Liza Williams: Self - Narrator and Interviewer

Quotes 

• [talking about Michael Havers' comments while presenting the prosecution case] 

  Liza Williams - Interviewer : He's talking about Wilma McCann. And he said "She drank too much. She was noisy and sexually promiscuous. Whether or not she was a prostitute is not known, but she certainly distributed her favours widely." It just feels quite unnecessary to me.

  Nick Davies : Yeah. Horrible, horrible. That did strike me as just old-fashioned, casual, sexist chauvinism of a kind that was really familiar, and I don't think he had any inhibition about saying that, because it was not unusual to talk about women, talk about working-class women, talk about prostitutes in that way. I'm not even sure whe was a prostitute. In fact, that's what he's saying: "Never mind - she's working-class, she drinks too much." Michael Havers came from that class, from that generation for whom a certain kind of view of working-class people and of women was absolutely core. It's just in the DNA. He didn't even notice that he had it.

• [talking about the press speculation at the time that the Ripper's murders may have been a reaction to his relationship with his wife] 

  Liza Williams - Interviewer : Michael Havers said at one point "Is it because he was having a rough time after his marriage? Was his wife, also because of her own illness, behaving impossibly so that he dreaded going home?" You can't explain this by saying that his wife was difficult.

  Nick Davies : [laughs] 

  Liza Williams - Interviewer : I mean, it's...

  Nick Davies : It's just ludicrous. You might well have a bad relationship at home. That would not begin to explain why you would go out and attack at least twenty women with hammer and screwdriver. There is some sort of classic caricature of the man with the nagging wife that's in there that's pretty nasty.

  Joan Smith : It was just this kind of extraordinary inability to see that a man might be responsible for what a man is doing. Very distasteful, because it was absolutely clear that *he* was the person responsible for all this death and destruction.

• [David Zackrisson, who was investigating the letters and tapes that the police received, started to suspect that they may not be genuine] 

  David Zackrisson : I still can't quite understand why they put all their eggs in one basket. Investigations are peppered with hoaxes, with false confessions. The persons who got that right at the start should have analysed that to the nth degree. After Barbara Leach, and I only ever discussed this with my wife, but it did come to a point where I had a moral dilemma. I said "There's enough information here. Should I leak it? Should I tell them that there's a wild goose chase?" In the end, I thought "No, I'll do things the proper way." And there was a member of the press who I knew very well - I never ever told him.

  Liza Williams - Interviewer : Do you regret not leaking it?

  David Zackrisson : [pause]  You know, that's a... that's a curve ball. What'll I say? Do I regret...? Would it have changed things? No, I don't regret it, because I think it would have made relationships even worse. I would technically have committed an offence under the Official Secrets Act. And that may well have destroyed everything we'd done, so I don't regret it. But it was a thought that crossed my mind.

• Liza Williams - Interviewer : In 1983, a year after Byford had delivered his report, Ron Gregory, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, who had overseen the entire Ripper investigation and who had so far faced no disciplinary action, retired and published his memoirs. They were serialised in The Mail on Sunday, and, even more controversially, it was reported he had been paid £40,000 for writing them.

  Nick Davies : Ron Gregory genuinely thought it was acceptable, after the disastrous quality of the investigation which is force had run, that he should sell the story of his experience of the Ripper inquiry. I mean, it was a bloke who'd lost his marbles or lost his conscience. He'd presided over a pretty disastrous police inquiry. At least thirteen women were killed, seven and more were attacked. You cannot sit back after a failure like that and say "That you very much, I'll take 40,000 quid in my back pocket."

  Liza Williams - Interviewer : In the two years that followed the court case, all the senior officers on the case quietly retired. Ron Gregory, George Oldfield and Dick Holland, Oldfield's deputy, have now all died. Jim Hobson is still alive. I wanted to speak to him for this series, and tried to contact him, but he didn't reply to my letter.

• Liza Williams - Interviewer : The Byford Report highlighted numerous procedural errors made by the police, but I wonder if the problem was deeper than this. Did the police's attitudes to women and prostitution, reflective of 1970s Britain, cloud their judgement? Did they, in fact, misunderstand Sutcliffe's crimes from the very start?

  Joan Smith : They made absolutely basic mistakes. It came out of a kind of belief in archetypal figures. You know, the prostitute killer, in inverted commas, featured very large in their imaginations, and it just skewed the case from start to finish. The police line was that "We made the red light districts too hot, so he moved onto innocent girls and respectable women." That wasn't what happened at all. He started by attacking women and girls. But if you go into a quiet little market town like Keighley and start attacking people on a residential street and they scream, lights come on, people come out, cars drive up, and you get interrupted. So the first three attacks, in his eyes, were not successful, so he then went into red light districts. They misunderstood why he was going there. What he was looking for was vulnerability. The thing about prostituted women is that they're very vulnerable. You can persuade them to get into a car. You can take them to a quiet place and you can attack them. I think this series of murders, what it did was it brought home what happens if really important things like the investigation of serious crime are in the hands of a small group of people who were incredibly like each other, reinforce each other's prejudices, don't even understand their own biases, and keep other people at bay. You had this little group of senior officer, all of whom were male, and the few critical voices, they weren't listening to, and several women died whole lives could have been saved. It was a conversation among men about dead women.