Revelatory investigation into the police handling of the Yorkshire Ripper Case which spanned over 14 years. Newly updated to include Sutcliffe’s bid for freedom in 2008, and the verdict from court in 2010.For over twenty years, the dark secrets of the biggest criminal manhunt in British history have remained a closed book. Detectives refused all requests to tell the inside story of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation that logged over two million manhours of police work. The victims who survived maintained a wall of silence. And the detailed forensic evidence, witness statements and autopsy reports have remained locked away.Until now.Award-winning writer Michael Bilton has persuaded the key people to talk. After years of exhaustive research he can finally reveal the extraordinary truth behind the murder enquiry that left Peter Sutcliffe free to kill again and again.With exclusive access to the detectives involved, to pathologist's archives and confidential police reports, the story of the hunt reads as tensely as any thriller. Its measured analysis of the calamitous investigation is also a shocking and important indictment of the most notorious murder hunt of the twentieth century.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
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Michael Bilton. Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
Wicked Beyond Belief
Michael Bilton
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
CHRONOLOGY
PREFACE
1. Contact and Exchange
2. The Diabetic Detective
3 ‘A Man with a Beard’
4. Tracks in the Grass
5. Impressions in Blood
6. A Fresh Start
7. Punter’s Money
8 ‘The Job Is Life; Life Is the Job’
9. A Miserable Place To Die
10. Chinese Walls
11. The Wrong Track
12. Going Covert
13 ‘He Comes from Sunderland’
14. Bad Feelings
15. Swamped by Paper
16 ‘He Lives Somewhere, He Works for Someone’
17 ‘The Beast I Am’
18. Mad or Bad?
19. DNA, DNA, DNA
20. A Suitable Case for Treatment?
21. UNMASKED: Leeds, West Yorkshire, 2006
THE FINAL CHAPTER
NOTE ON SOURCES
TEXT NOTES AND REFERENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AUTHOR’S NOTE ON THE APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
SEARCHABLE TERMS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Praise
About the Publisher
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The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
Dramatis Personae
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The formal post-mortem began at 11.15 a.m. Until then, no attempt had been made to look more closely at the body, especially at the back. The victim was forty-one years old and slightly overweight, which made her look several years older. She was five feet six inches tall. Donald Craig, the assistant chief constable, stood close to Hoban watching while the normal forensic procedures in a homicide autopsy were applied. Craig was an experienced murder investigator, who had solved all seventy-three murders on his patch during a three-year spell as the West Riding CID chief during the early 1970s. It made him a bit of a legend and people either loved or loathed him. He was tough, uncompromising and, some even said, a bit of a bully at times. He had few social graces and rarely apologized for anything. The West Riding man and the Leeds City man respected one another. You couldn’t take away Craig’s track record, and he had attended dozens of autopsies, so he knew what to look out for. His father, too, had been a policeman.
For nearly eighty years, since the late nineteenth century, the mechanics of identifying and preserving evidence at crime scenes encompassed a process that combined logic with rigorous scientific method. Minute specks of material could prove vital, and in eighty years the technology had changed dramatically. Forensic techniques now encompassed the use of highly expensive electron microscopes and mass photo spectrometers.
