From 1975 to 1980, the Hammer Happy sadist, the Yorkshire Ripper,

single-handedly created a culture of fear and paranoia for hundreds of thousands of women living in West Yorkshire, England.

Women were suddenly terrified to do something as basic as walk home alone from work.

The West Yorkshire police even issued an official warning for women to avoid going out at night unaccompanied.

A serial killer task force had an evidence room with thousands and thousands of index cards

used in the days just before computer databases began to be utilized

to categorize thousands of pieces of information and hundreds of suspects.

Among the many, many suspects was the real killer,

a local man named Peter Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe, a married long-distance truck driver,

would be interviewed nine times before his eventual arrest, and he was never considered a serious

suspect until just after he was finally apprehended. When he was apprehended, he was arrested for stolen license plates,

not murder. He wasn't quite caught red-handed, but he confessed anyway. Peter's earliest known

attack went back to 1969, and then after a long possible period of inactivity, during which

many investigators feel certain he actually did commit many, many more crimes,

Sutcliffe continued to murder and attack women in 1975.

When it was all said and done, Sutcliffe said it was a miracle that he hadn't been caught earlier.

Several of his victims were sex workers, but many were not.

Due to common prejudices of the day against sex workers,

his victims were either

classified as, quote, prostitutes or respectable women by investigators and the media, an assessment

that doesn't hold up well at all, just a bit cringy. The investigation to catch him became the biggest

manhunt in British history. The police put in an estimated

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