This may seem paradoxical, but it says a lot, if not all, about the way the investigation was carried out into one of the most famous serial killers in UK history. The victims Sutcliffe presented was 16 years old in the summer of 1977 Jane MacDonald All women the police can easily associate with prostitution – although at least one of them has scant evidence of this. And women with lighter morals can simply count on less attention, either from the police themselves or from the local press, who concealed news of their deaths somewhere inside the newspaper. It wasn’t until a teenager from a “normal” middle-class family was stabbed that the officers were provided with all the resources they needed, and according to one investigator – there was a “surge of attention”: the killing of the officers Jayne made it to the front page on the ground and even the major national newspapers showed Interested in what was happening for the first time.
The four-part Netflix series “The Ripper” attempts to reconstruct the conditions in which Sutcliffe – ultimately responsible for at least 13 deaths – could well thrive. Certainly in the early episodes, this presents a bleak picture of West Yorkshire – the area around Leeds – in the 1970s, an area that could best be described as a large group of Ken Loach-Movie. Most of the major industries already moved to low-wage countries when the oil crisis erupted and the latter factories closed their doors. Unemployment and poverty were so widespread that ordinary home mothers worked in prostitution to make ends meet at the end of the month. Meanwhile, feminism had infiltrated from the “golden sixties”: the police were almost entirely men, and few women working in the media had to content themselves with articles about flower shows and weddings. They were not allowed to write about serious topics such as crime.
Because the police assumed that a psychopath acted out of hatred toward prostitutes – hence the reference to Jack The Ripper – untold opportunities were missed during the investigation. For example, a young lady survived an attack by Sutcliffe years before he first killed anyone: when she recognized the hand of her attacker in stories about stabbed women and started telling the police, she was sent for a walk because she was not a prostitute. death Jane MacDonald It didn’t take a different approach either: the police thought it was an accident and in a letter to the killer at the newspaper, investigators even tried to appeal to the man’s conscience, now that his “bloody crusade against street women” had resulted in “the first innocent victim.” Ultimately, upon his arrest in 1981 – full luck – it turns out that Sutcliffe had been questioned no less than nine times before but had never been taken into custody for failing to conform to the profile: his co-workers eventually even made fun of him.
The hunt for Sutcliffe, who died in Coronavirus custody last November, went on for so long because the police didn’t care much about the victims, and you can actually blame the chain as well. In itself it is a thoughtful reconstruction of the serial killer’s case, but you don’t know much about the women who died in his arms and their relatives. The series opens with the testimony of the son of the first dead man – Wilma McCann, In the fall of 1975 – and ends with someone saying, “We must push Sutcliffe into the shadows and bring back the women he killed,” but in the end, the 13 dead are nothing more than names, dates, and injuries. Originally, the series was supposed to be called “Once Upon a Time in Yorkshire”, but eventually the content creators and Netflix chose a more exciting title, the horror of the relatives who collaborated: they recently published an open letter in the British press in which they wrote that they feel Cheating. That’s right, but the new title at least clarifies who is the central.
