The following is a review of the complete programme/series.
Jack the Ripper is generally believed to have murdered no more than five women, but he set the trend, there have been any number of rippers since, including in the UK most notoriously the Yorkshire Ripper. Unlike the original, this one was caught; in the modern age, one would expect a man who committed so many murders to be brought to book at some point, because the clues - forensic and otherwise - must mount up surely if slowly. The big question though is why was he not caught sooner? And at the end of the day he was caught by accident, arrested by a junior uniformed officer who was learning the ropes with his senior partner when they literally stumbled over Peter Sutcliffe sitting with a prostitute in his car. That officer is interviewed here, as are a number of others; the rest appear only in archive footage, the original head of the investigation, George Oldfield, having died a broken man in 1985.
While wisdom in hindsight is a wonderful thing, there is no escaping the fact that Sutcliffe had been questioned nine times before his arrest, and was as good a suspect as any.
This documentary will certainly be of interest to crime buffs, even if it is an embarrassment to police officers.
Jack the Ripper is generally believed to have murdered no more than five women, but he set the trend, there have been any number of rippers since, including in the UK most notoriously the Yorkshire Ripper. Unlike the original, this one was caught; in the modern age, one would expect a man who committed so many murders to be brought to book at some point, because the clues - forensic and otherwise - must mount up surely if slowly. The big question though is why was he not caught sooner? And at the end of the day he was caught by accident, arrested by a junior uniformed officer who was learning the ropes with his senior partner when they literally stumbled over Peter Sutcliffe sitting with a prostitute in his car. That officer is interviewed here, as are a number of others; the rest appear only in archive footage, the original head of the investigation, George Oldfield, having died a broken man in 1985.
While wisdom in hindsight is a wonderful thing, there is no escaping the fact that Sutcliffe had been questioned nine times before his arrest, and was as good a suspect as any.
This documentary will certainly be of interest to crime buffs, even if it is an embarrassment to police officers.