One thing that struck me in particular about the documentary was how much society has changed in the last 40 years; much more so that in the previous 40, I'll hazard. I'm not talking in the obvious terms of technology (there's no way Sutcliffe would have got to murder two or three today with ANPR, GPS and CCTV being so ubiquitous), or even the naked misogyny, but rather the people and the way they conducted themselves.
I was especially struck by the dignified if somewhat emotionally repressed way that Barbara Leach's mother, Beryl, talked about her daughter's murder, both immediately afterwards and following the conviction. Her father too, talking about that dress. Same went for another set of parents being interviewed. There's a stoicism that the working class/lower middle class used to possess which seems a million miles away from the way people are today. Don't think hiding your emotions is necessarily good or healthy, but there certainly was a dignity to it which I found admirable when watching the programme.
That's an interesting and very accurate observation. Mr and Mrs Leach reminded me a little of my grandparents, actually, though they were of a younger generation than my grandparents were. You could tell that they were devastated by what had happened to their daughter and I'm sure they showed their emotion in private, but in public they maintained a kind of quiet stoicism. 'Dignity' is absolutely the mot juste, and it's certainly far less prevalent in modern society.
He killed 3 and attacked several more after the hoax tape
The hoaxer rang the police a few weeks after its exposure and told them it was a hoax , one of the documentaries has the phone call
The tape was only taken seriously cos one of the earlier letters said the next victim would be older and by coincidence she was (Vera Millward 40 Manchester 1978) the letter writer also had same rare blood group as Sutcliffe.
He did ring the police and say it was a hoax, but unfortunately he didn't give them any details. Some random guy calling in from a payphone saying that the tape wasn't genuine, which is what he did, doesn't in itself provide much in the way of grounds the police to change their attitude.
I think the three initial letters sent in 1978 and 1979 were worth at least not dismissing. The writer did promise in March 1978 not just that the next victim would be an "old slut" but that he killing would take place in Manchester or Liverpool, cities in which a total of one woman had been killed between them to that point. He seemed to claim responsibility for the killing of Joan Harrison in Preston in November 1975, which the police thought would be unusual for a crank letter, while he referred to details of Vera Millward's murder that weren't widely publicly known.
Despite what the detective Keith Hellawell said on the documentary, I don't think credibility was necessarily destroyed even the fact that he omitted Yvonne Pearson's murder from his claimed tally when she was already dead but her body remained undiscovered. That murder was different in terms of lacking the hallmarks of Sutcliffe's style because it was opportunistic when he was driving home rather than occurring when he'd deliberately gone out to commit a murder. Thus he didn't have his usual tools with him when Pearson crossed his path. As a result, she didn't have hammer blows to the head or stab wounds, and it was months before detectives linked this one to the series of killings, having originally not done so.
However, when the tape arrived, it should have been obvious that it, and therefore the letters, could at the very least well be a hoax. There are various reasons for this:
- First, Oldfield believed that the possible Ripper link to Joan Harrison and the fact referred to in the letters relating to the Millward murder hadn't been discussed in the media, so only the actual killer would know the latter. He was simply wrong about that, as better research would have shown him.
- Second, while the writer and maker of the cassette didn't include the Yvonne Pearson murder in the Ripper's tally in March 1978, he did in the 1979 tape, so was then claiming responsibility for a murder he presumably hadn't known about when it occurred.
- Third, by this point, police had identified several women who'd been attacked from the summer of 1975 onwards by the man committing the murders and who'd survived. All were adamant that the attacker didn't have a north-east accent. The tape made obvious that the man who sent it was actually a Wearsider as opposed to simply sending missives when away from his normal area in order to deceive police as to his origins. That accent would have been an incredibly distinctive feature to the survivors and not one actually mentioned it.
- Fourth, it was obvious from the patterns of the killings and attacks that the perpetrator lived in the Bradford or Leeds area. Someone there in that period with such an accent would have stood out like a sore thumb, and would surely have been brought to police attention very quickly. (I feel sorry for any man with a north-east accent living in West Yorkshire at the time - they must have received an awful lot of stick).
I believe (I think I read it in Bilton's book) that the fact of the tape being received was leaked before the senior detectives had decided what approach to take with it. They then felt they had no choice but to go public, because if the media then reported they'd sat on potential evidence like that, there'd have been a huge outcry.
Be that as it may. But it was a catastrophic error, not justified by the circumstances known to them at the time, to go all in for the idea that this was definitely the voice of the Ripper, which is what the public were told very insistently at the time. We'll never know for sure what difference the tape made in terms of Sutcliffe not being apprehended earlier, but we do know that a senior officer chose to ignore the Laptew report naming him as a significant suspect in the summer of 1979 and no action was taken after an interview with him in January 1980, in both cases largely because he lacked the accent senior officers believed the killer to have.
Incidentally, there was never a blood group match made between Sutcliffe and the letters/tape. Both were of the rare type B, yes, but Wearside Jack was a secretor, meaning that his bodily fluids contained blood group antigens, and Sutcliffe was a non-secretor, so his didn't. But the killer of Joan Harrison also had type B blood and was also a secretor. Therefore, given that the Harrison killing was something the letter writer mentioned more than once, the police thought - probably not unreasonably - there must be a chance that the letter came from Harrison's killer.
In fact, that there was a match of such a rare blood group was pure coincidence. John Humble took a flyer when mentioning this murder in his letters, having read about it in the Daily Mirror. Harrison's killer was later proved to be someone entirely different and totally unconnected with either Humble or Sutcliffe. The CPS said they'd have charged the guy had he not died some time earlier:
DNA helps police 'solve' 1975 Joan Harrison murder - BBC News