Quizzes & Puzzles4 mins ago
The Long Shadow Part 2
Telling the story of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. I watched the last in the series last night and the outcome was quite shocking. One of his victims who survived his attack was awarded a fairly small amount in compensation, but lost her benefits because of it, and the detective who worked on the case sold his story to the newspapers for far more than she was awarded. Sometimes there really is no justice.
Excellent series though. It held my interest to the end.
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.George Oldfield, who was in charge of the investigation and so in thrall to the idea that the tape and letters were genuine, claimed that they contained information that only the real killer could know. This was clearly false, as any proper examination of them would have shown - everything in them was available from the extensive press coverage.
Oldfield's insistence that the tapes and letters were genuine wrecked the latter stages of the investigation. Little wonder died a broken man at the age of 61.
I think a lot of criticism now is from people who don't realise how not having computers to correlate data hampered this, and many other investigations, the final episode showed how the police were dashing around pulling cards from files to join the dots. Not sure if it's true but wasn't one outcome of the Ripper investigation the development of HOLMES, the national police system where information if routinely logged and the computer looks for connections.
I recall his capture, my late OH looked at the photo and said 'F***, that's Pete from the graveyard', he'd worked with him as a student in the early 70s!