The Ripper (2020) s01e02 Episode Script

1
This was a case
that had been running on for over a year.
They couldn't catch this guy.
He did these trademark murders
and then just vanished.
You're a coward.
Why do you come up and stalk young girls,
innocent girls as well?
You come up from behind them.
They don't have a chance.
You're not a man, you're a beast.
And I hate you.
You were wondering all the time,
when's the next one gonna be?
So it came as no surprise at all
to hear of another attack.
What set this one apart
was that the woman had survived.
She was able to talk to the police
from her hospital bed.
At long last,
this was the breakthrough
they'd been looking for.
Maureen Long became the first
of the Ripper's victims to survive.
She'd spent the evening
at the Bali Hai discotheque in Bradford.
She was picked up
in a car and brought here
just off the Leeds Road
to this waste ground.
What followed was a classic Ripper attack:
a blow to the back of the head
with a blunt instrument
and a knife down the front.
This is a macabre thing to say,
but the Ripper
had not been quite as careful.
And as a result,
Maureen Long was very lucky.
Police were very excited about it.
"We've got somebody who can tell us
about what happened,
give us a description of the man,
anything he said,
any speech patterns he might have used."
You get two or three together,
and you might be a long way
to cracking the case.
Maureen Long had seen him.
She would be able to tell me
what he looked like,
where he had come from,
how she met him,
and all the things about him
that might lead me to get to him.
He left Mrs. Long for dead.
Uh the fact that she survived
uh, is, you know, to my advantage
and not to his.
You may have stumbled on a big break now.
Erm there is that possibility,
and I would sincerely hope so.
I had to draw out from her
everything that I possibly could.
But one had to be extremely careful
not to feed
what you want her to tell you.
So we decided to try to take
things forward slightly differently.
I was called
to the boss's office.
"Got a job for you.
I want you to take Maureen Long out."
And joking, I says,
"I'm sorry, she's not my type, you know."
He says, "You haven't got a choice."
"I want you to take her
to the dance hall.
See if that man's there
if he's out there
stalking a potential victim."
He says,
"There's, uh, 15 quid expenses for you."
I says, "That ain't gonna last long.
That won't go beyond the first round."
I spent 78 quid that night
because she liked to drink.
I thought,
"I hope nobody sees me that I know."
'Cause I had to do the pretense, you know,
that we're a couple.
If she saw her attacker,
she was to tell me.
I'd have called troops in
and arrested him.
My friends used to say,
"What are you doing?
Haven't you caught this guy yet?"
And I'd say,
"Oh, it's not for lack of trying."
By the end of that night
there was nothing to indicate
that anybody we saw was our man.
There wasn't a lot in there,
in her head
about anything.
So to draw out from her
what she'd seen
and get her to talk about it
was quite a difficult situation.
She lived but not,
unfortunately, to tell the tale.
Brain damage destroyed her memory cells.
She can tell the police nothing.
About half-past eleven,
I went into the Mecca
getting drinks bought off various,
you know men, right?
And then, I got my coat
and that's all I remember
coming out of the Mecca.
That's all I remember about it.
This should have opened
the whole thing up
and it should have led to the detection.
It didn't.
Another blind alley,
another dead end.
We just got on with the job
to find something that might assist
in the inquiry.
Hello.
Doing business?
-How much, love?
-Ten.
-Ten pounds?
-Yeah.
-Full strip?
-Yeah.
Jump in, yeah.
I was 23 years old
doing my normal everyday policing
and waiting to be appointed
as a detective.
A killer was at large
and everyone had a role to play.
With the nature of where the murders
were happening and the victims,
the red-light areas
were were clearly vulnerable areas
in terms of, um,
the killer striking again.
I was part
of an undercover operation
in the red-light area
recording the car registration
details of
cars that were coming in
with a single male in
driving through the area, cruising.
One of us was shouting the numbers out
of the car going past
and the other colleague was scratching
the number down on paper.
It was staggering, the numbers.
There were just so many.
Car after car
thousands upon thousands
like a football match at times,
the number of people coming through.
George Oldfield knows as much
as any detective in Britain
about catching killers.
But he's met his match.
From this incident room
at Leeds Police Station,
he directs a team of 270 men,
all of them working full-time
on the search for the Ripper.
Incident room at Millgarth,
can I help you?
The incident room
was absolutely buzzing.
The whole building
was just taken over by manpower.
Elaine, can you check me
into the system?
Yes.
Andrew Robinson
St. Joseph Samuel, Leeds.
All the officers
were given a specific job.
I was given indexing the names
of people that came into the system
and I was put working
on what they called the "Big Wheel."
A metal carousel
that had all the index cards in.
Somebody might ring up and say,
"I think my cousin is the Ripper."
Just hold on, I'll just check it.
You would go to the wheel
and you would look through the indexes
and see if that name was already in
and if it was already in,
then you would fasten those details to it,
and off it would go to an inspector.
Out at the other end would be
a piece of paper titled "action."
And that action may be,
"Go and interview John Smith
at this address."
Red House.
Do that one piece of work,
write it up with a result,
and then bring it back
through the machine,
and it comes in
and goes around the incident room.
The information could come
from the house-to-house inquiry teams,
people that were telephoning in,
officers who came across something
while doing their ordinary police work.
We were getting hundreds and hundreds
of actions every day.
There were piles of paper
in the incident room.
Do you dread the news,
that there's going to be another murder?
I don't think I can answer you
more than to say that
I hope that we can draw
this to a conclusion
without anyone else having to die.
But I don't know
that that will be the case.
I I think there is a grave danger
that this man will strike again.
I had a good mate at work
and he was a keen gardener.
So we got an allotment
and we were going to grow
our veg and stuff there.
It was a lovely sunny day.
I'd got the day off work,
he'd got the day off work.
We thought we'd go to the allotment
and get a shed up.
I was getting all the old bricks
to lay a base.
And I
I'd only realized later that I'd rolled
my wheelbarrow over this girl.
Uh
Her hair was burnt off.
Her face was smashed in.
Her breasts were cut off.
She was
She was disemboweled.
She
Sh Sh She was cut
in the most horrendous ways
a person could cut someone.
I'd run to the phone box
across the road…
and rung 9-9-9.
They were there within minutes.
Jean Jordan's body was found
nine days after she'd disappeared.
The body was naked
and her clothes were scattered around it.
It was very obvious to any passerby.
I had to describe it all
and I just…
"Is that how you found her?"
"Is that what you saw?"
My God.
I just
didn't have a clue what was going on.
Jean Jordan was a known prostitute
last seen in the red-light area,
taken to a place which is a well-known
place of resort for prostitutes
to take the punters.
There was enough there
to make it pretty clear
that this was all part of the series.
The only difference
was that she was found
in Manchester.
Uh
We had somewhere in the region
of 400 officers at some time,
got all this activity
with hundreds of thousands of hours
in West Yorkshire.
But it's in Manchester.
Wow.
Greater Manchester
has the largest network of motorways
in the country.
Eight motorways, a total
of 260 miles of carriageway.
It was unusual
for any multiple murderer
to travel out of area.
But then, we were still in the early days
of getting used to motorways.
The motorways
gave people the
opportunity to do things that they
hadn't done, which included criminals.
If the Ripper has a means of transport,
and he's going to Manchester,
he could go anywhere.
After murdering Jean Jordan,
the killer had pushed her body
under the hedge.
And then, when it had not been discovered,
he'd been reckless enough
to return to the scene of the crime
and move the body out into the open.
There were slash injuries
to the trunk and abdomen
which had been inflicted much later.
It seemed that this assailant
had gone back to the body
looking for something
and had lost his temper
when he hadn't found it.
Her handbag was found
some distance away
and its contents
had been chucked all over the place.
But what had been missed
was an inside pocket of the handbag,
which contained
a brand new five-pound note.
Each five-pound note
has a unique serial number.
And when the Bank of England
distribute them,
they know generally
what district these notes go to.
So the banknote that was found
on the body of a victim
could be traced back to see,
"Where did that note come from,
and where was it distributed to?"
The going rate for prostitution
was five pounds a go.
If he had paid her five pounds,
and it was a brand new
issued five-pound note,
he must have guessed
that it was easily traceable
and gone to try and get it back.
How much importance
are you putting on this 5-pound note?
We are satisfied that this five-pound note
only came into circulation
on the 27th of September,
four days before she met her death.
We have reason to believe that it was
sent to one of three banks
in the Bradford, Shipley,
and Bingley area,
and that from the bank it found
its way to an employer,
and from the employer
into an employee's wage packet.
As a result, we are visiting
several factories in the area
and interviewing all the male employees.
This is as big or as good
as anything that's happened in the past.
There was a feeling of euphoria that
at least now we're gonna get somewhere.
We were teamed up with a colleague
who was based in
Manchester, the Greater Manchester Police.
We would go to the factories
where the people worked
address the employer.
The police came
and went through everybody.
It was in-depth.
They really went into it.
I mean, I was
quite joking about it and they
they soon told me how serious it was.
And they really put the pressure on,
and to everybody.
I probably interviewed
hundreds of people that night.
Hundreds.
Of course, there was haulage, stationers,
all sorts of businesses.
I mean it was, uh
an overwhelming number
of, uh inquiries to do
and, uh, interviews to conduct.
Um, there's a possibility
he has been uh, spoken to
during this inquiry.
We are prepared
to keep on pursuing these inquiries
until we have interviewed everybody
who could possibly have received
that five-pound note.
We needed the public
to help to get this solved.
But at that time
it was hard.
People weren't very interested.
The prevailing mood in the country was
worry about
whether you have a job next month.
London's burning,
but fighting the flames
were not professional firemen,
but naval ratings.
The first national firemen's
strike in British history.
It was a very turbulent time.
The Organization
of Oil-Producing Countries
has quadrupled
the price of crude oil in two years
and thrown
the industrial world into grave turmoil.
The price of oil went
through the roof not once, but twice.
That produced
a lot of stresses and strains,
because higher oil prices
always feed through into higher inflation,
so every time you turned around,
the price of everything you wanted
had gone up again.
So you were in this constant scramble then
to make your wages
keep pace with inflation.
Employers had other costs
to think about as well
and felt very often
they couldn't afford to pay increases.
So everybody was permanently on strike.
The government will not accept
deals which break pay policy
aimed at reducing
the country's inflation rate.
There were societal changes too.
It became acceptable to live with someone
rather than marry someone.
Uh It became acceptable
to have children out of wedlock.
So you've got all these undercurrents,
things seem to be changing around you
all the time.
And eventually,
in the eyes of some people,
you reached a point where you felt that
society was beginning to come apart,
to fray around the edges.
And now,
we've got a serial killer on the loose.
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Just before Christmas in '77
one of my colleagues came in and said,
"There was another attack
on a prostitute in Leeds."
This was significant in that,
like Maureen Long,
she survived.
The victim this time,
Marilyn Moore.
I didn't feel the first,
I felt the second and third blow.
and as I felt the third one,
my hands were on top of my head.
Then I I remember grabbing his trousers
and as I grabbed his trousers,
he pulled away.
And I heard him go back in the car
and as he drove off,
his back wheels skidded on the back.
A major breakthrough.
We we had tire information,
and three of those tires matched
the same tires that we'd seen
at the Irene Richardson murder.
And unlike Maureen Long,
she did remember the attacker.
Marilyn Moore was able
to give a good description.
They drew up an identikit picture.
It was one of the strongest clues so far.
The incident room
in Leeds was
He was around 30,
he had a beard, and he had dark hair.
The photo vita
of the Marilyn Moore attacker
was on the wall on every police station
throughout this country.
For the first time,
we had a picture of who we now
believed to be the Yorkshire Ripper.
Unless you were there,
you cannot
conceive of what it was like.
Every single police officer
in West Yorkshire
would've worked 24 hours a day
to catch this man.
It would be hard to imagine
a more difficult inquiry.
There's no pattern in dates,
days of the week,
frequency, or locations of the murders.
Is he likely to kill again?
I think that's very much on the cards.
Obviously, I'll never forget it
because it was my first crime scene.
I was in the lab at the time
and then we were told
we had to get out to the timber-yard.
I was the first woman
to join the forensic science lab.
And I was initially received
with a large dose of skepticism
by the chap who was my boss.
But you just think, you know,
"I'm here to do a job."
And you just get on with it.
The first thing that struck me
was how beautiful she was.
Helen Rytka is the 7th victim
to lose her life
at the hands of the Ripper.
I don't know what
I was expecting.
But she just looked very serene.
It surprised me.
I was pleased by that.
It made it made it easier.
Helen's body was found
in a timber yard by police using dogs.
It was a rather forbidding place.
It was very dark and wet.
There was a little bit of street lighting.
So there were dark shadows thrown
onto these great stacks of wood.
It was a horrible place to die.
We were very keen obviously
to see if we could find anything at all
that the perpetrator
might have left behind them.
Because rough wood
just picks up stuff, it's splintery.
But he wasn't leaving a lot of traces
that we could
actually analyze and compare.
And certainly nothing
we could get a blood group out of.
I'm anxious to talk to the man
who was said to be standing
in the entrance to the wood yard
at the end of Great Northern Street
up to the toilets -30.
Whoever it was,
was just so dangerous
um, and so likely to kill again.
And probably, it couldcould be
any day. It could be quite quickly.
And I think that that added
an extra impetus for George.
It was a lot for him,
all this stress, all this pressure
pressure from the press,
pressure from the professionals.
No officer had ever experienced
that level of video coverage or pressure.
I'm sure George
took it personally. I would have too.
The whole area was being blitzed by cops
knocking on doors with questionnaires,
because where she was last seen
was on quite a busy junction.
The belief was
this case will be cracked here.
48,000 people
have been interviewed.
A 136,000 vehicles checked.
And still nothing.
This girl in the picture,
did you know her?
I've seen her once.
-You've seen her once.
-Yeah.
With any murder investigation,
you need the public's help, clearly.
But there was a degree of apathy
amongst the communities
where these murders had happened.
And as far as I could see,
no one knows the victim.
Helen Rytka
and her sister, uh, Rita
had had a fairly chaotic upbringing.
Uh, and, eventually,
the girls were fostered.
But both girls
were troubled by their past.
They left home,
went to live in Huddersfield
and got involved in prostitution.
We got access to Helen's foster parents
via the police.
The police wanted them to talk to us,
so that this human portrait
of an unfortunate girl
might prick someone's conscience, perhaps,
to come forward and give them a lead.
Rita Rytka had accompanied
her sister on the night she died,
as she later told George Oldfield.
And Rita was no ordinary
Helen's twin sister, Rita, helped
with the investigation enormously.
It was
an incredibly distressing time for her.
They were both 18 at that point.
There was hope that this would
galvanize the public effort
towards contacting the police.
Rita put her heart and soul
into this scramble for information.
And it did nothing.
The women who might help
aren't noted for cooperation
with the old enemy, the police.
And their client's have obvious reasons
for being shy in coming forward.
What we do find
if there's something involving an animal,
if an animal is killed in the course
of the commission of a criminal offense,
then, you know, the public
are are are revolted by this
and then they will come forward
and give information.
Yet, when human beings are involved,
uh, particularly the type
that we're investigating,
the murders with which
we're concerned with,
um, there's this
-laissez-faire attitude.
-A reticence to come forward.
George's life
was this investigation,
had been for a number of years.
He'd see around him
officers getting divorced.
He'd see some of them dying,
which would be stress-related.
Stress is so dangerous to our lives.
And also to the investigation.
Because the information hadn't come
through to crack the case at that point.
It was, "What can we do next
to flush them out?"
And a huge amount of money
may be the carrot to do that.
And that was the thinking
behind the reward.
That, maybe, a life-changing
amount of cash would make someone,
if they were sitting on information,
might bring them forward,
might flush them out.
The basic reward was 10,000 pounds.
Private companies put in more and more
and eventually, they got the total
to 30,000 pounds.
You obviously think that money
is going to work amongst
some people who might be involved.
Whereas, they might
not go to the police voluntarily.
Yes, this is a sad reflection
on human nature,
but anything which could alleviate
the position or assist the police
uh, should be encouraged.
This is George Oldfield,
Assistant Chief Constable
West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police,
speaking.
If you have any information,
please pass your message
after you hear the short tone.
Anything you say
will be treated in confidence.
I think, the response
was overwhelming at first.
We did have
an awful lot of calls.
A girl might have fallen out
with a boyfriend,
so she'd ring in
and say he was the Ripper.
Is there Is there any way,
any other way we can trace him?
Wives said it was the husbands.
The one we spoke about earlier.
Yeah, I'm having trouble
finding the previous.
We had clairvoyants saying it was a man
on the top of a number 97 bus.
We received all sorts
of crank telephone calls.
And we put everything
into the system no matter how it sounded.
Imagine a football field
in the US or UK.
The files of filing cabinets
would have filled that football field.
There were millions and millions
and millions of pieces of paper.
Thousands of phone calls in a week,
twice that number of actions
coming back in.
As it built and built,
structural engineers
said the floor was going to fall in.
So we had to put
concrete pillars underneath
to hold the floor up,
to hold the weight of the floor up.
That's how much paperwork there was.
Nothing was working
as it should.
The filing system was so chaotic
they, frankly, were floundering.
It's impossible to believe
the Ripper didn't know
that it was suspectless,
that they had no idea who was doing this.
They had no idea, really,
how he was managing to do it.
He must have thought, "Blimey!"
Here was a man who could seemingly
appear and disappear at will.
And for all he knew,
they were no closer to catching him
than they were right at the very start.
No leads, no ideas.
Undetectable.
You know, I would have thought
the prostitutes would be on the run.
I thought they would have been
leaving this area in dozens and dozens.
There's no real evidence
to support that that is so.
I mean, I knew all the Bradford
and Leeds prostitutes.
I know because I made it my business
to say to them, "Look, you're bloody mad."
You know, what you're doing
just isn't in order.
And you couldn't
was like talking to a wall.
Are you scared when you go out
on the streets like this now?
Very scared, yeah.
Why do you do it?
Oh, lack of money really.
If there was plenty of jobs,
I would have a job.
Well, there isn't.
We've got some work somehow.
-How old are you?
But how can you, as a mother,
let your daughter
be a prostitute in this area?
This isn't that bad.
Well it's a living, love, innit?
It's a living, love.
There was
a lot of emotion flying around
among the general public at the time.
There's a great sadness.
There's a great sense of
horror
because of the carnage it's caused.
There was a lot of anxiety.
I was reluctant to see my wife out alone.
You know you're going to be
at whatever location it is.
You're not gonna leave that location.
I will come and collect you.
Everybody seemed to be on edge.
And then
Easter Sunday, at the end of March
a passerby noticed
in an area of wasteland
a woman's hand sticking out of a
a pile of rubbish.
The police were called
and under a sofa
on this wasteland and rubbish pile
was the body of Yvonne Pearson.
Mrs. Pearson's body
was hidden under a settee
on waste ground
in Bradford's red-light area.
Police think she died soon after
disappearing two months ago.
The way that
the killer had
disposed of her body
throwing her onto a waste dump
and covering her with an old sofa
You just thought,
"What is going on in this person's head
to do this?
What kind of creature
are we dealing with here?"
It was quickly established that
she'd been killed two months before.
The strange thing about that was
the Daily Mirror newspaper
placed under her arm.
It was dated exactly a month
to the day, she'd been murdered.
So the murderer had been back
and, uh, placed the newspaper
under her arm.
He's taunting the police.
Mr. Oldfield,
you're involved in this inquiry.
You've you've actually detected dozens
and dozens of murders yourself.
This, with respect,
is your one notable failure.
What is your own personal feeling
about it?
I, uh, feel, myself, that uh
we shall, in the fullness of time,
catch this man.
Uh, the greatest risk to the community
that there's been, for generations
I would say, certainly in his area.
And
I I I I've no hard feelings
towards him.
I just want to catch him.
West Yorkshire Police
had very good record
of dealing with the most serious crimes
compared with anywhere else in the world.
And here now was the most serious crime
it had ever faced
and it was failing.
People were ridiculing
the police.
In fact, there was graffiti
outside the Carlisle Public House
which said, "Ripper 8, police nil."
The tire track inquiry
was going but very slowly.
We checked five million vehicles.
Eventually, it was abandoned.
Whilst the five-pound note inquiry
looked to be one of the best leads
we possibly had,
we could not link
any single person to the murders.
The whole organization felt to be sinking
under the weight of this.
Detectives describe the Ripper
as one of the most cunning killers
they've ever had to trace.
The extravagance of his behavior
over the last twelve months
seems to be part of an attempt
to step up his campaign of terror.
Far from giving up,
he's likely to kill
even more flamboyantly in future.
I think he's most probably somebody
who's had an unhappy love experience
maybe with a prostitute.
who's caught some type of VD.
What is the psychological effect,
if any, of all the publicity
which is currently
given to this case?
What psychological effect
will it have on this this person?
Should we maybe
be withdrawing some of the publicity?
It it's happening again.
Somebody's lost a life again.
And we couldn't
stop it happening.
And it does have an effect.
The body was found
here on the grounds
of the Manchester Royal Infirmary
shortly after 8 o'clock this morning
by two gardeners who'd left their vans
on the grounds of the hospital overnight.
Again, the victim was a prostitute,
41-year-old Vera Millward.
When she was found
it was obvious
by the drag marks in the undergrowth that
she had been pulled away from the hedge
out nearer to where people were walking.
So that um uh
she would become fairly obvious.
There were more than
800 patients and staff
in the hospital buildings round about.
The whole area was floodlit.
The killer had taken more risks
than ever before
for this was a very public place indeed
to leave a murder victim's body.
The assailant was getting
publicity-hungry.
He wanted the world to know
that he had struck again.
The police
searched for witnesses
but they found the same
public apathy they'd always found.
Try as they might,
they failed to turn up anyone
who'd admit to having seen the Ripper.
And George Oldfield's men
remained in the dark about his identity.
You get to a stage
where you've done
everything you can possibly think of.
What can I do?
I can't let it go on,
because nothing's happening.
And so, George decided to ask the Ripper
to sort of, give himself up.
In your own interest
it is now time for you
to come forward and give yourself up.
I'm anxious that we catch you
before you've time to add another death
to the catalog that
you've already got to your credit.
If the man who's
done these things is watching
then I beg you to give yourself up.
You need a doctor's help.
Give yourself up
and you will get it.
I do want to ask you to give yourself up.
You see, you've made
your point eight times.
And if you continue making your point,
you're simply going to produce
public sympathy for these prostitutes
and I'm sure that
that is not what you want.
Around this time, the series of letters
came into the incident room.
Today, at a news conference
at the HQ of the West Yorkshire Police,
the most vital clues the police
have so far were revealed.
The Ripper has written
letters to the man who's hunting him,
the Assistant Chief Constable
of West Yorkshire, George Oldfield.
George Oldfield
received a series of letters
from an individual
purporting to be the killer.
Of course, you always get cranks,
but this seemed more than just a crank.
It seemed to be someone deliberately
trying to get a message across
as forcibly as could be.
The letter writer was signing off,
"Jack the Ripper."
What really drove it home, though,
was the reference
to the murder of Vera Millward,
who'd been killed
on the grounds of the Royal Infirmary.
It referred to her,
saying that she'd been in hospital
for operations there.
George Oldfield knew
that Vera Millward had actually had
three operations
at the Manchester Hospital
shortly before she was killed.
And this is where the whole investigation
now started taking off.
The man has taunted and
sent a challenge to you,
what's your reaction to that?
I'm prepared to take it in.
And we have been all the time.
He has also threatened
he's going to kill again.
Will you catch him before that?
I sincerely hope we catch him
before he can kill again.
The letters were sent
to the laboratory for fingerprinting
and forensic examination
of the gum seal.
The licked gum strip
on the envelope was, uh, grouped,
and that's when it was discovered that it
had come from a man who was a B-secretor,
which is actually one of the rarest
of the ABO groups.
It only exists
in about six percent of men.
You know, sort of, if
If you're digging
for days and days and days,
and then you suddenly find some gold,
it's like
that's a piece of gold,
you found something,
and we can deal with this.
That's how it felt.
I personally, and I'm sure
that colleagues felt that he's
he's got to be here, we've got to be
within touching distance of him.
This is going to happen.
We're gonna stop this man.
We're going to get him.
And then, out of the blue
a tape.
I am Jack.
I see you are still having
no luck catching me.
I am not quite sure
when I'll strike again.
Maybe September, October.
Even sooner if I get the chance.