Has he been named?

[Darryl Kenyon]

Were there 200,000 suspects as such, or 200,000 index cards pointing to various bits of info, of which only a small subset were directly suspect-related? I can't remember offhand.

Not sure Sam these are two sites I looked at - Geographic profiling (GP) is a statistical technique developed in criminology to identify likely candidates from large lists of suspects in cases of serial crime such as murder or rape. With large lists of suspects (268,000 names in the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the UK in the 1980s), it is difficult or impossible to investigate each name, and a prioritisation strategy is useful. GP uses the spatial locations of crime sites to make inferences about the location of the offender’s ‘anchor point’ (usually a home, but sometimes a workplace).

And - Peter Sutcliffe, also known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was the name on a list of 268,000 suspects generated by this investigation in the late 1970s. But how were the team investigating these crimes meant to cope with such an overload of information? These are the fundamental problems that geographic profiling is trying to solve.

I seem to remember on one documentary that there were rows and rows of index files with very little chance of cross referencing them

Regards Darryl

[Darryl Kenyon]

Following on I have read somewhere that if all the files were computerised and cross referenced as today, Sutcliffe would certainly have been in, at least the top twenty suspects.
Regards Darryl

[Darryl Kenyon]

My mistake, I should have said index cards, rather than files. Which probably gives a different slant on it.
Regards Darryl

[Sam Flynn]

I seem to remember on one documentary that there were rows and rows of index files with very little chance of cross referencing them

Correct, although I think those cards provided indices to various items - witness statements, crime scene reports, interviews, internal memos (etc), not just suspects. Even allowing for lack of cross-referencing, it would be truly remarkable if those cards referred to a quarter of a million suspects.

[Michael W Richards]

Correct, although I think those cards provided indices to various items - witness statements, crime scene reports, interviews, internal memos (etc), not just suspects. Even allowing for lack of cross-referencing, it would be truly remarkable if those cards referred to a quarter of a million suspects.

That was what I was getting at Sam, all those letters.

[Sam Flynn]

That was what I was getting at Sam, all those letters.

Yes, those too, and no doubt loads of relevant newspaper cuttings.