At journalism school thirty years ago, the police who caught the Yorkshire Ripper were held up as an object lesson in how not to break news of an arrest. At fault was their announcement on TV that – in not so many words – they’d solved the crime.
For detectives whose efforts to find Peter Sutcliffe had been repeatedly thwarted, it was an understandable mistake. But a serious mistake nonetheless. It ran the risk of prejudicing a jury in a future trial. These were the days when young reporters took very seriously the stipulation of the Magistrates’ Courts Act of 1980, with its tight legal definition of what could be said by the media after a suspect was arrested under caution.
Sitting in that lecture three decades ago, I had more reason than most of my post-graduate classmates to feel the almost unique chill of the Ripper story. As a boy growing up in Bradford, I had seen how a serial killer can genuinely hold a city of hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of claustrophobic grip. Sutcliffe murdered 13 women.
I had seen the look on my mother’s face, as she prepared to walk to work at a local hospital in the fog or dark. And this being the industrial West Yorkshire of the 1970s, there were many such evenings, when the mills, factories and coal fires still laced the air with soot.
As a boy growing up in Bradford, I had seen how a serial killer can genuinely hold a city of hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of claustrophobic grip.
And it wasn’t just the workings of Sutcliffe’s twisted mind that exercised such a feeing of collective dread. Because, at the time, Bradford felt ever-so-slightly cursed. Sutcliffe was arrested in 1981, but five years earlier another infamous killer was also caught by West Yorkshire police. His name was Donald Neilson. Nicknamed “The Black Panther” by the press for no other reason than an account of a witness to one of his murders who noted his lithe movements and black clothing. Neilson’s house, it transpired after he was picked up, was about a mile and a half from my childhood home.
In my twenties, and by this time working as a reporter at The Yorkshire Post, I came across a couple of older colleagues who seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with Sutcliffe. Reporting his vile actions had been the defining story of their careers. In the hotel bar next to the now-demolished Yorkshire Post building, they would hold forth. No detail was too macabre.
At that time there was still a sense in which journalists knew a lot more about a story than the public. I remember sub-editing court reports filed by colleagues covering the trial of Fred West, who committed at least a dozen murders up to 1987. It was truly hideous reading.
The internet was beginning to make it impossible to hold back even the grizzliest facts of a case.
But by 2006, when I was presenting TV coverage from Ipswich after five bodies were found (believed to have been the work of the “Suffolk Strangler”) things had changed. The internet was beginning to make it impossible to hold back even the grizzliest facts of a case.
So the news of the death of Peter Sutcliffe calls to mind memories, but also recollections of conversations. My mentor at the Yorkshire Post was a former Sunday Times reporter who had studied theology at Oxford. He firmly believed that criminal psychology could only offer a limited explanation as to why the Yorkshire Ripper did what he did. Sutcliffe was proof, he said, of the existence of evil.
Fast forward to 2008, and the trial of Shannon Matthews. She was the young mother from West Yorkshire who falsely claimed her daughter, Shannon, had been abducted. It later emerged she’d been kept in hiding so that her mother could claim a reward. It was a grubby and deeply squalid story. I remember presenting live in the studio when news broke from the court that Matthews had been given an eight year sentence.
As now happens routinely, detectives addressed the cameras. One described Karen Matthews as “pure evil”, a grotesque overstatement to describe a devious, broken and pathetic mother. As someone who has been on-air when lots of these post-trial TV “scrums” happen, I wasn’t entirely surprised. I’d noticed how detectives, far from taking emotion and melodrama out of a story, sometimes seemed quite keen on injecting it afresh. “Pure evil.” It felt like a case of life imitating art. Of real world coppers who’d spent too much time watching fictional coppers on TV. Crimefighting in the age of emoting.
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