Thirty thousand statements, a quarter of a million names, millions of car license plates, but not a single computer. They had barely been invented.
All information the detectives gathered was manually recorded and stored on handwritten index cards. Was it any wonder Ripper Squad was overwhelmed with paperwork?
The floor of the incident room at Millgarth Police Station in Leeds city center had to be reinforced to support 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 maimed and murdered, clues pointing to Peter Sutcliffe grew within that enormous pile of evidence.
He was questioned by the police nine times, his car was seen 60 times in red zones where the Ripper prowled around looking for victims. It was all there in that clogged 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 obstacle to the investigation. of the Ripper.
“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 rating system allowed Peter Sutcliffe to continually slip through the net.”
But it wasn’t just the avalanche of paperwork that engulfed detectives and delayed them so long in identifying the killer.
They were also surprised by a troublemaker known as “Wearside Jack”, who posed as the killer on the loose 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 killed. caught.
John Humble, for reasons best known to himself, sent false letters and an audio tape that convinced the police that they should search 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 persuade senior detectives that “Jack” was a brazen fake. Humble was unmasked years later and imprisoned.
The Ripper case was also doomed by accusations of misogyny, as police were convinced Sutcliffe was only targeting prostitutes. Victims who were not sex workers were initially not taken into account.
That idea was brought to Sutcliffe’s trial by prosecutor Sir Michael Havers, the attorney general, who said of the victims: “Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that others were not.
“The last six attacks were against totally respectable women.”
Sir Lawrence Byford’s compelling report led to major changes in policing, particularly the development of a computer system that much better collated information and facilitated cross-referencing.
It also gave all police stations access to various databases.
