Long before the Sheridan

case, the police were

leaking tapes

Norman Fenton

Following Kenneth Roy's pursuit of the person or institution that enabled the Sheridan police interviews to be broadcast, it's worth noting that there have been similar occurrences when television viewers were permitted, indeed encouraged, to watch similar police interviews. One such example is West Yorkshire Police's interview of John Humble, the so-called 'Wearside Jack', the man who had sent hoax letters and cassettes to the police during the search for the Yorkshire Ripper.
     After the hoaxer's arrest 27 years later, Jack Windsor Lewis, one of the two linguistic experts at Leeds University, who had originally provided the police with an amazingly accurate geographic origin for the hoaxer's background, wrote in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law that the hoaxer 'was interviewed at Wood Street police station in Wakefield and video extracts from the interviews were, rather remarkably, subsequently released to the press and seen in television accounts of the matter after his trial'.
     Just as shamelessly, as with the Gail Sheridan interview and the rosary/terrorist questioning, the viewer was invited to watch West Yorkshire police rehearse and record John Humble, reading the words of the transcripts of the hoax tapes. The police officers didn't actually say 'Once more with feeling', but they would have been as well to do so.
     A week after the murder of Jacqueline Hill, a 20-year-old student at Leeds University and the last of the Ripper's victims, I produced a documentary, 'The Mind of the Ripper', for the ITV network. We featured for the first time in the UK, a 'profiler', a sort of 'Cracker' figure but well before that creature of Granada's drama department, Jimmy McGovern and Robbie Coltrane appeared on our screens.
     But, as things would have it, the Yorkshire Ripper was in reality caught near Sheffield by a South Yorkshire police officer, who had decided to return to the bushes where Sutcliffe had claimed to have been urinating, having been arrested by the same officer for using false number plates on his car. The tools of the Ripper's trade were still hidden in those bushes, and the rest is, as they say, history. But a curious history it is, for if you read the assorted (and, no doubt, ghosted) memoirs of West Yorkshire police et al, it is they, not South Yorkshire, who caught the Ripper.
     But I have another interest to declare, and one closer to the issue of releasing police interviews to be broadcast.

I was subsequently approached by a solicitor representing the mother of the murdered Leeds student, Jacqueline Hill, who intended to legally pursue West Yorkshire's chief constable for failing to fulfil the required duty of care, that would have prevented Sutcliffe's murder of her daughter. The solicitor's approach to me was based on the programme 'The Mind of the Ripper', and the background knowledge it evidently implied. I agreed to help the mother, and even persuaded Thames Television that we should use a programme budget to further the mother's case, while producing a programme recording her struggle.
     A researcher and myself, both Clydesiders, began investigating the mother's case. Quite quickly, thanks to a journalist from Der Spiegel in Hamburg, we had found our own 'deep throat'. Like Woodward and Bernstein, in 'All the President's Men' we would meet our source in a car park on the southern reaches of the M1.
     This led us to a collection of previously unknown scandals involving the Ripper story, demonstrating that Sutcliffe's role as a major suspect could have been known four years earlier, saving seven lives. We were told that police officers had been claiming massive amounts of overtime for door-to-door inquiries that had never actually been made.
     A personal friend of Sutcliffe had specifically advised West Yorkshire Police in writing, and in person, that Sutcliffe should be investigated. His information had been filed as 'Priority Number 1', and then ignored.
     We were told how Greater Manchester Police had correctly predicted exactly where the Ripper worked, having matched bank notes known to have been used by Sutcliffe with payroll details from his employer. They passed this data on to West Yorkshire Police but were told to keep out of West Yorkshire's existing investigation.
     But most significantly, we were told how West Yorkshire Police had issued a 'Special Notice' to police forces throughout the UK advising that (sic) 'a person can be eliminated from these inquiries...if his accent is dissimilar to a north-eastern (Geordie) accent'.
     And this was issued regardless of the fact that after a disturbed and aborted attack on a 14-year-old schoolgirl (in reality potentially the Ripper's third victim), the schoolgirl had insisted to the police that her attacker had a local Yorkshire accent and, at the time, she produced what was an unerringly accurate photofit of Sutcliffe. But these clues were ignored as West Yorkshire Police always had insisted that the schoolgirl had not been attacked by the Ripper. Sutcliffe spontaneously described this attack in detail immediately after his arrest but, even then, it took many years before this fact was admitted publicly by West Yorkshire Police. Even then this was only done when the girl's family informed the local press.
     The so-called 'Wearside Jack', the hoaxer, had himself on several separate occasions during the search for the Ripper, personally telephoned the police to tell them that the tapes were all hoaxes. He was ignored on every occasion.
     All the information we had obtained was later confirmed as accurate when a previously confidential report on the police conduct of the Ripper affair was released in June 2006, subsequent to a freedom of information application. But our intended programme about the mother's pursuit of the chief constable of West Yorkshire was about to end very abruptly. The mother's failure to achieve some justice for her student daughter, Jacqueline, took longer. For several weeks after the body was found, West Yorkshire Police had constantly denied that this had been another Ripper killing.
     But in a biography of Margaret Thatcher published while she was still prime minister, the journalist Hugo Young wrote, without any subsequent denial, that Thatcher was so incensed about that murder that she announced that she, herself, was going to Leeds to take over the investigation in person 'because nobody but her, she thought, really cared about the fate of these wretched women'.
     Mrs Thatcher met the home secretary, William Whitelaw, and other officials, and Thatcher's words were officially recorded: 'The prime minister said that the local police had so far failed totally in their enquiries into a series of murders which constituted the most appalling kind of violence against women...it was now a question of public confidence. There were doubts whether the investigation was being conducted as effectively as it might be, and something needed to be done to restore the faith of the public in...the police'.
     Within days, a new management team took over the West Yorkshire investigation, and immediately concluded that the letters and tapes from the man with the Wearside accent were 'an elaborate hoax'.
     My researcher and I were asked to attend a meeting with a top-level Thames management team. No one other than us knew the identity, or in some cases even the existence, of our 'deep throat'. We were asked point-blank if we were now in a position to tell them, the management team, that the Home Office had known how badly the investigation was being conducted at the time by the West Yorkshire Police. When we answered affirmatively, we were asked to leave the room so that they could continue their own meeting. We were then curtly informed by phone that our Ripper project was over. Big time.

In 1988, the mother of Jacqueline Hill, the last victim, still pursuing in court what was now the case of Hill v chief constable of West Yorkshire Police 1988, claimed that West Yorkshire Police had failed to use sufficient and reasonable care to apprehend the murderer of her daughter. The House of Lords subsequently held that the chief constable of West Yorkshire did not owe a duty of care to the mother.
     Ronald Gregory, chief constable of West Yorkshire, sold his version of the Ripper story to the Mail on Sunday for a reported £40,000 (a substantial sum, then) causing a storm of criticism. Relatives of some of the Ripper's victims accused him of taking 'blood money'; the then home secretary Leon Brittan called him 'deplorable'; and – particularly hurtful to Gregory – the Police Review branded him disloyal and a hypocrite.
     Although it had now been officially concluded that the letters and tapes from the man with the Wearside accent were 'an elaborate hoax', the original tapes and letters had mysteriously gone missing from the police archives at least 12 years previously. But then, miraculously, a small fragment of an actual envelope, in which a letter was said to have been sent, was found and a DNA sample was taken from the licked glue. The world was told that this matched a DNA sample incidentally taken from John Humble, when he was charged with being drunk and disorderly in the Wearside area. John Humble became 'Wearside Jack'.
     And then equally surprisingly an original 'lost' cassette tape was found, the famous 'I'm Jack' one. But although he had phoned the police on several occasions to confess to having recorded the hoax tapes before Sutcliffe was caught by South Yorkshire, after his arrest he is made to read the transcript of the original tape, time after time, in the interview room until the police are satisfied. And then the tapes can be incidentally produced for the television audience. Which is where we came in.
     John Humble pleaded guilty to all four counts of perverting the course of justice so no evidence needed to be produced in court; tape, DNA or whatever. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. He appealed and lost. Half way through his eight years, it was reported in a Sunderland newspaper that he was to be released within the month. And thanks to the Probation Service and like agencies, Humble disappeared back to the world from which he had come. But not to television viewers in this country and throughout the world, since the interview tapes of him reading his part as 'I'm Jack' were sold on: they appeared on the National Geographic Channel, for example.
     If the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World continues to unravel as it does, we may see another very interesting perjury case being heard in Scottish courts. But will we see the police interviews of such a previously important figure grace our television screens? Who knows? But watch this space. I certainly will.

Norman Fenton wrote and produced for Thames TV a dramatised version of the inquest in Pretoria into the killing of Steve Biko, the black South African activist. Later, he extended his original version to stage-length and 'The Biko Inquest' was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company