The Ripper (2020) s01e04 Episode Script

1
Well, I was in the office
on the Monday morning.
and some of the fellows
in the office were talking.
And as I walked in, one of them said, uh,
"Well, this could be
a relation of John's."
And another one said, "Haven't
Haven't you got a brother called Peter?"
I said, "No, but I've got
a son called Peter."
"Does he live at Heaton?"
I said, "Yes, he does."
Whereupon one of the chaps
passed the morning paper across
with the picture of his house
on the front page,
which I recognized immediately.
And I just said, "Oh, my God!
This is my boy."
Five-and-a-half years
after the first attack
the police in West Yorkshire were able
to announce a man had been caught.
What can you tell us?
He is being questioned in relation
to the
Yorkshire Ripper murders.
It is anticipated that he will appear
before the court in Dewsbury
tomorrow.
Is it fair, then,
to say that the general hunt
for the so-called Yorkshire Ripper
is now being wound down?
Right.
Can you tell us
if he has a Geordie accent?
I cannot tell you that
because I've not heard him speak.
But I can tell you that
we are absolutely delighted
with developments at this stage.
Absolutely delighted.
- Can you--
-Really delighted.
George is delighted, as well.
In the end,
he was caught purely by chance.
It wasn't good police work
that caught him.
It was a--
A stroke of fantastic good luck.
Yes. Absolutely delighted.
Last night,
at their Sheffield headquarters,
police chiefs there invited
pressmen to talk to the two men
who made the arrest on Friday,
which led to this latest development.
Sergeant Ring and I were on just normal
beat patrol and uh, panned a vehicle.
We were patrolling an area
where prostitutes frequent.
We saw a Rover car parked.
We approached the vehicle.
Was there a woman
in the car?
Yes.
I could see
that he was very nervous.
He was frightened, and I says to him,
"You don't have to worry.
I'm not going to hurt you."
And he just laughed it off.
Then the police came,
and when he realized
that it was the police, he was petrified.
If the police didn't come then, probably,
they would have found a body
in that wasteland.
Why do you think that?
Because um, he is the Ripper
and
um I am a prostitute.
And in your view,
it was simple,
straightforward, good police work
that enabled you to uh, assist
the Ripper Squad in this particular way.
Just straightforward coppering.
All right, ladies and gentlemen,
can I, first of all,
confirm information that I've no doubt
many of you already possess.
And that is that the man
who is currently helping us
with our inquiries
is Mr. Peter William Sutcliffe
aged 35 years
a lorry driver
of 6 Garden Lane, Heaton, Bradford.
So, they've got him in custody.
I mean, he could've said,
"I'm not saying anything else,
I want a lawyer,
I want this, I want that"
He said, "No."
And then he gave a voluntary statement.
He outlined all all of his murders.
He started with Wilma McCann,
and he went through each of the murders.
And he went through them in detail.
Where they were,
what the victims were wearing,
what he said to them,
what they said to him,
which car he was in,
which tools and murder weapons he used,
where he discarded them,
everything.
Just very straightforward as if I'm
I'm dictating to you
a meeting in the office.
Five years of killing people.
Killing people,
viciously killing people,
and mutilating them.
As Sutcliffe is confessing
to all these crimes,
it was very clear and very apparent that
West Yorkshire Police
were on the right lines of inquiry.
He did recognize his tire tracks.
He did recognize the significance
of vehicle sightings.
He was aware
of the five-pound note inquiry.
He said, he actually went back
to try and retrieve that five-pound note,
because he realized that
that could be traced back to him.
Police still haven't said exactly when
the man will appear in court.
At a packed and excited
press conference last night,
the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire,
Mr. Ronald Gregory, had hinted that
he might appear at Dewsbury this morning
and when the court opened at ten o'clock,
it was almost besieged.
News had obviously spread
through the town and by mid-morning
a crowd of 150 or more were standing
three-deep on the pavement
hoping for a glimpse of the accused man.
He was named
as Mr. Peter Sutcliffe, born in 1946.
A married man, living in Branford.
Police were called several times
to move the crowds
back onto the pavement.
Then came word that the hearing
would not, after all, take place yet
and the decision on that
wouldn't be announced
until this afternoon.
We were sitting in the court wondering
what the delay was,
because it got later and later.
The number of people arriving
was becoming a security situation.
The anger of the last five years
was really spilling out onto the street
and you could hear something
going on outside.
We didn't anticipate
that number of people,
but what that did show to us
was the strength of public feeling
about this man.
This man that had destroyed
the lives of many, many families.
So there was that outpouring of relief,
but also vengeance.
A huge crowd had been gathering all day
in the narrow streets
outside Dewsbury's Courthouse.
Police cordoned off
part of the town center
as nearly 2,000 people
jostled for a vantage point,
many spilling across the roadway.
It wasn't until
the police van drove up,
that you realized, in the silence
of that old-fashioned courtroom,
how many must be outside
because it just erupted.
The screams, the shouting,
heightened our sense of nervousness
as to what we were about to see.
Sutcliffe was led up
into the dock
handcuffed to a plain-clothed detective
and surrounded by uniformed officers.
He came up those steps
into the dark and I almost missed him.
You!
Die! Die! Die!
He was a very insignificant man.
Th-- There was just nothing about him
that, that caught your attention,
or, or would have made you look twice
if you didn't know
who he was and what he'd done.
And until now
we'd not seen his face.
When I was 14
I was attacked.
It was 27th of August 1975.
I remember the hammer
just really banging down on my head
so hard, about five times.
But I remember
it going down there at the back.
Banging down on the back, just
not as hard as the top.
But, yeah, it was--
It was several fractures in my skull
and a fracture down
at the bottom there as well.
Uh, those were the injuries
that I sustained.
Two years later, in 1977,
there was this
other attacker going around
murdering women.
My instinct was just telling me
that this was the actual man
that attacked me.
So I went down to Keighley police station.
And they just smirked, really.
And said,
"Why don't we have fun and games today,"
and they treated it as one big joke,
as opposed to taking it seriously.
I think they always think
it was an isolated attack
because I wasn't a prostitute.
They didn't put any importance on it.
Years later,
they caught the Yorkshire Ripper.
I remember seeing his picture
in the paper for the first time.
And, um, I just remember saying to my mom,
I said, "That's him."
I said, "That's him. That's the--
There's no doubt about it.
That's definitely him."
I recognized him.
And I didn't want to recognize him.
I really didn't want to see that face.
The man who'd attacked me,
I thought it would be
someone else that I'd never seen before.
And to my shock, I recognized him.
I was delivering newspapers
by then, so I read it in the papers.
And it didn't look like the person
I had in my head.
It didn't look like a
This monster, this
This Marvel character.
This This
scary Yorkshire Ripper thing.
It didn't look like that.
Which is part of the reason
he probably got away with it.
He kept himself to himself, but I think
you find that's fairly reasonable.
He didn't strike as being
distant in any respect.
He wasn't somebody obviously
you know, seeking company.
But he wasn't somebody
who went out of his way to avoid it.
He went about his business.
And he was the type of person,
if you passed him in the street,
he looked as though he was purposeful.
Engaged in something,
involved in something.
He was just an amiable, pleasant fella.
That was all. Nothing.
You know, it's just stunning.
Any of us still can't believe it,
to be honest.
He used to say to me, um,
"Haven't you any friends that'll--
You know, a friend that'll come
that'll make a foursome,
but none of my friends
ever wanted to bother
because he'd no conversation, you know.
He was so quiet.
I think it also put the girls off.
He was quite a good-looking lad, but
I think after they'd sat down
and talked for a while,
they, sort of--
They backed off him a little bit.
You felt uneasy with him, you know,
because he didn't talk.
There was an insatiable
appetite for information about this man.
Who was he? What caused this?
What went wrong in his life?
In effect, what you're trying to do
is build up a picture of this man
from the cradle, almost,
to the day he was arrested.
Sutcliffe himself
was born and bred in Bingley.
His father, John Sutcliffe,
still lives in Bingley,
a mill worker,
had no inkling what had happened.
He was only a small baby.
He only weighed five pounds
when he was born.
Consequently, it took
a long while to grow up
and catch up with other children.
Even when we had children later,
he was still the one
hanging onto mother's
apron strings all the time.
He rather shunned
the company of other boys,
because they always seemed
to be much too big for him.
You could walk past the schoolyard
during the play period in the afternoon,
and he'd be
still in the corner by himself.
But he--
He never objected
to going to school at that age.
He He got settled in
and went regularly.
No No problem.
There was only one way to be
To be with a kind, gentle, timid child.
It's to be kind back to him.
And we were always kind to him.
Did you ever suspect
Peter might be responsible?
No way.
No.
No more than any other father
would have suspected his own son.
If you'd have known him,
you would have realized
that he was probably the last person
in the world that you'd have suspected.
I mean, any sort of
mental aberrations which would
cause him to do these things.
After he was arrested,
there was a kind of desire
for him to be the monster.
He has to be completely outside
the culture that he comes from.
And I thought this cannot be true.
You know, people--
People don't, kind of, spring fully formed
without any connection to the
the society they grow up in.
When I did a bit of research
on his background,
the key thing that I noticed is
that he'd grown up in an atmosphere
where contempt for women
and dislike of women was normalized.
And the idea that women are victims,
all of that, was there already.
Sutcliffe's father had been violent
and had beaten up his mother.
Boys who grew up in a violent household
often resist the the violent parent,
who is usually the father,
and sometimes they actually side
with the mother
which apparently Sutcliffe did as a child.
People called him a mother's boy
and they called him a sissy.
And I think he identified anything to do
with women and femininity as weakness.
And at some point, he switches
and becomes a violent man himself.
And I think this was his way
of being a a man.
I think it wasn't until the dust settled
after he'd been arrested
before the trial.
Only then do you start
looking at what you've got
and beginning to understand
that West Yorkshire Police had
been struggling as badly as they had been,
that the inquiry had gone
as badly wrong as it did.
One of the experts who has helped police
to analyze the tape and the voice
believes he's isolated the area
the voice comes from.
And how small an area
have you now isolated?
Well, I think you could, uh, call it
something like a square mile.
The Village of Castletown.
The rank-and-file detectives working
on the case were basically told,
"If he's not got a Geordie accent,
forget him."
I'm Jack
The Geordie inquiry was a disaster.
Sutcliffe told me afterwards,
he thought it was a joke.
He knew he was in the clear,
or thought he was in the clear.
It discounted, to a large degree,
all of the other lines of inquiry,
which would have caught this man earlier.
I reckon your boys
are letting you down, George.
When I heard
it was Peter William Sutcliffe
it was like somebody hitting me
in the chest from the inside.
I got into my car
went up to the police station,
into my locker,
dug out my old notebooks
looked up, at the time I found it.
"Peter William Sutcliffe interviewed."
"Not satisfied."
I'd knocked on the door.
He let us in.
He'd just come from upstairs.
And I says to him,
"Peter, do you frequent prostitutes?"
"No
not at all.
I've no need.
I'm only recently married.
I don't associate with prostitutes.
Not at all."
So we then go through an established
order of elimination criteria.
"Peter, we've got you down as visiting
uh, Manchester
on this day."
I says, "It's a sighting of a male
on his own in a vehicle."
I says, "Do you know what you were
doing on that day in question?"
He says, "Yeah,
we had a housewarming party.
All of my family was here.
Took my parents home and came back."
His shoe size was an eight and a half,
which was very similar
to the shoe size of the offender.
And I noticed that one of the, uh, boots
was quite worn on the right-hand sole
which was a point made out on the, uh,
tracks that had been left, the footprints.
When I says,
"We might have to come and see you later."
He says, "Yeah, all right."
Got the report typed up,
took it to the boss's office
and explained all the things
that were bugging me.
I says, "And the most startling
thing is, the Marilyn Moore photofit."
I says, "He's a dead ringer for that."
"Is he a Geordie?"
I says, "No.
He's from Bradford.
He's from around these parts.
But, I mean, it's an uncanny resemblance."
And he hit the roof.
He started effing and jeffing and,
"Anybody mentions
the effing photofits to me again,
they'll be doing traffic
for the rest of their service."
And I crawled out with my tail
between the legs and that was it.
Forgotten.
Peter Sutcliffe was a man
who had successfully, for five years,
hoodwinked an entire police force.
Detectives interview him
not once, not twice,
not three times, but nine times.
This is the biggest
balls-up in police history.
Here we had a man
who had been sighted over 50 times
in the red light district,
who'd been questioned
up to nine times by the police.
He said he lost count.
Whose "the five-pound note"
paid to a prostitute
was traced back to Clark Transport
where he worked.
It was Christmas '77
after the five-pound note
that was from a prostitute in Manchester.
And they came,
then they went through
through everybody
about the five-pound note.
They obviously interviewed
Peter Sutcliffe.
They did, yes, and that's the time
they took Peter away to
for further questioning.
That was the Manchester Police
that did that.
It used to be a joke that we used to,
you know
He was nicknamed "the Ripper."
And he used to answer to that sometimes,
so it was, it was rather--
It's rather sort of--
A bit sad now, isn't it?
So, I mean, it's--
You actually wandered around the office
and called Peter Sutcliffe the "Ripper"?
Well, it was in the office,
in the works, that
That was his nickname,
which is to say, is pretty sad.
Every time.
Again, again, again.
Sutcliffe, Sufcliffe, Sutcliffe,
Sutcliffe.
And he wasn't even in the top 40 suspects.
Now, I believe
there's something wrong there.
They were so wedded to this theory
that he was a prostitute-killer.
And no matter what happened,
they managed to find a way to cling to it.
Even when they were wrong.
Are you quite confident
that this is the motive,
and it isn't just--
It could be any woman,
and it just happens that
prostitutes are the women
most available at the time of night?
No, I think, uh
from the inquiries that we have made,
it looks very much to me
he is selecting the women in the streets.
By going down that route,
they were completely
getting the case wrong.
And so, the women they thought
were mistaken victims,
they didn't listen to their evidence.
They They thought they'd got it wrong.
And so, they were actually excluding
incredibly important eyewitness evidence.
All the senior detectives were men.
They were from a very limited,
very similar background.
They had very similar prejudices,
and they walk into this case
without any understanding of it at all.
What they were doing
was chasing Jack the Ripper.
If you are looking for a figure
from Victorian myth,
you are unlikely to come up
with a lorry driver from Bradford.
The trial was
set to be held in West Yorkshire
where the so-called "Ripper murders"
were committed,
but, because of local feeling there,
the courts agreed to transfer the trial
to the Old Bailey in London
the scene of some of Britain's
most famous and dramatic murder trials.
The Old Bailey then,
and still does, symbolize British Justice.
This was Britain's most notorious killer
and he was going to be tried there,
under those scales of justice.
Sutcliffe, charged with murder
of the 13 women,
denied the murder charges
but pleaded guilty
to 13 charges of manslaughter
on the grounds
of diminished responsibility.
He was also accused of seven charges
of attempted murder
and he admitted these.
The court appointed
a jury of 12, six women and six men
to rule on the real mystery
of the Yorkshire Ripper,
the reasons why truck driver
Peter William Sutcliffe killed 13 women
and tried to kill seven more.
The immense public
interest in the Yorkshire Ripper case
was clearly evident
at London Central Criminal Court.
A queue had begun forming last night
as people from all over Britain,
including some from Yorkshire,
braved the cold and rain
in the hope of a seat
in the public gallery.
Some had queued overnight.
One man had been there for two days.
There's carefully
organized security outside the Old Bailey.
Police check the identity
of people wanting to attend
There were twice as many people
as there the number of seats
available to the public.
The trial of Peter
William Sutcliffe is finally underway.
In the courtroom,
the officials prepared exhibits
including several hammers, knives,
screwdrivers, and a hacksaw.
The first two days
was going through what he'd said
in the police interviews
in the most awful, shocking detail.
But the public gallery
was full of relatives
and full of survivors,
and they had to listen to that.
The atmosphere only changed
when Sutcliffe took to the stand.
It was at eight minutes
to 12:00 when the counsel for the defense,
Mr. James Chadwin QC,
dramatically announced that he was
calling Sutcliffe to the witness box.
It was really tense.
Everybody seemed to be on edge.
Here was gonna be a chance
to hear from the man himself.
I vividly remember
the court falling absolutely silent.
Everybody wanted to catch every word
that this man was about to say.
Sutcliffe said his mission to kill
began here in Bingley Cemetery,
where, as a teenager,
he worked as a gravedigger.
"I was standing in an open grave
taking a rest from digging.
I heard a voice,
similar to a human voice,
but with the words mixed up.
It seem to be coming from a gravestone.
I climbed out
and walked up towards the grave.
It was something I felt was wonderful.
I believed then and now
that it was the voice of God.
I looked down into the valley,
and thought about heaven,
Earth, and the universe
and how insignificant we all are.
But I felt so important then.
Because I had been chosen
to hear the word of God."
He said
that he was hearing voices
coming from gravestones telling him
to kill every prostitute you come across.
Their arguments
essentially came down to
he's insane.
The first of three psychiatrists put out
a list of 19 signs and symptoms,
which she said gave him his final
diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.
You'd got the psychiatric evidence
from these three very eminent men
who'd all trooped through
the witness box and
told us that he was
paranoid schizophrenic.
You could see
the police bristling at this.
They saw
Peter Sutcliffe as going off
to a relatively cushy existence
in a secure unit, not a proper prison.
The motives for murder
are many and varied,
and often the most bizarre ones
are advanced when
an accused murderer stands trial.
So it was today at London's Old Bailey
where a jury must decide
the sanity of Peter Sutcliffe,
the man called the Yorkshire Ripper.
The prosecution's job
was to pull that argument apart.
Mr. Justice Boreham told the jury that
if they didn't accept Sutcliffe's story
of hearing voices from God
then he must be found guilty of murder.
There were
lots of stories floating around
about him having the knowledge
to simulate paranoid schizophrenia
not least because his wife Sonia
had been diagnosed
with the same condition
a few years previously.
In his report, Dr. Milne
revealed that, at one time,
Sonia had also suffered
from schizophrenia.
Although she'd made a good recovery,
Dr. Milne said he found,
during his three interviews with her,
she was temperamental, highly strung,
unstable, and obsessed with cleanliness.
So he would have known the symptoms.
He would have known how to fake it.
He would've known how to fool,
or try to fool, the psychiatrists.
In your experience,
can somebody successfully feign symptoms
of an acute psychiatric condition,
uh, not just, say, for one doctor,
but over three?
I think it's possible, but they have
to know a lot about psychiatry.
And have to know a lot about the kinds
of disorders that psychiatrists deal with.
He was my son.
He's still my son.
I'm not trying to forgive him
for what he's done.
I'm just hoping that someday
somebody will fathom his mind.
And whoever that someone may be,
I hope they'll give us a logical
explanation of what happened.
There is the argument
that only someone who is insane
would do what he had done.
He started with
suspected prostitutes.
He killed a couple of, of innocent,
if you can call it that, girls.
Then towards the end,
there were no prostitutes.
He was just killing women,
and he was killing young women.
So all of this about God's mission
to rid the world of prostitutes
was a load of nonsense.
"You have to decide,"
Havers told the jury,
"whether this man tried to pull the wool
over the doctors' eyes."
In almost any other circumstance,
you would accept that the probability
was that the doctors got it right.
He knew he was going to kill them.
It wasn't an accident.
It was deliberate.
He
I mean
He must never come out.
As the tension grew throughout the day,
so, too, did the crowd outside,
waiting expectantly for the verdict.
The jury had to go out.
And it was the most complex
discussions they would've had to have
about mental health illness.
It seemed to me such a complex decision.
And then they just said,
"Will the defendant please stand?"
After six hours, the jury
just decided that in an absolute sense,
Sutcliffe did know what he was doing.
The jury rejected his plea
that he was guilty of manslaughter
on the ground
of diminished responsibility.
Mr. Justice Boreham said,
"I recommend a minimum period
of 30 years should elapse
before your release on license.
That is an unusually long period.
But in my judgment, you are
an unusually dangerous, man."
Hip, hip, hooray!
Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!
As the news broke, Mrs. Beryl Leach,
mother of the Ripper's 11th victim
walked out of the court
into the afternoon sunshine.
How did you feel
when you saw him being taken away
-to be put behind bars for so many years?
-Can't really say "happy."
This is not a happy situation.
I'd rather him not be there
and Barbara to be
still be with us.
Then came Mrs. Doreen Hill.
Her murdered daughter, Jacqueline,
died last November.
And if there'd still been
capital punishment, would you have
hoped he would be hung?
I would have, but many people have said
they thought hanging
was far too good for him.
Tonight, Sutcliffe is
in Wormwood Scrubs Prison in West London.
He'll soon be transferred
to a high-security prison,
possibly Gartree in Leicestershire.
The Yorkshire Ripper,
Britain's most notorious
and a dangerous mass killer,
is behind bars at last.
The Home Secretary has told MPs
that the West Yorkshire Police
made major errors of judgment
during their investigation
into the Yorkshire Ripper case.
Mr. Whitelaw said that if the errors
hadn't occurred, there would've been those
who were subsequently killed
who would not have been.
Mrs. Doreen Hill may sue
Mr. Ronald Gregory, the Chief Constable
of West Yorkshire Police,
for negligence over the death
of her daughter Jacqueline
who was the 13th woman
to be killed by Peter Sutcliffe.
George Oldfield, at the age of 57,
will move to become
head of Operational Services,
responsible for traffic, the dog and horse
sections, and criminal records.
All of the people associated
with the Ripper investigation
were moved, sidelined,
ostracized, and blamed.
Absolutely delighted!
West Yorkshire's
Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory
is leaving the police.
He's retiring in June.
Gregory felt he was pilloried
for the failure of West Yorkshire Police.
He sort of put two fingers up
to the establishment and said,
"Okay, well, I'm going to make some money
out of this and buy a house in Spain."
You see, everything has commercial value.
If the newspapers
want to pay me, fine.
Um
From being someone
that was a very strong leader,
someone that we all admired
and looked up to
to, "Why would he do that?
Why would he sell a story like that?"
But he did.
There are still officers who are smarting
under this continuous condemnation.
That's all it is, that's all they've had
since it happened: condemnation.
And-- and I am trying
to set the record straight.
-That's all I have to say. Okay.
-Thank you very much. Thank you.
Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe,
has been transferred to Broadmoor,
the top security hospital
from Parkhurst Prison
on the Isle of Wight.
The Home Secretary Leon Brittan said
Sutcliffe was suffering
from a grave form of mental illness.
Three years later, Peter Sutcliffe
managed to convince the authorities
he may not have been mad at the time,
but he was certainly mad now
and he needed a place
in a secure psychiatric unit.
Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty
of being a murderer,
not somebody who was suffering
a mental health illness.
In Broadmoor, it's a softer life
because you are deemed not to be bad,
but deemed to be mad,
then you have more privileges.
Television,
phone calls, you have more visitors.
And you know what? That's unacceptable.
The police interest
in the Yorkshire Ripper isn't over yet.
After the trial, the man in charge
of the Ripper Squad in its final months,
said they hoped to talk to Sutcliffe
again about other matters.
I'd been given the job
of looking through and investigating
potential outstanding murders
and attempted murders
and then interview him.
We eliminated a number.
We had 20 that he possibly could
have committed,
uh, reduced to, uh, ten
that he probably committed.
We re-investigated all of these offenses.
I saw the surviving victims.
So I got more information about
what he did.
And so, I was armed with all that
information by the time I went to see him.
I was in the room waiting
and the door opened
and in came this man.
And it felt sinister.
I felt the pain that he caused.
I felt anger at seeing an individual
who had done all that
just sort of standing there,
as if he'd no cares in the world.
Some of the things he told me,
it's almost as if he was proud
to remember this.
It really was sort of his
His trophy, his big moment.
You-- You've got to believe, I
I had no forensic evidence.
I had nothing. I was just--
It was just a matter of me talking to him,
and getting him to tell me
something that he didn't want to tell me.
I was determined
to get something from him
and in the end, I did.
The police came around.
I thought, "What's he gonna tell me?"
He said, "Peter Sutcliffe
has made a confession
to Keith Hellawell.
He's made two confessions,
you being the primary one."
I said, "Will he be charged
with my attack?"
And the police just said,
"Well, there's no point him
being charged with your attack
because he's already been charged
with 13 others."
I said, "Well, what about me?
What about me seeing justice done?
I want him to be charged
with something that he
There's no doubt what he did to me."
It brought back feelings of anger.
But I didn't realize how angry I was
up until the police came.
But after something happens like that
I began to realize that I couldn't
let it affect my life.
I don't want to be living
a life hating people or
I want to live my life and,
you know, do nice things,
think about nice things and
Because at the end of the day,
they're not worth it.
The Yorkshire Police
is definitely not worth it, no.
No.
He's confessed
to what he's chosen to confess to.
There are still crimes that
he has committed and he knows that.
But I think he'll take that to the grave.
And he will believe, overall, he's won.
The Yorkshire Ripper investigation
had a very dramatic effect,
particularly on women in North England.
I think the first thing it did
was to make women feel very unsafe
and to realize how much the responsibility
was on us to look after ourselves,
because the police
weren't actually going to do it for us.
That was really the beginning
of women pushing back and saying,
"No, why shouldn't we
walk around at night?"
"Why shouldn't we walk
at two o'clock in the morning
without having to worry
um, somebody might attack us?"
So I think it--
I think it changed women's perception
of how we live in this culture.
And had an incredibly radicalizing effect
on a whole generation of women.
This case has somehow
come to define West Yorkshire.
It's 40 years ago, and people still
remember it as though it was yesterday.
If we can do anything, it's to push him
back into the shadows
and to bring out the women.
And to focus
on what these women might have been,
what they had ahead of them.
How strong they were,
how tough they were.
And how they met a coward
one night on a dark street.