Wicked Beyond Belief. Michael Bilton
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with tragic results. There was little or no glory for the detectives who had led the hunt for the notorious killer called the ‘Black Panther’, who turned out to be Donald Neilson from Bradford – a vicious and cold-blooded criminal, wanted for the murders of three sub-postmistresses and the kidnapping and murder of heiress Leslie Whittle. As in the Yorkshire Ripper case there had been an all-important hoax tape-recording that threw detectives off the trail of the real killer. Like the Ripper case the hunt involved several police forces. Like the Ripper case there was a great deal of resistance to calling for help from outside, and when the end came it was two bobbies in a patrol car who made the arrest, not realizing they had caught a vicious killer. Finally, as in the Ripper case, when it was over there was a need for scapegoats: the officer in charge suffered the humiliation of being shifted sideways – out of CID and into uniform.
Some MPs demanded an inquiry into the mismanaged conduct of the Black Panther investigation, but the then Labour Government refused. Home Office Minister Dr Shirley Summerskill told Parliament the case:
has been discussed by chief officers of police collectively and I am quite sure they are fully aware of the need to learn any lessons which may be learned from such an investigation … the fact that a particular investigation is a matter for discussion by chief officers of police is a reflection of our system of policing in this country. The local control of police forces is an essential element of that system. Chief constables in this country, unlike some continental countries, do not come under the direction of a Minister of the Interior, in the enforcement of the law. The responsibility of deciding how an offence should be investigated is for them and them alone.
But when the Yorkshire Ripper case concluded five years later in 1981 it was abundantly obvious that Britain’s chief constables, and the police service as a whole, had disastrously failed to learn the lessons of the Black Panther investigation. Government ministers, senior officials at the Home Office and the Government’s law officers saw little merit in an agonizing public debate over the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. MPs’ demands for transparency were turned down, and there would be no public inquiry. But there was a major shock in store for the criminal justice establishment when Sutcliffe’s trial opened at the Old Bailey in London.
The prosecution, led by the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, pushed for a suspiciously speedy hearing, accepting a guilty plea to manslaughter from the accused, Peter Sutcliffe, on the grounds that mental illness had diminished his responsibility for his crimes. It all seemed done and dusted. The court proceedings would be over within half a day because both defence and prosecution were in complete accord.
However, they had not reckoned with the Judge’s reaction. To his very great credit Mr Justice Boreham refused what was in essence a plea bargain. Instead he ordered a full and open trial by jury to determine whether Sutcliffe was mad or bad. The jury would hear the evidence and decide for themselves whether Sutcliffe was guilty or not guilty of murdering thirteen women; or was guilty of manslaughter because he did not know what he was doing. Justice demanded that this gravest of matters should not be swept under the carpet. Ultimately he was convicted and given a thirty-year minimum sentence.
It seems extraordinary that nearly thirty years later the arguments about Sutcliffe’s responsibility for his crimes had never gone away. A new team of lawyers came back with a vengeance in 2010, when the Yorkshire Ripper went to court saying that having served his minimum sentence, he was entitled to know when he would be released. For the public at large the very idea seemed preposterous, incredible even; but Sutcliffe’s psychiatrists at Broadmoor secure hospital had declared their great success in treating him and were arguing that all along he had suffered from mental illness, meaning that his responsibility was diminished when he committed his crimes. Sutcliffe’s lawyers argued this meant he was entitled to a reduction of his minimum sentence.
All this was made possible because the European Court of Human Rights in 2002 ruled that judges – not the Home Secretary – should decide how long a lifer spends in gaol. So once again Peter Sutcliffe stood at centre stage making headlines, once more his activities invaded the psyche of the British public, fearful that the courts might actually believe he was almost an unintended victim of the Ripper case and set him free. Politically, the very idea was quite toxic, and the Prime Minister and Justice Secretary were both put on the spot, as an anxious public demanded to know: ‘Is this man actually going to be freed?’
Dealing as it did with one of the most notorious killers in British criminal history, the Yorkshire Ripper case raised crucial questions. Before her death, Myra Hindley – the 1960s Moors murderer of several children – had routinely tested the patience of the public with her woeful cries that she had served her time. Now another notorious serial killer was following suit. Thirty years before, the thought that Sutcliffe would ever be freed would have seemed utterly fanciful. Then Britain woke up and found that three decades had slipped by, the thirty-year minimum sentence passed at the Old Bailey in May 1981, was almost at an end – and now the law was different.
After Sutcliffe was snared in January 1981, there were enormous issues raised which needed truthful answers, especially about the failure of the police to solve very serious crimes. Today, such matters would be openly debated and inquiries held. But back then the public at large, the families of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims, the media, the taxpayers of West Yorkshire, MPs, even seasoned high-ranking detectives closely involved in homicide investigations, were never given answers. The key questions had been: Why did it take so long to catch this terrible serial killer? Had the police been up to the task? Who should be held accountable for mistakes that were made? The reason for this was the huge sensitivity surrounding shocking errors in the investigation.
Sutcliffe’s official toll was thirteen dead and seven attempted murders. We now know that he attacked many more women and that there were many opportunities to apprehend him which were tragically missed. In recent times, public disquiet over the Stephen Lawrence murder in London and the multiple killings by Dr Harold Shipman resulted in full and transparently open inquiries. In contrast, public disquiet over the Yorkshire Ripper investigation was flatly dismissed with platitudes that everything would be better in future. No open inquiry took place. Serious questions were posed but the answers only emerged behind closed doors. A high-level secret inquiry had recommended revolutionary changes in the way the police investigated serious crime, and yet openness, transparency and the acknowledgement that the public had a perfect right to know the truth about the police hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper were nowhere to be seen.
In January 1982, seven months after Sutcliffe was given twenty terms of life imprisonment, the then Home Secretary appeared before Parliament to announce the findings of an internal Home Office inquiry by one of Britain’s most senior and respected policemen, Mr Lawrence Byford. He had brilliantly investigated what went wrong with the Yorkshire Ripper case, but William Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, refused to publish Byford’s penetrating report which stripped bare all the mistakes that were made. Instead a brief four-page summary of its main conclusions and recommendations was placed in the House of Commons library. This summary only scratched the surface of the body of crucial facts garnered during Byford’s six-months-long inquiry by an eminent team of senior British police officers and the country’s leading forensic scientist, which was a model of its kind.
In a quiet and unsensational way, Byford’s report laid out its unvarnished and unpalatable truths in more than 150 closely typed pages. It contained much extraordinary detail. Such was the confidentiality surrounding the report that it was printed privately outside London and not by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. No senior civil servant, not even the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, was allowed to view a copy until Mr Byford delivered it personally to William Whitelaw. As one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary, Byford knew that in preparing the report he and his inquiry team had a grave duty to perform not merely for the benefit of the police service, but for the country as a whole.
Byford and his team did not shirk their responsibility. The changes his report recommended were truly ground-breaking, so much so that a cynic might say that if there had been no Yorkshire Ripper, it might have been well to invent him, as the sole means to force dramatic but profoundly necessary changes upon a creaking police service.
As a staff writer for the Sunday Times based in Yorkshire from 1979 to