“It was a fish and chip murder,” journalist Alan Whitehouse says in the first episode of Netflix’s recent true crime series The Ripper, describing the brutal 1974 death of a sex worker named Wilma McCann — the kind of murder that quickly becomes yesterday’s news. “I spent very little time thinking about people like Wilma McCann.”
It’s an irresistibly blunt way of describing the cultural attitudes that would doom the victims of Peter Sutcliffe, the serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper, subject of the largest, most expensive, and most notoriously botched manhunt in British history. In Britain, the Yorkshire Ripper investigation is a case study in what not to do. And the first thing the police did wrong was to ignore the victims because of their class and presumed profession.
The Yorkshire Ripper case is one of those stories that you eventually just absorb if you’re a true crime follower like me. It’s why I cringe when there is news of an investigation involving the West Yorkshire police, even today, four decades after Sutcliffe was finally apprehended. Over the course of the five-year investigation, Sutcliffe was questioned by police nine times but never considered a chief suspect. Between those chats with investigators, he murdered at least 13 people and attacked at least eight more. When he was caught in 1981, after years of police missteps, lost opportunities, false leads, and rampant miscommunication, it wasn’t because of detectives closing in on him at long last, but because of an unrelated traffic stop.
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