TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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She was 20 years old, an English student who believed
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in second chances. On the evening of the 17th of November, 1980,
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Jaclyn Hill stepped off a bus in Headingley, Leeds. Her
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student home was a few hundred feet away. She had
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just come from a meeting about volunteering for the probation service.
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work she had chosen because she believed broken people could
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be put back together. She walked the last stretch home
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through the dark. She never made it. The police who
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found her on Alma Road already knew what the country
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would say. Thirteen dead, five years of hunting, and the
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Yorkshire Ripper was still out there, still walking the same streets,
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still free. This is the story of his final victims,
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the ones who died while the police were looking in
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the wrong direction. But to understand the end, you have
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to go back to the spring of 1979. The hoaxer
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had already sent his tape. The man calling himself Jack
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had already pointed 200 detectives towards Sunderland. and while the
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real investigation chased a ghost with a wear side accent,
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a 19-year-old clerk walked across a park in Halifax. Josephine
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Whitaker worked at the Halifax Building Society. On the 4th
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of April, 1979, she visited her grandparents, the way she
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always did, and stayed a while the way granddaughters do.
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Then she walked home across Savile Park as the evening
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light went. She took a shortcut through the dark. She
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was nineteen. She had her whole life stacked neatly ahead
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of her, like the ledgers she kept at work. The
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hammer fell, and it all stopped there. When her body
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was found, something had changed. Josephine was not walking any
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street late at night. She was a bank clerk crossing
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a park. And for the first time, ordinary families in
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Yorkshire started doing a new kind of arithmetic. If she
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was not safe, who was? Five months later, Barbara Leach
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left a pub in Bradford with her friends. She was 20,
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a social sciences student at Bradford University. Bright, funny, The
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kind of young woman whose friends still talk about her
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laugh decades later. She never came home that night. Her
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body was found in a backyard on Ash Grove, hidden
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under a piece of carpet. The 1st of September, 1979.
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Another student. Another life the city of Bradford could not
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explain to itself. Do you see what was happening? The
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old story the police told themselves was falling apart. For years,
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the force had comforted itself with a profile. The victims,
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they said, were women who walked certain streets. Women you
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could warn. Women you could blame for being there. But
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Josephine Whitaker was a building society clerk. Barbara Leach was
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a university student. The profile was dead, and the terror
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had no edges anymore. Every daughter in Yorkshire was a
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possible target now. Every parent in Yorkshire knew it. The
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country felt it in its bones. Women stopped walking alone
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after dark, in towns where their grandmothers had walked freely.
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Taxi queues stretched around the block in Leeds and Bradford.
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Self-defence classes filled up. And every morning, the newspapers asked
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the same question in bigger and blacker type. The Ripper.
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The Ripper. The Ripper. He had a nickname now, borrowed
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from a killer a century dead, and it sat on
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the front page like a brand. And still, the machine
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ground on in the wrong direction. The Ripper squad was
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still asking men to read the hoaxer's letters aloud. still
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listening for the wear-side accent, still discounting suspects whose voices
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did not match a tape made by a man who
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had never killed anyone. Peter Sutcliffe had already been interviewed,
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already released. The system had touched him and let him go.
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Then came the summer of 1980 and the strangest murder
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of all. Marguerite Walls was 47, a civil servant at
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the Department of Education in Pudsey, a steady, respected woman
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who never missed a day of work. She worked late
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on the 20th of August, 1980, and walked home to
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Farsley through the evening, the way she had done a
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hundred times. Her body was found in the garden of
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a house called Claremont, on New Street. She had been
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strangled with a rope. Strangled, not struck with a hammer.
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And that difference, that one small difference in method, meant
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the police did not connect her death to the Ripper
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at all. The strangler of Farsley was filed away as
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a separate crime. It was only later, when Sutcliffe himself confessed,
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that the truth came out. He had killed her too.
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The investigators had his 13th victim sitting in a different drawer,
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and they never opened it. Think about that for a moment.
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The most expensive manhunt in British history. Tens of thousands
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of interviews, and a victim was right there, in their
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own files, unrecognized. Because the profile said Hammer, and this
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one was rope. In the autumn of 1980, he struck
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twice more, and twice his victims lived. Upadhyabandhara, 34, was
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attacked in September. She survived. In November, Teresa Sykes, 16
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years old, was struck with a hammer in Huddersfield. 16.
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A schoolgirl. she survived too two living witnesses two people
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who had looked at him and lived to describe him
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and still the net did not close by now the
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public mood had turned from fear to fury five years
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thirteen dead with a fourteenth and fifteenth attack in the
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same autumn Newspapers were openly mocking the investigation. Women were
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marching in the streets of Leeds. The police were offering
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bigger rewards, holding bigger press conferences and chasing the same
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wrong accent. In living rooms across Yorkshire, people were asking
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the question the police could not answer. How is he
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still free? And that is the terrible truth. at the
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heart of this story. It was not that the killer
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was a genius. It was that the hunters had blinded themselves.
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A fake tape, a fake accent, a fake letter, a
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whole investigation bent around a fiction, while a real man
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with a real hammer kept walking home past real police stations.
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On the 17th of November, 1980, Jacqueline Hill believed in
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second chances enough to volunteer for the probation service. She
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believed people could change. The man waiting in the dark
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on Alma Road did not. He took her life a
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few hundred feet from safety, and she became the 13th
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and final name on the list. 13 women. Wilma. Emily. Irene. Patricia. Jane. Jean. Yvonne. Helen. Vera. Josephine. Barbara. Marguerite. Jacqueline.
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13 names. 13 families. 13 empty chairs and a country
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that had stopped asking when he would be caught and
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Started asking how he had been free for so long
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But the end was closer than anyone knew The man
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who had walked free for five years was about to
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make the smallest, most ordinary mistake of his life. A
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routine stop. A false number plate. A quiet street in
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Sheffield in the first days of a new year. Next time,
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the arrest. Next time, the confession. Next time, the trial
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that finally put a name and a face to the terror.
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I am Marcus. This is Case Files. New episodes daily.