manhunt had 200 officers and 130,000 interviews,
116
00:10:18.529 --> 00:10:21.269
It had the killer in the room more than once,
117
00:10:22.070 --> 00:10:25.370
and it let him go. That is not a failure
118
00:10:25.429 --> 00:10:30.330
of effort. It is a failure of imagination. And before
119
00:10:30.389 --> 00:10:35.570
the police could fix it, something worse arrived. A letter,
120
00:10:36.789 --> 00:10:43.309
in a strange accent, from a man calling himself Jack.
121
00:10:44.809 --> 00:10:50.480
Next time on Case Files, the hoax that broke the investigation.
122
00:10:51.460 --> 00:10:55.559
Three letters, a cassette tape, and a voice from Wearside
123
00:10:55.820 --> 00:10:59.779
that sent the entire manhunt to the wrong city for
124
00:10:59.830 --> 00:11:03.230
a year and a half. That is next time. I
125
00:11:04.830 --> 00:11:10.889
am Marcus. Case Files continues daily, one complete case every season.