Another example of the dreadful shortcomings of Yorkshire Police. Numerous opportunities to catch him yet senior officers failed time and time again. Hopefully the families of all the victims can put an end to these awful events with his death. The press did not cover themselves in glory either with their innuedos about the victims. He will not be mourned.
Interviewed 9 times. Police ignored PS as he didn't have the same accent as the hoax caller who claimed to be the killer. Despite those who survived claiming his accent was of a local man, nothing like the hoax caller. Stunning and costly failures.
BBC Four repeated a trilogy of films on the subject recently. I didn't want to watch it and it was a very difficult viewing however it was a necessary task to learn of the utter arrogance,ignorance and downright incompetence of the senior men. I hope it's used as a training resource. Pitiful failure.
John Humble received a sentence for perverting the course of justice in pretending to be the killer. He died last year. The incompetence of the chief investigating detective was staggering. And not having computers to help sift through the mass of information.
Sadly when one watches cases of serial killers be it the police in the US, Ukraine or Poland and no doubt elsewhere the perpetrator often gets fingered but escapes the clutches of the law to offend again. Things are improving though with all the advances in forensic science, psychology, profiling and the like. Jack Unterweger is one of those who slipped the net although the police had serious misgivings about him. He even ended up as a presenter on Austrian television as a reformed character before continuing his murder spree.
Absolutely agree with you, it was a real ****-up. However, we do need to consider how much more difficult it was in those days, particularly as it was the systems were all paper based with almost no IT input. As an investigation officer for a short while in the early 80's I know it was really difficult spotting trends or links across police station boundaries. Nowadays, a press of a button reveals, for example, who with a beard has been stopped in the past year, whereas back then it was a laborious sifting through piles of paper in different locations that had little chance of success. There were something like 500,000 statements taken, thousands of interviews and hundreds of police officers involved. Cross-referencing and identifying key info would have been exceptionally difficult. There main "IT" was a machine that sorted hole punched index cards, for heavens sake. In one police station there was 4 tons of paperwork that required strengthening the floors, and through all this there was intense pressure to arrest the culprit and the officers were working very long hours. Whilst I am not excusing links being missed, there are reasons why this happened. In the late 80's I took part in some training that was based on the Yorkshire Police investigation, as it revealed the need for far better information sharing and analysis. At that time, it was felt that in reality, better systems would have saved perhaps 3 or 4 lives based on the available evidence including limited forensic information such as semen samples. Fingerprint searches were not quick and there was no DNA in those days, of course. Despite these problems, there were several occasions where hard-working and diligent officers spotted Sutcliffe as key, and they were ignored by senior officers due to pre-conceived ideas and closed thinking. Those errors were inexcusable, as for the fruits of the largest ever and most expensive investigation to be wasted due to a few officer's mindset, was almost a crime in itself. I'm just saying that, the criticism of an entire police force is a bit unfair, as the size of the task needs needs to be put into context.
Yes,the trilogy highlighted a number of civilians and officers who were ignored. As I said in my second post on this topic,the senior men were appalling.
