Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
sad truth is that elements of secretive and evasive handling in the aftermath of these tragic events meant the British government, police and security services fuelled the fires of conspiracist thinking, inside the Muslim community and far beyond it. As the American embassy in London implied in mid-2006, in a candid report back to Washington revealed by WikiLeaks, this mistrust was never going to be easy to overcome (see bit.ly/wikileakspostbombings).
‘Since 7/7, HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] has invested considerable time and resources in engaging the British Muslim community,’ the secret US embassy cable said. ‘The current tensions demonstrate just how little progress has been made.’
Many British Muslims still doubt the official version of what happened in London on 7 July 2005, despite the lengthy coroner’s inquest that finally took place more than five years later. Many other observers still believe the public has only been told as much as it was convenient for it to hear.
2 From ‘Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7 July 2005’, published by the Stationery Office http://www.officialdocuments.gov.uk/document/hc0506/hc10/1087/108 7.pdf
3 This was reported in the Intelligence and Security Committee 100-page report published 19 May 2009.
4 In the inquest, both the emergency doctor and the forensic medical examiner identified seven bodies. They are named and located on a diagram.
COULD THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN ONE?
Even those who were not alive in the late 1970s have heard of the Yorkshire Ripper, the cruel and elusive murderer who killed time after time and baffled some of Britain’s finest detectives for more than five years.
When lorry driver Peter Sutcliffe was finally arrested in January 1981, the nation heaved a sigh of relief. Altogether, there had been at least 13 murders – mainly of sex-trade workers in the West Yorkshire area – plus a number of vicious attacks on other women.
Sutcliffe was a violent, brutal paranoid schizophrenic, though he was deemed to be sane enough to stand trial. He attacked his victims with ball-peen hammers, knives and sharpened screwdrivers, killing and mutilating them because, he claimed later, he heard voices in his head telling him to kill prostitutes. The voices, he said, were the voice of God, and the former gravedigger claimed to believe they came to him from the headstone of a long-dead Polish immigrant.
Sutcliffe confessed and was tried on 13 charges of murder and seven of attempted murder. He was found guilty on all the charges and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Because he was held to be sane, Sutcliffe was sent to an ordinary prison to serve his life sentence. He was seriously assaulted by another prisoner and soon reassessed and sent to the secure psychiatric hospital at Broadmoor. In 2010, after a legal application that could have opened up the possibility of parole had been turned down, he was told he would be spending the rest of his life in Broadmoor.
No one doubts that Peter Sutcliffe was rightly found guilty of committing a string of horrific murders. But did the numbers add up?
There were rumours that Sutcliffe knew the gruesome details of some of the murders, but couldn’t say anything at all about some of the others. And there were claims that the forensic evidence clearly pointed to two different killers.
Thirty years on, the questions remain. Were there two Yorkshire Rippers? And did the police, anxious to clear up a long-running, high profile case, conspire to cover up the facts, even though it meant a ruthless serial killer was still at large?
During the years before Sutcliffe’s arrest, the man leading the hunt, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield of West Yorkshire Police, had been taunted and teased by messages that claimed to be from the Yorkshire Ripper. These were taken seriously, as they seemed to include unpublished details only the killer could know, and they served to confuse the investigation. One message was on a cassette tape and the voice was quickly identified as having a distinctive Wearside accent, pinpointed as coming from the Castleton area of Sunderland. Sutcliffe was 80 miles away and spoke very differently. While the police followed up the Wearside connection, Sutcliffe went on killing.
In 2006, more than a quarter of a century later, an unemployed alcoholic called John Humble was convicted of perverting the course of justice, after a cold-case review had done some clever DNA matching with a saliva trace from one of the original envelopes. Humble was from Sunderland, within a mile of Castleton.
That finally dealt with the mystery of the Wearside Jack tape. But the bigger questions about the Yorkshire Ripper case still won’t go away.
REASONS TO DOUBT
There is one very simple reason to believe that, whatever the apparent inconsistencies, the police got it right.
The murders stopped, as far as we know, when Peter Sutcliffe was arrested, convicted and jailed. That isn’t conclusive proof, of course. If there was a second Yorkshire Ripper and he had been deliberately exploiting Sutcliffe’s murderous activities as a distraction and cover for his own crimes, you might expect that those would come to an end, too – assuming the second murderer was able to stop himself from killing again.
From a public safety point of view, the fact that the murders ceased was obviously a welcome development. But the ending of the long sequence of killings of prostitutes and other women in West Yorkshire didn’t necessarily mean there was no longer a murderer to be brought to justice.
REASONS TO BELIEVE
For the suspicious and the sceptical, the whole Yorkshire Ripper case has never been successfully solved.
Many of the witnesses and most of those who took part in the investigation are long dead. But one person who was deeply involved was Ron Warren, who was deputy chairman of the West Yorkshire Police Authority at the time of Sutcliffe’s arrest. He never had any doubt that there were important aspects of the 13 murders that were concealed from the public and the legal system.
‘There were definitely two murderers involved in the thirteen,’ Warren told the Yorkshire Post in 2005. ‘It was well known in the operations room that there had to be two, because of the blood evidence. I do believe Sutcliffe was found guilty of more murders than he could possibly have committed.
‘I suppose the police were more interested in getting it all wrapped up than in getting at the whole truth.’
Even more recently, at the age of 89, Warren was asked if the police had really been aware that Sutcliffe was not the only killer (see bit.ly/ripperblood).
‘All the police knew there were two men involved,’ he said. ‘It was fairly obvious from the forensic evidence that there were two, because there were two different blood groups involved.’
There has been an argument for many years about Peter Sutcliffe’s blood type. The police stated he was blood type B, while others have claimed that his father insisted it was type O, which might seem to be supported by Warren’s comment.
But this issue is not as critical as it might seem. Physical evidence from several of the Ripper murders pointed to a killer who was not just type B, but a B secretor. This means that the B antigens are secreted and show up in body fluids. Those who stated Sutcliffe was type B also said that he was a non-secretor, which would mean that the body fluids found at the crime scenes were not from him. Whether he was identified as a type B non-secretor or as a type O, either way he could not be linked to those particular murders.
And,