Under attack from all sides
More on the misogyny and murder issue:
The police – waylaid for 18 months by a hoax and having only started to take the case seriously once “innocent young girls” (their words) and not just sex workers had been killed – had shifted the responsibility for public safety on to women themselves, urging them not to go out after dark.
But on 25 October, with her boyfriend away in London on a CND march, Lea decided she would not stay at home. She went to the pub to plan her 21st birthday party and after a few drinks walked through Leeds University’s Headingley campus to get her bus home. It was then she was approached by a man who called to her with such warmth that she assumed he must be a friend she couldn’t quite recognise.
Talking to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Lea, now an artist, recalled the “nightmare terror” when she realised the man in fact posed her severe danger.
She turned and ran like hell, but she could hear him running after her, faster and faster. He smashed her over the head and knocked her out, but a passer-by had heard her scream and chased Sutcliffe off, so Lea survived.
The feminist campaigner Julie Bindel was 18 and living in Leeds when Sutcliffe killed his 13th and final victim there: Jacqueline Hill, a 20-year-old student, who was murdered three weeks after Lea was attacked.
Bindel lived less than a mile away from where Hill’s body was found and had been followed up the hill late one night the week before the murder by a man fitting Sutcliffe’s description. She reported it to the police, but they dismissed her.
Jesus, I didn’t know that.
She was involved in a group campaigning to end violence against women in Leeds and described how women felt under attack from all sides – not just by the Ripper, but by the blatant sexism from the press and West Yorkshire police.
“It was toxic,” she said. Headlines stated Sutcliffe made his “first mistake” after killing a 16-year-old walking home from school, Jayne MacDonald. The clear implication: that sex workers or women who had been drinking were fair game. She recalled how George Oldfield, who led the investigation, addressed the murderer on TV in 1979 saying: “There may be more pawns in this war before I catch you, but I will catch you.” That’s what women were to these detectives, said Bindel: disposable pawns.
…
Police were so fixed in their view of the world and what a serial killer would look like that they missed numerous chances to catch Sutcliffe, said [Joan] Smith: “One of the cops once said: ‘He doesn’t have to confess. The day we have him sitting across the table from us, we will know.’ But they visited him nine times and he never even made it into their top 10 lists of suspects.”
Hooboy, there’s a prize human delusion – that we “know” bad people when we see them. You’d think (you’d hope) cops know that better than anyone.
The Yorkshire Ripper moniker, attached to the case by the media early on, hampered the investigation, said Smith. “Jack the Ripper is the prototype serial killer but we don’t know who he was, we don’t know what his motivation was, what kind of person he was and he’s this mythic figure. If you project this on to an ordinary bloke, I think they were expecting him to have horns or something.”
And it wasn’t just the media who called him the Ripper. The Guardian includes this photo:
It’s horrifying – it makes almost a joke of the whole thing.
Nina Lopez of the English Collective of Prostitutes helped organise protests outside the Old Bailey during Sutcliffe’s trial and can recall the fury women felt when the attorney general at the time, Sir Michael Havers, said of the victims: “Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women.”
Why yes, that is infuriating.
Sutcliffe contributed to the creation and galvanisation of “a very vibrant women’s movement against violence”, said Bindel. “Because as soon as you pick up the rock and see the misogyny underneath you can’t unsee it.
“We still haven’t got the message about the violence inherent in prostitution; we still haven’t got the message about how women in prostitution are not disposable, that there are no innocent victims because there were no guilty victims.”
Forty years on, not enough has changed, agrees Smith, who now chairs the Violence Against Women and Girls board. “Now we’re now in the situation where women’s organisations are having to take the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] to court for not prosecuting rapists.”
Remember – the rate of rape prosecutions has gone down over time.
Did she or someone acting on her behalf then take it up the line that ends with the Chief Superintendent or the relevant cabinet minister?
Where prostitution is illegal, the women selling sexual services on the streets (low class) or visiting clients in response to client request at the clients’ homes (high class ‘call girls’) are an easy mark for protection racketeers: if not Mafia types then the cops themselves will provide the ‘protection’, for a consideration of course.
On top of that, most solved crimes involve a perpetrator with some sort of traceable connection to the victim. But the Ripper types simply go out and murder more or less at random.
(There are measures women can take that improve their chances in such situations.)
Reading these posts reminds me of when the snipers were terrorizing the DC area back in 2002. There was a palpable sense that anytime you were out in public—filling the gas tank or buying groceries or whatever—you could be the next victim. I remember going to Home Depot one afternoon and being paranoid in the parking lot, doing my best to hurry through and not walk a straight line. A couple of days later a woman was killed in that very parking lot.
The difference is that the victims were more random, and there was no attempt to blame or dismiss them. I can’t imagine why.
There’s something else here, too. How to explain it…
It’s the thing about not being able to recognise a serial killer, because he looks and seems just like any ordinary man. Two conclusions can be drawn from this. First, that serial killers are good at hiding their violent thoughts and impulses. The second, which is never discussed, is that so many men have similarly violent thoughts and impulses, that serial killers just blend right in.
@Omar:
Why do you ask? It was not Julie’s responsibility to do that, it was the police’s responsibility to take her report seriously in the first place.
Ophelia has barely touched on the horrific institutional, professional and personal failures of the police during this investigation. I doubt there was a clear route for escalation or that any pressure would have been applied from the top if there were. This was the 70s and procedure, oversight and transparency were less than they were today. And they are pretty piss poor in practice even now. I doubt it would have occurred to Julie or anyone else that there was a route to being taken seriously.
But all that is beside the point, of course, because as I said, escalation was in no way Julie’s responsibility.
Also she was EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD. I can’t begin to express how clueless I was at 18.
Yes, I was going to say that too.
And she was from a small, rather sheltered town in the North East in the 60s, I wouldn’t expect too much wisdom until she’d grown into it. I should know, I was brought up in the very next small, sheltered town along ten years later and I know how clueless I was.
Look, we can’t say that this killer was targeting “women.” He couldn’t possibly know how each of them identified. Besides, I am assured that “women” is a legal category invented in the last decade.
Screechy, I imagine no one even mentioned “women” once while you were in law school, right? Just like no one ever mentioned “women” once while I was studying biology. Of course.
Well, there was a class titled “Women and the Law” or something like that, but I guess we all assumed that was some new-fangled thing invented by some ivory tower professor.
(Seriously, though, a friend of mine took that course — he said he was the only male in the class, and it actually became awkward because the professor kept calling on him, he supposed out of an attempt to “balance” the discussion.)
And this is the problem with getting anything changed for the better. Women have been taking classes centered around men forever (and still most of them are), but put the word “woman” in the title of the course, and men avoid it like somehow they might come in contact with menstrual blood, or something.
Which brings to mind an amusing anecdote. I was having a book reading a while back, and reading a book I wrote which delves immediately into the messy world of menstrual cycles. The first chapter talks about getting the first period, and then there is the mess of having to collect all their menstrual items and take them to the clinic to make sure there is no fertilized egg (yes, it’s a dystopia). While I was reading, a couple of young men entered the bookstore. They heard about two sentences, turned around, and fled. Wimps.