Thirty thousand declarations, a quarter of a million names, millions of car license plates, but not a single computer. They had barely been invented.
All the information the detectives gathered was recorded and stored manually on handwritten index cards. Was it any wonder the Ripper squad was overwhelmed by paperwork?
The floor of the incident room at Millgarth police station in Leeds city centre had to be reinforced to withstand the weight of the files in their cardboard boxes. Imagine if there had been a flood or a fire.
Over five years, as more women were mutilated and murdered, clues pointing to Peter Sutcliffe grew within that enormous pile of evidence.
The police questioned him nine times, his car was seen sixty times in the red-light districts where the Ripper lurked for victims. It was all there, in that congested system.
West Yorkshire Police were clearly unprepared for the scale of the investigation, as the elusive serial killer wielded hammers, knives and screwdrivers across the north of England.
But don’t take my word for it – read the damning words of the late Sir Lawrence Byford in his 1982 report on the police handling of the investigation, in which he wrote: “The ineffectiveness of the major incident room was a serious handicap to the Ripper investigation.
“While it should have been the effective nerve center of the entire police operation, the accumulation of raw information resulted in an inability to connect vital pieces of related information.
He continued: “This serious flaw in the central indexing system allowed Peter Sutcliffe to continually slip through the net.”
But it wasn’t just the avalanche of paperwork that overwhelmed detectives and delayed them for so long in identifying the killer.
They were also surprised by a troublemaker known as “Wearside Jack”, who posed as the loose killer and led them, for more than a year, on a wild goose chase that gave Sutcliffe time to kill three more women before he was caught.
John Humble, for reasons best known to himself, sent fake letters and an audio tape that convinced police they should be looking for a man with a Sunderland accent, despite conflicting evidence from some Ripper survivors.
Sutcliffe should have risen to the top of the list of suspects, but instead he was slipping down due to his West Yorkshire accent and kept killing.
It took an FBI criminal profiler and the squad’s own dialect analysts to finally convince senior detectives that “Jack” was a brazen prankster. Years later, Humble was unmasked and imprisoned.
The Ripper case was also plagued by accusations of misogyny, as police were convinced that Sutcliffe only targeted prostitutes. Victims who were not sex workers were initially ignored.
That thought was carried into Sutcliffe’s trial by prosecutor Sir Michael Havers, the solicitor general, who said of the victims: “Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not.
“The last six attacks were against perfectly respectable women.”
Sir Lawrence Byford’s damning report led to major changes in the police, including the development of a computer system that collated information much better and made it easier to cross-reference.
It also gave all police stations access to various databases.
