Has he been named?

[Sam Flynn]

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

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

[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]

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.

[Darryl Kenyon]

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

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

[Michael W Richards]

Would the vast amounts of letters be something that went into a Suspects file? Where else would they be filed, Unverified Correspondence? There were hundreds a week, from all over, do those numbers get incorporated into the greater number discussed?

[Sam Flynn]

Hi C.d, Since the ripper crimes spanned a number of years and was very high profile, people were ringing up wily nily I think they logged every name mentioned even the ones like " My neighbour has a dodgy walk"...

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.

[Michael W Richards]

"Jack the Ripper" was certainly a work of genius, whether it was coined by a killer or a hoaxer. Wouldn't be surprised if a name like that was already doing the rounds, rather than plucked out of thin air.

It was a powerful choice, I think that's why we have a journalist to thank for it.

[Harry D]

Chronologically, yeah. As a terrifying phantom menace is what I referred to Harry. Leather Apron was scary, Jack the Ripper was deadly.

"Jack the Ripper" was certainly a work of genius, whether it was coined by a killer or a hoaxer. Wouldn't be surprised if a name like that was already doing the rounds, rather than plucked out of thin air.

[Michael W Richards]

No, it wasn't. He was just known as Leather Apron before that.

Chronologically, yeah. As a terrifying phantom menace is what I referred to Harry. Leather Apron was scary, Jack the Ripper was deadly.

[Darryl Kenyon]

Hello Darryl,

How in the world did they get 260,000 names on a suspect list? Did they just include everyone who lived within a certain radius of the crimes?

c.d.

Hi C.d, Since the ripper crimes spanned a number of years and was very high profile, people were ringing up wily nily I think they logged every name mentioned even the ones like " My neighbour has a dodgy walk" Didn't Anderson say something similar about all leads, even absurd ones being followed up. And when the infamous fake cassette tape with the Geordie accent was played across the nation that would have opened up thousands more names who people believed sounded similar.
Regards Darryl

[c.d.]

Hello Darryl,

How in the world did they get 260,000 names on a suspect list? Did they just include everyone who lived within a certain radius of the crimes?

c.d.

[Darryl Kenyon]

What we must remember when we are considering how many people were interviewed or questioned is the fact that a lot of men who could have been the ripper would have verifiable alibis in the fact that most of the male population who did work, worked long hours thus diminishing their chance of being the killer [less free time]. Plus the constrains of how much free space they had IE so many per room [thus again checkable alibis] would also impact on the search for the killer. What I mean by this is the field could be narrowed up quickly. Also, apologies if I am wrong here but there were a lot more police per square mile than there are today. Not only that but a lot of them were local bobbies on the beat and who would use their local knowledge in trying to determine who was a legitimate suspect or not and were to look.
This is taken from online - According to Canter (2003) geographical profiling, within the context of a respected diagnostic approach, was developed in 1980 during the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry when the Police approached Stuart Kind (a leading forensic biologist) who adapted mapping techniques that he had learnt as a navigator in the Royal Air Force together with the locations, dates and times of the Ripper murders to produce a profile that suggested, quite correctly, that the offender (Peter Sutcliffe) lived somewhere between Shipley and Bingley.
One final point there were 268,000 names on the Yorkshire ripper suspect list at it's height. Would Sutcliffe's name have appeared on it regardless of the five pound mistake he made? Well he was questioned about being in the red light districts were some of the murders occurred, perhaps Jack was spotted hanging around Commercial St at night and questioned about his presence?
Regards Darryl

[Herlock Sholmes]

I’m of the belief that there was a Ripper who killed between 4 and 6. Of the named suspects I favour Druitt then Kosminski. No other named suspect really comes close to convincing me. BUT....if I had to put money on it I’d probably hedge toward an as yet unnamed culprit.

So in short Harry, I don’t know. My natural pessimism leads me to think that we’ll probably never know.

Unless you know something that we don’t Harry?