The six year search for the Yorkshire Ripper
The six year search for the Yorkshire Ripper was the largest man-hunt in British history and it was hindered by a man from Sunderland who peppered the Police with bogus letters and created a tape recording which haunted a nation. With the arrival of DNA technology in recent years, the police re-opened the case of the hoax Ripper and found their man. In 2005, nearly 30 years since he sent his first letter, the police knocked on John Humble’s door.
Anyone with a weakness for the macabre will find this account of one man’s deluded bid for notoriety strangely gripping, but in truth it had utterly tragic consequences. The fall-out of the infamous “Wearside Jack” tape was that the police shifted their hunt for the serial killer away from Yorkshire to the North East of England, leaving Peter Sutcliffe free to roam the deserted streets in his search for new victims. He murdered three more women in that time and was ruled out of police enquiries on several occasions because he did not have a Geordie accent.
The chilling accounts of others involved hardly covers the Yorkshire Police in glory however. Voice experts who worked on the tape and the ripper’s victims who survived his early attacks all questioned the authenticity of the recording which formed the centre-piece of a nationwide man-hunt. Weighed down by guilt, Humble even called the incident room to tell officers that the tape was a hoax. Unfortunately he was ignored. For the families of those last three victims, forgiving John Humble is understandably difficult, but by the end of
red this documentary his remorse is tangible.
