The Ripper

 The Ripper is an excellent British crime documentary made for Netflix in 2020.  The program has an interesting feminist perspective and, in my estimation, is an almost perfectly realized example of this genre. Produced in four 47 minute segments, the show covers territory that an American documentary (for instance The Vow) would expand to eight hours or, even, more.  In fact, the documentary has an effect that is rare with respect to these kinds of shows -- it seems too short and, in fact, omits important parts of the story.  (For instance, one of the Yorkshire Ripper's 13 murder-victims isn't even mentioned on air and is identified only in a title at the end of the program.)  The program is feminist and, therefore, victim-oriented:  it shares some of the ideology of the Black Lives Matter movement; the show posits it as crucially important to name the women who were killed by the Ripper and show us their pictures.  This is particularly important because these victims were, by and large, unfairly maligned at the time that they were slain.  Documentaries that are honest about human affairs are, of course, catalogues of folly and this show is relentless in its exposure of police negligence approaching criminal dereliction of duty.  However, The Ripper's approach is subtle -- the director doesn't provide any perspective on how horribly the police miscalculated their investigation (thereby, certainly, allowing several murders to occur that could have been preventable) until the last episode.  The final 47 minutes show effects a reversal that causes the viewer to completely re-evaluate what we have been earlier shown.  

The Yorkshire Ripper committed his atrocities between 1974 and 1981, although he may have been active as an assailant for several years before the first killing.  His first known victim was a woman named Wanda McCann who was killed on the outskirts of a red light district in Leeds.  (She had left her small children behind in her flat and had been drinking when the murderer smashed her skull with a claw hammer and, then, gutted her.)  Disastrously, the police interpreted her mutilation as the work of a "prostitute-killer" like Jack the Ripper -- a murderer whose identity has never been established.  After a half-dozen killings, all implemented in the same way, the Ripper sent an audio cassette to the hapless investigating detective.  In the U.K., accents are a primary marker of class and prestige.  The Ripper had a so-called "Geordie" accent showing that he came from a small city in the Midlands called Sunderland.  A linguistic expert, further, asserted the he could place the accent within a square mile in Sunderland.  In addition, the Ripper sent a letter to the investigating gendarmes although this was disregarded, ultimately, due to the fact that the diction in the document was directly cribbed from the notorious letters by which Jack the Ripper taunted the police.  Various other clues existed:  the murderer's blood-type was a very rare AB (less than 6% of the population) and the man had very small feet -- he wore an 8 shoe-size.  The tread of his car was found at one murder scene and so the type and age of his tires were known.  One of the dead women was found with a 5 pound note on her body -- 5 pounds, at that time, was the going rate for sex with a prostitute.  The note was brand-new and had recently been issued and it, also, could be readily traced.  Despite all of this information, the police were stymied and didn't make any arrests.   And the Ripper kept killing women.  In a couple of cases, the women survived and there was a "photokit" (a composite picture) showing his appearance.  But still the cops were baffled.  When the Ripper turned from murdering prostitutes to school-girls, there was general alarm -- the prostitutes were thought to be generally disposable and no one cared too much about their slaughter.  Single women were put under a sort of curfew.  The feminist movement was just getting under way at that time and the police failure to capture the Ripper caused wide-spread rage.  The feminists, quite reasonably, wondered why they were being told to stay off the streets after ten p.m.  It was obvious that a man was murdering women and there were demonstrations in which women demanded that all men be kept off the streets instead.  Ultimately, a young cop observing a car parked in an odd location, ran the license-plate and discovered that the owner of the vehicle didn't match the registration.  The car drove off and the woman in the vehicle survived.  The cop came back, and searching the waste area where the vehicle had been parkedm found the Ripper's tools -- his hammer and some knives.  And, so, after 13 known killings over 5 and 1/2 years, an arrest was made.  The killer turned out to be Peter Sutcliffe, a married truck driver.  Sutcliffe admitted the crimes but claimed that he should be convicted of manslaughter on the basis of "diminished capacity" -- that is, madness.  Sutcliffe was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.  However, later he went insane in jail (or feigned insanity)and was sent to mental institution.  

The film makers save the shocks for the last show.  As it turns out, Sutcliffe wasn't a "prostitute killer" -- his crimes were those of opportunity; it happened that prostitutes were simply easy to lure to lonely locations where they could be murdered.  In fact, he was a sex-murderer or thrill-killer who targeted women in general.  The police, hastening to characterize Sutcliffe as a Jack-the-Ripper avatar, that is a whore-murderer, completely misunderstood what he was doing.  As one of the talking heads in the show says:  the Midlands cops were still trying to solve the Victorian era murders committed by "saucy Jack." Sutcliffe wasn't from Sunderland and didn't speak with a "Geordie" accent -- the audio cassette was a hoax.  Furthermore, the police had interviewed Sutcliffe, who otherwise met the profile of the murderer, not once but nine times.  Detectives had interviewed him so frequently that his co-workers had nicknamed him "the Ripper".  The five pound note had been paid to him by his employer at the truckdriving firm where he worked -- something well-known to the police investigators.  The "photokit" composite depicted a man who was the "spitting image" of Sutcliffe.  The Yorkshire Ripper, in fact, had been hiding in plain sight for, at least, four years.  Because the cops had characterized him as a "prostitute killer", they missed, at least, seven other assaults that he had committed with hammer before actually murdering and mutilating his victims -- the cops ignored those assaults because they had involved school girls or respectable women.  It is the show's theme that the division of victims into prostitutes or women of "loose character" and respectable women, essentially, mystified the investigation and confounded its results.  There was a modicum of justice:  the smirking detectives who managed the investigation were disgraced and, at least, one of them was demoted to "dog catcher."  (However, the most negligent of the group sold his story to Britain's tabloid press and ended up owning a nice vacation villa in Spain.)  

The show is fascinating.  Compared to American serial killer programs, it's relatively discrete.  Although the Ripper mutilated his victims in horrific manner, these details are left undescribed.  The program's orientation toward the victims creates an interesting perspective on the Ripper's crimes. The program is visually sophisticated, although most of the imagery is unobtrusive -- we see the desolate areas of field and waste-land where the bodies were found, often placed as if on display.  The only corpses that the film shows are some of Jack the Ripper's victims.  If you like this kind of stuff, The Ripper is economically made, unemphatic, and, ultimately, a devastating indictment of a particular kind of bureaucratic idiocy.

(Sutcliffe died in custody in November 2020, a victim of Covid.)